This is an intriguing phenomenon, This problem in trying to figure out how to talk about the end. And this set me thinking about why the end seems to be alien to my sense of life, to my sensibility; because, if you look at the history of the church, reflected in these readings, those people thought that the end was imminent. The end of the world: Jesus was going to return and there was to be the final Judgement and all the rest of it. And then we look at the middle ages, under the weight of the Black Death, an of awareness of the frailty of life pervaded the life of the church for centuries. Their sense of the end was very clear.

I have been looking for a couple of weeks for some hymns to play and I was amazed while going through many, how often heaven, death, the end, the classic four last things: heaven, hell, death, and judgement, come up as regular themes. Yet, if you look at modern hymnody you get a kind of la-la-land enjoyment of the present, but there is very little talk about the end.

I was just wondering why, in our own recent past, the sense of the end was so clear, and I remembered that I am a child of the Depression. Neither of my parents were very wealthy, my father told me he lost his whole life-savings, all two thousand dollars that he had saved, in the crash of the banks. I lived hardly luxuriously and I think that that is the thing that makes all this talk about the end in that early hymnody so clear; because life was so short and difficult for most people, as it continues to be.

I was just talking to Kate Woodburn who just got back from Haiti: eighty percent unemployment. She describes it as hell for her. Bunches of babies dying everyday at this orphanage where she worked. This is not anomalous on our planet. In that context, talk about the end becomes quite plausible, the end becomes a relief and a release. And that may cast some light on this business of why the sense of the end is so alien to me, because I do not live, in that famous phrase, in that "veil of tears".

Remember when, after every low mass, we used to say that, "Hail Holy Queen", weeping and crying in this veil of tears? I do not live in a veil of tears ostensibly; I live in North London in a very fancy house, surrounded by books and art and CD's and music and nice friendly dogs. Yeh, I feel like very often I am living in a veil of tears and I try to figure out why; I am not hungry, I am not cold, I am not diseased, not in any major way.

The notion of the veil of tears depends on a shape of life. To talk about the end is to talk about a direction, a point, a climax. It is not the sort of absurdist sense of end where life just cuts off for absolutely no reason and nothing happens, as in the novels of Kerzyndky or some of the absurdist playwrights. No, the end says that life is supposed to have a shape, which leads to the end even if it is simply the relief of pain. That is a shape and the end makes sense in that context. So, my problem is that I feel like I am in a veil of tears and yet the sense of the end is alien, and why is that? This is my difficulty.

As I look at what is going on in the reading, and what is going on in the people around me, very often I think that there is an enormous amount of activity, an enormous number of all kinds of demands on myself. I am very busy, but there seems to be no coherence to all this activity.

We talk about five-year plans, as at College we have gone through five-year plans. But in a few weeks after we made the five-year plan nobody remembers it; it has all disappeared, it all just vanishes. Why? What is so corrosive? I think that it is the sense that this activity is a kind of frenetic running around with no ostensible point. It does not really seem to be going any place, and there is so much of it that it has built up its own momentum so that when I do not have anything to do I feel like I am falling apart; because the thing that keeps me together is precisely the pace and the variety of activities. So the veil of tears that I live in is, I think, the absence of a real sense of meaningfulness, of what goes for much of my life. And I think those are tears even deeper than the tears caused by death at an early age, or extreme and abject poverty.

So, if there is anything in that, and I think there is, another dimension of the puzzlement over the end has appeared in a set of exams I was working through this past week where the students said, "Well everybody thinks this, you think this and you think this". Well, alright, everyone can think whatever they want. In other words, we are radically detached from each other and I pointed out to them after class, "if what you guys are saying is true then we better shut down this operation; what we are doing is all nonsense, this is total rubbish". I mean, if there is this solipsistic existence that most people sense is their lives - that I live my life and you live your life - that just aggravates this whole business of frenetic activity and makes it even less coherent.

If this is where we are, and to a depressingly large extent I think it is where I am, at least, and I think there is a warrant for believing that that is where a lot of the world is, the difficulty regarding "the end" comes clearer. I point to these two PBS programs that I watched again: "Running Out of Time", and "Affluenza". In "Running Out of Time" , Scott Simon talks about how much activity is taking place -- we are much busier, we are working much longer hours, than people did thirty, forty years ago. Also, "Affluenza"; we have much more stuff, many more toys, than ever we had. AS we are doing this in this radically individualistic way, it is not surprising that there is a kind of sense of hollowness at the center of this activity. There is no direction, there is no shape, there seems to be no point.