Light On Dark Water

The Storms that Herald the End?

The subject of the end times came up at dinner the other
night, apropos of the recent hurricanes: it seems that one of my
daughter’s teachers suggested that they might be a sign of
the end. I doubt that, myself. For one thing, hurricanes of this
strength are far from unheard of, although it’s true that
these have been unusually close together in time, were unusually
strong at least while they were still well out at sea, and have
struck in unusually close proximity to each other. Ivan, Dennis,
Katrina, and Rita were all very strong storms, and they all
struck a section of coastline from the Texas-Louisiana border on
the west to the Alabama-Florida border on the east, a span of
roughly four hundred miles, perhaps an eighth (I’m looking
at a map and guessing) of the coastline bordering the Gulf of
Mexico. I think those of us who live in that area can be forgiven
for wondering if there is some design at work here. Still, if the
events have been unusual, they can’t be said to have been
so improbable as to be anomalous, and the fact is that more and
more severe hurricanes struck the United States in the decade of
the 1940s.

There’s a simple reason why Americans are engaging in
apocalyptic speculation: these hurricanes have affected us
dramatically. I don’t remember hearing any of us talk this
way in 1998, when Hurricane Mitch, a late-season (October 29)
monster, struck Nicaragua and killed some 11,000 people.

I’m a resolute agnostic as regards the end of the world,
and in fact tend to believe that the more widespread the belief
that it is near, the less likely it is to be so. Sooner or later,
of course, someone is going to be right in predicting it, but
every age has provided ample reason for those living in it to
believe that wickedness is so widespread that it meets the
criteria of prophecy, that the end must be soon or else the world
will be utterly given over to evil, and so I neither make nor
believe any very specific predictions.

There is, however, one thing that gives me pause. The old
familiar wickedness of the human race we know very well: the
wars, the tortures, the oppression, the lust and the lying. C. S.
Lewis once speculated that the quantity of good and evil in the
world remains more or less constant, but gets distributed
differently in every age: so (for example) our age is horrified
by the brutality and cruelty of punishments once handed out for
very minor crimes, but has positively encouraged people to
abandon on a whim marriage vows made before God, and to throw
over the whole concept of sexual morality. Perhaps it all adds up
to equal measures of virtue and vice.

But we have invented a new crime. We propose to meddle with
the very substance of human life. We propose to destroy human
embryos in order to improve our own health. We propose to tinker
with the genes of the newly conceived so that when they grow up
they will look like we want them to look and behave as we want
them to behave. We propose to grow duplicates of living people in
a laboratory for purposes of our own.

Once, back in the 1970s when I was more or less testing the
waters of Christianity after a long absence, I had a conversation
with an Episcopal priest known for his “liberal”
views. I had the feeling that he was trying to impress me, under
the mistaken impression that I was looking for a modernized and
contemporary religion, long on secular enlightenment and short on
revelations and commandments. I only remember one specific thing
from the conversation; as best I remember, he said something like
this: “We (the Episcopal Church) don’t hold the sort
of only-God-can-make-a-tree position that the Roman Catholics do.
We would see nothing wrong, for instance, in genetically
engineering people with gills so that we could mine the bottom of
the sea.”

I was dumbstruck and horrified by this, not yet being aware of
the apostasy happening within every Christian community at the
time. Ten years or so later I related the conversation to a
great-aunt of mine, who as far as I know had no religion and was
in her late 80s at the time. She considered what I had said for a
moment, then replied simply “Well, I suppose people will
always want to have slaves.” She saw plainly what the
Christian bien-pensant could not.

Perhaps our experiments with cloning and genetic engineering
and all the rest of it will prove to be unfeasible. Perhaps they
are just slavery under a new name, and perhaps God will let us
get away with it, as he has let us, individually and
collectively, get away with so much. But it seems to me that they
have the potential to distort beyond recognition the elementals
of human life: the bond between parent and child, husband and
wife, brother and sister, one generation and the next. And I find
myself hoping, if not expecting, that God himself will put an end
to these obscenities, since it seems unlikely that we will
voluntarily turn aside from this path, those of us who oppose it
being, apparently, in the minority.