Instructions for the End of the World: Homilies of Comfort and Resistance

Even as “we are staring down the end of all things,” there is still inspiration to be found in “ancient texts,” activist and Anglican priest Helwig (Encampment) observes in her remarkable, much needed compendium of guidance for today’s trying times. Drawn from homilies that she “preached from mid-March 2020 onward,” the essays collected here address a “difficult” and “escalating” set of crises, including the fraying of social bonds evident in “visible homelessness,” a “turn toward conspiracy theories,” the rise of “strongman authoritarianism,” and accelerating climate change. Despite the “terrifying momentum” of these crises, she writes, she has found that, as she “struggle[s] with the texts the church holds to be central” (she calls homily-writing an exercise in “constraint-based literature”), she has come to see them as written by “people in trouble, people dealing with war and slavery and oppression,” who nonetheless persisted in attempting “to feed and heal and liberate” and to be “in community” with one another—whether it be via John’s concept of the Word of God, which she describes “pitch[ing] a tiny, human tent” wherever “people have struggled,” or on the Feast of All Souls, when she ruminates about the ongoing relationship “we continue to have... with our dead.” Helwig concludes that to be “in community” means that “we are pledged, in the most fearful of times, to be the people who strive to live past fear.” The result is an edifying, beautifully composed wellspring of moral courage. (June)