An apocalyptic beginning of the End of Days? Make my solar eclipse a chance to sing again Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ from 1972

Is today’s partial 38 per cent solar eclipse over Thompson, Manitoba, under clear blue skies and balmy 16°C temperatures (the normal April 8 daytime high is 4°C), a sign of a premillennial Rapture signalling the beginning of the End of Days, as today’s total eclipse crosses two towns in the United States named Nineveh in Ohio and Indiana, as well as Rapture, Indiana? The original Nineveh, the oldest and most-populous city of the ancient Assyrian empire, is situated on the east bank of the Tigris River and encircled by the modern city of Mosul, Iraq. Interestingly, today’s solar eclipse is not visible in Mosul.

Not being either a scholar of eschatology or astronomy, I probably wouldn’t even be contemplating such a question about the April 8 solar eclipse if it hadn’t been for my old Left Coast friend Ron Graham posting on Facebook today, “To those religious nutcases that believed the upcoming solar eclipse would be ‘the rapture’, be sure to check in with us on Tuesday. It quite possibly did happen for some, but appears that Jesus overlooked you and your friends for some reason.”

While it is true that Christian scripture records that Jesus preaching on the Mount of Olives, a mountain ridge in East Jerusalem, east of and adjacent to Jerusalem’s Old City – in what is called the Olivet Discourse, found in Matthew 24 – talks about the end times and says the sun will be darkened, belief in apocalyptic happenings portended by solar eclipses are not proprietary to Christianity. Throughout history, eclipses have been interpreted by many cultures and religions as a disruption of the natural order.  

Hindu beliefs involve demons swallowing the sun. In ancient China, the etchings discovered in Anyang depicted solar eclipses as celestial dragons attacking and devouring the sun. In South America, ancient Incans believed solar eclipses were a “sign of wrath and displeasure” from Inti, the “all-powerful sun god.” Choctaw Indians from the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States believe a mischievous black squirrel gnawing on the sun causes solar eclipses, and legend holds the squirrel must be frightened away by the clamor and yells of the event’s human witnesses. In West Africa, the Tammari people, also known as Batammariba from the northern regions of Togo and Benin, believe the celestial bodies intersecting during an eclipse represent human feuds on Earth.

Well I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse naturally won
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun

I have always loved Carly Simon’s 1972 song “You’re So Vain.” In the early 1980s, many of us thought the song was about singer James Taylor, who was married to Carly Simon from 1972 to 1983. But in a 1983 interview with the Washington Post, Simon said, “”It certainly sounds like it was about Warren Beatty, He certainly thought it was about him – he called me and said ‘thanks for the song. ‘” Later, she said two other men, who so far remain unidentified, along with Beatty, also inspired elements of the song. So who knows?

As I said, I am neither a scholar of eschatology or astronomy, so perhaps it is not surprising my interest in solar eclipses is anchored elsewhere.

In the 1980s, I spent a too short part of many a summer at the Dell family’s summer home on the Atlantic Ocean in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where my mother-in-law, Carol Dell, a Vineyarder by both birth and disposition, would tell me stories of Carly Simon and James Taylor, who were also both in many ways Vineyarders themselves. Stories about Island events such as live performances at the Hot Tin Roof, opened in 1979 by Carly Simon, George Brush and Herb Putnam. Close your eyes, and you were transported back a few years in time and were there, so it seemed. Magical. The full lyrics to “You’re So Vain” go like this:

Son of a gun

You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht
Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf it was apricot
You had one eye in the mirror, as you watched yourself gavotte
And all the girls dreamed that they’d be your partner
They’d be your partner and

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you

You’re so vain (you’re so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you, don’t you?

You had me several years ago when I was still quite naive
Well you said that we made such a pretty pair and that you would never leave
But you gave away the things you loved
And one of them was me
I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee and
You’re so vain

You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain, you’re so vain
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you don’t you, don’t you?

I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee and

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain (you’re so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you don’t you

Well I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse naturally won
Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun

Well you’re where you should be all the time
And when you’re not, you’re with some underworld spy
Or the wife of a close friend, wife of a close friend and

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain (so vain)
I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you don’t you, don’t you, don’t you now

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you
You’re so vain
Probably think this song about you
You’re so vain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGQ2DJ65-ok&t=6s

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The thinning of the “Veil Between the Worlds” – All Souls’ Day marks the end of the Allhallowtide triduum

I’m a fan of The Gap in the Curtain, a 1932 novel by the Scottish author John Buchan, the 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, who served as Governor General of Canada between 1935 and 1940. It is a novel about the thinning of the veil at certain times between the worlds of the living and the dead. As an aside, my favourite G.K. Chesterton quote, taken from his 1908 book Orthodoxy, which he described as a “spiritual autobiography,” is “Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes: our ancestors.”  

