“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.”---2 Peter 3:10
“It ain’t over til it’s over.”---Yogi Berra
The world is coming to an end again, and soon. June 24 to be exact, so you might want to move those vacation plans up a smidge. It’s not just Swami Andypanda who’s calling the shot this time, nor one of those cults camping out on a mountaintop waiting for the UFOs to whisk them away from Oblivion. Nope, this time it’s The Bible, or so says wingnut apolcalypse theorist Mathieu Jean-Marc Joseph Rodrigue who drinks heavily and studies the Book of Revelations in his spare time. “I heard a voice in the middle of the four living beings,” claims Mathieu. “He who has intelligence can interpret the figure of the beast.” Rodrigue has taken eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, put them in his pot and stirred briskly, coming up with a D-day date of June 24, 2018. Not to worry you, but Nostradamus also predicted the world would end this year.
Not to dismiss The Bible as a reliable source, but it’s all so vague. Take Jeremiah 29:11, for instance: “’For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”
Could mean anything. Why not just say, “Get thou forth into Yonkers and open a Wendy’s franchise.” Anybody can understand that. What about Philippians 4:13: “I can do all this through him who gives me strength.” Just say, “Thou shalt find a personal trainer.” As always, simplicity is the key.
Another thing. The Bible should be more careful about promising too much. It gives believers a false sense of security. Listen to this one from Isaiah 41:10: “So do not fear, for I am with you, do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you with my righteous right hand.” See how much good that one does you when you sit down with Mr. Meanie and try to get an unsecured bank loan. Pop goes the weasel.
Long story short, nobody knows when the world ends, not even T.S. Eliot, nor whether it ends with a bang or a whimper. That doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying, these prophets of doom, these misguided souls who feel more comfortable with the rain than the parade. And who knows---if they keep it up for another ten million years, sooner or later one of them may be right. Meanwhile, I’m with Yogi Berra.
Early Warnings
When we were kids, nobody thought about the end of the world much. We had more important things to worry about. That little girl in the schoolyard who kept batting her eyes and smiling at us. Mediocre test scores on long division. Why the Red Sox manager would never remove the starting pitcher until the other team had 5 runs. Critical issues, important in the here-and-now.
One day, however, my mother took me and my sister Alice (the Republican) downtown to shop for school clothes. We were just emerging from McCartney’s on bustling Essex Street and there he was, clad elegantly in burlap with a fetching rope belt, an unwashed goober carring a sign which screamed “The World Will end Tomorrow!” I looked at my mother. My mother looked at Alice. Alice looked at me. What the hell was this? Did this mean they’d be canceling the Labor Day fireworks? Why was there no mention of this calamity in the Lawrence Evening Tribune?
Our mild-mannered mother, Marie, never one to look for trouble, marched over to the sign-wielder and tapped him on the shoulder-blade. “You’re scaring the kids,” she scolded. “What’s the matter with you, anyway?” I leaned over to Alice, broaching the subject of my ornery grandmother. “Good thing Nan isn’t here,” I said. “That guy would have a couple of lumps on his head and no more sign.” I think the whole experience scarred Alice, fostered a lifetime fear of protesters and sent her scurrying into the arms of the Grand Old Party, where she has remained ever since. Great oaks from little acorns grow.
Maybe The End will emanate from an unexpected source.
It’s The End Of The World As We Know It
This End Of The World business has been going on for ages. We mentioned Nostradamus, but he wasn’t the only one. Hilary of Poitiers, an early French bishop, declared the world would end in that same year, 365. It didn’t. That didn’t stop a subsequent French bishop (a pessimistic lot, those French) named Martin of Tours from writing “There is no doubt that the Antichrist has already been born. Firmly established already in his early years, he will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power.” Martin pegged the end to come “sometime before the year 400.” The Antichrist, alas, got bogged down in the contretemps between the Ostrogoths and the Huns and was last seen cleaning out horse stables on the banks of the Volga. Strike two, the umpire said.
Hippolytus of Rome, Sextus Julius Africanus and Irenaeus all predicted that Jesus would return in the year 500, basing their opinions on the alleged dimensions of Noah’s Ark. When it didn’t happen, Sextus asked for a do-over, revising his prediction to “sometime before 800.” That’s like a 1950 prognosticator foretelling “The Cubs will win the pennant within 100 years.” They don’t pay off in Vegas for brilliance like that. Even given a mulligan, Sextus was wrong again, automatically retired from the soothsayer business and made to stand in the imperial naughty corner for one hour each Tuesday afternoon.
Pope Sylvester II (the only pope ever named after a Looney Tunes cartoon figure) predicted the end of the world in the nice round year 1000, causing riots all over Europe and the emigration of pilgrims to Jerusalem. Pope Innocent III predicted the Apocalypse would arrive 666 years after the rise of Islam. After the latter inept forecast, the National Association of Armegeddon Prophets rescinded the Papal Charter and forbade any further doomsday predictions from the Vatican, an edict which lives today. But leave it to those wily Catholics to sneak in another one, this one involving the abuse of schoolchildren. The church called it The Miracle of Fatima.
Who needs LSD when you’ve got The Miracle of Fatima?
Three Kids And A Promise
In 1916, as World War I raged elsewhere in Europe, Lucia Abodora, 9, and her cousins Jacinta and Franciso Marto, 6 and 7, were tending a flock of sheep outside the tiny village of Fatima, Portugal. Suddenly, as always happens with angels, a brilliant light appeared in the sky, stunning the children. A voice from the radiance said something on the order of, “Do not be afraid, I am the Angel of Peace. Pray with me.” Abodora, later renamed Lucia de Jesus de dos Santos, recounted the scene in a memoir (“Fatima In Lucia’s Own Words”) published in 1976. During the remainder of that year, the angel showed himself two more times to the children, visits they reported to no one.
In the spring of 1917, the three were beset with stronger visions, mysterious visits that would put them on the path to eventual sainthood and transform Fatima from an ordinary village to the site of a Catholic shrine venerated and visited by millions. The Virgin Mary appeared to the children on May 13, 1917 as “a lady dressed in white, shining brighter than the sun, giving out rays of clear and intense light.” She promised to come to the children on the 13th of each month. Jacinta finally told her mother about it, the alarmed woman hauling her before the parish priest to recant. Jacinta would not.
News of the visions spread by word of mouth and the following month a small crowd waited with the children to witness the second apparition. On the third sighting, July 13, the trio said the Virgin Mary revealed three secrets to them about the future. There was great speculation that the final secret would foretell the end of the world, a notion not discouraged by the nuns of St. Patrick’s, who taught us, nor by the upper echelons of the Catholic Church. On September 13, the Virgin told Lucia she would perform a great miracle in October so all would believe.
On October 13, 1917, the crowd of believers had streamed in to the Cova da Iria, the site of the earlier apparitions. At about 2 p.m., people began to see what later became known in the Church as The Miracle Of The Sun. The day-long rains suddenly ceased and the sun was said to emerge from the clouds to spin and tremble for ten minutes. The Lisbon newspaper, O Seculo, saw it this way: “Before the astonished eyes of the crowd, the sun trembled, made sudden incredible movements outside all cosmic laws---the sun “danced” according to the typical expression of the people.” Onlookers from as far as 25 miles away noted the strange phenomena in the sky. Lucia dedicated her life to God and became a Carmelite nun.
When the “secrets” were eventually revealed by the Church, most people were disappointed. The first involved the two World Wars, the second the dawn of Communism, the third, revealed only in the year 2000 by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, was a foretelling of the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981. These, at least, were the secrets the Catholic Church chose to reveal. Lucia de Jesus de los Santos, long snug in a Carmelite convent, was no longer available for verification. She died in 2005, perhaps having taken the real secret, the date of the end of the world, with her. (Insert creepy Twilight Zone music here.)
