What did you wear to The Rapture?

Another Rapture come and gone. I feel like Charlie Brown at his brick wall with Linus kissing goodbye another Christmas season. You will recall that Harold Camping's last Rapture was in 1994. Really this end of the world stuff is getting to be a habit. But I don't think Camping should feel downhearted. As Peter Lynch has pointed out, if you're going to make a prediction, you'd better do it often. If he makes it a standing order, Camping stands a better chance of being right eventually.

But truth be told, I'm glad The Rapture has come and gone. For all the merriment it produced at the office (we saved all of our more menial tasks for Monday just in case we didn't survive the weekend), there is also an element of discomfort to the whole thing. After all, who could fail but be discomforted by those outlying coworkers who did actually believe The Rapture was on its way?

I have to give Angel some credit. She had never heard of The Rapture before. It's like all the Simpson's parodies and the year 1994 passed her by without any hint of doomsday gloom. Surely then this novel idea was more likely to take hold of Angel than it would for the rest of us who've been through a Rapture or two. Poor Angel. She looked obviously jittery by 11am Friday morning.
"You don't honestly believe the end of days comes tomorrow, do you?" I asked her.
Her silence in reply said it all.

There's nothing to be done in such cases. The punchlines just get robbed of their humor when you have someone who honestly thinks that their house is likely to be carried away by a bed of hot lava. (Then again, maybe Angel does have a house I don't know about on the hill of that Icelandic volcano that's starting to spew well-timed hellfire.)

Ruined punchlines aside, my mother, whose native language is not English, managed to put the situation in perspective this morning. "Has it occurred to you," she asked me thoughtfully, "that 'rapture' rhymes with 'rupture'?" I had to admit that it had not occurred to me.