Light and Fire

In our current world there is a fair amount of discussion about endings--apocalyptic endings, to be exact. In the prophetic traditions of the Abrahamic faiths there is a plethora of images and words that give focus to the sense that history as we have known it will end or change and that something will take its place. For some the "ending" is seen as disastrous, for others it is understood to be a transition to something better, or higher perhaps.

I want you to imagine the words that are common to Christianity: The world will be destroyed in a blaze of fire. This is well known phraseology and is based upon various passages in the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures. Imagine that we take these words literally, which would mean that the earth, perhaps, is going to be destroyed in fire, according to prophecy--bringing to mind, for example, nuclear holocaust, or global warming. Is this the only way to interpret this phrase? I think not.

Imagine that we examine these words a bit more closely and understand them in a more metaphoric, and perhaps positive way. For example, quite rightly we could read the same phrase in this manner: The world as we have known it (the kosmos), will be deconstructed in a burst of Light. If we read it this way, we could understand that the social construction of human society based upon lower levels of consciousness may actually come to an end when there is an eruption into consciousness of a new form of Light which would give humanity a whole new way of seeing and being--in other words, light-understood-as-consciousness will change dramatically and the kosmos as we have known it will finally be destroyed.

I am not saying that this latter way of reading the text is the correct reading, I am only suggesting it is a possible reading, and we may have missed a very important point for a very long time in our anxieties about and interpretations of the future. At the very least we need to keep both options in mind as we move into that future with the help of prophecy.