Left Behind?

Driving to Meeting on Sunday morning, Nancy and I participated in the Bill Family Liturgy -- listening to Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion." His tales of Lutherans and others in the Upper Midwest help prepare us for an hour with Quakers and others in the Lower Midwest. Listening to his stories reminds me that for all our theological and geographical distances, we're not so different after all.

On Sunday morning, he and his radio players did a sketch about geese flying to Canada and who witness THE RAPTURE. Thousands of naked Christians are floating skyward -- a bit disconcerting to the geese! They observe that some towns (those more liberal) have few folks soaring to Heaven, while entire flocks from more conservative towns are being swept to glory -- just as they expected to be.

Nancy and I chuckled, both at the craziness of geese witnessing the rapture and the certainty of those who know they'd be raptured. Perhaps the laughter had a tinge of nervousness on my part, having grown up with just enough second coming talk that I wasn't anxious to experience and had even more fear of being left behind. Pulling into the parking lot, at the end of Keillor's story, I remembered a poem titled "On the Day the Rapture Happened" that I'd downloaded awhile back --

On the day the Rapture happened,

The man in America

Who keeps a record

Of all the things happening in the world

So he knows when the Rapture will happen

Found that he’d got a hundred per cent;

A one hundred per cent chance of the end,

That Jesus would come and take him away.

So he went outside

And he waited.

And he waited.

And he waited a bit longer,

And he looked at his watch

And he made himself a cup of coffee,

And he went inside and he thought:

Back to the drawing board.

On the day the Rapture happened,

Nobody else noticed that anything had occurred,

But a family in Kerala wondered where

Grandad had wandered off to,

And nobody noticed or wondered where

The girl who slept in a cardboard box

In a shop doorway

On a street

In Buenos Aires

Had gone to at all.

("On the Day the Rapture Happened," by Wood, http://www.wibsite.com/wibblethorpe/wood1.htm)

What, I wondered, would Garrison's geese make of that?

--Brent