The Chaplain

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the poplars we hung up our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs. Our tormentors demanded songs of joy, saying “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land?

A reverent hush fell over the viewing deck. As if by agreement we stood in quiet awe as we watched the blue of the ocean continue to shrink away below us. Somewhere a baby’s cries mingled with the sobs of other exiles, overcome with the sight of our planet slowly retreating in to the black emptiness of space. I wanted to reach out to them, to comfort their distress and encourage them, but like the rest I was transfixed by the horrible beauty playing out before us. I could only watch and pray in heartbroken silence.

I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the Lord’s wrath. He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than in light.

For all its complexity and ingenious design, the Exodus Project had been created and executed in extreme haste, born of desperate necessity. When Cluster IS1412 had first been observed approaching our solar system, reactions had ranged from panic to complacency. When the astronomers calculated a forty per cent chance of a direct asteroid collision with Earth, the people did what they always do in the face of imminent disaster. They took to the streets and demanded that the government do something about it, as though through some force of legislation they could divert the course of an oncoming cataclysm.

Others, of course, were quick to tell us there was nothing to worry about. The chance of a collision was infinitesimal. We’d faced this sort of danger before. The status quo would keep us safe. There was even a fringe of activists claiming the meteors did not exist, that they were a myth devised by big business to distract us from the truth of our slavery to economics. The fact that the cluster was near enough and large enough to be seen with a telescope from any backyard or rooftop did not discourage them.

In June of 2076, NASA announced that their latest round of projections suggested a ninety-three per cent chance that the closest meteor would not impact Earth directly, but would pass close enough to pose a threat to our network of satellites. The problem, they said, was radiation rather than physical impact. The world rejoiced. The economy unfroze. Church attendance dropped back to normal levels.

In March of ‘79 the true nature of the threat became much clearer. The meteors did not have to hit us to rain destruction on us. Radiation spikes from the cluster were already being detected by orbital sensors. Two had overloaded, burned out and crashed down into the Indian Ocean. The effects on our atmosphere were already being observed. We weren’t going to be smashed with interstellar space rocks. We were going to be fried like sausages in a microwave. And there was nothing we could do to stop it.

There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On Earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. Many will die in their fear, apprehensive of what is coming in the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.

When they asked me to be a chaplain on the Exodus escape rockets, I felt a mixture of hopeful relief and sickening depression. Humanity’s last great endeavour was to be blasting off and running away, watching on as our planet burned below us. What of our grand dreams for a society of love and justice? What of the vision of bringing the Kingdom of God to Earth, now reduced to dust and ashes? What of the promises to bring the Church to glory?

We have failed. Like the ancient children of Israel we have grown lazy and complacent, trusting in our election and in our status as the chosen ones while ignoring God’s call to work for justice and compassion. Instead of uniting the world into one body of many parts, we have fractured into a hundred thousand fragments, bickering and competing for resources, despite there being more than enough to go around. We have imagined ourselves to be indestructible and indispensable as the building blocks of God’s temple on Earth.

Well, we know what happens to temples when God’s people are unfaithful.

God have mercy, some of us even cheered when they announced the advent of the meteor cluster, proclaiming it was God’s judgement for a sinful world. How right we were, and how arrogant to imagine that we were somehow exempt.

I looked on the earth; it was formless and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked on the mountains; they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. I looked, and there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens had fled. I looked, and the fruitful land was a wilderness, and all its cities were pulled down before the Lord, before His fierce anger. For thus says the Lord, “The whole land shall be a desolation, yet I will not execute a complete destruction. For this the earth shall mourn and the heavens above be dark, because I have spoken, I have purposed, and I will not change My mind, nor will I turn from it.”

And now I stand shoulder to shoulder with a broken and desolate people. I am tasked, perversely, with providing spiritual comfort to a community whose only solace can be found in each other and guidance to a people whose path has long since crumbled into dust. There is no more comfort. There is no more church. There are just four decks of humans watching on as their home disappears into the blackness.

Our navigator steers us toward Proxima Centauri and to the promise of a new land and a new home under a new sun. Whether the promise becomes reality or not, I will never know. I and everyone else on this spacecraft will be long dead by the time we ever reach another star system. It will fall to our children’s children’s children, and to the generations beyond them to strive for a new human world.

They will have no foundation to build on. We can offer them nothing but destitution and destruction and perhaps the faint hope that if they learn from our failures they can avoid repeating them, as we have, again and again.

“As the new heavens and new Earth that I make will endure before me,” declares the Lord, “so will your name and descendants endure. From one New Moon to another and one Sabbath to another, all mankind will come and bow before me.”

The Earth is gone now. Nothing but the long silent darkness of eternity awaits.