Shall we be changed?

Mary Miller’s The Last Days of California exactly captures an important aspect of the sort of rapture-ready Christianity I was raised and educated in: the unwillingness to face mortality that’s probably at the root of many people’s eager embrace of an imminent apocalyptic eschatology. Strangely enough, until I cracked open this novel, I hadn’t realized that my one-time yearning for the rapture was a way to avoid acknowledging that I’ll die one day.

“It’s how we deal with death,” one of Miller’s minor characters says. “It’s human nature to want the world to end when we end.”

The novel is insightful as to the motivations for belief and doubt, many of which resonated strongly with my own experience: doubt taking the form of yearning to believe. As Jess, the narrator, expresses it, “I wanted to believe we were special. I wanted to believe all of it—heaven and happiness and joy unlike anything I’d ever known.”