According to the clock outside Bloomingdale's-someone must have passed it on the way to church this morning who could give us an update-it's about 68 days, 13 hours, and 28 minutes until the turn of the millennium. But according to the latest reports, hotel and restaurant reservations for Millennium Eve in New York City are lagging well behind expectations. What is the problem here? A once-every-thousand-years event is taking place in the Capital of the World, and only a few people are showing up to celebrate? Given my abiding faith in the good judgment of people in this town, I can only conclude that the millennium may not live up to its billing after all.
On the other hand, it might. Recent surveys show that fifteen percent of people in America believe that the world will come to an end sometime soon. And two-thirds of all Americans believe a major cataclysmic event will soon occur that will substantially change life as we know it. So what's going to happen when the millennium expires in 68 days, 13 hours and 28 minutes? Will all hell break loose?
The irony, of course, is that many people today do fear that all hell will break loose when the millennium turns, but for reasons that are technological rather than theological. A thousand years ago, people thought Jesus would return and the world would end at the millennium anniversary of his birth. Actually, the anxiety was more pronounced at the millennium anniversary of his death, which came in 1033. In both cases, however, the expectation of the world's end proved premature. Beliefs about the end of the world, by the way, are the only beliefs about which historians can safely say, in retrospect at least, that they are false. With any luck, we will be able to say the same about the Y2K problems.
Even so, my own guess is that at least some of the anxiety people feel today about the end of the millennium does have theological roots. Both the Jewish and the Christian traditions have well-developed traditions of belief about the end of time-eschatology, it's called. Simply put, eschatology is the belief that the world will come to an abrupt, divinely ordained end, called the apocalypse. When it comes, good things will happen to good people, and bad things-very bad things-will happen to bad people. In the Bible and elsewhere, apocalyptic literature appears when times are tough and the future seems bleak and unbearable. The stories about the end of time are designed both to inspire the faithful and put the fear of God into those who might otherwise lose faith.
The book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament, also known as the Apocalypse, is the paradigm text. It's filled with many familiar scenes and characters-familiar mostly from the movies. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse are there (coming, of course, from the four winds and the four corners of the Earth), Death and Hell ride malevolently on horseback together, and a scroll is found which describes what will happen at the end of time. The scroll is sealed with seven seals. Each time a seal is opened, more mayhem erupts.
My favorite moment occurs when the sixth seal is opened and a great earthquake shakes the earth. The sun becomes black as sackcloth, the full moon becomes like blood, and the stars of the sky fall to the earth as the fig tree drops its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. The sky vanishes like a scroll rolling itself up, and every mountain and island is removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hide in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, "Fall on us and hide us from the face of the one seated on the throne and from the wrath of the lamb. For the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?"
Two thousand years ago, even one thousand years ago, people did not base their decisions on what they learned in a laboratory or at the end of a proof or in the conclusion of a double-blind study. In those days, knowledge came from prophets who heard the voice of God and holy women and men who saw visions from God. And stories like these scared the hell out of people. The stories also reinforced a deep belief that the hearers were a chosen people, and that they were living at an historical point of fulcrum when time would become eternity and human beings would make their final leap forward into everlasting bliss or everlasting damnation.
We mostly don't believe that scenario anymore, either the part about the seals and the earthquakes, or the part about time and history being decisively shaped by divine will. But that doesn't mean that we disagree with the principle. One millennium or two ago, the world was ringed by what Matthew Arnold referred to as "The Sea of Faith." God was ensconced at its center. As Richard Russo points out in last week's millennium issue of the New York Times Magazine, we have spent much of the latest millennium driving God out of the center, into the farthest reaches of the universe. Copernicus proposed that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not vice versa. Galileo invented the telescope and explained the first laws of motion. And Newton's theory of gravity explained the way the mechanical world worked without reference to a First Force. Combined, these quantum leaps in human understanding served to banish God not only from a central role in time and history, but from the very heavens as well.
The presence that replaced at the center of the universe, of course, was the life of the individual. Truth is based on human reason, knowledge is based on human observation and discovery, beauty on human sensibility, justice on human social contracts, and goodness on human aspirations. Our minds and imaginations have become both the touchstone and the capstone of almost everything. As one of the hymns in our hymnal reads (and we don't sing it often for obvious reasons) we are "of life its shining gift, the measure of all things."
But, though God has been deposed and human beings have been coronated, some of the trappings of the office remain, such as the deep conviction that our time in human history is a special time, and therefore that we are a specially chosen people. This conviction has been common in recent centuries, particularly here in the United States. It's the religious face of our civic sense of manifest destiny. Today, many people in our nation believe that this is a point of fulcrum, a hinge of history, from which we are moving into a new world of the information age, propelled by knowledge and skill with which we clone mammals and genetically engineer humans and map DNA. Looking at the evidence, it's tempting to conclude that we are indeed special people living at a special time.
