Eschatology

Gospel Reading: Luke 10.48-32 (click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Clearly The Sound of Music isn't going to provide the organizing principle for Ms. Norris's book. You remember how the song goes, "We'll start at the very beginning, a very good place to start..." Then again, anyone who was reading Kierkegaard at sixteen might not look next to Julie Andrews for insight.

The first chapter of Amazing Grace is about last things: eschatology. T.S. Eliot might have approved of Norris's strange decision to begin her book with a chapter on endings. The third of Eliot's Four Quartets is a poem titled "East Coker" which begins, "In my beginning is my end..." and ends, "In my end is my beginning." Both writers seem to believe that our endings have a great deal to do with our present lives.

I need to confess a little baggage of my own with regard to eschatology and the notion that last things should impact my present life. At summer camp as a child we would 'play' the persecution game. It was a form of capture the flag, but with a dark, Cold War twist. To be captured in enemy territory was to fall into the hands of the KGB. Prisoners were then interrogated by agents who tried to get us to renounce our faith.

As you might expect, with associations like these eschatology is a word I would be glad to let slip from my own religious vocabulary. Yes, we learned that our beliefs about the 'end times' should impact our present lives. But that impact mostly took the form of fear as we wondered whether our faith would be found wanting on Judgment Day. But, thanks to people like Kathleen Norris and T.S. Eliot, I am finding that 'eschatology' might not be the life sapping term I thought it was. In fact eschatology might help me live more fully rather than more fearfully.

I'll try not to do too much violence to the gospel readings when I bring them into the conversation each week, but one moment in the reading seems relevant. We are told that Martha was 'distracted by her many tasks.' There seems to be a certain kind of attention to the present that the story of Mary and Martha is asking us to pay. Mary's attention is contrasted to Martha's distraction. And Mary chose the better part.

Kathleen Norris's story of how the life of a friend opened up after an encounter with cancer might be making a similar point. Considering what's eternal, or considering our mortal limits can be a way of focusing ourselves on the miracle of life that is right in front of us - a turning from our distractions, we might say. And in the process we get glimpses of what's eternal in the here and now. 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand' is the way Jesus put it.

Near the end of the Four Quartets Eliot returns to the theme:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning...

There is a way of considering ultimate things and the end of things that can make us only more attentive to the life that is before us. Not fearful attention, wondering what horror might await us on the other side of the grave if we haven't got our religious acts together, but a powerful engagement with the life God has given us. The Christian faith is about not ceasing from this exploration. And maybe arriving back where we started, but knowing the place or knowing ourselves for the first time. Maybe eschatology can be life-giving after all.