From the age of five, author Paul Mitchell had a morbid fear of death until, when he was 20, a theology of rapture (that at the end of time the ‘saved’ will fly up into the clouds and meet Jesus ‘in the middle of the air’) and conversion to Christianity allayed his fears. Now, over 30 years later, he finds solace in poetry and contemplative prayer, and through them explores mortality, how to live authentically and in a way that is life-giving.
It’s 1989 and I’m reading Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth in my second-floor university college room. Through the open window come the sounds of young people like me in the courtyard below, laughing and throwing water balloons at each other. Their joy saddens me. They don’t realise their fun – and the world – is about to end.
A few months earlier, I’d been like them; reckless and irreligious. But now I’m born again and, like the Christians of ancient Thessalonica and Corinth, I’m sure Jesus’ second coming is imminent. This truth has me urgently sharing the Gospel with friends – who desert me as I encourage them to get off sin’s highway and onto the narrow road to glory.
The narrow road, also, to rapture: Hey guys, just starting your life journeys, the battle of Armageddon will start soon! Give your life to Jesus and when he comes down from the clouds, he’ll take us all off to heaven .
At the pub, they look at me like I’m crazy, but I’ve never felt saner. “You’ll be sorry,” I implore them, and they laugh and buy another round.
A few years later, I read Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Building on Lindsay’s work – and packaging their view of biblical end times in a rollicking narrative – the book increases my confidence the world will soon enter interminable crisis and I’ll be raptured. So, I live that way: I don’t care about the world’s long-term future, the environment, or petty things like sport, politics, science or art, unless they’re Christian in the narrowest sense. I don’t think about establishing myself financially. I just do whatever I believe it’ll take to make sure those who don’t know Jesus are ready to be snatched from the earth “to meet the Lord in the air.”
Where we won’t experience death, the fear of which many atheists view as religion’s root cause.
My fear of death started when I was five. Mum shouted from the kitchen window for me to bring back to the garage all the toys I’d left on our country town nature strip. The task was herculean and, as the sun set, I hauled tricycles, bats and balls and metal toy trucks, one-by-one to the garage. After dropping each item in the darkening shed, I realised I would eventually finish this insurmountable task. And, somehow, that made me realise everything had to finish, including me.
I feared death every day for fifteen years. The gloom came over me when I was enjoying kicking a footy or watching television, a voice saying, Ah, this is good – but you’re going to die. It was worse at night when the fear wasn’t a voice or even a thought; it was a blanket thicker than anything covering my body. When I was in primary school, I’d cry for help and mum would come into my room. She’d tell me death was for old people and to think about something nice, like flying on a jumbo jet. Neither she nor I had been on a jumbo jet, but I imagined its white body flying until it disappeared into the dark and empty universe above my bed.
That dark and emptiness fell from the ceiling and filled me for years – until I turned twenty and had a spiritual awakening on a Lake Eildon houseboat. It came after a drug-induced psychosis had given me a few weeks of extreme paranoia and suicidal thoughts. But, in the space of an hour on the houseboat, an encounter with Christ took me from existential terror to clear-minded joy. A few days later, looking out over still blue water ringed by forest, I began to understand I was now also on board the good ship Eternal Life.
But the rapture soon took over any deeper meditation on the subject. The aforementioned authors’ narrative-driven, up-to-the-moment views were addictive. There would come any day now “the twinkling of an eye” and the last trumpet’s sound, leading to a cosmic event I was desperate to be part of: “[T]he dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed,” St Paul wrote, and I was thrilled to know I’d be one of the changed, not one of the dead.
Death simply wasn’t for me. Even if I made it to be one of those old people that mum had said death was for, I still didn’t think it would involve me. Those graves I saw others enter, the furnaces into which I watched coffins slide? Irrelevant.
In his book Adam’s Return, Fr Richard Rohr writes that men, who he says view themselves, or feel the need to view themselves, as invincible, must accept they’re going to physically die before they can live authentically. That pursuit of authentic living led me to a more contemplative approach to faith. Fewer prayers asking for help, more time waiting in silence and allowing the Spirit to speak in many and mysterious ways.
Over time, my fire and brimstone end-time theology simmered. And, while it boiled dry, I also retired from the one-person selection committee to which I’d appointed myself, choosing who would play on the heaven and hell teams for eternity. To paraphrase Bono commenting in song about his younger self, I knew much more then than I do now. And I’d add that what I don’t know now is more than enough.
Kind of. Because a couple of years ago I realised part of me had continued to live as if I’d be raptured and wouldn’t physically die. Maybe it was turning fifty that changed the narrative, hearing of school friends who’d died, and reading newspaper reports about strangers in their fifties succumbing to cancer. Whatever it was that made me conscious of my rapture theology, the result was that death scowled over my joyous times more sternly than it had before I became a Christian. And it didn’t feel like my faith was helping. Where was my surety of what I hoped for, my certainty in what I couldn’t see: eternal life and resurrection?
I returned to my old love, poetry, and wrote as if my life depended on it because I felt in some way it did. In writing long and difficult poems late at night, I didn’t realise how closely I was mirroring St John of the Cross’s approach to the same kind of dark night dilemma. Not long after this writing, I read Thomas Keating’s Intimacy with God, and centring prayer became a vital part of dealing with my later life wrestle with mortality. I also experienced some of the ‘purification’ Keating said is possible when we commit to centring prayer, as emotional pains “of a lifetime . . . stored in the unconscious” are released.
After all this, I came out of heavy, dark clouds and landed on earth, where the inhabitants mostly accept that their bodies, like the one typing these lines, will die. The theology of rapture that had underpinned the idea I wouldn’t see decay, yes, decayed. It became brittle over time as I banged at it with poetry and, like burnt-out logs when prodded, it crumbled and fell away.
I’m no longer covered in the old blanket fear of death; it’s been lifted off to float away into a brightening universe. I didn’t realise it, but it had been a burden to think I wasn’t going to die. Now I’ve never felt more alive because I am perhaps, in Rohr’s words, moving into authentic living.
The rapture may or may not come. I may live one more day or thirty years in this typing body. But those old, charcoaled logs have fallen to ash and new kindling is up and burning with a light that I have faith, more than I’ve ever had faith, will never go out.
Paul Mitchell has published six books, including poetry, fiction and non-fiction works. His latest is Matters of Life and Faith (Coventry Press, 2021), a collection of personal essays.