A small contactee group whose members asked us not to name it reached, this month, the date on which it had expected to be taken up. The reporter present describes the morning after as quiet. No one wept, exactly. Coffee was made. Someone said, to no one, that the delay was probably a mercy, and someone else agreed, and the day went on.
We record these mornings because they are the truest thing a movement produces. The prophecies are loud and the doctrines are elaborate, but the disconfirmed morning — the coffee, the small brave reinterpretation, the choosing to stay — is where the human fact of the thing sits. These are not fools. They are people who found something to belong to and discovered it was load-bearing, and who, when the appointed day passed, decided that the belonging was worth more than the prediction. It usually is. That is the part almost no one gets right about them, and it is the only part the Ends desk is sure of.