Apocalyptic Joy

Apocalyptic is not only a genre but an impulse. And apocalyptic joy is not the denial of suffering but the tenacious refusal to grant catastrophe the last word.

The genre uses terrifying symbols of worlds ending to wake readers up to imagine a better world in the present. The apocalyptic impulse threads through religion, politics, and culture whenever we are stopped in our tracks by truth, led behind the “veil” to a deeper experience and perception of reality.

Apocalypse is about seeing reality and ourselves as they are.
Apocalypse is about old certainties being shattered.
Apocalypse is about the inbreaking of the new.

I’m following the inspiration of a writer named David Dark, whose book Everyday Apocalypse scours pop culture for marks of the apocalypse. But like me, he’s not chasing conspiracy theories about the end times, biblical code-breaking about what texts like Revelation “really mean,” or divine world destruction. He’s looking to television shows like The Simpsons, writers like Flannery O’Connor, or musical bands such as Radiohead to demonstrate an apocalyptic way of being in the world.

“Apocalyptic changes everything. Its attentiveness to the minute particulars, to the infinity forever passing before our eyes, can leave us feeling ashamed of our ongoing impenetrability to the immediate. It creates an unrest within our minds, and it can only be overcome by imagining differently.” —David Dark

Joy arises in this disruptive place of change. But it’s not naïve happiness or numbed satiety. It is something that interrupts even Revelation’s violent visions. I’m thinking of it as apocalyptic joy. It’s a joy that comes when illusion collapses, a strange wellness that arrives when truth is unmasked. We discover, despite it all, that we’re still standing, and that divine Love is what has enabled us to stand the entire time—even when we’ve fallen.

Photo by Joy Lakra on Unsplash

This may be why end-of-the-world stories appeal to me. Shows like The Last of Us, movies like A Quiet Place, the 28 Days Later series, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (and its sequel) explore the choices we make when faced with crises: humanity or depravity.

I’ve written before about the avant-garde music organization Bang on a Can that hosts a summer institute at MASS MoCA near me. Music students come from all over the world to hone their skills in new music composition and performance. The institute is capped by a marathon festival: two and a half days of experimental music. It’s the place where I most experience apocalyptic joy.

I was never interested in what passes for traditional classical music. I’m starting to appreciate it lately, but for years I found it incredibly boring. Yet when I walked into my first Bang on a Can marathon concert and experienced twelve hours straight of cutting-edge classical music, it felt like a revelation. Who knew that classical music could be cutting-edge? I didn’t understand what the cellist, violinist, electric guitarist, saxophonist, and electronic beat maker were doing. I couldn’t verbalize what I was hearing. But it was as if someone had turned classical musicians into punk rockers and created a new style altogether. It unlocked something free in my soul.

Bang on a Can announces new worlds, is fearless in tearing down established idols of what “counts” as classical music and compels listeners to see the present moment differently. They describe themselves as “dedicated to making music new.”

Bang on a Can is, in the language of the Bible and this newsletter, apocalyptic.

Here are two examples from a couple of years ago: Twenty-four Panasonic tape-deck boomboxes formed an oval behind us in a MASS MoCA field overlooking the Berkshire hills. Composer Phil Kline’s last words before vanishing from the face of the earth played through them—meditative and eerie, as if we were peacefully awaiting an alien ship.

Another piece, Steel Hammer by Julia Wolfe, used banjo and mountain dulcimer alongside three female singers to tell the tall tales of John Henry. Thirty-six percussionists later filled a courtyard with an hour of sound.

I’m still unpacking what it all means, but the impact, at least for this listener, is to see the world anew, fresh, and alive. Apocalyptically.

Revelation’s hymns, expressive in their apocalyptic joy, remind me of Bang on a Can.

One memorable hymn in Revelation starts like this: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah.” —Revelation 11:15

This verse has a sonorous ring, made melodically famous by Handel’s Messiah, but that’s not the reason it lingers with me. What the verse captures in one proclamation is nothing less than transformation itself.

The realms and realities against Love give way so that Love is all that remains. But the movement of becoming the “kingdom of God” is not smooth. To make it through the peaks and valleys of daily life and the empire’s abuses of power, love must be fierce, as Jacqui Lewis says.

Revelation insists that the kingdom of the world does not become the kingdom of God without confrontation. John of Patmos’s visions show this confrontation through monstrous metaphors, but the nine hymns in Revelation sing this showdown of power. Rome and its rule are coming undone (“the kingdom of the world”), revealing a transcendent reality of justice, new life, and new possibility. The people are praising and dancing accordingly.

The hymns often use call-and-response refrains, which the biblical scholar Brian Blount compares to Black spirituals and Hip-Hop. The hymns peel back Rome’s rotten core of injustice in a way comparable to the hard-edged truth-telling of conscious Hip-Hop. Tupac’s rhymes form one example: “It ain’t a secret, don’t conceal the fact / The penitentiary’s packed, and it’s filled with Blacks.” Or Kendrick Lamar’s poetry: “You hate my people / I can tell cause it’s threats when I see you / I can tell cause your ways and your moves / And I can tell cause you’re fake in your truth.” These songs of Revelation—raps against Rome, as Brian Blount calls them—involve a confrontation of power—the empire and its oppressive impact on one hand, and the nonviolent way of Jesus on the other.

There is plenty in the book of Revelation that makes us cringe. It’s easy either to ignore its insights or to read it uncritically and reinforce toxic images of a violent God. But Revelation’s hymns do not give up hope. “They witness to the promise that God is relieving Rome of its historical command. Right now” (Blount).

Joy erupts because the finitude of the empire and its power over us is revealed. Despite its own pretensions, it is not ultimate. The apocalypses in the world and in our lives are not ultimate. By confronting reality, they are becoming something new, even something joyful. Catastrophe does not have the last word, because that remains Love’s prerogative.

P.S. more on the “whore of Babylon” next week.