The River And The End of the World

From our little spiritual ghetto in western Oregon we had a gunshot view up the Willamette Valley. In the distance, one could see Mt. Hood and further on, across the Columbia River, Mt. St., Helens. In 1980, Mt. St. Helens was starting to show some volcanic activity. Seismologists and geologists were finding that the ground was heating up on the mountain. A few months later a bulge formed on the north side of the mountain. In May of 1980 the mountain blew. Earthquakes you can feel, but volcanoes you can see. From the valley in Oregon we watched the plume of America's newest volcano, bent eastward across the sky. To us, it was holy script predicting the end of the world.

The end of the world was a boon, a promise of a change in circumstances and venue, living like we were, all crammed together on our rundown Christian ashram. I had been there for a few years. We were all betting on the particular rightness of our course. The "end of the world" is a galvanizing point in any Christian group. They have to put themselves on the good side of judgment. Part of being right and true is the art of guessing when the heavens part and God comes to claim those with the best math skills. It becomes a part of their doctrine. And by the time you have invested all your energies in an outfit for a few years, you begin to close your ears to the warning signs that the calculations are flawed and the whole thing could fall apart. Those predictions of doom took the pressure off the hard routine and the strange grinding noises from deep in the organizational machine, and gave us something to refocus on, namely, preparing for the end of time itself.

In 1844, on a mountain top in the western part of New York State, a week before Halloween, the followers of William Miller gathered. Miller, a Baptist preacher, had done a series of complex calculations predicting the precise day that God would judge the earth. So on October 22, 1844, Miller and a large group of believers, stood on a mountain and waited for the end. However, it was not the end. October 23 rolled around and the day became known in Americana as "the Great Disappointment." The retooled calculations and the doctrines that spun out from those disappointed followers continue today, alive and well in the Seventh Day Adventists and their more disappointed brethren, the Jehovah Witnesses. The Jehovah Witnesses have played apocalyptic roulette six times in the last century and lost. The disappointment grows with time.

The end of the world, as I have heard it described, and from what I have read, is almost another place. It is full of strange creatures, horrible real life manifestations of very bad dreams. Curses of every sort will be hurled down on the earth and its people. There will be water turning to blood, scorching heat, and painful diseases to assail us. Human-sized flying scorpions will sting us, and though terribly painful, we won't die. It will be a hell on earth.

However, as bad as all this is, the rank and file of Christianity will supposedly be watching all this hellish judgment on those left in the earthly arena from lofty sky boxes especially reserved for the occasion. Ritual church attendance, regular tithing, and piecemeal volunteerism in the organizations, will punch their doomsday ticket. It is part of the benefits of membership. Christians will be gloriously disconnected from the real suffering of the world. Nothing really will change, it will just get better. The bothersome evil that has been nipping at their heals will be swept away in a moment. God will certainly finish off whatever our political and military devices have not vanquished. He becomes our ultimate servant, slipping neatly into our interpretations, devices and predictions, a God who allows Himself to conform to our constructions of Him. So it is with the end of the world. It will be packaged up for the constituents in such a way to make something as abstract as eternal life, bliss, and oneness with God an entirely rational event.

That's what the group I belonged to did. We leveraged the biblical language to suit our situation. The words 'many' and 'few' appear frequently throughout the New Testament, 'many' being the lost and the 'few' being those spiritual insiders privy to the grand machinations of the eternal. We were the 'few.' We drew our line in the dirt out in front of the commune. We were 'in' and, well, as hard as it was for us to believe, everybody else was 'out.' The more absurd it seemed, the more special we felt. We were chosen out of many. The exponentials of the language, with our own spin, kept us happily disconnected from reality for another year or so.

In 1982 another event happened to further fuel the rightness of our cause. In Guatemala City we had probably our most successful endeavor going. There was a large congregation of upper and middle class Guatemalans attending a church we had started as part of a relief effort after the earthquake of 1976. The janitor of the church was a fellow named Rios Montt, a former Guatemalan General. A coup of young officers toppled the Guatemalan government. They then asked Rios Montt to become the President of the country.

