Of Signs

Two adjacent billboards. An treatise on life.

The first, stark white text on dark background. A simple message: The World is Going to End. A citation from the book of Revelations. (chapter one, verse seven) A toll-free phone number, evidently leading to some manner of greater truth possessing the power to assuage the mortal fear struck by the previous message.

I am not brave enough to dial it. Or bored enough.

The second features a lovely young woman, with an enviable figure, clad in the scant attire of a popular eatery’s uniform well-designed to accentuate said figure, with a brief text containing a pun on the word, “cocktail.”

Childhood guilt has kept me from patronizing this particular establishment. Such is life.

Eternal damnation. Sexual titillation.

I cannot help but think sometimes that they got the billboards backwards. Shouldn’t temptation come before condemnation?

The great irony of these seemingly disconnected advertisements is that while they seem completely in opposition, one an appeal to animal lust and the other to religious ecstasy, they are in actuality the same message, the same emotion, the same pitch. They are the same in the way that papal political striving is the same as monastic aesthetic withdrawal. They both assume that life is defined by the same doomed or dooming misery. They both want to know what you’re going to do about it.

And they both want you to know that you should be very afraid.

We call it the lowest common denominator because it Is both low and common, this appeal to fear, this temptation to reptilian instinct. You are being left out, or you will soon be, if you do not … it you will not … Maybe there is something better out there, in the smile of a pretty girl or a glass of alcohol, there is a missing truth that threatens the entire meaning and purpose of your existence, you’re only here for a little while longer, so party!

Or pray.

Which will you choose? “There is nothing better for mortals,” says the writer of Ecclesiastes, “than to eat and to drink and to find enjoyment in their work.” But the Lord also says, “Keep awake!” undoubtedly reminding us that there is peril in our future. It is the classic Lady and the Tiger choice. Or so they tell us.

So which will it be?

Neither. Because we’re better than that.

OK, no we’re not, but we can be. Surely we are mostly small and broken, imprisoned by fear, yet in rare small glimpses, foretastes, whispers, promises, we can be touched by Grace and experience a small bit of a new truth. “Perfect love casts out fear,” says the writer of the Epistle to John. This world’s message of fear can be drowned out in Gospel song, despair replaced by hope, opportunity and service overcoming curvatus in se.

I once was blind, says the old song. As I pass by signs on the side of the this world’s road, I pray to be even blinder.