Everyone Still Here?

Just a note, but do you suppose the fact that the word "Holy" is completely worn away from Mr Camping's Bible in the picture below is meaningful? Prophetic?


Well, it's 8pm here and personally, I am happy the world is still here. The Oakland Civic Orchestra has a concert tomorrow and along with a Mendelssohn Overture and Ravel's Pavane for a Dead Princess (which apparently has nothing to do with princesses, dead or otherwise), we are playing the Eroica by Beethoven. We've been practicing for weeks and finished our dress rehearsal at 3:00pm today --- right on time to be whisked away to heaven. Lots of traffic on the way home, but maybe we were in the wrong time zone for the prediction's given time. Of course sitting here now in my hermitage, darkness all around outside, maybe "the rapture" has taken place and all the good folks have been taken and here I am left behind! Now THAT would give a new meaning to eremitical solitude, wouldn't it? And assuming I have been left behind, what does that mean for my relationship with God --- or God's with me? Do I just treat it as non-existent? Has he turned his back on me? Left me completely alone??? Am I rejected? Condemned? Is my future simply a few months of misery as the world is assaulted by any number of scourges and woes followed by oblivion or hell? Hardly sounds like something the God of Jesus Christ would orchestrate does it?

Of course, I know I am not really alone. It seems that Harold Camping himself is alive and well about 15+ miles from here, as are his daughter and any number of his followers. Camping, by the way, said he was a bit bewildered by the failure of his prediction --- a prediction that had people selling everything they owned and driving to California to share in the terminal events with others who believed as they did. Camping's organization (right here in the Oakland area) has made and spent millions of dollars on this and now, well, I wonder if the explanation Camping will give will advert to more mathematical miscalculations or be an honest confession of the place of human hubris in the face of Divine inscrutability and Scriptural texts that cannot be read or mined for timetables and starcharts like a Farmer's Almanac.

The temptation to joke about this latest "prophecy" (which I am really trying to restrain) is tempered in part by my own sadness that such things actually happen and are given credence by those who supposedly believe in the same God Christ proclaimed. Even Christ said clearly that he did not know the hour or the day of the second coming and the day of judgment. In part it is also tempered by a sense that significant theological issues have been raised by Harold Camping's predictions. For now though, I need to practice a couple of passages in the Beethoven (a fugal passage which I thought I had down but blew this afternoon, and the finale which is simply WAY too fast for my sluggish nervous system!), then do some quiet prayer and get to Compline. There will be time (God willing) to think over the theological issues and reflect on why it is these predictions about the last days are always so credible to some --- and, along with belief in God, such complete nonsense to others. The truth is probably somewhere between these extremes. Personally, I am glad the OCO gets to play tomorrow's concert though. Amateur orchestra though we are, we've practiced hard for this last concert of the season and it should be a good one!