The End of Time

 
It’s Sunday Morning and time for our scripture reading and homily. This morning our scripture will be an excerpt from Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

Starting at p. 190 (I am reading from the May, 2003, trade paperback reissue version), Tom describes the Clock People, a community of Native Americans with an esoteric history, related to the April 18, 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, that we will bypass for now. The important thing to know about the Clock People is that they are maintaining, in a burrow beneath the surface of the Earth, the clockworks: the mechanism that holds Time and Space together for Earth dwellers. But, they look forward to the End of Time:

“Please do not construe … ‘the end of time’ to mean ‘the end of life’ or what is normally meant by the apocalyptically minded when they speak (almost wishfully, it seems) of the ‘end of the world.’ That is paranoiac rubbish, and however one may finally evaluate the Clock People, their philosophy must be appreciated on a higher plane than doomsday drivel.” (p. 190)

The Clock People have only one ritual: “The Checking of the Clockworks – the keeping/making of history. Likewise, they have but one legend or cultural myth: that of a continuum they call The Eternity of Joy. It is into the Eternity of Joy that they believe all men will pass once the clockworks is destroyed. … They are preparing for timelessness by eliminating from their culture all rules, schedules and moral standards other than those that are directly involved with the keeping of the clockworks. … (T)hey may be the first community so far in which anarchy has come close to working.” (p. 190)

(I’m weary of going back-and-forth between the text and the keyboard so, taking advantage of Amazon’s “Search Inside This Book” feature, I have taken a screenshot of the rest of our morning’s text, which appears on p. 191. I would have done the same for p. 190, but it was not available.)

 

 
Amen.

 
Cheers,
BuFoon Steve Gillard