It strikes me that asking if I believe the world will come to an end is similar to asking me if I believe I will die. The answer, in both cases, is the same – yes, but the important question is where, when, and how.
Writing in the latest issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin on the subject of poetry and religion, Christian Wiman (editor of the journal, Poetry) states death is an abstraction until it isn’t, until it is imminent. Grasping the meaning of both the past and the future requires an act of imagination. As Wiman says, “strictly speaking – the past and the future do not exist. They are both, to a greater or lesser degree, creations of the imagination.”
I sometimes wonder if the immediate sensate nature of modern life isn’t leading to the gradual decay of imagination. After an hour spent playing games on the computer, I realize that past, future, and imagination have been parked and forgotten on a remote shelf of my brain.
I do believe that faith, hope, and love requires imagination. I have been married to the same woman for over 50 years. At this moment, in the present, she has some chores she would like me to do. “Sorry dear, I am writing.” Those 50-plus years of our past exist only as creations of my imagination but these creations are vivid and feed my love.
The future also exists only as a creation of my imagination, but in it Win continues to be the tough, intelligent, beautiful woman who is making my heart skip and my throat tighten with excitement. Faith, hope, and love need -- indeed, must have -- the renewal and sustenance that come out of the past and down from the future.
At funerals many of us listen to St. Paul’s words about faith, hope, and love and we listen to the eulogized memories of those who loved the departed. These fruits of the imagination are not certainties, they are creations. Imagination needs exercise to bear good fruit.
The Bible, of course, has a good bit to say about the end of the world. If you are a visual person and the words found in Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Book of Revelation do not stir your soul, go to Angers, France and see the Tapestry of the Apocalypse. The Tapestry was completed in the year 1382. Extending for 120 yards, it is the magnificent fire and brimstone vision of the wild imagery contained in the last book of the Bible, The Revelation to John.
The world is a beautiful and wondrous place. To think of the ultimateness of its end requires a fearsome act of imagination. These are all good reasons to be careful and loving stewards of the earth.
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