SPIRIT IN THE SKY

The idea that, without warning, millions of righteous people could suddenly and simultaneously be whisked away to a celestial safe haven, prior to the final destruction of the world, is one that has intrigued me ever since I first read about it, and the images such an idea conjures up are spectacular and eerie, to say the least. 

Click here for more information: 1 Thessalonians 4: 15 - 17

 

















RAPTURE                                    

There are no trumpets; it’s all very low-key:
no spectral horsemen or many-headed beasts.
Men and women simply drift away like dandelion-seeds on a soft breeze,
one by one at first,
then gradually
the sky fills up with them. 
A surrealist painting: multitudes rising through indescribable blue;
pale clouds adrift in the background.

Youths in baseball-caps, men with umbrellas, girls in patterned dresses, daft old ladies, school-boys, postmen, beggars: all are lifted up.
Nuns, like magpies, joyfully rise.
Machine operators, shopkeepers, farmers, dog-walkers, policemen, joggers, young women with tired faces, suddenly beatific:
all float upwards. 

They rise heroically, each in an orb of shining light:
the only movement in a world
suddenly
stilled.

Traffic becomes gridlocked; jet-planes hang suspended
in charged air; all the birds of the earth fall silent
as the expanding sky
grows brighter, 
brighter,
brighter yet.