My friend’s brother, a self-styled doomsday prepper who proudly identifies as a “conspiracy theorist,” ran into an unexpected obstacle when COVID-19 arrived. In all his loud preparation for some vague apocalyptic future wrought by liberals, he had somehow forgotten the face masks.

When my friend told me this, we both laughed — less at his anxiety as he scrambled for the next few days to find masks and more at the pricking of his prepper pride that he had to. Lord knows, we were all freaking out in our own way, trying to understand how to prepare for something none of us had ever faced, and her brother had every right to his own freakout. But what struck us as absurd is all the energy he had spent preparing for the wrong apocalypse.

Lest you think I am hasty to judge him, I feel like I can do so from personal experience. My own disorganized, single-person pantry (the one that year-round mimics the sad end of a yard sale) belies the truth that I once was preparing for the end of the world, too, and that I also prepared for the wrong apocalypse. As a teenager belonging to a pre-millenialist evangelical church, I imbibed its teachings on End Times as if I could store away calories from the words themselves and feed off of them through a lean winter. I prepared — using the language of the Gospels — to “flee to the hills.” Every year at our church’s summer youth camp, I spent a great deal of energy on two things: crushing on boys and preparing to survive Armageddon.

Once, at the end of a hard, long hike up a box river canyon in the Sierra Mountains about twenty miles south of Yosemite Valley, my wilderness survival mentor — a kind and generous Christian man preparing young people to greet a terrifying future — appraised the flat, protected area along the river and announced to our group of about ten campers that this was where he would bring his family in the coming time of trouble. He said it as though it were a secret place he had found but this area cradling the South Fork of the Merced River was called Pallachun, or “a good place to stay,” by the Miwok people who first made their home along the river thousands of years before and who were forced out as recently as the same century as the one we were standing in. The end of their world had already happened but that is not the one that we were thinking about that day, even as we passed by grinding stones long worn into a granite boulder near the trailhead, evidence of the home they were forced to leave.

Our wilderness survival teacher extended an invitation to us to claim refuge here as well so I mentally marked the location while struggling to imagine my very loving, very suburban family making that same trek. But none of us imagined the terrifying future that was directly ahead. None of us could see into the future 20 years when that very stretch of mountain refuge would be taken out by fire and, within a handful of years, the very directionality of being able to “flee to the hills” would be reversed as the refuge once found in the Sierra mountains and foothills became hellish fire traps in the ever-lengthening California summers. Even then we were preparing for the wrong apocalypse.

My interest in wilderness survival began to wane through my college years as I began to contemplate for the first time that maybe Jesus wasn’t coming back tomorrow. My dad had his first heart attack. A friend of mine died in car accident. Life began to puncture escape fantasies about life and by the end of college I was looking into a black hole of not knowing what to do with the rest of mine. My interest in religion as a possible career path eventually took me from my conservative Christian college to graduate school at a liberal Presbyterian seminary in Northern California.

But during the first week of classes 9/11 happened. I remember that morning, waking up to the news about the first plane hitting the North Tower. Even before I managed the short trip to the student center to watch on the large TV the unfolding horror with the rest of our small seminary community, my old religious training had snapped to attention in my body. The impulse to leave school and “flee to the hills” overwhelmed me. These attacks had to be the sign that the End was truly near.

Instead of following my first impulse to head back to my dorm room to pack up my bags for a quick escape, I made my way down to the chapel   for the regular morning worship service. There were prayers of lament . And there were prayers of thanksgiving. I was surprised by these. Having been brought up in a non-liturgical tradition, I was skeptical of any rote recitation of prayer. But the voices praying the liturgy in unison: “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give our thanks and praise,” felt sweetly defiant and mysterious in the face of such chaos. It was my first real experience of why liturgy matters, of what is possible when traditions become the handholds that help us crawl out of the abyss and what relief there is knowing someone before you reached safety by placing their weight against those same handholds.

As the Communion bread was passed around that morning, no one yet knew the world we were about to step into. We were taking Communion in California, thousands of miles from the core of the devastation happening at the moment, but we knew we had all been forever changed. One of the seminarians gave a piece of the Communion bread to her baby who waved it around like cotton candy and giggled in the way only babies know how to do. The entire scene in the chapel caught the attention of my heart even as my body was still ready to be in flight.

Here was a form of religion that was teaching its followers how to be in community in a time of crisis, how to find solace in the presence of others and in the transcendent traditions of faith even when there are no answers to be found. By contrast, the religion I had been practicing prepared me to run away, to prioritize survival over community, to find refuge in remote forests — not in the closeness of community — and, most definitely, not in the deeper refuge of the heart. Whatever the future held, I was not ready to be the person I wanted to be now—a person who could stay.

Recognizing I had been wired to flee helped me to stay put. And the next three years began an intricate unwinding of beliefs and assumptions upon which my personal world of religious faith had first been built. After seminary, I continued to travel through a more liberal expression of Christianity until I entered into my work as a hospice chaplain. The subtler layers of my fundamentalist religiosity continued to soften and dissolve against the unanswerable questions of suffering and luminous power of love that I regularly bore witness to in my work. My theology became more about “What helps you get through?” than about any absolutes about right or wrong.

However, even as I consciously left behind the End Times theology of my childhood, my apocalyptic mind would take much longer to undo. Doing death work though brought me into a close study of the apocalypse in deeply personal and private terms. In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Blind Assassin, the octogenarian narrator bluntly sums up her view of her fading world: “It’s the end of the world every day, for someone.” For someone like myself who had lived most of her life thinking she had a ticket on the escape pod in the last seconds of countdown before launching her and everyone she loved far away from the land of Death, I was nowhere near prepared for the way the world ends every day, for someone.

Landing as I did in death work though became the continuation of an education in learning how not to run away when the world is ending. I learned the truth of this while accompanying people to the end of their own personal worlds. Learning to stay with what is happening is the summation of almost everything I have learned from this every day kind of apocalypse, including the one my family and I lived through as my dad was dying and my mom, brother and I stood on either side of his bed in the ICU watching his last breaths, talking to him in desperate tones of love, until the waves on his heart monitor became a thin line. Our world absolutely ended that day, in an every day way.

Now, with COVID-19, I am learning anew as a member of a global family in distress that the most she can personally offer in this moment, again, is to simply stay. Stay at home. Stay mindful of those who cannot. Stay in this moment. Stay connected to the people I love. Stay honest about my grief and fear and and loneliness. Stay available to the grief and fear and loneliness of others. Stay humble to the truth this is just the beginning of a long and painful revelation of what no one yet has the full vision to see. Just stay in it. Stay here now.

This kind of staying in it no matter what is what every real apocalypse requires. Because the revelation that apocalypse brings — the true meaning of the word not as a final ending but as the unveiling of a new reality — is nothing that we can outwit or get out ahead of. You can’t outrun apocalypse by protesting it, screaming at it, or creating conspiracy theories about it. But through small, concrete acts like physical distancing and masking our faces, we participate in the unveiling of a new reality, a reality co-created minute by minute, a reality informed by a greater awareness on a scale never before possible of our deep and vital interdependence with one another. None of us know the day when we will be able to move again through the world safely unmasked. But even now, we are in a time of unveiling. If there is anything I have learned about preparing for the wrong apocalypse, it is that I cannot fully prepare for what is ahead in this one either. But if I can just commit to staying, then my preparation to face what is ending and to greet what is arriving will arise from the staying, not in the running away.