“We have our loneliness and our regret with which to build an eschatology,’’ Peter Porter says in a poem, speaking of secular modernity. Our loneliness, I think, is our sense of God’s absence, our unfulfilled longing for God that runs unseeing through all our relations with one another, making human relations take all the weight of expectation that only a relation with God can bear. Our regret is our sense of the darkness of the human heart, our longing for a kindling of heart that runs unfeeling through all our feelings, making commonplace feelings take on a role in our lives that only the infinite passion of a faith can sustain. An eschatology is a sense of human purpose or human destiny, but built out of out loneliness and our regret it is unseeing and unfeeling.

The House of Wisdom  John S. Dunne  University of Notre Dame Press 1993 page 52