My supernatural story of the thinning of the veil involves the late Rhonda Payne; a story involving an obscure fridge magnet, of all things, and stretching from Halifax to Yellowknife. Rhonda, author of the play Stars in the Sky Morning, a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland – a playwright the National Post described as a “national treasure” in 1999 – was a fiery actor, writer, director, producer and activist from Curling, Newfoundland, who would go onto co-found Ground Zero Productions with Don Bouzek in Toronto, and after that Riverbank Productions in Peterborough on Parkhill Road East (the studio office was quite literally on the banks of the Otonabee River.) She died in Halifax in June 2002. No saints or miracles in my story, but an experience 20 years ago that sent a chill up my spine like I’ve never felt before.

In late June 2002, I was living in Yellowknife. Rhonda had died in early June at the tragically young age of 52 in Halifax, where she had been living since 2000. She had been ill only a short time.

I had known Rhonda since November 1997 when she lived on Parkhill Road East in Peterborough and she was running Riverbank Productions, her theatre company. I had arrived back in Peterborough seven months earlier to begin a second tour of duty at the Peterborough Examiner. I met Rhonda at a dinner party and found her to be one of the most vivacious guests I have ever met under such circumstances. That’s still true today.

Rhonda was a big, and at times, tumultuous, presence in my life for the next several years. I learned of her illness in late May 2002 when I was vacationing in Iowa. Instead of returning to Yellowknife as planned, I re-booked and caught perhaps the most convoluted flight plan ever that saw me backtrack through Minneapolis, Calgary and Edmonton before finally catching flights east to Moncton, and then driving to Halifax from my mother’s place in Amherst, Nova Scotia, to visit Rhonda at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre. She was well enough that day to talk and go for a short walk down the hospital corridor, but she died six days later, and three days after I had returned to Yellowknife.

Several weeks later, near the end of June, a young reporter, Christine Kay, who was from Ontario, I believe, but had just graduated from the journalism program at University of King’s College in Halifax, arrived in Yellowknife to start her first reporting job in the newsroom of Northern News Services Limited (NNSL). We gave her a desk that had been cleaned out and empty for some time.

What happened next, I still recall almost in slow motion. Near the end of her first day, Christine walked over to my desk (which was across the newsroom from hers, with numerous editors and reporters between our two desks, and I was not her direct supervisor as a news editor, and she knew none of us anyway) and held out her hand to me, and said, “I found this in my desk and didn’t know what to do with it.”

What she handed me from her desk drawer, from a supposedly cleaned out and empty desk, was the only thing she had discovered when she was unpacking her stuff into her new desk: a small fridge magnet. Although hard to describe precisely in a visual sense after 18 years, it was symbolically at least, no ordinary or common fridge magnet. It was identical to a fridge magnet I had only seen once before – in Rhonda’s kitchen on her fridge door on Parkhill – and have never seen again since that day in the newsroom Yellowknife in late June 2002, about three weeks after she died: The fridge magnet resembled a Celtic priestess perhaps performing a Beltane Day dance.

My immediate and involuntary reaction was to blanche, as if I had seen a ghost, which shocked poor Christine Kay, who had simply handed me a fridge magnet of unknown provenance she had discovered in a drawer in her new desk.

At that moment, I came to a profound understanding of the concept of the thinning of the “Veil Between the Worlds,” so rooted in the history and tradition of the the Allhallowtide triduum, and recalling for me All Souls’ Days from almost a decade earlier, from 1993 to 1995, when I studied graduate history in the master’s program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and would reflect and pray on what was often this time of year a gray fall day in the Limestone City at St. James Chapel, adjacent to St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kingston on Johnson Street.

It stands to this day as a unique episode in my life experience. My hunch is the answer to this rogue coincidence, if indeed there is an answer, might be discovered somewhere on the western shore of the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland and Labrador, between Cow Head and Daniel’s Harbour, the ground of Rhonda’s being. There is much beyond the material world, far beyond my ken.

Halloween has roots in an ancient Irish festival called Samhain.

