OK Doomer

“God did not say, ‘You shall not be distressed,’ but ... ‘You shall not be overcome.’” --Julian of Norwich

Photo by Jeff Finley on Unsplash

I’ve learned a new word from the Internet: Doomer.

The term applies to someone so taken by gloomy fears that their mindset is saturated with catastrophe. A doomer thinks that everything is going to heck in a handbasket, that extinction is nigh. That political calamity or global apocalypse is right around the corner. (I know: some days it seems that way!)

You can buy a whole range of bug-out bags—backpacks equipped with water and food and simple gear that will allow you to survive in a meltdown, because, as one website warns, there will be such mayhem and so many traffic jams that you’ll need to run: “your legs are the most reliable form of transportation you have in a time of crisis.” Thus backpacks, not suitcases—filled with survivalist basics, while you flee the chaos to come.

There is much to lament—things we do need to care deeply about, work we will be called to. But we also need something more, a bigger, orienting perspective. How do we live, and cope, and survive, and I would add, even now, thrive? Where do we turn? In my better moments I know that above all earthly things is a universe of heavenly realities: angels and the communion of saints and a living, eternal God.

I know we don’t talk about those overarching dimensions a lot in our day and time, but they are there and they are real. And they intersect with this world. We get glimpses of them. Little foretastes. We do well to watch for these signs of divine activity and even anticipate them.

Paul the apostle movingly writes about the possibilities for this larger angle of view: “If you have been raised with Christ,” he says, thinking of what Jesus has accomplished, “seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”

I like how Eugene Peterson rendered the passage: “Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that’s where the action is. See things from his perspective.”

“See things from his perspective”: an antidote to doomerism?

And there’s this: Julian of Norwich was a great pray-er and medieval church influencer. Her fourteenth century was, like ours, a time of turmoil. I think of her as a patron saint for pandemic times (see my longer piece here: https://bit.ly/3JeeWG1); she lived not only through a pandemic, but in proportions we’ve not yet seen: I mean the Black Plague, the Great Pestilence, which wiped out as much as half of the population of her river port city in England. And on top of rampant disease, there was famine, political intrigue, war.

But she said this: “God has made everything that is made for love—and by the same love everything is sustained.”

God not only made the universe, she means; God also stays close to those he’s made. God is not vaguely hanging around, God tends the world he lovingly fashioned in the first place. We remember this when, as in Colossians, we “look up” and “see things from [God’s] perspective.” We recall what foundational relational realities undergird the universe—and our everyday worlds.

That doesn’t mean we coast through. Julian clarifies: “[God] did not say, ‘You … shall not be troubled, you shall not be distressed,’ but [God] said, ‘You shall not be overcome.’”

Even when a gloomy horizon looms, even when we have reason to be distressed, we need not be cowed. If God made us in and out of love, and sustains us by that same love, I can resist the pull of doomerism. Always there will be opportunities to look up. Always reasons to hope.