Latter Day Slants Over the centuries, The End Of The World has seldom been out of the limelight for long, but each predictor had his own version of the Ultimate Fireworks. In 1533, the Anabaptist prophet Melchior Hoffman assured everyone the Second Coming of Christ would take place later that year, conveniently in Strasbourg. Don’t worry, though, 144,000 people would be saved from the flames and you could be one of them. A fellow named Jan Matthys begged to differ, predicting the Apocalypse a year later, on April 5, to be exact. For some unknown reason, the city of Munster would be off limits to the death and destruction, perhaps to spare its famous cheeses. Martin Luther was typically vague but promised the end of the world would occur no later than 1600. In his Book of Prophesies (1501), Christopher Columbus foretold the end of the world in 1656, but who’s going to listen to a guy who can’t tell Provincetown from Manginapudi? He later revised the date to 1658. Revision was popular with the prophets of doom. Puritan minister Cotton Mather saw the end coming in 1697, then revised the date two more times. Was there smog in his crystal ball? Those Camisard Prophets could never make up their minds either, foreseeing The End in either 1705, 1706 or 1708. The art of Fine Tuning seems to have escaped these doomsayers. Some Apocalypses were niftier than others. Fun-loving Jacob Bernoulli told us a comet would destroy the Earth on April 5, 1719, though William Whiston said it wouldn’t get here until October 16 of 1736. Good work, guys, adding little more pizazz to the program. Presbyterian minister Christopher Love (an obvious alias) argued that it would be an earthquake in 1805. Everybody wanted to get into the act, even a hen in Leeds, England, which began laying eggs on which the phrase “Christ is coming!” was written. Wow! Or almost wow. Sadly, the whole thing was discovered to be a cruel hoax perpetrated by hen owner Mary Bateman, who had cleverly been writing on the eggs in a corrosive ink so as to etch them, then reinserting them back in the hen’s oviduct. Is there no shame in this business? In 1910, Camille Flammarion predicted that the appearance of Halley’s Comet later that year “would impregnate that atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet,” but not the planet, itself. He said possibly, right? That meant that discriminating customers who bought “Comet Pills” might be protected against the upcoming toxic gases. Evangelist Wilbur Glenn Voliva was not one for details. He announced “The world is going to go ‘puff’ and disappear” in September, 1935. We like to call that The Gentle Apocalypse. Our old pal Jeane Dixon predicted that a planetary alignment on February 4, 1962 would do the trick, fomenting massive prayer meetings in India (“The Gullible Country,” according to local license plates). And then we come to that old rascal Jim Jones, the man responsible for the phrase “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” Funny old Jim, once a charismatic churchman and later the founder of a Pentecostal church which became known as the Peoples Temple, alleged that a nuclear holocaust would take place in 1967. He moved his followers all over California, looking for a safe place to duck the bombs. Despite the fact he was completely wrong about the Apocalypse, not to mention a little bit crazy, his legion of woozy followers emigrated with him to Guyana in 1977, setting up a commune called Jonestown. On November 18, 1978, after a dust-up with U.S. representative Leo Ryan of California, who had arrived in Guyana with a phalanx of newsmen and relatives of the cultists to conduct an investigation, Jim Jones commanded his hundreds of followers to drink cyanide-adulterated punch. Okay, Jim, if you say so. When Guyanese troops arrived the next day, they found 913 bodies, one of them Jones. As the beloved John Clay used to sing, “Now this story has a moral, and the moral to me is quite rare:” You start with this stuff about The End Of The World----next thing you know, it kicks you in the derriere.” Okay, so the meter is off. Sometimes these morals get tricky. Jim Jones & the gang: fun times in Guyana. That’s all, folks….
“The Prophet” died of a bullet wound to the head, perhaps self-inflicted. He was elected posthumously to the Doomsayers Hall of Fame in 1991.
