Apocalypse Next Week?

My younger sister has recently taken an interest in religion. Not the Catholicism that we grew up with, but one of those other ones, one of those that take the Bible seriously, and believe that the End of Days is near. My older sister thinks that soon she will fly up to heaven in the Rapture. She has also told me that she thinks that the end is coming, and has worried that I still harbor doubts about the after-life, and that I should just quit my flip-flopping on the issue of one God. My sisters' religious beliefs do not stop me from loving them with all of my heart, it's just that in both of those End of Day scenarios, the lesbian sister, (that would be me) perishes in a most horrible way, (burnt up in a fire, driven into the sea by avenging angels, or I seem to remember something about plagues and horsemen?) and does not get to fly up to heaven with the rest of the chosen straight people. Not only do I not go to heaven, I spend a really long time (eternity is pretty long isn't it?) in a place where depending on which doomsday story you believe, is either hotter than DC in July, or colder that St. Paul in January.

I guess you can understand why I'm not anxious join up with the rest of the faithful.

Having sisters is almost like one of those indecipherable Catholic Mysteries of my youth, nearly always one of the Joyful or Glorious, and for me, a constant source of love and support. I can call my sister a Jesus Freak, and she will laugh and not be offended, and she can frown on my poorly shaped eyebrows and leather jacket, and I will love her just as I always have. I can barely stand to spend a month apart from my sisters, and living in an eternity without any of them would be the cruelest hell imaginable. And while I don't share the same belief of a Christian Day of Reckoning, I feel that there is some reckoning that is happening now. In my agnostic and practical mind, it is as simple as cause and effect. It is not an angry god coming to avenge a sinning population, but the cumulative effect of a nation that has neglected its responsibility to take care of the things that sustain all of us, coupled with a desire to have more than we need. We respect the guy who rich, we all desire to achieve wealth. We watch the lives of the rich and famous on E-News. We know Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears better than we know our Presidential candidates, Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton. We are paying $400 billion per year on just the interest on our debt as a nation. We borrow and we spend. We max out our credit cards, and we take out new lines of credit on our homes to pay for it. We have neglected our rivers and oceans. We have contaminated the very air that gives us life. We have dumped all sorts of unimaginable things into the water we depend on to sustain the world. We have been a poor steward to this planet, and we see the consequences with every passing day, every melting ice shelf, every strange tornado in winter, every hurricane that is too severe, every drought, every wild fire out of control is a Reckoning that has been coming for years, and it's footfalls are getting louder every minute. We all feel it coming, we just have different names for it.

I would love to be one the chosen and fly up to heaven, but I have a responsibility to the next generation.

We all do.

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