On the day when the world ends a great bridge will span the void between earth and heaven. The souls still living and those who have died will cross the bridge toward where the high god Ahura Mazda dwells. Not all will finish the journey. Those who have, throughout the ages of the earth, fought on the side of goodness and justice will attain their goal and begin an eternity of bliss, but those who were deceived and corrupted and served Ahriman, the lord of evil, will fall screaming into the pit of fire to languish in eternal torment. The world is the battleground between good and evil and the children of humankind are soldiers in those armies. After the last great battle, at the end of time, judgment will be passed and reward and punishment will be meted out.
That story sounds somewhat familiar to most of us, if not in its details, at least in its general theme, and so it should, because it was those Persian stories of the last days that were the seed and model for the later apocalyptic myths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The influence of the Babylonian and Persian myths on later religions is much stronger than most of us realize. You probably haven't even heard the two names that are the title of this sermon, although Ahriman has sometimes been used as another name for Satan or the devil in western literature. Properly so, since the idea of Satan came from this demi-urge. Originally, Ahura Mazda created two brothers, one who chose good and the other evil, one who created and one who destroyed, and they were of equal power, but as the religion of Zoroastrianism developed, Ahura Mazda, or Ormuzd, as he came to be called, more and more became identified with the good brother, and since he was the high god, it was believed that the final triumph of good over evil was assured.
This couldn't happen without a struggle, however, for the power of evil was very great. Every living thing was brought into the fray, the demons made by Ahriman on his side and all other living things except human beings on the side of Ormuzd. Human beings, having free will, and therefore being able to choose, although created by Ormuzd, could be recruited by Ahriman. Many were and still are, and in the last days, they will receive the consequence of their choice. This absolute dualism informs all the western religions, and stories of the apocalypse wane or flower over and over again as the times seem to call for them.
During the time of Jesus and for several generations both before and after his time, these apocalyptic ideals were rife. The power of first Greece and then Rome seemed so terrible and so impossible to combat that the only remedy seemed to be the end of time itself. St. John the Evangelist, reputed author not only of the Gospel of John and the three epistles attributed to him, but of the Book of Revelation, was in such anger and despair over the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the sufferings of the Diaspora, that the power of his apocalyptic work and its images of destruction and judgment has never completely faded.
Today it may be that its influence is on the rise again. It is perhaps a little difficult to tell whether there is a real rise in apocalyptic thinking or whether the survey saying that 25% of the American people believe that the world will end this year has simply brought it to our attention. There have always been apocalyptic sects in the west, calculating the end times in various ways, and recalculating when they are shown to be wrong, and it has always seemed to me to make little sense to pin one's hopes on the second thousand years when the first did not answer their expectations. I suspect, however, that there really is a rise in such beliefs. It may use different images, different gods, different calculations, but the feeling and the fear and the hope are there.
Usually when we think about the images of the apocalypse, we think about destruction. The world will end with earthquakes, tidal waves, war, famine, disease and all the horrors that John portrayed. It could happen, of course, just that way. We could be hit by a comet even bigger than the one that is thought to have destroyed the dinosaurs. We could compromise our own environment so thoroughly by pollution and our weapons of destruction that we could probably manage it ourselves without a comet's or meteor's help. We could, given certain changes in the balance of the solar system, fall into the sun. Sooner or later the world really will end, and its ending is unlikely to be either comfortable or attractive to the beings living on it. All things being equal, that ending will probably be of little interest to us, personally, but it could happen. What is important, however, about the belief in the apocalypse is not the destruction of it, which will certainly happen, one way or another, one time or another, but the idea of judgment. It is Judgment Day, when the good are rewarded and the evil punished, and all human plans, both for good and for evil, are finished.
That, I think, is its attraction to its believers and the reason for rising belief in it. Few people are so unhappy that they simply want the world to end, and if they do they have various means of accomplishing their own end, at least. What they want -- what they need -- is an absolute certainty of something. There are people temperamentally unable to deal with ambiguity. They need to understand themselves and the world in terms of simplicity and purity, in strict dualities: right and wrong, good and evil, true and false. For such people the ambiguity of such a time as ours is impossible either to understand or endure. Human beings always, of course, think that our own times are the most difficult, the most confusing, the hardest to live with, but this time I suspect we may be right. The verities we used to know are gone. We hardly know how to decide between right and wrong when the answers may be cultural rather than absolute; we can hardly even mention the word truth except with qualifiers and personalizers; we see the law of unintended consequences overtaking our best-motivated actions; and sexual moralities, as the easiest example, decided one way in our advertising, talk shows and soap operas and another in our political and social pieties. We are losing our cherished freedoms to the fear of terrorism and the desire for preservation of material goods, and we often have our doubts about the efficacy of prayer, and equal ones about the efficacy of science. No wonder people are grasping for certainty and longing for rescue from this morass, even at the cost of the destruction of the world.
