"The Rapture", painting reproduced as a popular print in the 1970's

Running late, or left behind

10 and 9, 8 and 7, 6 and 5 and 4,
Call upon the savior while you may,
3 and 2, coming through the clouds in bright array,
The countdown’s getting lower every day.
~ The Blast-Off Song (The Rapture Song)

Last year I attended a party for several graduate students of San Francisco State University’s MA program in history. Towards the end of the evening a man in his early 30′s told me how as a child he had gotten lost in the grocery store. Unable to find his mother after some time he began to panic. He wondered if the Rapture had happened. He wondered if he had been left behind while his mother had been spirited away. I almost dropped my beer bottle. This was an experience that I knew well, but one I hadn’t thought about in years. The memory of a similar event washed over me like a wave and I found myself shaking uncontrollably for several minutes. It was the result of shear recognition; an enormous rush of adrenaline courtesy of meeting a long lost friend on a dark road at night.

The Rapture, as imagined in a Christian comic book, 1970's

That long lost friend was prepubescent me, looking at my watch when my mother was 15 minutes late from picking me up at the barber shop. I was certain Christ had returned and I had not really been one of the elect. My heart raced as the internal, mental Rolodex spun frantically, possessed by gale force winds. Who could I call? Who could I run to with the Seven Year Tribulation about to commence? Then I had it: my great aunt Gerry, grandma’s agnostic, divorced  sister, never without a cigarette. Her house had an entire room of wall-to-wall books, none of them Christian. What was more, she lived only six or seven blocks from the barber shop. I knew if the Rapture had happened, Aunt Gerry would definitely have been left behind. I recalled her rolling her eyes when I mentioned Adam and Eve and in that sardonic smoker’s cackle of hers offering up a pithy “Well, that’s ONE theory.” Aunt Gerry would be my refuge!

Although I had not vanished along with my godly mother into the clouds I had most certainly disappeared into my own head. It took a moment to realize my mother was standing in front of me, a little out of breath “Jason. Jason, I’m sorry I’m late.” Years later my graduate student friend, seeing a similar glazed look in my eyes put his hand on my shoulder: “You look like you need another beer.”

Expectation, or I know all there is to know about the waiting game

Richard Oelze, "Expectation" (Erwartung), 1935-36. The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it promises;
And oft it hits where hope is coldest; and despair most sits.
~ William Shakespeare – “As You Like It”, Act I, Scene 2

The Rapture is an immanent event for millions of American Evangelicals. Christians have always believed in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, however, the idea of a pre-coming (as it were), when Christ’s follower will be taken up before his actual reign over the earth as Messiah Triumphant, is part of a belief system scarcely two centuries old. It is called premillenial dispensationalism. Few American Christians know this, although it is the source of their view of time and eternity. The didactic visuals of this belief-world are a rich topic unto themselves. For a glimpse take a look at the apocalyptic time-maps of Clarence Larkin, first introduced to me by my great-grandmother who was a devout student of dispensational lore.

Brick wall and clouds: for me these are more than metaphors, they are two of the most potent image-objects of my childhood, around which a whole host of meanings came to be clustered.

My father began to do the work of a grown man when he was a small child. Along with his siblings, he was essentially a work horse, helping to run a small dairy for an unhappy father who would rather have been hunting in the woods or racing his hound dogs. Although a devout Christian later in life, my father’s father was for the most part incapable of showing Christian charity to his only son. This little boy grew up to be a man who had two modes of being-in-the-world: work and drink. Despite this, he was (and is) a devout Evangelical Christian.

As a professional bricklayer and stone mason, his arduous days were filled with intense, physically demanding labor. I was his hod carrier from the age of ten, following in his giant footsteps, thrilling to the limits of my own exhaustion, which never failed to garner praise from this usually un-complimentary man. Over the years Dad would confide in me: “I just wish the Rapture would come. Sometimes I just don’t want to go on.” His yearning for this cosmic event seemed to deepen in direct proportion to the rapacity of his -isms (workahol and alcohol). As I grew older I found this strange combination of addiction and religious fervor a cocktail I could no longer stomach.

As an art student in New York City in the late 1990′s, I came across the German Richard Oelze‘s haunting painting “Expectation”. Though labeled a “surrealist work”, for me it shared nothing with either Dali or DeChirico, those clever set designers of modernist and Freudian fantasy. Oelze’s painting seemed a psychic photograph of an Evangelical Christian’s state of mind. I felt certain that if any of this anonymous group were to suddenly turn and face me, I would know each of them by name.

Oelze’s work precipitated a sort of enrapturement. In the twinkling of an eye I seemed to vanish from the white halls of MOMA, only to rematerialize back on the family farm, three thousand miles away, where I was once again listening to my exhausted father ramble on about the Rapture.  The truth was, both of us were always on the brink of that moment of fulfillment: he from his God, me from him. Neither of us were ever able to fully exhale during those intense conversations about Christ’s return. We were unwilling to let it all go because somehow that was not our job. The “someone else”, whose job it was, had dropped us off twenty centuries earlier. He had promised to come back and pick us up. He was incredibly and undeniably late.

