Up, up and away

The Rapture. I may have missed it on Saturday. You know how it goes, a couple of the kids were visiting and we had cider to buy and enjoy, we had to find a good home for coffees and treats, and art to ogle and tempt us. Perhaps I just didn’t have time for The Rapture. It wasn’t on my radar or my calendar.And, from what I’ve read and seen and heard, many of y’all had similar barriers to Rapture. What with planting trees, shearing alpacas, selling heritage seedlings, taking in an infrared sauna, feeding the tourists, perusing the “reuse,” sommelier- ing and cycling, who among us, had time to be heading anywhere at the end of it all, except to a lawn chair with a cool drink? When all was said and done, we found our own form of rapture. Obviously, the two-four weekend is a really bad time to stage The Rapture. I’m not the kind of gal who would spend an evening with the good book or entertaining interpretations of the end of the world (as we know it). This whole Rapture thing seemed to be scam of rapturous proportions with a soupcon of wacky billboard press. As you know, I spent more than half of my school days a uniformwearing student in a Catholic school. The first subject every school day in the parochial school was “Catechism.” Given my “druthers” I would have opted for much dreaded arithmetic or,my fag, social studies, but Catechism with Mother Leone it was. Every morning at five minutes after nine, the blue, the green or the grey Baltimore Catechism hit the desktop and the reading, reciting and memorizing began. Every school day morning I snoozed through a lesson from the blue, green or grey Baltimore Catechism. Then in a REM state, I can honestly say I don’t remember any fire and brimstone or the judgement day or an uplifting in the rapturous sense. Heck, I thought rapture was the day the school bus was late and getting into class just as the Leone Lesson of venial and mortal sins was ending. Times have changed, I guess. The media, really, is the message (thank you Mr. McLuhan). Had I listened more in Catechism class, who knows, I might be a marketing guru now. The message was obviously hidden in the grey, the blue or the green Baltimore Catechism, endorsed by Archbishop Fulton Sheen.A telemarketer before telemarketing was fashionable.

So, if I get my head into a “rapture” frame of mind, it looks to me like The Rapture is, and has been, happening in dribs and drabs or in some cases, bits and pieces. Just listen to the news. Read a paper or surf the net. If you’ve been keeping up on worldly events it’s all about the flooding, of epic proportions, in Manitoba and in Quebec and the southern U.S. I wouldn’t be surprised to see enterprising folks getting into the business of building arks. The folks in Alberta, who could probably use the flood waters, have dealt with hundreds of wildfires. Several people have died and hundreds are homeless. Over 800 tornadoes touched down in the midwestern United States killing hundreds of people and leaving thousands injured and wondering what the H E double-crossing-yourself happened. Eight hundred tornadoes! And, as always, there’s the gunfire and bombing plaguing the innocents of the Middle East.To top it all off, this year we’ve watched, shook our heads, donated and prayed as earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear plant meltdowns and volcano eruptions whirled around the globe. Kaa-rumba, there’s hardly a spot on this earth where people are unaffected by natural disasters and political stupidity.

My real take on The Rapture is pretty simple. I don’t buy it and I’m not about to sell anything to pay for it. I do believe someone, or two, made an awful lot of money scamming people whose lives are already filled with tribulations. Harold Camping has twice predicted a Rapture.Twice, Harold Camping was flabbergasted to find his feet were firmly planted on the ground the day after his 1994 and 2011 forecasting. Apparently, Camping went back to work on the 23rd of May to work out the kinks in his foreseeing. Had he read the weather forecast and been in Tornado Alley on the 21st, his “rising up” may have happened. I don’t think he’d be in Kansas anymore.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca