I tried to imagine how St. John the Divine got up to his cave near the summit of the Greek island of Patmos. He must have been in pretty good shape I concluded as I climbed there through the rocky, inclined pastures populated with grazing goats and paved with their turds. Then again, the author of the Book of Revelations (the Apocalypse) might have been cranked up on some narky substance; after all you don’t get the sort of visions that this weirdest book of the Bible reports on a couple of glasses of merlot. There aren’t any photos of St. John the Divine, but try to imagine the Rev. Jim Jones, or David Koresh, in long locks, whacked out on peyote and a jug of Thunderbird with a crystal-meth chaser.
It was the late 1980s and I was in better shape then. I could have taken a bus up to the top, where a monastery dedicated to John crowns the peak, but a vague asceticism seemed to prod me to ascend on foot. I would stop to catch my breath and look back to see my white ship getting smaller and smaller down at the port. John ensconced himself in a cave for a year, called the “Cave of St. Anne.” As the legend goes, this is where he is reputed to have written, smoking, snorting and drinking God knows what, his nightmarish visions and visitations. Why he wasn’t content with the wonderful view of the eastern Aegean I don’t know. Instead, he had visions of the past and future that were a bad trip on any uncontrolled substance. Angels, dragons, books of seven seals (lots of stuff in sevens— plagues, angels, golden bowls), horned beasts arising from the sea, whose number, by the way, is 666 (Rev 13:18), armies clashing, and cities thrown down by God’s wrath, and of course, those Four Horsemen. Small wonder that John is the patron saint “against poisonings.” Add “overdoses” to that one.
It’s doubtful that John had any idea that his ramblings and rants would be picked up and interpreted by legions of mystical charlatans to ensnare the frightened, the gullible, and the credulous dimwits of the bargain basement of Christianity. John’s hallucinations are a veritable bottomless mine for the fertile and eschatologically apocalyptic imaginations of the [C]Rapturists. These are the shamsters who have constructed “end time” prophecy for the “saved” who will be taken up to heaven and those who will be “left behind” that sounds like the trailers for a couple dozen horror and end of the world films run through the brain of Charles Manson.
The Crapture has become a billion dollar business. Certainly the authors of the very lucrativeLeft Behind series which are turned out like Harlequin horrors, and the other books, CDs, movies, T-shirts, and one supposes, soon, Crapture luggage, don’t want this fleecing of the suckers to end very soon. The Crapture posits that the earth is really a pretty nasty place, where evil beings like the Anti-Christ run around trying seduce our souls away from ingesting such feculent notions as the “pre-, mid-, and post-tribulations,” and loads of other nonsense. At various times Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and even Ronald Wilson Reagan (each of his three names are 6 letters each, get it?), and maybe even you, can get to where the mark of Satan can be seen on your forehead by the “saved” (i.e., those who have bought, if not necessarily read, the Left Behind series).
What is supposed to happen is that one day (and many adherents believe that is it will happen in their lifetime, so they can be a real pain in the ass to people who they believe have not been “saved”) only the saved will get transported “up there” in a rapturous “beam me up Jesus.” The rest of us will be left down here in an earthly hell of plagues of locusts, wars, famines, disease, death, global warming, Halliburton, and Enron accountants—in short, an endless Bush administration.
In Revelation 20:1–3, 7–8, John “saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years were ended. After that he must be loosed for a little while. . . . And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be loosed from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations which are at the four corners of the earth.” From this you sort of get an idea of how latter day eschatologists can really have some fun with Revelations. Think of it as sort of a video game where you can take any number, seven seals, 666, four corners of the earth, or four horseman, and look around for things, events, whatever you can find in similar numbers around you, and voila , instant prophecy! It’s the perfect way to interpret your life, if you prefer to substitute bible study classes for, say, advanced algebra (which I personally believe was created by the Horned Beast to screw up my high school GPA).
While they are waiting around to be ascended into heaven, singing “Na na, na, na NA-nah” back at the “unsaved” will they perhaps have a real revelation that, if there is indeed a God, and He inhabits heaven, that He is not likely to be of such poor taste, and so desperate in His eternal loneliness, that he would submit Himself to spending eternity with a bunch of credulous a**h***s?
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.6.2006)