Jesus said to them:
“Watch out [blepete: see, perceive] that no one deceives you.
Many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’
and will deceive many.
When you hear of wars and rumors of wars,
do not be alarmed.
Such things must happen,
but the end [telos] is still to come.
Nation will rise against nation,
and kingdom against kingdom.
There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines.
These are the beginning [archēs] of birth pains.
Mark 13:5-8 NIV
“You will hear of wars and rumors of wars.” Familiar cadence, familiar fear.
“The Little Apocalypse” is what they call this passage in Mark, this chapter that bisects Jesus’ life, this pause to orient our perception before the descent into the Passion. Apocalypse does not mean destruction, apocalypse does not mean end. Apocalypse means unveiling. A dissolution, a sweeping aside, a rending of deceptive and misleading perceptions so you can see things as they are.
The narrative pauses and it turns personal. Fear is familiar, its rise and its fall, each time efficiently deploying a systemic conviction — this is the apocalypse I won’t survive. The self fears annihilation and sees its possibility everywhere. Wars and rumors of war. Famine and earthquakes. The spiral of collapse swirls ever closer. Nation, culture, public humiliation, private betrayal—nothing is left untouched, until it shatters even the most intimate of bonds, parent and child.
Jesus drives the drama to a fever pitch, mythical in resonance, hyperbolic in scope, until even the stars fall. What other language to resort to to describe the dismantling of the ego, the dissolution of the self, the terror of the freefall into surrender, when everything I know and everything I have is razed to the ground, not one stone left upon another.
We think we fear external things: war, famine, earthquakes. But it’s actually our internal experience that we resist. We fear pain, we fear loss, we fear overwhelm, we fear annihilation. But there is a difference between pain and suffering. One is a sensation, the other is a story, a valenced perception that predicts our lived experience.
Don’t be alarmed, perceive what’s actually happening. See things differently, don’t be scared. There’s a different way to perceive what’s happening, a different way to experience it.
The dark night of the soul is, in actuality, the dark night of the ego. “It’s not the end of the world. It’s the end of worlds—our worlds that we have created.” Richard Rohr
The end is not yet. Do you not yet understand? Do you not yet perceive? Do you not yet see?
The end is not destruction, the end is not annihilation, the end is telos. Telos is completion, telos is wholeness. Telos is the unfolding of the oak tree from the acorn. Beginning and end, archēs and telos, round and round again.
“These are the beginning of birth pangs.” With these words, the curse of the fall is invoked, fear summoned, endurance required.
Do not be deceived — the curse lies not in the pain, but in the perception that pain is suffering.
Contractions are the metamorphic action. Labor begins with a surrender into openness, a descent inward into oneself. Between the beginning and the end comes the overwhelming intensity of transition, and you lose conscious access to your capacity, lose the ability to perceive the purpose. Pushing takes effort, conscious participation. Amidst the horrors of Mark 13, the key is here — this is all about birth. What seems like destruction is actually creation.
Pain is not a curse, pain is a portal.
The collapse of empires, whether without or within, is a portal. The crumbling of the structures built on top of my self reveals to my perception that which is inviolable, indestructible, enduring, eternal. The kingdom of heaven is within. It is not out there, it is not someday, it is not up in heaven. It does not come and go. The tearing of the veil is revealing what is and always has been — that there is no separation from within and without, that no matter what structures are raised and razed, the foundation was and is and will always be.
There are always wars and rumors of wars, always earthquakes, always famine. It is the way it is and always has been. When my world, as I know it, is threatened or destroyed, what then? How then shall I see? Perception widens to reveal it not as death’s rattle, but as birth pangs. Our most precious story, embodied. Crucifixion is the passage to resurrection. Apocalypse reveals wholeness. Labor leads to birth. Death is the portal to life.
Don’t be afraid. See.
Leilani Kritzinger is married to Pastor Devo and mother to four children of the teen/young adult variety. She is a serial enthusiast, most recently in a months-long deep dive into the rich world of embodied metaphor.