There is no way to “re-clothe” the Adventist fear of contemplative prayer or geology or Roman Catholicism. But we may look elsewhere to nourish our souls. We can practice contemplation. We can respect the work of earth scientists. We can discern between the goodness and the perverse that are both so evident in Catholicism. We can let go of our insistence that the “end times” must happen according to our hundred year old charts and cultivate instead a confidence in the God of history and a carefulness to cooperate with goodness.
We have an obligation to speak truth in the world. We are obliged to resist evil. We will fulfill these obligations best if we have a practice of contemplation of the divine, the good, and the beautiful. We will hinder the spread of evil best if our own souls are saturated in goodness.
So, most of the time, we do well to simply turn our faces away from the naked, screaming emperor.