Second Coming

In the Christian tradition, there is a belief that Jesus was not a mere prophet, like those of the Old Testament, but the foretold Messiah who would save the world. Other Abrahamic traditions (including Islam and Baha’i) share the prophecy of a Messiah, but don’t necessarily link it to Jesus. This Messiah is supposed to be sent directly from God – at the end of days – to lead the faithful to their new, everlasting life, whilst those who remain unrepentant sinners are doomed to eternal destruction. Many take this prophecy quite literally; some even try to calculate the actual date. Many don’t believe it at all. But could it have a hidden meaning?

Many other religions, including those that predated the Abrahamic traditions, also have an ‘end of days’ prophecy, when the force that created the universe [and, of course, human-kind] will return to wipe ‘evil’ away. In all these religious traditions, even the dead will rise from the Earth and be judged. The righteous and faithful will be ‘saved’ and those tainted by evil must either repent or be destroyed.

But what if the prophets weren’t referring to a specific date; a single event? What if each person who lives faces a process in which either they find their place in the eternal creation of the universe, or they choose to cling to the supremacy of their own ego, deny continuous creation and select instead the dusty future of remembering life but knowing they no longer have it?

I find it hard to reconcile the idea, on the one hand, of a powerful force, engaged in continuous creation of all that exists – including its capacity for ego and for ‘evil’ – and, on the other hand, this same creator bringing everything to a fiery end, just to purge something that he/she/it had been creating all along.

I can understand the way that some traditions tried to reconcile this dilemma, by saying that the creator ‘left’ the universe to merely mechanical progression and that evil arose after this event. But even that has the flaw that it implies the creator either didn’t do a perfect job, or deliberately created the seeds of evil. That seems too ‘human’ to me: it has the smell of a human rationalisation. If we paint our all-creator with the same flaws that we have, how can we even trust that the ‘end of days’ will be a success?

No, the only reasonable assumption is that the universe is exactly as it was and is meant to be: that there is no ‘evil’, there is only choice – a possibility of freedom, even if the cost of that freedom is to abandon self-will.

Already, I can sense the fires being readied, to burn this heresy out of people’s minds. But isn’t that exactly the choice we face in life? Isn’t it also the choice that religions put before us? You can either hold your own ego to be ‘absolute’ or you can see that you are one of many – part of an incredible, inter-connected web of continuous creation. And if you do try to drive the world to obey your will, you will find – especially with the hindsight of history – that all you did was create tiny wrinkles in the sands of time. All empires end in ruins; all great works crumble to dust, unless they lift the whole of life to greater conscience.

So maybe it’s not so hard to consider that the ‘second coming’ is not the coming of a Messiah to save our world. Why would it need saving, if it is already being all that it should? But maybe it is our ego that needs saving: needs to repent its fight against the ‘will’ of continuous creation. Or it can choose to continue to fight; to continue to pit its own will against that of creation and believe that to be ‘free will’. Do we imagine that an all-powerful creator could not foresee ego and allow for it in the workings of the universe? Do we imagine that what ego wills is somehow different than what the universe needs?

It is hard to look upon war and torture and believe they are ‘what the world needs’. But that is because we see them through the lens of our own ego. If there were no darkness, how could we see the light? Our whole, ego-centric way of life creates division out of what we perceive as ‘good’ or ‘harm’ to our own interests. And then we collaborate to amplify those divisions. Each of us acts like a mini-creator – just trying to survive; just trying to ensure the survival of our offspring; just trying to make sense of it all. War and torture are perhaps not ‘our’ choice, but they are someone’s choice – someone’s cunning plan to make things better, for them. They remind us – starkly – that we’re all making cunning plans.

I truly can’t adopt the idea of a messianic ‘second coming’. But I can, most certainly, see the possibility for each person to go full circle, from the innocence at their physical birth, to a revelation of enlightenment about the true nature of continuous creation.

God didn’t ‘leave’. God didn’t create a hidey-hole ‘heaven’, separate from this cosmos. This cosmos is already ‘perfect’ in its continuous creation. It needs no Messiah – no ‘end of days’ clean-up; but maybe we do.

And if you are one of those Humanists, who doesn’t believe in any supreme power, all I can say is, “God bless you.” He does, anyway.