It is strange because I teach Scripture here and these writings are constantly talking about the end. It is clear that up until the time that the gospel of Mark was written, this very passage from the famous thirteenth chapter of Mark, that they expected the end momentarily; they expected Jesus to come back because the resurrection of the dead was the great sign of the beginning of the end. They figured that if God raised Jesus then the end was not far afield. Of course, we have moved well past that anticipation of the end.

The problem got worse when I moved through dozens of hymns trying to find music for this mass I was astonished to find how many of those texts talk about the end of time. Negro spirituals, which I deeply love and listen to, are constantly talking about "Over Jordan", "Deep River", and "My Home Lies Over Jordan"; they are all about the end. And then it dawned on me that the reason why so many of these eighteenth and nineteenth-century hymns talk about the end is that life was short and brutish for most people and as it continues to be for vast numbers on this planet at this very moment. So, the end, as holding the prospect of release, was very real for those people.

Have you read the book "Angela's Ashes"? The book has become very popular. For immigrants there is no escaping. Talk about life being short and brutish. But that is not my experience. My life does not seem brutish in anything like that way described, by poverty, or disease. And then too, the phrase kept recurring to me when - some of you may be old enough to remember - after mass we used to say every day the prayer "Hail Holy Queen". In fact, that very phrase is even in this hymn that we will play at communion: "This veil of tears". I thought maybe that is the connection; because in a very large segment of my life I do experience life as being carried on "in a veil of tears". Yet, there is something importantly different here, because the veil of tears I experience does not somehow first open up and then end, but seems to occlude the possibility of an end. And so what I have struggled for is to try to figure out what is there in my experience, in so far as it is fairly typical of modern experience, that makes thinking of the end so difficult? And it is not the kind of classical problems, but rather it is something quite different. "End" says direction. "End" says shape. End is not simply the abrupt cutting off; that is not what the Christian understanding of the end is. It means a goal, which means shape, which means direction. And it dawned on me, maybe that is the key for us post-modernists.

Now you do not have to read Derrida, and Foucault, and all those French literary critics to come to the point of sensing that life is fairly chaotic. Life is shapeless. As Yeats said almost one hundred years ago, "the center does not hold". We don't even know whether there is a center.

Stress, as the disease du jour; what does that mean? We are doing too much, but I do not think it is a kind of arbitrary amalgamation of all kinds of responsibilities and jobs, and past, and problems. Rather it is that all this seems to add up to no particularly coherent whole.

That film, "Affluenza", that I talked about, I watched again. Or, that other Scott Simon thing, "Running Out of Time"; they both say we are running madly. But where? For example I look at my kids and none of them go to mass, I do not know anybody on the Faculty whose kids go to Church, and perhaps therein lies the key.

The world is certainly shapeless today in a way I do not think it has been for a long time. It is certainly shapeless in a way it never was when I was growing up. However onerous it may have been, the onerous was the difficulty of poverty, of not having enough, or, other problems. But there was not this deeper problem of "what does this all mean?" Is there any kind of pattern? Is there any kind of coherence? Is there any kind of integrity, any kind of wholeness? We are endlessly busy. That is not the problem in and of itself, but it is that we are so disheveled, I believe. Life is deshabille.

Routinely, at the college we talk about the good old days. I have been here twenty-five years. The good old days are as recent as fifteen years ago when people talked to each other, and people spent time with each other. We do not do that anymore, and it is not just because we are bigger. We did get busier; there is more stuff going on. But there seems to be, again, less coherence to all this frenetic activity. So, I think that this veil of tears that I occupy, and here I am very careful because I see some people half my age, and considerably more than half my age, and wonder if their experience of life is like that. But then I watch MTV, where incoherence has almost become de rigueur in the presentation of things: image, image rapidly piled upon image. The incoherence almost seems to be something desirable. If that is the case, then it is impossible to talk about the end except in some kind of absurdist drama like Jersey Kasinsky who says, "Well, you are just walking along and, 'bonk', a car comes along and runs over your head and that is the end".

That is not the end that these texts talk about. The end the texts talk about is not just a release from pain, but is the achievement of final coherence, that the world truly is in God's hands, and that all of our activity somehow has to be co-ordinated by the building of love which is, of course, what the end is supposed to be all about. But I do not think this happened. I do not think this is true for me. I am supposed to be professionally religious, and it is an embarrassment to me to say that I have had to struggle, to say why the end is not even available to me as part of a regular furniture of my mind and my imagination.