The rapture of anticipation
Ihave an announcement to make that might raise eyebrows in atheist circles if there were such things as atheist circles, but there aren’t because atheists don’t seem to feel the need to form them. The announcement is that I have ordered an Advent calendar.
Advent means literally the coming. In the Christian church it describes the four weeks or so before Christmas, as believers prepare to celebrate the coming of the son of god a couple of thousand years ago.
It also serves to remind them that he has promised to come again at a time of his own choosing. This second advent will feature the Rapture, when the virtuous few will be whisked away to an eternity of bliss, while the wicked many will be flung downstairs into everlasting torment – atheist circles very much included.
Edmund Gosse was a minor Victorian writer whose mother died young. His father was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist sect who believe that the Bible is the literal word of god.
In his memoir, Father and Son, Gosse recounts how his father lived in daily expectation of the Rapture and raised his son in a state of strict moral innocence so that when the big day came he would be saved. That Gosse junior grew up to be both sane and generous of heart is testimony to the resilience of the human child.
The Rapture remains popular, especially in the United States. A poll conducted a few years ago revealed that four out of every 10 Americans not only believe in it but also expect it to happen before 2050.
I haven’t, however, joined them. Despite my Advent calendar I do not believe in either the first or the second coming.
Nor have I done a Donne. John Donne was a 16th-century poet. Half of his youthful poems were written to persuade young women into bed, while the other half were written to celebrate the successes of the first half.
In later life, however, having sown an acreage of wild oats, Donne became concerned about the fate of his soul, went into holy orders and ended as Dean of St Paul’s.
Renouncing one’s carnal youth and taking out a religious insurance policy is not uncommon among older people, but my Advent calendar does not mean I have done anything similar.
I last had an Advent calendar at the age of 7. It was a flimsy thing with cardboard flaps behind each of which lay a disappointingly small piece of chocolate. As the chocolate suggests, the calendar had no religious connotations.
Its only purpose was to raise the pitch of my excitement at the approach of Christmas. And the Christmas that excited me was a holiday with gifts and gluttony, far closer in spirit to the pagan feast of the winter solstice that it began as, than the religious celebration that the Christians later pinned on it.
But I am not a child any more, I have lost my sweet tooth, and I am no longer excited by Christmas, so why after all these years should I have ordered an Advent calendar?
It is because as soon as I heard of this particular calendar I thought there could be no more apt way to celebrate the approach of a festival that began life as a pagan knees-up.
For behind each of the 24 doors on my soon-to-arrive and much-anticipated Advent calendar for 2022 lies a different bottle of wine. Any and all of which I’d be delighted to share with my local atheist circle, if only such a thing existed.