Love in the Apocalypse
Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash
Earlier this year, I wrote an experimental piece for Macrina Magazine that tried to draw a link between an artefact of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) - in this case Seven Lions’ “Days to Come” - with eschatology. I drew on an intuition that of all music genres, EDM seemed the most upfront in bringing in the vocabulary of soul, redemption, transcendence, eternity, light and darkness familiar to many believers, including many Christians.
In tracks like “Days to Come”, there is a Heideggerian awareness of being towards death – that intuition that we orient ourselves to the world realising that things as they are will not stay the way they are, and realising that the current state of things will soon die. In spite of that realisation, we ought to press on towards that end of all things, all whilst backed up by the waves of synth and pounding basslines.
One other theme which I did not cover in that essay for Macrina, concerned the coupling of the end of all things with the love of another. While this comes out in a number of other songs, it finds its most intense expression in another piece by Seven Lions, in collaboration with Illenium, Said the Sky and Haliene, entitled Rush Over Me.
In that piece, the apocalyptic sense of the coming end is linked with the desperate attempt to properly express one’s romantic affections for another, and to enflesh that in a heartfelt – even self-emptying – farewell before the walls of the world finally come crashing in. The coming end, while tragic, is also apprehended with eager expectation, because it is also a moment of great revelation and horror.
I raise the coupling of love and the world’s end in dance music because it is a faint parallel to a similar coupling in Chapter 21 of the Book of the Apocalypse, where the passing of the first heaven and the first earth (21:1) transitions immediately in the next verse to the arrival of the new Jerusalem “prepared as a bride” for the beginning of her marriage to the Lamb. While Rush Over Me sees the big revelation at the moment when love dies, the culmination of the end of the world’s end comes with the start of a journey marked by romantic love.
Actually, that is not quite true…
David L. Schindler’s Ordering Love looks at this link from another end, focusing not at the end of the world, but its beginning in Genesis. Schindler contends that the creation of the world is not only a sign of God’s power to create something out of nothing. God need not have created the world but freely chose to do it, and chose to imprint his Word onto every creature.
This shows not only God’s power. For Schindler, it demonstrate’s God’s love as an ordering principle of the universe. Love was not only present at the beginning of the world. It was also the very basis on which the world came into being in the first place.
If love constituted the metaphysics of the world from its very beginning, and if God is faithful to His promise of never abandoning His creation, we should not be surprised to see the same motif expressed at the end of the world. From the standpoint of biblical revelation, history is not absurd. Rather, all of history is bookended by divine love. Love brings it into being, and it will be in love that the last page of history will be turned.
At the same time, we can take comfort in the thought that the metaphysics of the universe are also at play in the minutiae of our personal experience. We can see the threads of our history that have come to an abrupt end – through disappointments, setbacks, trauma and tragedy – not to have a tragic finality, but to be highly revelatory moments. While we viscerally experience the coming end, we can remember that the operations of divine love are at work behind the veil.
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