Ecstasy,  or Thrilling to the figure in the clouds

El Greco, "The Burial of Count Orgaz", 1586, Church of Santo Tome, Toledo, Spain

God gave us faculties for our use; each of them will receive its proper reward. Then do not let us try to charm them to sleep, but permit them to do their work until divinely called to something higher.
~ Saint Teresa of Avila

Like many Evangelicals I was taught that Catholics were not true Christians. Growing up where I did (in the San Joaquin Valley close to Stockton, CA) Catholic people were usually of Italian, Mexican, or Portuguese descent. Catholicism was a sign of otherness- it was both theologically unsound and decidedly non-Anglo.

For a short while when I was ten, our neighbors were an incredibly kind, elderly Portuguese couple whose large home and front yard included statues of various saints and one of the Virgin and Child. My parents were on good terms with the Amaros and we sometimes visited with them. One day I asked my mother why they got to leave their nativity set out when it wasn’t Christmas. She explained that Mr. and Mrs. Amaro were Catholics and Catholics “believed in statues.”

I was confused by the Amaro’s “belief in statues” and how that connected to the sublime feeling I got every year when we unwrapped and laid out our brightly painted, imported “Italian” creche bought years before at Sears. Didn’t this mean we “believed in statues” too? Later I would be told that Catholics prayed to statues, putting their faith in the power of images, rather than the word of God alone.

The Amaros attended a Catholic church in Thornton, CA where in the 1980′s a statue of Our Lady of Fatima had been reported to weep real tears. During my child-hood several parades were held  in which this figure was carried through the streets. I had never been inside a Catholic Church but through movies and TV realized that they contained glorious things: stained glass windows, Gothic tracery, life-size figures with crowns, carrying scepters and staffs, often haloed and winged! It was made perfectly clear to me, however, that such colorful and rich accoutrements were examples of blasphemy.

A procession honoring Our Lady of Fatima is held annually in Thornton, CA

My powerful feelings of desire (and aversion) for Catholicism were similar to those that visited me late at night, when I would awaken out of a reverie in which the central focus were the older teenage boys who occasionally deigned to ruffle my hair or smile at me on the bus. Such delicious feelings- whether for shimmering stained glass or for handsome high school jocks- were visceral. Catholic churches and beautiful boys made me smile to myself, made me want to float up to the ceiling. These obscure objects of desire took me to the place of ecstasy.

Dirck van Delen, "Iconoclasm in a Church", 1630, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Although I didn't know it at the time, the anti-Catholic sentiment of my family and church was descended from earlier forms of Protestant iconoclasm (the destruction of religious images).

It wasn’t until college that I began to understand the historical roots of my parents’ antipathy to the Catholic faith- and to its perceived reliance on images. The strange thing was, the Biblical passage that my parents pointed to as evidence of the Rapture (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18) was intensely visual! When it was recited in Church and I closed my eyes- I SAW IT HAPPENING: as the Last Trumpet sounded, countless people shot upward into a brilliant blue sky, their bodies bursting with light as if becoming fireworks. Jesus stood on a cloud arms outspread beckoning to all of these fiery souls to follow him through the clouds back to the immeasurable heights of heaven. I did not so much believe in the idea of the Rapture as I felt and thrilled to it when it became a vision in my mind of what “must surely come to pass”.

At age ten I encountered El Greco’s masterwork “The Burial of Count Orgaz” reproduced as a centerfold in an over sized art book at the library. As Oelze’s “Expectation” would connect me to the Rapture in terms of yearning, so El Greco’s rendering mirrored the Rapture as an ecstatic fulfillment. I understood that the image was probably made by a Catholic (the unapologetic grandeur of its religiosity matched the visual world of the Amaros). I was aware that the explosion of upward movement at the center of the composition was the same surge of energy I experienced in my heart when I thought about the Rapture.

Anxiety, expectation, ecstasy: three all-consuming emotions  experienced with a lover, that one person in whom we have placed all of our hopes for a better future, when we will be more wholly ourselves. For Christians of all denominations, Christ is often envisioned as a lover. Years later as I poured over the El Greco image I realized how close “Orgaz” is to “orgasm”.

For my Evangelical father the Rapture was the ultimate release from the physical bondage of work and of alcohol. For me, as a child, fearing I had been left behind, the Rapture was the ultimate fulfillment of all my fears.  But the discovery of the images of ecstasy in Catholic iconography were a turning point for me- the first glimpse into another sort of Christianity. By making Jesus and ascension/rapture REAL through a visual representation I found a sort of relief, if not release. I now realize that the sensory overload of Catholic pomp offered me a kind of Christian embodiment through the very act of beholding. (For an excellent general introduction to embodiment and Cathoicism see The Catholic Imagination by Andrew Greely.)

Statue of Christ in a garden, evoking His "agony in the garden of Gethsemene"

In my church we were waiting for our God to return, waiting to be caught up to meet him in the clouds. Our Catholic neighbors went about their daily tasks, moving through the house and the garden, while their God and His Saints watched them. Looking over the wall I could see them too. How I wanted to make my father understand that Jesus was here already and his feet were firmly planted in the grass. Why were we all staring up at the clouds into an empty sky. We could have been enjoying the presence of Jesus standing with his arms outstretched, right before our very eyes.