Our interpretation of the Bible was held together with fundamentalist rebar. We were literalists. Authority meant obedience and likewise, submission. The apostle, elders and other spiritual officers of this Guatemalan church now had an interesting situation. The President of their country was downstream in their chain of command. Taken to its extreme, they had the whole country in their spiritual care. This apostolic exponential was real.

It was hard to believe, but there it was on national news, Guatemala had a new President and he was one of us. This put a real edge on the sword of authority. This stuff wasn't theory any more; what had previously been only spiritual abstractions had now produced a real event. By our way of thinking, now that God had some real authority on the planet, He was giving us our first nation. The first domino had fallen, and surely others would follow ....soon. We had spoken this into existence. It was something to ponder.

After taking office, the President set up an unofficial round table of spiritual advisors. It included on a spiritual level, apostles and prophets who, on a temporal level were a real estate salesman, ex-hippies, a postman from the U.S. and Guatemalan businessmen from the local church.

Diplomatically, I'm sure it was a tightrope for the new President. His new faith included a real spiritual hierarchy. His salvation was tied in many ways to his submission to that authority. When the political doors swung open to this authority a whole range of new questions arose as to how far this spiritual authority could go in influencing the new President. I'm sure those who had put the President in office were not exactly thrilled to see all those gringos holding forth on the direction of the country which is about 90% Catholic. I imagine it was the same for the monarchs in Europe prior to the Protestant reformation with all those clerics from Rome messing with the national interests.

I did some spiritual triangulation to gage our spiritual position and found that we were dead on course. We were inheriting nations, or at least acquiring them through holy juntas (joly huntas). We had watched Mt. St. Helens go off. We were riding a wave of natural disasters and military revolutions. The end was near and we might be in charge.

Many of us had never tasted power like this. Moving up a few inches in the organization put you in authority, spiritual authority. People under you were wrong, right, up, down, fast or slow, based solely on what you thought. It was invasive and many times crude and silly. Common courtesies were overlooked in favor of instilling submission and exercising authority. But we thought we were doing good in the world. Our spiritual ambitions were stoked to control the lives of men and women everywhere.

The larger the organization grew, the more celebrity became a desired commodity. In our primitive understanding of spiritual offices they became prizes, ached and longed for. If you were selected to be a deacon instead of an elder or a pastor, it was because of what you weren't, not what you were. It was looked at as a demotion. Although the party line stated just the opposite, the rank and file knew what was what. So in time we created an organization, like the great reservoirs on the river, that was warm at the top and cold at the bottom.

Like the big dams, we were able to extract a lot of power from the lives of people. At one point we had quite a few people joining up. This gave us volume, and with the visionary aspects like Guatemala and our "end of the world" theories galvanizing, we gained velocity, the energy that is released when people think a cause is right and just. And we had the organizational mechanisms to harness that energy. We too were dam builders.

In the end though our dam couldn't hold. We lacked certain sophistications in managing our prospects. The head apostle in Guatemala eventually ran off with his secretary, leaving his wife and six children. The appointment of Rios Montt became a historical footnote. Guatemala still struggles politically. Instead of becoming a signal of the end of the world, Mt. St. Helens became a biological showcase of the resiliency of nature. Our attempts to restore ourselves, Christianity and a nation had failed. Not that there was ever a chance of restoration but in its effort we learned we really had only one way of doing things. The way things had always been done in the West with honest-to-goodness regular power; the power of constituencies, money and political know how. We had limited quantities of all three.

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Seventeen years after the mountain blew, I finally made a trip up to Mt. St. Helens to view the carnage the volcano had brought upon the adjacent forestland. We drove up on a whim, my family and some friends. It had taken this many years to gain my interest. Since it is only 35 miles off an interstate, I figured anything that close to heavy traffic could be only mildly interesting.

The mountains of the Northwest are impressive for their singularity and their size. Mount Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams, Mt. Jefferson and Mt. Shasta, are great geologic markers at the eastern boundary of the "ring of fire" that sweeps north and west across the Pacific Ocean. While living in the Aleutians in Alaska, I would fly and see volcanoes, some active and some extinct, every hundred miles or so throughout the Islands. There are 42 volcanoes along the Aleutian Chain, 21 of them active. So I have seen a few volcanoes. Yet nothing prepared me for the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

The name at the entrance struck me, Mt. St. Helens National Monument. It wasn't a national forest, it was an event, something like a biological Gettysburg, an event, as I would see, that was still unfolding. We paid our fee at the entrance and began our drive up the mountain. About a mile up the road we stopped at the first of several interpretive centers.

On May 18, 1980 the mountain exploded. Within minutes, 57 people lost their lives. Thousands of deer and elk were killed along with many more thousands of smaller game, and an old growth forest disappeared. Spirit Lake had all of its water blown out of it. Almost a cubic mile of dirt and ash, heated to 1300 degrees, was blown into the sky and simultaneously, out across the northeastern quadrant of the mountain slope at almost 700 miles per hour. Superheated mudslides washed down the slopes and into the rivers carrying hundreds of millions of tons of volcanic sediment. It was a small apocalypse. A mountain melted and rivers boiled--very biblical.

On top of the mountain that fateful morning was a geologist taking a photographic survey of the development of the bulge on the north side of the mountain. He was like an Old Testament prophet in the cleft of the rock waiting to see God, hoping get a glimpse of His wrath and in this case, get a photo of Him. There were the hold outs, Harry Truman whose home on Spirit Lake vanished in the maelstrom with him in it. There were the Russian woodcutters below in the forest who were swept away in the heated flood of mud that swept down the mountain. All these moments were carefully cataloged against the backdrop of the explosion of the mountain.

With the exception of the highway and the interpretive centers, nothing has been touched since the blast. Everything was left just as nature dictated. It was a rare opportunity to see what would survive, come back, and in what time frame and order. So all was left untouched, but everything has been monitored and closely examined. Every plant and creature that has emerged from the destruction has been noted.

We made our way slowly up the mountain. By the time we had viewed the second interpretive center we were in a state of reverence. We could touch the power that was in the earth. We could see the force of it and the will of it. Nothing could stand in its way. It made all the structures in my mind very small. It wasn't scenery, it was a taste of the real force of nature striking with unbelievable destruction and then a whole community of vegetation and animal life reclaiming the land and the rivers once again, all at the same time.

I thought of all the tension that was released, the great cataclysmic sigh. Just maybe this is how it will be with the end of the world--all the tension that has been created in structures and relationships will be released. In the scope of time, it will be a terrible instant, but for those who are watching the clock, it may take a few years.

I think "the end" will be all about reconciling everything back into a great order, a great spiritually natural system where there is no waste and everything is related properly--the order of man with God; the order of men with each other; the order of men with nature. I see it as it was that day on the mountain, a burnt offering, a holocaust, all life consumed totally by fire, and the next day life sprouting up through the ashes.

As for the prophet geologist who witnessed the breath of God and died, miraculously his photos survived. He was the faithful witness. His photos are a centerpiece of a short, but powerful film recreating the event as it happened. It is one of the very few films, maybe the only one which is authentic every time it is seen. The film depicts the events leading to the explosion and the explosion itself. It is intimate footage by the photographer of 24 megatons of thermal energy being released. As the film comes to an end, you are left in silent awe. As you finally stir to get up, they raise the curtain and there before you is the Mountain in real life, with its enormous caldera still smoking, across an empty moonscape--evidence of its potential fury. If the Book of Revelations needed a theme park, this place would be a good start. It is a place of extremes: terrible destruction and resilient life.

There are many cryptic verses and wild imagery that would confuse anyone. There are many who say they know what the signs are and have unraveled the apocalyptic puzzle. Large fortunes are being made placating contemporary American Christianity about their rational approach to the end of the world; that their memberships, doctrines, rituals and public good works are enough to sustain them from the rigorous judgment of God. I have already placed my bets on the end of the world and have been wrong in a Las Vegas kind of way. I have listened to many smart men and women wade into these apocryphal waters, wallow around for awhile and end where they started, with very little real, bankable information on the end of the world.

The interpretations are doctrinally canted so there are as many interpretations for the end of the world as there are denominations. It is all very confusing. The only sure point of agreement is that there is an end to this world. Beyond that it's anyone's guess.

Evaluating the end of the world through the lens of a river, I believe the holy plumb line of judgment will measure the trueness of the relationship of mankind with each other and God. In a great release of tension, everything else will be swept away. When looking at the end of the world through a doctrinal slant, things get complex and conspiratorial quickly. I think that's what makes it so controversial and consequently intriguing. The good guys could be bad guys and vice versa. Who is the antichrist? Throw in numerology, astronomy, assassination, the riders of death, harlots, flying scorpions, sacred seals, billions of people dying, earthbound armies fighting celestial beings and it becomes more cinematic in our minds than real. The religious experience is primarily informational, and absorbing information is the primary role of the intellect. So the end of the world becomes something we try to figure out in our minds. We try to visually connect the dots and figure out where we stand, based on information.

For example, the "mark of the beast" got a lot of press. It is called the number of the antichrist, 666. At some point people will be known by a number instead of a name. Then there is the mark of God, a mark by which He will know whom He is related to. The mark of God is about intimacy, a familiar mark known to God. It occurs to me that every person sitting in the pews is counted, and the tax-deductible donations are accounted for and annotated by number and name. There are more numbers for the salaries, the maintenance costs, the number of board members. How many ushers does it take to gather the collection? Then there is the cadence of religious holidays that fall on specific days. For many these are paid holidays.

Religion and society are full of numbers. The question is, which of them really belongs to Life and true relationship? Where numbers are important, it follows that relationship on all levels vies for third or fourth place within that system. To the organization, maintaining structure and agenda, it seems, are more important than vital relationships.

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The Bonneville Dam sits approximately 30 miles south of Mt. St. Helens. Each is a reminder of tension and the results when the tension is released. The life in the river is looking for release. The river presses for flow again. In the same way Christianity aches for flow. That cannot happen under the current regimes. Bonneville and the other dams on the river will not go away of their own accord. Nor will the religious institutional dams come down. There is too much power at stake. The efficiencies and conveniences created are too much a part of what we have come to enjoy. They have created, by most of the world's standards, luxury and riches. The word luxury itself comes from the word luxate which means to dislocate. Luxury separates us from true fellowship.

The dams, like religious Christianity, have been created for us and by us. They are systems at odds with real life. The dam, like the mountain, exists in tension. The mountain released its tension, first as terrible destruction, then as life. I think of the same scenario about the end of the world--terrible destruction then life. But this time, as I see it, it will be the release of tensions created by men. All our efforts to create power from life will be tested by fire. From the religious to the mechanical, everything that uses energy outside of true relationship will be judged. Fidelity will be a primary benchmark in all relationships both divine and human. After judgment, relational intimacy will be restored, there will be wholeness all around, the divine will be one with the flesh again, and natural connections between men and nature will be restored.

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Our group of brethren at the commune didn't get to see the end of the world. But we did get to see the end of our little organization. By the beginning of the 1990s we were pretty much finished. Our experiment had failed. There was a great release of tension in the failure. All the crazy expectations flowed down the river and life went on. The original apostles appointed to oversee huge chunks of geography began to see the strain in their families while trying to take over the world and in many cases just make a living. In the end it was the simple things that got us. We discovered how thin organizational membership really is.

Hindsight reveals that the end of it was the beginning of better things. Most of us were released into a larger context of how things are done. There is a remnant of the old group that still flies the flag. The old apostle died and is remembered fondly for stretching the fabric of our thinking some. But most of us have gone on, some dazed by the experience and others feeling set free. We join a long list of failed utopian societies who tried to create heaven on earth, the physical kingdom of God. We tried to find the divine out there in the physical geography of the world, never truly realizing that the Kingdom was in each of us all the time. So the failure of the machinery brought us back full circle to relationship where we started. There was a promise hovering in the vision we chased. We thought there would be fulfillment in our collective energies. Our little religious world was judged and wiped out. For many of us, all we have left are the long friendships that have emerged from sharing the crazy days.

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