COMMENTARY: Shuttle Trumps `Left Behind’ for True Religious Mystery

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Television topped itself this past weekend with an exposition of self-conscious and superficial religious mystery on Sunday (July 16) night and a report of unself-conscious and profound religious mystery on Monday morning. The National Geographic Society, famous for its yellow-bordered magazine, veered perilously close to yellow journalism with its […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Television topped itself this past weekend with an exposition of self-conscious and superficial religious mystery on Sunday (July 16) night and a report of unself-conscious and profound religious mystery on Monday morning.

The National Geographic Society, famous for its yellow-bordered magazine, veered perilously close to yellow journalism with its exploration of what it termed the “secrets” of the biblical Book of Revelation. Any organization that features Tim LaHaye, author of an endless series of “Left Behind” books about an ever-ending planet, as a commentator on humanity’s chances for being saved is in the entertainment rather than the education business.


The End of the World is foretold by the Book of Revelation, LaHaye believes, so we had better buy tickets from him for the last plane out because he sees “no hope for the unsaved after this life.” He, of course, is only one of the many salvation hucksters who believe that the Book of Revelation is a kind of theological Global Positioning System through which we locate ourselves in the battles, fires and natural disasters that literally fulfill its presumed prophecies.

Revelation is also called the Book of the Apocalypse, accepted by many as a kind of divine dictation about the world’s woes given to St. John, who put it all down as a kind of coming attractions of the vengeance God would take on sinners before pulling the curtain down on civilization.

Nobody would build roller coasters or make horror movies if Americans did not enjoy being scared in small doses, so there is no surprise in their enjoying a minor shiver at such distortions of the Scriptures and the meaning of religion.

Especially when the National Geographic program’s digital wizardry dramatizes some of LaHaye’s scenarios about the disasters soon to be visited upon sinners, in short, us. This combination paintball, wrestling and video game rendition of the judgment already finalized on us trivializes both belief and believers.

The faithful were better served by television’s coverage of the return of the space shuttle less than 24 hours later. This voyage and return shifted our eyes from the Earth so soon to be set afire by a judgmental God to the heavens and the wonder of our far from finished, much less finally judged, human journey.

Our true experience of religion involves mystery but not mystification. True religion does not solve or explain the mystery of our existence. It allows us to experience the mystery that is found, if it is to be found at all, when we enter everyday events rather than when we are ejected from them by a distant and easily displeased God.

The words “mystery,” “Apocalypse” and “Revelation” have a meaning in common. They refer to an “unveiling” rather than an indictment, an opening rather than access denied to the wonder of life. It allows us to enter our human sorrows rather than to be punished for our human shortfalls.


We can’t get anywhere by the flight path of fear filed by LaHaye who warns that if we don’t get on board his Salvation Spaceship we will all be “left behind.” We already had seats with the crew members of the shuttle, our surrogates in exploring the vastness of creation and of our calling to be at home in it.

The shuttle is the religious symbol of our century, for on its every venture it validates the truth that pseudo-prophets like LaHaye deny: The Earth is not off-course, a condemned star wobbling toward extinction. The blue and green Earth is in the heavens, participating in the unity of the universe and reminding us of our own unity.

One astronaut was struck with wonder on our behalf when at one moment he could see the sun, the symbol of eternity, and the moon, the symbol of time. That revelation has nothing to do with the end of the world but of our discovery of the world where we may live on the often chilly plains of time but are warmed and nourished daily by the eternal sun.

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

AMB/PH END KENNEDY

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