Maybe it isn't surprising that I had encountered the word in a book by Soren Kierkegaard. I can still picture the pale yellow, well-worn paperback of Fear and Trembling and the Sickness unto Death that I had picked up in a used bookstore near the University of Hawaii. And I still shudder when I remember how those awful words appealed to a shy, precocious, pensive adolescent. I was terribly lonely, a scholarship student in an expensive school. A fish out of water, with little grasp of the complex culture of the Hawaiian Islands, where my family had recently moved; "shark bait" was common slang for pale-skinned, bookish kids like me. I took up Kierkegaard in self-defense, finding a kindred spirit in the eccentric Dane. In a similar way I latched onto Emily Dickinson. And the two nineteenth-century recluses, in becoming my friends, plunged me all unwitting into the realm of eschatology.

It was my word, but why? Surely not just because I was a maladjusted teenager finding the present very hard to take. Why does it still seem to be a word that defines me? The motto of the Norris family crest that my father found in England reads "Regard the End." Maybe eschatology is in my blood. Or maybe it has to do with my constitutional inability to do things right. The first time I was asked to preach to Presbyterians I talked about the communion of saints; the first time I addressed a Sunday gathering of Unitarians I spoke about sin. Often it is by doing things all wrong the first time that I make them come out right in the end.

I didn't do living right, at first. When I was six months old, I nearly died. All wrong, for an infant, to be so caught up in the last things. Naturally, the hospital was called Providence; in all likelihood, as I was in danger of dying, a nun baptized me there. My official baptism came four months later, in the arms of my grandfather Norris, a Methodist pastor. Six months of age is too early to learn that one's mother and father are helpless before death. But the struggle that took place in my infant body and still-forming, preverbal intelligence was between life and death, and I am convinced that a sense of something vast, something yet to come, took hold in my unconscious and remains there still.

The word "eschatology" no longer seems otherworldly to me, or even focused exclusively on future events. It seems more in tune with quantum physics and its sense of time as fluid, constantly in motion in what we call the future, present, and past. I have come to regard the word as life-affirming in ways far more subtle than any dictionary definition could convey. What I mean is this: an acquaintance of mine, a brilliant young scholar, was stricken with cancer, and over the course of several years came close to dying three times. But after extensive treatment, both radiation and chemotherapy, came a welcome remission. Her prognosis was uncertain at best, but she was again able to teach, and to write. "I'd never want to go back," she told her department head, an older woman, "because now I know what each morning means, and I am so grateful just to be alive." When the other woman said to her, "We've been through so much together in the last few years," the younger woman nodded, and smiled. "Yes," she said, emphatically. "Yes! And hasn't it been a blessing!" That's eschatology.




Copyright © 1998 by Kathleen Norris

From Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998). Used by arrangement with Penguin Putnam Publishers, Inc.