Author Description

When Bob Dylan wrote the song, “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall” for his second album, it was a time when many people thought the world as we know it could come to an end. It was 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Of course, we have lived with the threat of destruction through nuclear war since the bomb was unleashed in 1945. But today, we have let that threat dim to an irritating background static in a world ruled by a wider variety and greater intensity of craziness, so it appears. Then, it had a special intensity—in the foreground; the elephant in the fallout shelter. Dylan said at the time, that he wrote that song the way he did because he thought his life was about to end, and he wanted to say everything in one song. Similarly, yet a universe away from such pessimism, Jesus’ discourses and prayer toward the culmination of the Book of John make up his last words before the great eucatastrophe of the Cross and the Resurrection, and here, in moments he had privately with his disciples, he said and did everything necessary and possible to prepare them for these events that they wouldn’t be able to wrap their heads around until the Holy Spirit dropped on them at Pentecost. Well, this book is sort of in that spirit. The end of the world is personal for each of us, and one way or another it will end sooner than later for me. I do believe this world will have an objective end, to be replaced by “the life of the world to come,” as our Creed has it. In the mean time each of us has to die, and that is the end as far as each of us is concerned. As I have reached the age of seventy-two by God’s mercy, I find myself “out of warranty,” as one friend spoke of himself. Having passed the Psalmist’s said normal lifespan of seventy years, I have been seeking to get my house in order in every way possible. Poetically, that’s where this book comes in. I may be given to write others—that’s as may be. But I am treating this one as if it were the last, and getting into it all the “thin