The World Is Always . . . What?

I came across a book title a couple weeks ago that got me thinking (not hard to do). It’s a personalized sociology book entitled The World is Always Coming to an End. Although it looks like a good one, it’s very unlikely I’ll ever read it. (I don’t have enough buckets left for the bucket list books I need to read before I head off to the Big Library in the Sky.) But the title delights me and suggests a parlor game for next time you’re with reflective friends.

The author got the title from something a local fellow used to say in the 1960’s. He was talking about how the neighborhood was always in transition over the decades—from Anglos to Irish to Jews to Blacks, each group fearing that the new arrivals were going to wreck the place. And yet this particular community remained and remains a good neighborhood to live in. I want to broaden the implications quite a bit.

There is today, as so often in the past, a sense that, to cite Yeats (and later Achebe), “thing fall apart.” Narratives of decline greatly outnumber and are more persuasive than narratives of progress. Even the deep in the bones progressives are grim at the moment. (Where’s Pollyanna when we need her?)

Here are thoughts about the “always coming to an end” sensibility, some of them contradictory:

— yes, the world is always falling apart. It is also always being repaired. That gives us something to do worth doing. God made you to be a shalom repairer and extender. Get off your butt.
— the idea of decline and falling apart implies a fundamental “ought” at the heart of reality. The whole concept of “coming to an end” in the sense of decline or dissolution requires that we have a sense of how things ought to be instead. That, in turn, is an argument against a merely materialistic understanding of reality.
— do not give yourself to obsessive alarm about the state of things. A lot of anxiety and hand-wringing about everything from who’s in the White House to climate change to hostility to religion in the western world is an example, in my book, of “first world problems.” (Climate change—end of civilization! I know, I know. In the 14th c, plague killed more than half the people of Europe, one of six great plagues in recorded human history.)

Yes, the world as we’ve known it is coming to an end, always has been and always will. So deal with it. And now the parlor game. Give people a piece of paper and pen and ask them to complete this sentence (in as many ways as they wish, or only one way): “The world is always . . . .” Then have each person read his or her answer and explain why they believe that. It should engender revealing discussions.

Here are some ways of ending that sentence that occur to me off the top of my head, often in contradictory pairs. “The world is always . . .”

— a mystery.
— a painful place / exciting place.
— contradicting itself.
— worthless / worth exploring.
— meaningless / full of meaning.
— a joke (sometimes funny, often bad).
— a puzzle.
— a place of selfishness and cruelty / a place of compassion and kindness.
— a wounding place / a healing place.
— God forsaken / God haunted.

The world is always something, including coming to an end. You and I are coming to an end. Let’s do something useful with the time we have.