Dinner with Peter

Met up again with Peter last night (thanks, by the way, to Lonnie for her advice to keep up contact with him). He's a little disappointed that another year is ending and the world isn't ending with it, but his vision of the Apocalypse is still strong.

The days are coming, he tells me, when restraint and righteousness have been delayed too long, when the earth runs dry and the blood in human veins runs cold, when brother will fight brother to the death over a glass of clean water, when the piece of technology children most long for is a sharp knife. In those days, he says, women will have nothing but sackcloth left to wear, will have their faces covered in ash and soot as soon as they step into the air outside. In those days, food will carry with it the taste of desolation, night will hang so thick it's hard to see the moon rise red, hearts will groan because they are too tired to break. In those days, prayers will only be whispered because of the scorn that will follow anyone who still believes in a good God.

Then comes the miracle. Cities torn asunder as primeval forests spring at once from the ground; the atmosphere aflame, burning itself free of toxins. The earth closes her wounds, swallows her scars. Adam returns to the world he once knew to meet his descendants, who are rising from their graves, whose spirits are pouring out of the Ganges into resurrected life.