Raptured in Biddle's Escape: Art as Therapy

Interactive Rapture art by Joseph Davis

We duck into Biddle’s Escape after collecting a handful of books from Fungus Used Books & Records. I’ve got Loghan Muha in tow, a preteen on the cusp of the Alpha and Z Generations. They, an artist becoming—youth evident, soul wise. There is a language without words, present mysteries understood between us, that I trust is universal, though not everyone finds the key. 

Muha sits across from me at the checkerboard table facing the counter. Their curly explosion of hair gently tucked while reading Why Poetry? by Matthew Zapruder. I observe their movements to witness the subtlety of understanding. They glance up at me. “There are so many questions. I’ll need to pause to process.”

I pause with them, leaving our books on the table to explore the art inside Biddle’s. We play a favorite game of mine. If you could take any piece home, which would you take and why? Their eyes begin to move around the cafe. I revisit the piece I chose once before and decide it’s still the one I want: an androgynous alien statue. But another catches my eye and sends a trigger warning to my body. Dangling from a nail, a clipboard with a piece of paper boasting a sign-up sheet: “Next RAPTURE November 13, 2026,” with simple instructions: Friend Family Coworkers Politicians Yourself etc. Above the clipboard, a digital countdown in green: 

864 Days 3 Hours 22 Minutes 41 Seconds

I experience a feeling of being watched, and I am; above me, the artist (and owner of Biddle’s) Joseph Davis, has affixed a plastic naked baby doll representing Jesus to a light-up cross on the ceiling. There are seven names signed up for The Rapture with various reasons identified. big fuckboy. manipulative bastard. stalked me nine years. good at lying.

Edgar C. Whisenant, a former NASA engineer, published 88 Reasons Why The Rapture is in 1988, and the United Pentecostal sect I was born into took it seriously. I was raised with a literal interpretation of the bible—taught that Present Life was to be spent in preparation for the After Life. Davis’ piece refers to The Rapture that is the second-coming of Jesus, where all believers—the Christians—will be called up to Heaven to praise God in eternal worship. Those left behind were to suffer imaginable horrors. My developing mind painted vivid images of the genocide of those who refuse The Mark of the Beast; a mark most will accept unconsciously.

I suffer vivid flashbacks of the days- sometimes weeks-long revivals. The sea of frantic adults, repenting their sins; the pastor blessing foreheads with oil. We line up to be baptized, singing hymns ad nauseam, wailing; hot tears on cheeks, quivering jaws, begging to be saved, asking God to spare us, to give us the gift of the Holy Ghost and bestow upon us the tongues of the language unknown. We can have it, and we want it. We want it more than anything. Adults run around the church, waving handkerchiefs, dancing when we are not to dance, falling onto the floor, exhausted from seeking the spirit. I was ushered into the experience—brainwashed from fear tactics, emotional manipulation—with my own baptism and confirmation of tongues at 7-years old. 

I became accustomed to those in charge being unable to answer my questions and satisfy my need to understand what it is I was supposed to believe. We can’t escape fear because we can lose our salvation; an insidious cycle of dependency. I wondered if I would be strong enough to die for these beliefs unknown if I wasn’t raptured. Would the sacrificial gesture get me into Heaven? I am plagued by fantastical desires of martyrdom; an innocent named guilty, ashamed because I live, asking for forgiveness while being led to the guillotine without a fight. Jesus Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder symptom. 

Now I imagine a world—the biblical New Heaven and Earth—without Christians. All those who have abused my spirit, gone? Please leave me behind. Jesus’ return will save the rest of us from his own misguided followers. A list of names once marked for prayer in distant memory floods my brain. 

I play the role of a stranger in Pittsburgh with pleasure; a memoir artist, I delight in rewriting history to showcase who I am now. I cannot continue to tend to versions of me unsupported. People change; it is not to be feared, but celebrated. Isn’t that what all those revivals were supposed to do for us? Receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost means you are changed. But the changed person, without the proper tools, can easily slip back into comforting [conforming] patterns of behavior. These patterns produce sin to be repented of and the change is forgotten. I come from a family who touts consistency in character and personality—“staying the same”—as truth while also believing in a Holy Ghost that is meant to change us. I’ve become estranged from those unwilling to respond to the very change they still beg for at the altars of my childhood. The tongues that “saved me” I now understand as mimicked behavior—a performance of salvation birthed from fear. In our desperation to prove ourselves worthy, we fake change that has not actually occurred. But change cannot be faked. 

Inside of art, I grapple with hypocrisy.

My parent’s religion made me fearful of life, but the essence of the Holy Ghost—the superhuman ability to accept love and offer love without condition, which I have found accessible inside the uninhibited nature of creative flow—encourages me to live. 

We cannot escape ourselves. Perhaps that’s what art is here to remind us. We ache for what we already have access to; it is the pain of remembering we were made to live, and we hate the reminder [we are not living], so we avoid looking. Death is not an end state; Jesus’ life as metaphor tells me this. I get lost in the metaphor because literal feels limited, with nowhere left to explore. 

Loghan points to a piece on the ceiling—the one they’d keep—a portrait of a face shrouded in black hair with red contours around the nose, like tears running. “It looks like blood.” 

Artist unknown

Tears of blood … how easily I am taken to Jesus on the cross. 

At 12-years old, Muha’s point-of-view tells them time is plentiful; without the constant buzz of death on the horizon. A contrast to my experience living in these biblical End Times. To live is evil, and I must be saved from my own humanity. The Rapture as Art brought me home; I was taken to a past which reminded me who I am in the present. I am here, in Biddle’s Escape, and I am safe. I am saved. The key I have found in art—the universal language that Muha and I understand between us—exorcizes the demons in a way religion never achieved. 

In Muha’s examination of poetry, asking Why?, they moved to Ember & Flame by Rasaja Wolfe. Loghan’s review of Wolfe’s wordplay struck a chord. “… I liked how the theme was mostly rebirth. It made me realize that letting go of what I was might help me grow and change for the better. I didn’t think that was a valid thing to do and that I always had to stick to who I was instead of inviting emotional growth.” 

I am raptured by art; I die, and am resurrected inside of it.

Muha has found the key. Art is life is salvation. Living is the freedom Jesus died for. Being human, a masterpiece.