But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. — Matthew 24-37-39 KJV
The above passage from the Bible shows how easy it is to get used to what is going on around us, no matter how many signs of disaster there are. It is easy for us as humans to quickly get used to a crisis until it doesn’t seem like a crisis anymore.
I found this brought to mind when reading this blog my someone I regularly follow about how we should all be prepared for the coming crash. Now, unlike many, she isn’t forecasting an end-of-the-world crash, but a life-isn’t-going-to-stay-the-same crash. And she is encouraging us to be prepared, while admitting it is hard to know exactly what to be prepared for. Having grown up in Portugal, but living in America now, she has more experience with what past crisis have been like, and so I listen to her advice.
But those sorts of specifics aren’t what I wanted to write about. I was talking with Betsy about that blog, and made the comment that I intellectually find it reasonable, but as an American I have a problem with emotional acceptance.
What it comes down to is what we are willing to believe and accept, and that is based on the metaphors we live our lives by (see my previous blog on ideas and metaphors). The difficulty today is that there are so many things that have changed — our technology has made so many previous ways of thinking obsolete, and many of the metaphors people are living their lives by have not kept up. Actually we really don’t know what metaphors apply, and how true the new ones will turn out to be. We just know that many of the old ones are no longer true.
Yet, with that said, there are still some truths, some metaphors that won’t change. We are still flesh and blood; resources still have to come from somewhere; we forget these sort of things at our peril. The idiocy of today is many hold onto the metaphors that weren’t even true when they were originally promulgated (communism, for example), while dumping the metaphors that are eternal.
If we don’t get these straight, we head ourselves, personally and collectively, for the disaster that “takes us all away.”
As a man of faith, I will note, as G.K. Chesterton so succinctly pointed out to me in his book Orthodoxy, that the church spent centuries wrestling over metaphors, seemingly silly, sticky points, heresies and the like, because of the importance of these metaphors. If we have a place we can look for concrete, solid metaphors that are unchanging, this is where I begin my search. And yet it is the modern church that seems most willing to give these metaphors up. They take them out of the hymns; they take them out of the catechisms; they take them out of the disciplines.
When I mentioned this to Betsy she branded me with a title: Fundamentalist. I believe there are fundamentals. Whether it is the Bible, or the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, to believe in these as written, is to believe in fundamentals — a rock bottom upon which everything else can grow and change.
But I realize few do these days — and that is the ultimate source of the change, the crash that just might come upon us.
At The Rainbow 