How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Eschaton

I grew up in an end-times cult. Then why am I so chill right now, in the End Times?

I’m sitting on a bench in the public garden on the bluff, the one that overlooks the southern end of the city. The sound of collective and very ordinary life is filtering up to me through the canopies of the oaks, whose leaves are still new-glossed and lively with that sharp, insistent green of early summer. There’s an occasional crack of a baseball bat, distant and small, and the hoots and the clapping hands of everyone who’s gathered to watch the game. And birds singing, and an ice cream truck (which I’m disappointed to discover doesn’t sound the way ice cream trucks sounded when I was young.) The occasional siren.

All this evidence of life going on as it always does. Everything that’s going on in the world, India and Pakistan throwing bombs at each other, and the nation that was founded in response to genocide committing a genocide of its own, without an ounce of self-awareness, and the country I came from as fascist now as I predicted it would be years ago, when I left it. All of this. And everything else, all the weeping and the damage done, and yet there are kids buying ice cream in the street. And somebody has made a good hit at the game, to judge by the crowd’s reaction.

With everything that’s going on in the world, you probably haven’t heard that a historically large and unusually resilient piece of space junk is about to re-enter earth’s atmosphere. There’s actually nothing all that surprising about space junk falling back into our atmosphere. Somewhere over the course of my life—and I’ve only just turned 45—pieces of rocket and satellite and billionaires’ cars falling to Earth went from being the kind of event that would be the subject of global news stories to the kind of event that happens on average three times a day. While we’ve been waiting around for a big, flashy future to reveal itself, it snuck up on us. We never saw it coming.

Anyway. This satellite—it’s actually more of a landing vehicle. It’s called Komos 482 and it was launched by the Soviets in 1972. The Soviets aren’t even a thing anymore, though Putin is sure trying hard to get the band back together. Kosmos will probably not burn up on re-entry, like the vast majority of space junk does, because it was originally intended (and engineered) to travel to Venus and drop through its atmosphere to the surface of the planet, and then to send back whatever data it could collect. I don’t know how hip you are to the climate of Venus, but it’s not a great scene. Its surface is hot enough to melt lead, so re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere is not expected to pose much of a problem for it.

That means it’s most likely that Kosmos will impact the planet.

If it does, it’ll be the largest piece of space junk to ever fall back to Earth. At one meter in diameter, it’s not big enough to do major damage to the planet, and odds are good that it will strike the ocean (most stuff that falls on us from space does land in the ocean.) But it’s not beyond possibility that it hits a populated area. If that were to happen, it could cause serious damage to infrastructure and would pose a real threat to safety.

This seems like a fitting metaphor for everything that’s going on right now. Leftovers of the Cold War plunging back down after decades in our orbit, careening in a line of fire through the frail and illusory things we have made. We always think that history is behind us. But the Cold War didn’t end just because Bush and Gorbechev said it did. Nothing ever ends—not really.

I grew up in an end-times cult. It seems weird to say it, but like junk from space falling through the sky three times a day, that’s just the way it is. The religious tradition into which I was born, which my ancestors had helped found, was singularly focused on the end of the world. That isn’t terribly unusual, either; several new denominations of Christianity sprouted from the fertile chaos of the early 19^th century, all of them as millenarian as my family’s.

The Last Days loomed over my entire childhood. The end of all things was a constant presence in my thoughts. I can rarely remember playing as a child. Mostly what I do recall of my childhood is long bouts of rumination on the imminent End. I would sit somewhere in the backyard or in the playroom and think about how the world was going to end soon. When I did do something fun (birthday party, swimming with my cousins), all the enjoyment I felt in the moment was countered by the thought, What does it really matter? All of this is going to end soon.

If you’re wondering whether this caused an astonishing amount of fear and distress to me, yes, of course it did. There was more anxiety in me than my small body could hold. I began to self-harm because I preferred physical pain to the psychological pain that never really left me. It’s a monstrously abusive way to raise a child, telling them that they are never safe, and at any moment everything they know and care about will be destroyed in a rain of fire from the sky. I go back and forth on blaming my parents for being terrible at their jobs and forgiving them. They were both very young when they had my sister and me (too young, really, to be parents) and they were both indoctrinated into an end-times cult. They didn’t really have a shot at the Lifetime Parenting Achievement awards.

After my parents divorced, my mom lost all interest in the dogmas of the church, including all that stuff about the Last Days. I lived with her during the school year and with my dad during the summers, so I got more of a reprieve from the anxiety while school was in session. But when I went back to Idaho to stay with him, I absorbed enough obsession with the End Times to last me a full year.