It is often associated with Los Dias de Muertos or “Days of the Dead” in Latin America. Almost 19 years ago, I wrote a story on Nov. 10, 2004 for The Independent, a weekly newspaper in Brighton, Ont., noting monarch butterflies in the fall of 2004 had started “arriving in central Mexico last week, on the first of November, at the same time as the national festival of Los Dias de Muertos or Days of the Dead (https://web.archive.org/web/20041208020154/http://www.eastnorthumberland.com/news/news2004/November/041110monarch.html).

For the local people, monarch butterflies are ‘old souls’ returning to the sacred mountains,” I wrote.

All Souls’ Day is a day to honour and pray for the dead who are believed to be in purgatory – the place in Roman Catholic belief in which those who have died make an elevator stop midway of varying lengths, as it were, to atone for their sins before going on the rest of the way up to heaven on the top floor. Roman Catholic belief suggests that the prayers of the faithful living on Earth – known as the Church Militant on Earth (one of my favourite descriptors for the Church, bar none) – help cleanse these souls of venial sins and help them reach heaven. Temporal punishment for sin is a punishment which will have a definite end, when the soul is purified and is permitted into heaven. Thus temporary. Temporal punishment for sin is that which is experienced in purgatory.

The day is primarily celebrated in the Catholic Church, but it is also celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox Church and a few other denominations of Christianity. The Anglican church is the largest Protestant church to recognize All Souls’ Day on Nov. 2. While considered a holy day, All Souls Day is not a holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church, where the faithful are required to attend mass.

The custom of setting apart a special day for intercession for certain of the faithful on Nov. 2 was first established by St. Odilo of Cluny at his abbey of Cluny in 998. From Cluny the custom spread to the other houses of the Cluniac order, which became the largest and most extensive network of monasteries in Europe. The celebration was soon adopted in several dioceses in France, and spread throughout the Western Church. Legend has it that a pilgrim returning from the Holy Land was cast by a storm on a desolate island. A hermit living there told him that amid the rocks was a chasm communicating with purgatory, from which perpetually rose the groans of tortured souls. The hermit also claimed he had heard the demons complaining of the efficacy of the prayers of the faithful, and especially the monks of Cluny, in rescuing their victims. Upon returning home, the pilgrim hastened to inform Odilo, the fifth Benedictine Abbot of Cluny, who set Nov. 2 as a day of intercession on the part of his community for all the souls in Purgatory.

C.S. Lewis, the noted mid-20th century Anglican Christian apologist and author, viewed purgatory primarily as a state in which the redeemed are purged of their sins before entering heaven rather than an intermediate place of retributive punishment for people with unconfessed sins, noted Jerry L. Walls, a scholar-in-residence and a philosophy professor at Houston Baptist University, in a December 2017 interview with the Plano, Texas-based Baptist Standard. “Viewed in that sense, some type of purgatory – a process that allows sanctification to be completed before an individual enters God’s presence – can be embraced ecumenically” (https://www.baptiststandard.com/news/faith-culture/c-s-lewis-believed-purgatory-heavens-sake/) said Walls, a Methodist who now attends an Episcopal church, wrote Ken Camp, managing editor of the Baptist Standard.

According to Catholic belief, the soul of a person who dies can go to one of three places. The first is heaven, where a person who dies in a state of perfect grace and communion with God goes. The second is hell, where those who die in a state of mortal sin are naturally condemned by their choice. The intermediate option is purgatory, which is thought to be where most people, free of mortal sin, but still in a state of lesser (venial) sin, must go. The primary scriptural basis for the belief is found in 2 Maccabees, 12:26 and 12:32. “Turning to supplication, they prayed that the sinful deed might be fully blotted out … Thus made atonement for the dead that they might be free from sin.” Additional references are found in Zechariah, Sirach, and the Gospel of Matthew. The first two books of Maccabees only are part of canonical scripture in the Septuagint and the Vulgate (and hence are deuterocanonical to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy) and are included in the Protestant Apocrypha (https://www.gotquestions.org/first-second-Maccabees.html).

Most Protestant denominations, however, do not recognize purgatory, or All Souls’ Day, and disagree with the theology behind both.

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All Souls’ Day marks the end of the Allhallowtide triduum

All Souls’ Day marks the end of the Allhallowtide triduum, a three-day religious observance, which encompasses All Saints’ Eve (Halloween), All Saints’ Day (All Hallows) and All Souls’ Day.

