It’s about 11:00 in the morning, Eastern Time, on what’s looking to be a beautiful day. Sunny and clear skies. The forecast says we can expect 80 degrees by late afternoon; ideal weather for the end of the world. Well, not the end, precisely. While the Rapturists are expecting to be beamed off this rock in about 7 hours to live blessed and immortal lives of goodness in Heaven, the world itself will hobble on, a diseased cripple too dumb to die ahead of the bad times facing it: the Anti-Christ, global tribulations, the Ark of the Covenant opened. Remember Indiana Jones? We’re in store for a global hurricane of death and misery and despair, a Biblical rendering of our souls. Armageddon, in other words.
Except that’s not going to happen, of course. By 6:30 today, the only vanished Christians on Earth will be the ones who have chosen to hide out of their own embarrassment at being such gullible fools. Assuming they have the capacity to feel embarrassed by their actions, which is, admittedly, no easy assumption. I would likewise assume that the leaders of this movement who’ve spent the past few months fleecing their flock, people like Harold Camping, will keep a very low profile over the weeks ahead. Can we say awkward?
It’s so easy to mock these people, so easy that it’s almost not worth doing. On message boards all over the internet, on spoof Web sites, on late-night television and news broadcasts, the mockery goes on. I can’t say it’s not deserved, although there’s something unsatisfying in it, too, something that I imagine as being close to what hunting cows with an assault rifle might feel like. But there’s something else about these Rapturists, too, something that goes beyond their innate ridiculousness and becomes another thing entirely. In fact, I have to say that, on some level, I envy them.
To quote President Obama, let me be clear. I do not envy the Rapturists for being gullible enough to believe some huckster when he tells them that Armageddon will begin with a rolling rapture that takes place at 6:00 in each time zone. What I envy in them is the purity of the emotion that this absurd belief must create in their minds. I envy the fact that this fool’s path they’ve been following, in the end, allowed them to experience something that most of us, maybe all of us, never will: the last night and the last day of the world.
Think about that for a moment. We’re talking about believing—and I mean utterly believing, believing with every fiber of your soul and your body and your mind (although there may be doubters among them; even Jesus himself had to deal with those)—that the world as they know it is going to end. We’re talking about believing that these hours, these hours passing right now, are not only their last hours on Earth, but the last hours of Earth.
Can you imagine that feeling? We hold to this idea of the moment before we die as being a sort of “white flash” in which your entire life, all of your failures and successes and lies and loves and hates, everything gets played across the movie screen of your mind. One single moment that is the essence of you. Now take that concept and make the moment not just about you, but about everybody—all of us, the human race, existence as a whole. Can you imagine that? The purity of that feeling? What it must be like to not just think but to know that everything is about to end?
Like I said, most of us will never experience that sort of emotion. I imagine that it’s like a drawn-out version of a rollercoaster’s slow crest, or that long breathless second before you parachute from a plane or bungee from a cliff. Except it’s not, because in neither of those examples do you expect to die. Closer might be the suicide jumper as he shuffles to the building’s edge, or the cancer patient with one night to live waiting through those last long hours. But even those don’t really compare; it’s a matter of scale. It’s Ray Bradbury’s The Last Night of the World come true—but not really. It’s the experience without the fallout.
And so I have to admit that a part of me does envy these people, these believers, these Rapturists. I envy them that, come tomorrow and the next day and all the days after that, after the embarrassment of still being here has faded and they’ve settled back into whatever drudgery delineates their normal lives, they will have had this moment. They will have lived the last night on earth, lived it and experienced it as only someone who truly believes it ever could. They will have experienced it with a singular purity that I don’t think can be reproduced by any drug and the rest of us, those who mock them now, will never know that feeling for what it is. We can imagine it, sure, but we can never really know.
And that’s too bad. I mean, my God, what a party that could have been.