Eschatology

Suppose eschatology were a subject taught at institutions other than seminaries?

Some of the year 2000 worriers seemed to me to be simply longing for The End, or at least a good catastrophe. At least then, they seemed to say to themselves, we'd know why we were so upset, why we feel unreal, like tourists in our own realities. I'm sure some of them were disappointed when disaster didn't strike...

On the other hand I felt a lot of people had put things on hold to see if there would be disasters, and when there weren't, an amazing amount of energy was released.

I know there are places where life definitely isn't good, like Iraq (U.S. sanctions having unintended genocidal consequences) and the former Yugoslavia – where they have real catastrophes underway right now. But for a fat and spoiled Norteamericana like me, whose catastrophes are largely psychic ones, it's been a good year so far, basking in all the energy released when the end *didn't* come.

I think our Western-European inherited culture is very fixated on eschatology...an eschatological sense of time particularly. We want the universe and everything in it to have a beginning point and an end point, Genesis to Revelations and the Big Bang Theory to inevitable entropic disintegration. This probably explains our other fixation on hours and minutes. Just once I'd like to wake up naturally in the morning on a weekday, without the garish buzz of the alarm clock.