My dad was singularly focused on the concept of the eschaton. Naturally, as a Mormon, he was dead sure that the great event on the near horizon, the singular Happening that would put an end to history itself, would be the second coming of Christ. He fully expected another human being to be reborn as a new incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth. He fully expected that this would happen in his lifetime, imminently, any second now. I think this was more than a belief to him, more than a tenet of his faith. I think it was a need. He longed for the end of the world because the only world he knew was so unkind to him. His was a hostile, cruel, suffocating reality, one in which he’d never quite been able to be his real self. Though he had tried. I give him credit for that.

My dad died when he was 49 years old. He was found in his bed, so it’s assumed that he died in his sleep, but we don’t really know what killed him. If he were alive today, he’d be 70, and he would have lived to see his wish. The Last Days are here.

It’s funny how calm I am about all of this, given how much the Eschaton terrified me as a child. I used to read Revelation the way some kids read books that are forbidden because of graphic sex scenes or too much gore, alone in my bedroom with one ear trained on the door, sneaking the book with a guilty thrill. And then I’d have nightmares for weeks after reading it.

Revelation is an interesting book, a singularly wild ride in the world of ancient literature. As a kid, I was drawn in horror and awe to the frightening imagery—all those visions of multi-headed beasts, the fires, the plagues, the magnificent whore in scarlet and purple with a jewled cup in her hands. I was captivated by the way the text with its archaic Jamesian lilt could work upon the imagination. I felt the prophesied suffering and dreaded it.

Now, reading the same book as an adult (which I’ve found myself doing often, these days) Revelation holds no more terror for me. Maybe that’s because the imagery doesn’t feel so non-specific anymore. We’ve lived through too much of it already. Imagined horrors become a little more mundane after you’ve experienced them first-hand and survived them. And once you’ve accepted that something like this can be real, the mystery of how it happened entices you too much to pay any mind to the scary parts. There’s physical evidence that time might not be linear, so maybe it’s actually possible that a man stranded on the island of Patmos sometime before the first century A.D. might have somehow caught a glimpse of Earth 2000 years in the future. Stranger things have happened. For example, there’s a fucking car orbiting this planet because the richest man in the world will do literally anything in an attempt to feel a less empty and useless.

I don’t know when the concept of the Eschaton changed for me, from source of fear to source of wonder. Maybe when I stopped paying so much attention to the frightening imagery—the Beast with the fatal wound to his head that is miraculously healed—and started paying attention to what happens at the end of Revelation. Have you read it? It’s pretty nice. The good guys triumph over evil. They build a whole new city, a new reality from which all evil-doers are permanently banned. Earth heals, and humankind enjoys a thousand years of peace, and there are no churches anymore because the God of Love has come to dwell among the people.

If you’ve read this far, then you’ll probably be surprised to learn that I’m not religious—at least, not in any way that most people would recognize as such. I am no longer a member of that cult, or that church, whatever you want to call it. I don’t belong to any organized institution of faith. In fact, I hold a pretty strong belief that to organize a religion is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of God—or to intentionally pervert the concept of God, if I’m feeling especially uncharitable. Although I think it’s a fascinating piece of anthropology, I don’t place any particular stock in the Bible—except the Book of Revelation, which I believe to be a far more interesting and historically important document than the rest of the Old and New Testaments.

Not being religious, I didn’t have a dog in the race during this Vatican conclave to choose a new Pope. But I’m pretty happy with the result. Good old Francis stacked the deck with progressives, so the conservative contenders who would have gone on pushing an agenda of hate and exclusion were eliminated quickly, and found consensus almost as swiftly as they rallied around Leo XIV. Pope Leo is so red-hot progressive that at the first Mass over which he presided, he had a nun give the first reading. That’s a rare occurrence within the Catholic church and all but unheard of within the Vatican. Leo himself referenced Revelation when he spoke at Mass. In both cases, references to chapter 21—the world made new after the old one has passed away. The paradise where all people of good heart and good works stand face to face with God.

There is something apocalyptic in the air. Those words would have upset me years ago. But now I know that “apocalypse” never meant “destruction.” The word translates to “revelation,” and that is what we are on the verge of now. Amid the wars and the rumors of war, amid the jockeying of false prophets and beasts who make fire in the sky, there’s a sense of anticipation of something new—something so utterly novel and astounding that its revelation will remake everything we thought we once knew about reality, pick apart the weave of the world that is now, and rework it into a city of gold, where no one hungers or thirsts, where sickness and weeping are no more. You can feel it. I know you can, and it’s not your imagination. It’s real.

I will sit here on the bench until the sun goes down. Until the sea air turns cold, and the smell of salt overtakes the perfume of early summer flowers. I will watch for Kosmos, the relic of a dead age, to blaze in an arc of fire across the sky. And when I see it, I will speak these words to myself: The second angel sounded his trumpet, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea.

Then I will go home and crawl into my bed and I will dream sweet dreams. And in the morning, I will get up at the usual time, and make my coffee, and the world will go on like it always has before.