The literalist Christian sects who expect the metaphors of Revelation to come to pass precisely and in order are growing and flourishing, but they are only one aspect of the apocalyptic hunger. You remember the sect who expected the Hale-Bopp comet to his us? The story of Heaven's Gate is simply another version of apocalyptic hopes. For them the rescuers and redeemers were not Mithra or Jesus or the angels of whatever god is thought to be the true one, but powerful aliens who would whisk their souls, made worthy by their discipline, to another plane of existence. The rise of the militias with their fervor for their own certainties is yet another example of the phenomenon. It is not a coincidence that they are often connected to the religious right. They too see things in simplistic and moralistic terms, and feel that their battle for what is good is absolute.
The terrorists of the attacks on the World Trade towers and the Pentagon felt entirely justified. They were the good and pure fighting a holy war against the evils and corruptions of Western society. Those who were killed were participants in evil and their deaths did not signify. Their own deaths were the deaths of martyrs or only what is to be expected in war and were to be met bravely. Good and evil, right and wrong, truth and lies, life and death. It is terribly simple, terribly certain. We know which side we are fighting on, and the end is very soon.
The problem is that it just ain't so. Nothing is all good or all evil. Absolute certainty is no easier to discover than absolute truth in this finite world, and people are a goulash of love and hate, generosity and greed, kindness and cruelty, stupidity and wisdom. Who gets the most of us? Ahura Mazda or Ahriman?
It used to be that every once in a while I would find myself flying into New Orleans from Houston over the swamps west of the Mississippi that reach down to the gulf. On looking at them it seemed to me that there were spots that simply could not be defined as land or water. They were such a slurry of both that it was impossible to decide. Our world is like that, too, and so are nearly all the people in it. Although it's a nice symbol, the Taoist circle with the black and white halves, each with its small circle of the other, doesn't tell the half of it. It's not just that good things have a bit of bad in them, or vice versa, but that we're such a mixture you couldn't even draw a line down the middle or give boundaries to the little circle. It would just slop over the edges and make the whole thing a kind of speckled gray. There are few of us who, given sufficient motivation, could not do almost any evil. Indeed, it's only the size of the motivation required that differentiates between the mostly good and the mostly bad. There are also very few of us who do not desire goodness, who do not hunger and thirst after righteousness, but without the wisdom to discover it or sufficient will to seek it even in the hard places. It is true, too, that few good deeds go unpunished and few bad ones are without redeeming consequences. Few of us are always servants of Ahriman without some traces of goodness, but fewer still are untouched by him. Rather than a time of clear-cut judgment, of destruction and salvation, it is probably more true to quote T.S. Eliot than St. John the Evangelist when he said in The Wasteland:
This is the way the world ends;
This is the way the world ends;
This is the way the world ends;
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
Even Ahura Mazda, confronted with the marsh of human good and evil would probably not be able to decide whether they were off the bridge or on it, and although the world may end in cataclysm, it is more likely to draw to an end confusedly, ambiguously, with no one quite sure when the end really happens.
We live in an ambiguous world, land and water both, not always separate but mixed in the swamplands. I suspect that it is only by learning to accept and live with this ambiguity that we can redeem it. In one way though, at least, I think the ancient Persians had the right idea: we are ourselves responsible for our choices of good or evil. We choose whether to fight on the side of Ormuzd or Ahriman. In the finiteness of our understanding and the morass of the world in its reality, it is not always possible to know which is which. It is, however, possible to hold the ambiguity as a touchstone, to keep us from falling into absolutist, apocalyptic thinking, to keep us humble, and to keep us working for the good even when we're not sure whether it's really good or whether it will make any difference.
I think that it will make a difference. Even though there is no Buddha, no Messiah, no infallible prophet who will come again to judge us we can be responsible for our own salvation What we think is good is more likely to be good than what is evil. Things aren't so ambiguous as all that, but I believe that the mere recognition and acceptance of ambiguity, rather than giving a false and dangerous ground on which to stand, as its rejection does, gives us real grounding for the work that we must do to try transform ourselves and this world into a people and place that needs no bridge to a better one, no destruction to make way for God's holy realm, but that can be itself better, freer, and fairer. We may not reach heaven -- in fact, I'm pretty sure we won't -- but if we keep the courage to live with our uncertainty we can get a lot closer.