The End of the World | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: The End of the World | Previous Challenge Entry
By Bruce Phenix
01/29/20
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Arthur Kent and Sylvia Dee’s song “The End of the World” is not a favourite of mine, but it does express something important: the sometimes painfully sharp distinction between the physical world we all inhabit and the individual’s private world. I’ve always found it hard to share the urgent concerns expressed by people ranging from cosmologists to interpreters of the Book of Revelation that the physical world is to end at a particular time in the future. It concerns me more immediately that all the time, round the clock, countless individual worlds – or any of the more particular worlds that are clustered within them – are coming to an end. These endings may be brought about by death, which involves a permanent earthly separation, or by sickness, injury or heartbreak, which involve the permanent removal of some possibility in life. As Tennyson observed, “Never morning wore/ To evening, but some heart did break.” (1)
We were told that according to the Mayan calendar the world would end at 11:11am on Friday 21st December 2012. “I see the world didn’t end after all,” I remarked casually to a longstanding work colleague and friend later on that day before we both broke up for Christmas. But I was wrong. He became ill and did not return to work after the holiday, dying some weeks later before I could see him again. The particular world he and I had shared, the world of our relationship, our little world of friendship and mutual support, had indeed ended on that day.
If God can create a world, he can certainly end one – who knows when he will? But he can also re-create and renew both the physical world we inhabit and each of our individual or particular worlds if he so chooses. I believe that he’s engaged in this work of creating and re-creating all the time, in many different ways. “I die daily,” (2) exclaimed Paul; and indeed, in some ways, any Christian is constantly dying and being reborn, losing his or her life in order to save it.
The end is nigh for all of us, and we must all prepare to meet our Maker. But a new beginning is also nigh for all who wish to grasp it, and we can meet our Maker in an important sense every day. If we can accept these God-given endings and new beginnings in the right spirit, then – in the words of Jesus’s reassurance to Dame Julian of Norwich – “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” (3)
(1) In Memoriam A.H.H., canto VI
(2) 1 Corinthians 15:31, KJV
(3) Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 27

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