“When you hear of wars and insurrections,
do not be terrified; for such things must happen first,
but it will not immediately be the end.”
~ Luke 21:5-11
The liturgical year comes to an end this weekend. The calendar year will also be soon upon us. Winter is here and it always speaks of an ending to me. I am in my twilight years. And all the the current events and latest happenings here and around the world all point to the portents of the end-times: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be powerful earthquakes, famines, and plagues from place to place; and awesome sights and mighty signs will come from the sky.”
But it will not immediately be the end. And the end I am waiting for is not a cataclysm but a rapture of the veil that separates our temporal world, where events are defines in time, to the eternal, where time is the eternal now. Imagine a lump of mud. There is now way it can ever think it could live. And yet, in some timeless reality, life sprang from it. And that mud, that dust itself came from the debris of some exploding stars. And within me, some of the trillions cells in my body may have been from that very first explosion when the universe came into being.
The world evolves, ever slow slowly yet surely. From nothingness to the big bang. From the big bang to the birth of galaxies. From the galaxies to the planets. On the planet Earth, the first stirring of life. From simple cells to complex ones. From primeval organisms to sentient ones. And finally, conscious beings who are aware of what is happening around them and yet not totally seeing everything there is to see. Nor understanding everything there is to know and learn.
Yes, there are changes coming. And the trajectory of changes has always been for the better. Things become more, and better, and there is greater and greater perfection. The best is yet to come.