All Souls’ Day is often associated with Los Dias de Muertos or Days of the Dead in Latin America. Almost 17 years ago now, I wrote a story on Nov. 10, 2004 for The Independent, a weekly newspaper in Brighton, Ont., noting monarch butterflies in the fall of 2004 had started “arriving in central Mexico last week, on the first of November, at the same time as the national festival of Los Dias de Muertos or Days of the Dead (https://web.archive.org/web/20041208020154/http://www.eastnorthumberland.com/news/news2004/November/041110monarch.html).

For the local people, monarch butterflies are ‘old souls’ returning to the sacred mountains,” I wrote.

All Souls’ Day is a day to honour and pray for the dead who are believed to be in purgatory – the place in Roman Catholic belief in which those who have died make an elevator stop midway of varying lengths, as it were, to atone for their sins before going on the rest of the way up to heaven on the top floor. Roman Catholic belief suggests that the prayers of the faithful living on Earth – known as the Church Militant on Earth (one of my favourite descriptors for the Church, bar none) – help cleanse these souls of venial sins and help them reach heaven. Temporal punishment for sin is a punishment which will have a definite end, when the soul is purified and is permitted into heaven. Thus temporary. Temporal punishment for sin is that which is experienced in purgatory.
The day is primarily celebrated in the Catholic Church, but it is also celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox Church and a few other denominations of Christianity. The Anglican church is the largest Protestant church to recognize All Souls’ Day on Nov. 2. While considered a holy day, All Souls Day is not a holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church, where the faithtful are required to attend mass.

The custom of setting apart a special day for intercession for certain of the faithful on Nov. 2 was first established by St. Odilo of Cluny at his abbey of Cluny in 998. From Cluny the custom spread to the other houses of the Cluniac order, which became the largest and most extensive network of monasteries in Europe. The celebration was soon adopted in several dioceses in France, and spread throughout the Western Church. Legend has it that a pilgrim returning from the Holy Land was cast by a storm on a desolate island. A hermit living there told him that amid the rocks was a chasm communicating with purgatory, from which perpetually rose the groans of tortured souls. The hermit also claimed he had heard the demons complaining of the efficacy of the prayers of the faithful, and especially the monks of Cluny, in rescuing their victims. Upon returning home, the pilgrim hastened to inform Odilo, the fifth Benedictine Abbot of Cluny, who set Nov. 2 as a day of intercession on the part of his community for all the souls in Purgatory.

C.S. Lewis, the noted mid-20th century Anglican Christian apologist and author, viewed purgatory primarily as a state in which the redeemed are purged of their sins before entering heaven rather than an intermediate place of retributive punishment for people with unconfessed sins, noted Jerry L. Walls, a scholar-in-residence and a philosophy professor at Houston Baptist University, in a December 2017 interview with the Plano, Texas-based Baptist Standard. “Viewed in that sense, some type of purgatory – a process that allows sanctification to be completed before an individual enters God’s presence – can be embraced ecumenically” (https://www.baptiststandard.com/…/c-s-lewis-believed…/) said Walls, a Methodist who now attends an Episcopal church, wrote Ken Camp, managing editor of the Baptist Standard.

According to Catholic belief, the soul of a person who dies can go to one of three places. The first is heaven, where a person who dies in a state of perfect grace and communion with God goes. The second is hell, where those who die in a state of mortal sin are naturally condemned by their choice. The intermediate option is purgatory, which is thought to be where most people, free of mortal sin, but still in a state of lesser (venial) sin, must go. The primary scriptural basis for the belief is found in 2 Maccabees, 12:26 and 12:32. “Turning to supplication, they prayed that the sinful deed might be fully blotted out … Thus made atonement for the dead that they might be free from sin.” Additional references are found in Zechariah, Sirach, and the Gospel of Matthew. The first two books of Maccabees only are part of canonical scripture in the Septuagint and the Vulgate (and hence are deuterocanonical to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy) and are included in the Protestant Apocrypha (https://www.gotquestions.org/first-second-Maccabees.html).

Most Protestant denominations, however, do not recognize purgatory, or All Souls’ Day, and disagree with the theology behind both.

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It may be fiction, but it’s still nice to see evangelical authors Randy Alcorn and Frank Peretti haven’t given up completely on journalists and the secular media

I say bravo to Randy Alcorn and Frank Peretti for offering us characters such as Jake Woods and Marshall Hogan in books like Deadline and This Present Darkness.

