end times near death experience for jesus

Mumbai (2018): photo by Suresh Naganathan, 12 April 2018

For You - With Care AndLove

WE ARE BEING GIVEN

SIGNS AND TESTIMONIES FROM ALL OVER

THE WORLD

PLEASE READ AND PASS ON

This note was one of a stack left in a box used by neighbours as a book exchange.

The note was written in a broad looping hand. The penmanship immediately gave something away: that handwriting could only have been produced by one of these neighbours, the rich ones who live farther up the hill and never, never stop at the stop sign at that corner. They are very loopy in that special way rich people have. To them the sign seems to say not STOP but: THIS APPLIES TO EVERYBODY BUT YOU.

A stapled seven-page single-space text was attached: a copious compendium of sermons, links, reading lists, you tube lectures, and divers similar religio-nutjob items devoted to that indefatigable yet tres tres fatigué topic, End Times, now well on the way, according to all this literature- which I must admit to having perused in only the most cursory fashion, standing there in the midst of ordinary lethal traffic roundabout pandemonium as I was, for after all are not end times upon us, end of the world and all that, sorry gotta run - to a location near you. But one sentence did stick in my gaping fossil craw.

All around the world, people of all religions are seeing Jesus - in visitations, in dreams, in near death experiences.

As the next several thousand words in this document, and then the next several thousand after that first several thousand, and so on, appeared to offer little more than unimaginative variation upon and elaboration of that opening sentence, and as my eyes are bad and I am a slow reader even at the so called bestas vs. endof times and as cars were whizzing past and honking and proving all over again that the automobile was the beginning of the end for mankind, the end of mankind ab ovo was in any case always going to have to precede the one small step for mankind in actu without anyone outside the module noticing, aboard the vessel gentle, benign-seeming creatures could be seen moving about deliberately and purposefully on what looked like mechanized tracks in parallel channels like department store dummies gliding without a sound through a hypothetical future consumer transaction and as we are now getting on into the middle or perhaps nearing the actual end of the end, and how are we expected to know when we get there, will we not be deceived about that just as we have been deceived about everything, all the time, forever, what else is new, the ship (Space Vehicle USS Sunkenspace Command and Control Sub-Unit 2207-a) appears smaller and smaller on the screen as it is enveloped by the blackness of deep space, growing tinier and tinier, now dwindling to almost nothing, a bright dot lost in a dead sea of Time, the one bit of the literature I could not keep out of my mind was that opening sentence, alluding or indeed directly referring as it did to phenomena occurringin near death experiences.

The ones people of all religions are seeing Jesus in, I mean. And in truth I suspect (don't you, when you pause to give it a bit of thought?) they might also be seeing Jesus in other ways as well, or not at all, having other things to see, these curious putative yet quite possibly enquiring-minded people of all religions, but this exorbitant evangelical literature does not appear to have registered any of that, nor to account for the bizarre possibility that all known religions might anyway have a lot to answer for, though too it's hard to deny that the religion that struts Jesus as its poster boy is currently coming on strong at the three-quarter pole in the troublemakin'sweepstakes, dad's six-guns a-blazin y'all.

But jes doan yew mess with Tx-ass is all.

And I did wonder, for a time and a time, without yet stepping into the traffic swirl to risk my life yet again, standing there poised upon the helm of my bent metal cane, within the badly listing empty sack featherweight envelope of me, whether the good samaritan who had filled that free book box with this flood of evangelical proselytism, here at the brink of the very maw of the maelstrom, was aware of the statistics on traffic fatalities at that corner, where death by car is seen with greater frequency than Jesus, by an overwhelming margin.

But really. Am I wrong or are the End Times nutjobs upon us again, a plague, making us long for the redemptive transformative miracle that might turn them into mere locusts, in their innumerable swarms, so much less unsettling, so much easier to bear?

It's all very problematic.

But one must contribute something, one must attempt to do good, not to be weighed down by disappointment and defeat and made leaden and useless and lumpy and old, quite so easily, I thought to myself, standing there, perhaps a bit like Ruth in the alien corn, not forgetting that all Ruth wanted to do was good, after all, amid the glancing metal havoc.

So I conjured up an emergency scribble-instrument of the archaic sort and crafted, with bony twisted claw, upon one of the folded evangelical documents, before carefully (With Care and Love) replacing it atop the stack, what I hoped might appear a pretty good imitation of that loopy end times penmanship.

HI! - I AM SATAN!

HOW'S ABOUT A LITTLE EQUAL TIME!

I PISS ON YOUR

SIGNS AND TESTIMONIES FROM ALL OVER

THE WORLD

PLEASE READ ANDPISS ON