O Rapturous Day!

But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of the heavens, but my Father alone.
--Matthew 24:36

If you've been paying attention, you realize that at approximately 6 p.m. tonight, Pacific Daylight Time, those chosen by God will disappear from the face of the earth, having been assumed body and soul into heaven. I hope this warning reaches you in time.

Harold Camping is only the latest of the prophets to have predicted the timing of Doomsday. Much of Europe, reportedly, was petrified in the late tenth century, awaiting the dreaded year of A.D. 1000.

Despite attending Sunday School diligently during boyhood and adolescence, as well as having read my Bible avidly as a child, I'd never heard of the "Rapture" until the last decade. You can't find it there in the Bible, unless -- apparently -- you squint, focus on certain key obscurities, apply mathematics, draw inferences, and set angels to dancing on the head of a pin. An odd way for God to set forth his warnings to mankind, one might think. In fact, a major warning I took away from my own religious education was the one given in Matthew: Be vigilant, because the end will come when you least expect it.

My first real intimation that the Rapture was a concept taken seriously by some Christians came from reading the Portofino trilogy by Frank Schaeffer. These novels, both funny and sympathetic, are based on his own childhood in a missionary family. His parents, members of an obscure sect that had at one time splintered off from the Presbyterian church, had dedicated their lives to saving the lost Catholic souls of French-speaking Switzerland. One day, as he recounts in Zermatt, the final book of the trilogy, he awoke to find himself alone in the missionary compound. He instantly panicked, seized by guilty fear that the Saved had been "Raptured," and that he, all unworthy, had been left behind.

It says in the Bible that several amazing things will happen when Jesus zooms back to earth to snatch his elect up into the clouds at the Rapture. The moon will turn to blood. The water will turn to blood too. So I flushed the toilet ... .

After finding assurance in the toilet's clear water that his manifold adolescent sins had not yet caught up with him, he recalled with contrition the time that he had reduced a friend to uncontrollable tears by secretly putting red dye in the boy's toilet while his folks were away.

Schaeffer survived his childhood, and made the radical conversion as an adult from millennial Calvinism to Greek Orthodoxy.

I suspect that when we awake tomorrow, even our most devout friends and neighbors will still be here with us. For most of us, it's sufficient to recall that our personal encounter with eternity won't await an unpredictably timed Second Coming. Each of us is only a heartbeat away -- a burst aneurism, a car swerving across the center line -- from our own personal departure from earth.

The realization that the day and hour of our own personal demise is unknown should suffice. We can leave the timing of the termination of the universe itself to the mind of a Power higher than the angels, higher even than Mr. Camping.