Earthquakes in the last month in many places of the world, strong typhoons that brought about flooding, and in the last few days, ashes spewed forth from Mt. Mayon in southeastern Luzon - is this time part of the end times?
I haven't seen the movie 2012 yet. I've been planning to. Movies on the end of the world hold a fascination few people can resist. Books are no different. They are lapped up as soon as they are sold in bookstores. Angels & Demons, a book written by Dan Brown before he penned the Da Vinci Code, tells the possibility of ending the world using antimatter. The book was made into a film that was shown worldwide in May 2009. I tried to watch it online but felt that the movie started too slow and quit a few minutes into the film. Not having given up on the story, I am now on the 14th chapter of the book and have been acquainted with the dead scientist Leonardo Vetra, his daughter Vittoria, the hassassin and Maximilian Kohler who brought the protagonist Robert Langdon into the picture. Dan Brown has been accused of being a Catholic-basher because of the controversial The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. And this is probably why people who never meant to see the film versions of the books in the first place ended up watching them.
I don't know if I could survive if The Day After Tomorrow became a reality. I saw 10.5, a film about an earthquake that made most of the West Coast in the USA disappear and most recently I came across Haeundae, a Korean film I had been searching for for months. I am grateful to jaguarlampungY who first uploaded it on youtube. Haeundae beach attracts thousands of tourists yearly. It was the setting of the first ever disaster film of South Korea. The story was about a tsunami that hit Haeundae and the lives of the people who were affected by it. The story is not improbable. South Korea is in eastern Asia while Indonesia, where thousands were killed by a tsunami on the day after Christmas 2004, is in southeast Asia.
For a Catholic, the end times signify the 2nd coming of Jesus. No one knows the day or the hour, said the Lord.
Must we scare ourselves? Catholic or not, no one knows the day or the hour. If anything good comes out of watching films and reading books on the end of the world, it is that we stop for a few hours and think about the end, about the world's temporariness and then we return from them grateful for life and the blessings that God continues to pour on us; that we decide to stop being apathetic and start caring about the world and the people around us before it is too late.
We do not know the day or the hour but it is certain that the world as we know it will end and that Jesus will return. It is also certain that my borrowed life will come to an end. If I live everyday as if it were my last, I will not be afraid of the end times.
A prayer apt for the parousia is this : Make me ever ready to meet you, My Jesus, now and until the end of time.
Haeundae photo from hancinema.net.
No comments:
Post a Comment