It might be difficult to feel hopeful, but apparently we are coming out of this pandemic. Canada, and much of the world, is caught up in yet another wave of infections and we are learning yet more terms that we will hopefully have wiped from our vocabulary after this time. “Variants of Concern” are currently wreaking havoc, but even as they do so, vaccinations are ramping up and the end of the tunnel is not far off.
It’s not a bad exercise, before things get busy socially and otherwise post-pandemic, to reflect upon what we have lived in the last 15 months. I offer one such reflection today.
Remember the moths?
For those living in and around Vancouver in September 2020 we faced an invasion of moths. Swarms of moths as soon as you stepped outside your door. I ride my bike a lot and even 10 kilometres into the forest the moths were everywhere. When riding across the Lions Gate Bridge I remember that I rode on a carpet of dead moths while those still living hit my face like bugs on a car windshield. If you recall, the moth invasion coincided with forest fire smoke that descended over the whole city and reduced visibility to almost nil while filling the air with stale smoke odour. This all happened as a plague ravaged across the world. If you didn’t know better, you might think that they were signs of the apocalypse. While I rode my bike one day I imagined frogs falling from the sky or Lost Lagoon turning blood red.
Apocalypse
The word apocalypse is often thought to mean the horrifying end of things. This is not actually what apocalypse means. Apocalypse means, “unveiling”. It refers to an overarching revealing of what lies behind history and time. In evangelical circles apocalypse is often mistaken to have to do with terrible things like earthquakes, famine, pestilence (pandemic) and with a very few people being saved from almost absolute destruction and damnation.
Jürgen Moltmann was a Christian theologian who stood against such fearful views of history and the end of things. Moltmann, in outlining a theology of hope, presented that one of the key reasons that hope was largely removed from some forms of Christian theology was that certain “fanatical sects” began to speak of apocalypse and eternity in terms of “end times events” rather than the renewal of all things presented in Christian scripture. Moltmann says that once this way of understanding apocalypse set in, Christian theology around “end times” bore no relation “to the cross, the resurrection or to the exultation of Christ”. Future hopes were banished, and fear became the primary engine of this distorted, but popular theology.
When I remember the moths I personally reflect on some of the major losses in my family during this time of COVID. It has been a terrible time, but the moths and the smoke and even the pandemic do not define the apocalypse. It will take some doing, but hopeful Christian theology might aim to re-imagine apocalypse in positive light. You can find doomsday prophets all around. They exist on the right (moral decay, spiritual decay, the world is coming to an end) and on the left (ecological decay, moral decadence, the world is coming to an end).
Hopeful Christian theology does not shrink back from the difficult, sad and terrible truths of the world in which we live. We are called to address oppression and division and fear and hatred and environmental destruction. Hopeful Christian theology is not doomsday theology, however. It looks for signs of the renewal of all things and works from an awareness of the good in the world.
But I do remember the moths.
And I also remember the moths. There are probably still vestiges of them behind the work table in my carport. I have had a couple at my front door recently, waiting for an invitation.
Almost anything in a single unit can appear to have some beauty, as a single moth may appear exciting or fascinating to a lepidopterologist. However, I would suggest that, in swarms, nothing is beautiful. In times of great loss we are grateful for the beauty and hope shown to us by the optimists, the great Christian writers, the thinkers, the poets.
Hopeful theology is our way through this unveiling.