At Evening

“Also known,” he observed to me, “as the Day of Doom.”

I nodded. We had somehow gotten on to the topic of the last judgment, a topic one does not merely get on to, and his remark startled me. Then I realized it had been meant to startle me and I wondered.

“So you believe it?” I asked.

“Do I believe there will come a day of doom? Oh yes.” He knocked back his brandy and sat gazing into the empty tumbler.

“Have you ever thought what it will be like?”

He looked at me, after I had asked that question, with a speculating look.

“I have—” he said, and I waited for him to go on. After some time he did: “I don’t know how you envision the Day of Doom, but I envision it as a moment of light and pain and cleansing.”

He paused again, so I said, “I imagine many envision it as a moment of pain—chaos perhaps.”

“Yes. I’m not sure I mean a moment in the same way though. There are fleeting, temporal moments and then—at least I think so—there are the moments of eternity: endless and somehow transitory, or . . . complete afterward and with no sense of elapsing time when they occur.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

“Well, I’m not sure I follow myself,” he said with a smile. “It is something of an intuition; perhaps it is a sense I’ve picked up from some place or another, from some book or a poem . . . the sort of think you get from reading E.R. Eddison.”

I shook my head to indicate I had never read Eddison, hoping he wouldn’t discern the fact that I’d never heard of what appeared to be an important author.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I envision the Day of Doom as a day of Revelation.”

“Revelation of what?” I supposed, too late, I might have suggested: a revelation of judgment.

“Many things, the first being the glory of God in the face of Christ. In that terrible moment he will look on us . . . and we shall see him as he is.”

The light outside had been gradually failing, and suddenly I was aware we were sitting in twilight in that room. I stirred in my seat and glanced at a lamp, but he went on.

“In that light . . . in that light only that which has been sanctified can survive—and the rest will be consumed.”

“I suppose I always had the idea,” I offered, clearing my throat which had become dry all of a sudden, “that there would be some mutual scrutiny involved . . . of the events of life—played back like a movie, you know? Pretty embarrassing and drawn out—”

“Yes, I know what you mean. I don’t think it will be that way, though. I think there will be a realization of the completeness of Beauty, Goodness and Truth in that on which we gaze, or of the completeness of something better, and a realization—utter and perfect, even to the affect of it—of our flaws, failures, shortcomings, sins and iniquities. Iniquities,” he repeated, looking at the darkness on the floor. “A realization of the perversity and meagerness of our desires.

“And in that moment of perfect realization, and exact, exquisite pain, we will at last know enduring joy, since we will be transformed by the loss of all the dross. And only the presently forming better being will remain.”

He paused once more and picked up his glass, peered into it, and then put it down again. “Only that which presently enjoys union with God can in the end enjoy beatitude, which is union with God.”