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By Liz Quirin

Make Every Day an Important One

I’m writing this column early because tomorrow, May 21st, the world is supposed to end. This has been the general “apocalypse” theory being touted by enough people to get into media outlets, or internet sites. These so-called doomsday predictions have been around in various places for many years. When I lived in New Orleans many years ago, a man walked up and down Canal Street wearing a sandwich placard declaring the world would end one day in March. I asked if he couldn’t have picked a different day since that was my birthday and I had other plans. If that seems silly to you, imagine how silly I thought it was for him to be walking up and down a busy New Orleans street proclaiming something that I was certain was untrue.

Now, here we go again. Today’s the day according to the latest “prophecy.” Where do these people come up with their predictions? One man, interviewed on the radio, said he had predicted this in the past but he didn’t have all his celestial information mapped out correctly, but he was sure May 21 would be the date. If you’re reading this on May 26th or later, you see the fellow again miscalculated and did not align his information accurately.

And what are Catholics to make of all these doomsday predictions? A few years ago, we were contending with books about end times, called the “Left Behind” series, but they were not written from a Catholic perspective and did not reflect Catholic teaching. Catholics do not read the Bible in a literal way. We read and study the Bible in the context of Catholic teaching, but the authors of these popular books do not do that, and neither did the man who predicted the world would end May 21st.

Since we’re all still here on Monday and the rest of the week as well, it would be easy to dismiss this as one more waste of time and energy except for one thing: Each of us will face a day when our individual world will end, and it might be good to give that some thought. What would you do on your last day? What if you lived every day as if it were your last? And every day you made it your rule to be kind, to be gentle, to be forgiving and loving of the people in your life and then you reach out to others and offer them your best ever “last day” every day.

We may scoff at these doomsday folks, but they do send us a message about living our lives each day, not wasting the minutes and hours we have here on earth on all the trivial things we could do. It should also make us keenly aware that we don’t know enough about our faith to say anything substantial to those who take the “Left Behind” series of books for adults and youth seriously.

Looking for material, I went to the USCCB web site and typed the word “rapture” into the search field. It brought up a group of articles in a paper called “The Living Light” that addressed the issues and would be worth a look and a read. Now, all we have to worry about is the Mayan prophecies about Dec. 21, 2012, right?