To believe that, however, is to miss a crucial consequence of Copernicus' discovery. As the Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott explains in a recent New Yorker interview, Copernicus' proof that the earth is not the center of the universe simply confirms the idea that our location is not special. The more we learn about the universe, the more non-special our location looks. The earth is orbiting an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy.
When this principle is applied to time, it becomes clear that we are probably not living at a special time either. Gott recalls visiting the Berlin Wall in 1969 and wondering how long the wall would last. Was it a temporary aberration, or a permanent fixture of modern Europe? He made the following argument. If we divide the wall's total history, from beginning to end, into four quarters, and if Gott's visit was located somewhere randomly in that history, there was a fifty percent chance that his visit happened in one of the middle two quarters-that means, not in the first quarter of the wall's life, and not in the last quarter.
If his visit came at the beginning of the middle fifty percent, then one quarter of the wall's total history had passed and three quarters remained. In that case, the future would be three times as long as the past. Since the wall had been up for eight years, and three times eight is twenty-four, Gott concluded that there was a fifty percent chance that the wall would last no longer than twenty-four more years. On the other hand, if his visit came at the end of the middle two quarters, then three quarters of the wall's life had already happened and only one quarter remained. In that case, the future would be one-third as long as the past, or a little less than three years. So there was a fifty percent chance that the wall would come down sometime between three and twenty-four years from then.
It came down twenty years later. But let's say that we want to raise the stakes and the confidence level. Let's say that we want to know how long the human species is going to last, and we want confidence that our answer will be ninety-five percent accurate. Fine, says Gott. He begins with the assumption that you and I, having no reason to think that we've been born in a special time, are probably living during the middle ninety-five percent of the ultimate duration of our species. In other words, there is an overwhelmingly good chance that we're living neither during the first two and a half percent nor during the last two and a half percent of the time that human beings will have existed. Since we've been around for two hundred thousand years-that is the first two and a half percent, and we'll trust Gott with the rest of the math-there is a ninety-five percent chance that the human future will last more than fifty-one hundred additional years but less than 7.8 million years.
In other words, chances are that we will soon face neither the abyss of the apocalypse nor the dawning of a bold new era. Chances are that we are not swinging on the hinge of history here and now. Chances are that these are ordinary times. Why does acknowledging that matter to us? Because the turn of the year or the century or the millennium tempts us to make the same mistake as did the ancients: to look for the meaning of our days and lives in either the wonders or the terrors of the future, to search for grand themes and decisive changes and paradigm-shattering developments to mark our passage on this earth, to see ourselves as central to the unfolding of creation.
But if we look in those places, chances are we will forever look in vain. These are ordinary times. We are ordinary people. To me, that's the good news. It enables me to live my life as it unfolds, in ordinary ways on ordinary days. My problem with the millennium is that it is a very big concept, and only that: a concept. Though I can sometimes wrap my mind around it, I can never wrap my life around it-my everyday life, that is, the ninety-five percent of my life that makes up ninety-five percent of my life. Chances are I will spend most of my life in ordinary ways. And it's how I spend most of my time that will mostly determine whether my life as a whole is satisfying.
I recall a scene described by Andre Dubus in his book titled Essays From A Movable Chair. Dubus is a writer who lost his leg some years ago in an auto accident. He tells about making sandwiches on Tuesdays for his second- and seventh-grade daughters and taking the sandwiches to school. He writes:
On Tuesdays when I make lunch for my girls, I focus on this: the sandwiches are sacraments. And each motion is a sacrament, this holding of plastic bags, knife, of bread, of cutting board, this pushing of the chair, this spreading of mustard on bread, this trimming of liverwurst, of ham. All sacraments, as putting the lunches into a zippered book bag is, and going down my six ramps to my car is. I drive on the highway, to the girls' town, to their school, and this is not simply a transition; it is my love moving by car from place where my girls are not to a place where they are; even if I do not feel or acknowledge it, this is a sacrament. If I remember it, then I feel it too. Feeling it does not always mean that I am a happy man driving in traffic; it simply means that I know what I am doing in the presence of God.
If I were much wiser, and much more patient, and had much greater concentration, I could sit in silence in my chair, look out my windows at a green tree and the blue sky, and know that breathing is a gift; that a breath is sufficient for the moment; and that breathing air is breathing God.
If we live wisely and well, ordinary moments will be sufficient for us too. But not just sufficient: they will be more than enough-they will be sacred. Copyright AllSouls 1999.