Alcorn, who lives in Gresham, Oregon, is the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries (EPM), a nonprofit ministry. Alcorn, who holds bachelor of theology and master of arts in biblical studies degrees from Multnomah University, served as a pastor at Good Shepherd Church in rural Boring, Oregon for 14 years before he started Eternal Perspective Ministries in 1990, after a writ of garnishment for Alcorn’s wages was served  on Good Shepherd Church on May 4, 1990, where he was pastor of missions, ordering the church to surrender a portion of his wages.

In 1989, Portland police, as Tim Stafford later noted in an April 1, 2003 piece for Christianity Today, had arrested Alcorn “several times for blocking the doors of several abortion clinics. One of the clinics had sued him and other ‘rescuers,’ winning a small judgment plus attorney’s fees. Alcorn had refused to pay, believing it would violate his conscience to write a check to an abortion clinic.”

As Stafford tells the story, “Some time before the suit, Alcorn and his wife, Nanci, had placed all their assets in her name – house, car, and bank account. Alcorn had given away or sold the copyrights to his five published books. At a debtor’s hearing he was able to state truthfully that he owned nothing of value. An opposing lawyer went so far as to ask about the gold band he was wearing on his left hand.

“Alcorn held up the ring, milking the drama of the moment. ‘I’m not sure what it’s worth today, but I paid $12.50 for it at Kmart four years ago.'”

“Alcorn had not anticipated having his wages garnished, however. This implicated not just Alcorn’s conscience, but also that of his church. If the church refused to pay, serious legal complications could follow. Many church members had grave doubts about the wisdom of Alcorn’s protests.”

So Alcorn resigned two days later from Good Shepherd Church, which he had co-founded, and was the only church he had ever pastored.

Deadline,  written in 1994, was Alcorn’s first novel after writing five non-fiction books. It tells the story of three old friends, whose friendships date back to childhood and their service in Vietnam: Jake Woods, a liberal and largely secular journalist who is an award-winning syndicated columnist for the Oregon Tribune; Dr. Greg “Doc” Lowell, chief of surgery at the local hospital, and a diehard atheist and humanist; and Finnegan “Finney” Keels, a  devout Christian and the owner of a computer software business – represent two conflicting worldviews that Jake has to choose between after a halftime Kansas City Chiefs and Seattle Seahawks football-watching Sunday afternoon pizza-and-Coors beer run to Gino’s in Lowell’s cherry-red Suburban ends in tragedy, leaving Woods as the sole survior of what may not be an accident, as it first appears, but rather a double homicide.

In endorsing Deadline,  Frank Peretti  wrote: “Randy Alcorn is a walking resource library guided by godly wisdom. Like his  nonfiction,  this  novel  is  for  clear  thinkers  who  enjoy  a  good  argument.  There  can  be  no  mistaking – and  there  should  be  no  ignoring – the  vital message of this book.”

Trumpeted in both TIME and Newsweek as the creator of the crossover Christian thriller, Lethbridge, Alberta-born Peretti now lives in northern Idaho (he spent from 1978 to 1984 as a factory ski maker working at the K2 ski company on Vashon Island in Washington State’s Puget Sound) wrote two of the best-selling spiritual warfare novels in recent times – This Present Darkness, published in 1986 and Piercing the Darkness, published in 1989.

He also played the banjo in a bluegrass band called Northern Cross.

This Present Darkness was not an immediate publishing phenomenon, but gradually word began to spread, and the book remained on the Christian Booksellers Association’s Top 10 bestsellers list for over 150 consecutive weeks. It has sold over two million copies worldwide. This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness, popularized the idea of territorial spirits ruling over specific geographical areas, vividly portraying demons, commanded by Rafar, and angels – led by Tal, captain of the heavenly host – engaging in fierce aerial battles over schools, churches, towns and territories, have combined sales of more than 3.5 million copies.

And one of the unlikely heroes of This Present Darkness? The fictional editor of the local small town weekly newspaper, the Ashton Clarion, former big city reporter and skeptic Marshall Hogan.

Deadline, which remained on various bestsellers lists for 36 months, was the first in Alcorn’s Ollie Chandler collection of novels to date, featuring Chandler as a brilliant and quick-witted homicide detective who lives by Ollies’ First Law: “Things are not what they appear.”  Dominion followed Deadline in 1996, and a third book, Deception, was published in 2007.

Alcorn spent time with Portland homicide detectives, Tom Nelson, a now retired detective sergeant and certified forensics computer examiner from the Portland Police Bureau, and columnists at the Oregonian, as well as observing editorial meetings at the Indianapolis Star, so he could accurately create the Deadline’s storyline, setting and characters.

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