Let's take it from the top

I really liked it when the world was gonna end.

Oh, sure! I was background terrified and in despair all the time.

But the thrill of being in on special knowledge—and about something so viscerally, painfully, literally life-or-death—was a long-term high like no other.

And it was a blessed partial relief from responsibility too, in this fallen, tragic world. Because while we were “called to be good stewards” of the earthly home God gave us, and while we were still called to preach and evangelize (the New Evangelization, anybody?) the Church and its Truth throughout the world, to all the corners of the earth…

If the world was predestined to end in an apocalypse someday, and it was going to be at some time when things were really unbearably bad on Earth and the Gospel had gotten a chance to be preached in all parts of the world (more or less…), it sounded like it could be soon. What with the way the world was rapidly sliding further and further under the total dominion of Satan and his forces, evil present everywhere, not even Church schools or pulpit homilies free of corruption and heresy, and all. And when Obama was elected president, boy, he might even be the Anti-Christ! That was the first presidential election I ever paid attention to.

On the night the election results were released, I, a child, wrote in one of my very first journals:

May God have mercy on us. Obama has been elected president. I am so scared of what is to come.

News media and magazines told me Obama wasn’t a US citizen. That he was Muslim. That he was a communist plant. That he was evil. That he wanted to usher in an age of more attacks on religion and Truth than ever existed before. That it would lead to religious civil war, that we would die martyrs in our churches, in our schools, that I should prepare to be another Cassie Bernall, that I should expect porch bombs and the secular Satanic takeover of our government. That he might be the Anti-Christ. That it might finally, at last, be the end of this evil, evil world. That all the evil forces in the world were getting their way. That I, and every person I loved, was probably doomed.

If the world was already predestined to end, and probably soon—

—maybe I didn’t need to be as worried about caring for the world, other humans, or any collective long-term survival.

It felt like the partial easing of a burden, a lessening of responsibility. A comfort of knowing that the worst it could possibly get would only matter for a little while, and then it wouldn’t matter in the end, and either way it would be out of my hands.

I didn’t want to live in the end times. But I sure believed I was supposed to look forward to them (with hope! anticipate with hope and awe!).

I daydreamed about what a relief it would be to finally let down my secular-vs-religious guard once the end times were finally here. It was so much easier, as I learned about horrors in the world, to believe that there would be an ultimate apocalypse that wiped it all clear off the map. It wouldn’t be my problem. It was so convenient to trust in the ultimate End Times. Even when they scared me out of my mind.

It’s hard, losing the comfort, even while I work hard on losing the terror. They’re so intertwined. Some days, I don’t know how to begin unwinding them. I hope that in the future I look back and feel like they never connected at all.