Only the End of the World is the End of the World
Hope is more than a feeling. It's a practice.
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Only the End of the World is the End of the World
Bessel van der Kolk is a leading figure in understanding and treating trauma. You may be familiar with his book The Body Keeps the Score. A podcaster once asked him how to deal with the trauma that political tensions, social conflict, climate change, and economic uncertainty that is contemporary life.
His answer was instructive. This is not a trauma. It’s an ongoing challenge.
You see, a trauma is something that happened in the past. Its impact upon us was so severe that we keep reliving it in ways that distort and disrupt our experience of the present. By contrast, we’re dealing with an unstable, unpredictable, disorienting present.
As he put it, “The world is much more unsafe and unclear, and we don’t know who’s on our side, who’s not on our side, who’s telling the truth, who’s not telling the truth.” Things seem to be falling apart around us. For some of us it feels like the end of the world.
And as it turns out Jesus has a lot to say about what we should make of such times and how to navigate them. Only, it might not be quite what you expected. In essence he says, “Life is messy. Lean in. You’ll never get it all cleaned up and it’s going to leave a mark. But I’ll be with you.”
For instance, Jesus and his friends were gazing at the temple. He told them that one day this amazing example of architecture, this monument to their faith and anchor for their common life, would be nothing more than a heap of rubble. In short, chaos is coming. They asked him when this would happen. But instead of giving them a calendar date, Jesus taught them a lesson about hope and the messiness of life.
He told them, “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines.”
Then he said, “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” In other words, only the end of the world is the end of the world. But as far as you’re concerned, every situation you face is a beginning. An opportunity. You and I can always start love’s healing, liberating, reconciling work right here. Right now.
Jesus is painfully honest. Life is an imperfect gift. Wonderful and wretched things happen. “It is what it is.” Only, that’s not where he stops. He says, “It is what it is. Now what are you going to do about it?” Hope begins by squarely facing reality: It is what it is. But we are capable of doing more than merely acknowledging, passively accepting, or blindly reacting to the contours and dynamics of the world we inhabit. This is where the “now what” that Jesus is talking about comes in for us. We have the radical freedom to choose to love.
Jesus makes our freedom to choose love especially clear in one of his most counterintuitive teachings: love your enemy. Again and again we will encounter people who use coercion, violence, and domination to make a better place for themselves in the world at the expense of others. Including us. It’s tempting to hit back. Fight fire with fire.
By contrast, Jesus teaches us to inhabit this planet in a fundamentally different way. We can refuse to be enemies even, and especially, with those who insist on seeing us as their enemy. Instead, we can choose to become our true selves as the image of God. God is love. So when we love, it is God’s love pouring into us, saturating us, and overflowing from within us.
That’s how the living God is present with us and in us. Receiving love and freely choosing to give that love away make life worth living. And that’s just what hope is: the felt sense that this messy life is worth living. No matter what. Because Christ is always in it with us.
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Thank you! I needed this today--"doom-scrolling" has taken on a whole new meaning in recent days, and I've been doing too much of that. As an octogenarian, I'll admit that I am weary, and the call to "do *something*" makes me feel anxious and guilty, so it is good to be reminded that "doing something" is often an internal matter. A few days ago I had a lovely conversation on Facebook with a woman I've known since childhood whose posts I regularly have to hide, because they tend to reflect misinformation and conspiratorial beliefs--and here we were, briefly connecting. I thought, "What if I had simply "unfriended" her?" I would have missed a chance to be reminded that we share our lives with many people who may not be exactly enemies, but whose opinions and choices we believe can be damaging to all of us--and yet...they are God's beloved, too. Jesus never said it would be easy--but he does remind us that he's not going anywhere, even when we're falling apart and freaking out. There's a saying that's been attributed to many different sources, and is perhaps trite, but has some real truth: "Everything will be all right in the end--and if it's not all right, then it's not the end."
I thought there might be an R.E.M. track at the end of this post, Jake. 😊
Thanks for your uplifting reminders, as usual. Life is messy, but Jesus is with us, thankfully.