BOSCH, Hieronymus "St John the Evangelist on Patmos," 1504-05
A mishmash of poetry and readings intended to communicate my understanding of Revelation — a speech I gave to a bible study group a few years back. A Godawful Mess, those poor people.
Sacred Scripture uses the image of the vine in various ways. In one, the vine serves to express the Mystery of the People of God, what for Christians St. Paul referred to as the Mystical Body of Christ. From this perspective which emphasizes the Church’s internal nature, the lay faithful are seen not simply as laborers who work in the vineyard, but as themselves being a part of the vineyard. In John 15:5, Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Part of our responsibilities as lay faithful is to not only to accept the gospel in faith but to proclaim it by word and deed.
The Boston Archdiocese, through the facilities at St. John’s Seminary has prepared a program called The Master of Arts Ministry to help build an informed laity that fulfills the vision of John Paul II in Christifidelis Laici. I finished up another course this past fall in Fundamental Theology and one of the assignments I had was to prepare a “reflection paper” on the meaning of Revelation. The paper was intended to serve as a basis for making a presentation to a group like ourselves here to help us explore the topic of Revelation.
It is in many ways a vast topic, Fr. Paul Ritt who was my professor for the course, told us that everything, Faith, Hope, Charity, God and Man and his Salvation, Redemption, Scripture, Tradition, the whole kitchen sink of Catholic Theology begins and ends with Revelation. We read an encyclical Dei Verbum, devoted to the topic and written by the late Pope John Paul II. I thought I would begin my little presentation tonight by asking what Revelation means to you and how you would attempt to express that to others and see what we get as our group definition (Five Minute Group Discussion).
Possible Answers:
- Self communication of God in history: God manifesting and giving us no less than God and in the process imparting knowledge about God.
- God’s free gracious, efficacious (producing or capable of producing the desired effect; having the intended result; effective an “efficacious drug”) self-disclosure in words and deeds and ultimately in the person of Jesus Christ
- General (God disclosing God in all created things, in all people) and special (God revealing God in the unique, unrepeatable revelations which is recorded in the Old (“dabar”) and New Testaments as handed down by the Church. Culminates in the Incarnation of God in Christ)
- The word made flesh: scripture is the Word consigned to writing. Tradition is the word passed on in the life, doctrine and worship of the Church.
- Revelation as inner mystical experience imparting the grace of communion with Jesus Christ
- God’s self-communication that elevates humanity’s self consciousness allowing it to see itself and the world in a new light
- Revelation as symbolic disclosure (the Fig Tree) “The Fig Tree Parable:The point of the fig tree parable is the damnableness of an outward show of religion with none of the fruit of religion, which is the love of God and man. He is teaching not about fig trees but about men. It is always the season for men. There is no off season in which it would be against the order of nature for men to do their duty to God or their fellows. There is something here not altogether unlike the condemnation passed upon Satan for the Fall of our first parents – that henceforth he should go on his belly. How could a pure spirit go on his belly? But God was talking to Satan in serpent language. And our Lord is warning men in fig tree language.”– F. J. Sheed, To Know Christ Jesus
Fundamentally the concept of Revelation is an answer but I think it is always important never to forget the question. Many of us have been blessed by strong families and good upbringings and we may forget the question from time to time. And never to forget also that smugness, said the American Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor, is the great Catholic sin.
I always find the question all around me in this secular world and never better expressed by Philip Larkin, an English Poet Laureat of the 1950 and 60’s. This is a shocking poem and I don’t mean to offend anyone but it displays a certain sneering cynicism that is high art:
(Reading One)
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Philip Larken, This Be The Verse
So if this is the ethos (the characteristic and distinguishing attitudes, habits, beliefs, etc. of an individual or of a group) of those whom we are going to speak with, I think we are going to need some kind of attention grabber to start the conversation.
A Swedish Catholic Theologian, Soren Kierkegaard said that if he were a doctor and were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, he would prescribe silence. For even if the Word of God were proclaimed, it would not be heard or heeded, for there is too much noise and busyness in our world. I often use poetry when I’m trying to communicate. Nothing quite like a man breaking into verse to stun those around him, particularly when he’s talking about death:
(Reading Two)
How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?
Is there a horn we should not blow as proudly
For the meanest of us all, who creeps his days,
Guarding his heart from blows, to die obscurely?
I am no king, have laid no kingdoms waste,
Taken no princes captive, led no triumphs
Of weeping women through long walls of trumpets;
Say rather, I am no one, or an atom;
Say rather, two great gods, in a vault of starlight,
Play ponderingly at chess, and at the game’s end
One of the pieces, shaken, falls to the floor
And runs to the darkest corner; and that piece
Forgotten there, left motionless, is I. . .
Say that I have no name, no gifts, no power,
Am only one of millions, mostly silent;
One who came with eyes and hands and a heart,
Looked on beauty, and loved it, and then left it.
Say that the fates of time and space obscured me,
Led me a thousand ways to pain, bemused me,
Wrapped me in ugliness; and like great spiders
Dispatched me at their leisure. . .Well, what then?
Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,
The horns of glory blowing above my burial?
Conrad Aiken, Selection from Tetélestai
Blaise Pascal, the Catholic apologist, planned to begin his book, the Pensees, by talking about death because death creates silence – not just when it happens but also before that, when we contemplate it. This poem by Conrad Aiken which I quoted before does just that, contemplates death. Here’s a bit more, so I can get back to speaking about Revelation:
(Reading Three)
Morning and evening opened and closed above me:
Houses were built above me; trees let fall
Yellowing leaves upon me, hands of ghosts;
Rain has showered its arrows of silver upon me
Seeking my heart; winds have roared and tossed me;
Music in long blue waves of sound has borne me
A helpless weed to shores of unthought silence;
Time, above me, within me, crashed its gongs
Of terrible warning, sifting the dust of death;
And here I lie.Roar now above my decaying flesh, you winds,
Whirl out your earth-scents over this body, tell me
Of ferns and stagnant pools, wild roses, hillsides!
Anoint me, rain, let crash your silver arrows
On this hard flesh! I am the one who named you,
I lived in you, and now I die in you.
I your son, your daughter, treader of music,
Lie broken, conquered. . .Let me not fall in silence.I, the restless one; the circler of circles;
Herdsman and roper of stars, who could not capture
The secret of self; I who was tyrant to weaklings,
Striker of children; destroyer of women; corrupter
Of innocent dreamers, and laugher at beauty;
I, Too easily brought to tears and weakness by music,
Baffled and broken by love, the helpless beholder
Of the war in my heart of desire with desire, the struggle
Of hatred with love, terror with hunger;
Who laughed without knowing the cause of my laughter, who grew
Without wishing to grow, a servant to my own body;
Loved without reason the laughter and flesh of a woman,
Enduring such torments to find her! I who at last
Grow weaker, struggle more feebly, relent in my purpose,
Choose for my triumph an easier end, look backward
At earlier conquests; or, caught in the web, cry out
In a sudden and empty despair, ‘Tetélestai!’
Pity me, now! I, who was arrogant, beg you!
Tell me, as I lie down, that I was courageous.
Blow horns of victory now, as I reel and am vanquished.
Shatter the sky with trumpets above my grave.
Conrad Aiken, Selection from Tetélestai
“Tetélestai” is the name of the poem. Do you know where that word comes from or what it means?
“When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” [John 19:30] It is the Greek translation of that last word that Jesus utters from the Cross. Much of what is in that word, Tetélestai, its meaning and grammar, sum up a lot of what Revelation is: To end, to be finished, completed, fully executed, to discharge a debt totally and completely. Jesus is the completion of revelation, the slow and gradual process of God revealing himself to Moses and the Prophets, the story of the Old Testament. It began with the burning bush and his name “Yaweh.” It ends on the cross.
It’s in the Perfect tense — Tetélestai. The grammar that says finished in the past with the result that it stands finished forever, a completed action with emphasis on existing results of that past action: “I have baked a cake.” Action of baking finished; result the cake is here. The passive voice represents the subject, Jesus Christ, as being acted upon by someone else, God the father, who imputed our sins to Jesus Christ and judged every one of them. The mood of the verb Tetélestai is declarative for a dogmatic statement of doctrine; salvation is totally complete. The present state: Eternal salvation life is available. The past action: Jesus Christ was judged for our sins. There is both good and bad news in this: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.”[John 3:36]. So it is decidedly not a cry of despair (like that which emanates from the poem, the man falling into silence) but one of triumph when we think of Jesus on the Cross. And belief in him will shatter the sky with trumpets above your grave. Thousands of years of salvation history, untold numbers of saints and believers marching to their deaths with joyous hymns on their lips, proclaim that victory.
One of the propositions of Revelation is that of eternal life, a life with Jesus sharing in the life of God the Father. Malcolm Muggeridge, another English writer and like all of these I’m quoting here, a guardian angel of mine, wrote this thinking about that moment, on the cusp of reaching eternal life:
(Reading Four)
Our Transformation At Death
So at last I may understand, and understanding believe; see my ancient carcass, prone between the sheets, stained and worn like a scrap of paper dropped in the gutter, muddy and marred with being trodden underfoot, and hover over it, myself, like a butterfly released from its chrysalis stage and ready to fly away. Are caterpillars told of their impending resurrection? How in dying they will be transformed from poor earth-crawlers into creatures of the air, with exquisitely pained wings? If told, do they believe it? Is it conceivable to them that so constricted an existence as this should burgeon into so gay and lightsome a one as a butterfly’s? I imagine the wise old caterpillars shaking their heads – no, it can’t be; it’s a fantasy, self-deception, a dream. Similarly, our wise secular voices. Yet in the limbo between living and dying, as the night clock tick remorselessly on, and the black sky implacably shows not one single streak or scratch of grey, I hear those words; I am the resurrection, and the life, and feel myself to be carried along on a great tide of joy and peace.
Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus
How can we apprehend this meaning of revelation? There is so much to guide us and it begins in communion with others at the sacred store where we can read scripture, learn traditions and be in communion with the saints who have passed before us. We need to create for ourselves a space where we can come to understand the nature of Jesus’ministry: the pronouncement of the kingdom of God and the demand to repent our lives of sin and death in order to save our immortal souls.
Is it not the nature of our experience of the world that gives rise to Revelation in the first place? Listen to Blaise Pascal:
We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness.
Pensées 401
Since no one can change human nature, no one can make us stop desiring truth, happiness or goodness; and no mere human being can give them to us. We can get these two things in crumbs and droplets while wishing for great loaves and waves, but we cannot create them; we are aqueducts not fountains, creatures not the creator. As C.S. Lewis said: “Human beings can’t make each other happy for very long.”
The fundamental truth of all addicts and all men is that we do not create happiness or goodness. GK Chesterton, another guardian angel of mine, felt a “haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Robinson Crusoe’s ship—for even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise — according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.” That is the story of original sin.
How can we apprehend the meaning of revelation?
Consider this poem, The Idea of Order at Key West, by Wallace Stevens, the subject is the voice of poetry but to me it is really considering nature and the transcendent (God), all from a walk along a sea wall at Key West and a view of the harbor as night falls:
(Reading Five)
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone.
But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea. It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West
I used to listen to this poem on a recording I had and when Stevens finishes reading, “keener sounds” seems to reverberate and if anyone were to ask me what revelation has meant to me, I can only think of this poem and “keener sounds:” a keener realization of what the truth is and an awareness, at times frightening, of how I must live and be held accountable to that truth.
Ghostlier demarcations: revelation is an unfolding of God’s self-disclosure whether it be in the words and deeds recorded in the Old Testament and ultimately in the New Testament in the person of Jesus Christ or as an inner experience imparts the grace of communion with God (Avery Dulles). The latter is what I know and sense through this poem but it is the same as what is written and taught in my church, which calls herself the body of Christ.
I am speaking to you here tonight on her behalf because as Avery Dulles has said, “the fruits of this process of God’s self disclosure are transmitted to believers by education in the church and in the living community of faith.” We all have stories or we damn well should have stories of our faith. And when you share them with others you do proclaim the gospel by word and deed. We become part of God’s self disclosure, a part of the unfolding of revelation itself.
Here is Malcolm Muggeridge again proclaiming his moment of faith:
(Reading Six)
“I want to cry out with the blind man to whom Jesus restored his sight: One thing that I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see. How, I ask myself, could I have missed it before? How not to mhave understood that the grey-silver light across the water, the cry of the sea-gulls and the sweep of their wings, everything on which my eyes rest and my ears hear is telling me about God.”
This life’s dim Windows of the Soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole
And leads you to believe a Lie
When you see with, not thro’, the Eye.
Thus William Blake distinguishes between the fantasy that is seen with the eye and truth that is seen though it.
There are two clearly demarcated kingdoms; and passing from one to the other, from the kingdom of fantasy to the kingdom of reality, gives inexpressible delight. As when the sun comes out, and a dark landscape is suddenly glorified, all that was obscure becoming clear, all that was incomprehensible, comprehensible. Fantasy’s joys and desires dissolve away and in their place is one joy, one desire; one Oneness—God.
In this kingdom of reality, Simone Weil tells us, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy as goodness; no desert so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. There we may understand what St. Augustine meant when he insisted that ‘though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone, and how, in the light of this realization, all human progress, human morality, human law, based, as they are, on the opposite proposition – of the intrinsic superiority of the higher over the lower – is seen as written on water, scribbled on dust; like Jesus’ scribble while he was waiting for the accusers of the woman taken in adultery to disperse.
What will it mean to you? What happens when you realize that there has been a God all throughout history who has tirelessly sought to show you the way and who exists at this very moment like an expectant father waiting for a son to return home after years of waste and sinful acts against the very life he gave him. Let others know it will become their very life and it is a life of joy.
(Reading Seven)
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
I am in awe every time I read that. Chesterton has written: “There is perhaps nothing so perfect in all language or literature as the use of these three degrees in the parable of the lilies of the field; in which Jesus seems first to take one small flower in his hand and note its simplicity and even its impotence; then suddenly expands it in flamboyant colors into all the palaces and pavilions full of the great name, Solomon, in national legend and glory; and then, by yet a third overturn, shrivels into nothing once more with a gesture as if flinging it away If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you…
It is like the building of a good tower of Babel by white magic in a moment and in the movement of a hand; a tower heaved suddenly up to heaven on the top of which can be seen afar off, higher than we had fancied possible, the figure of man; lifted by three infinities above all other things, on a starry ladder of light logic and swift imagination.
Merely in a literary sense it would be more of a masterpiece than most of the masterpieces in the libraries; yet it seems to have been uttered almost at random while a man might pull a flower.”
Talk show host Laura Ingraham had a terrible moment fighting breast cancer and chemo therapy, facing the end of her career when she sought the advice of a Catholic priest who took the time to speak quietly with her about her faith. She never forgot his comforting words: “Don’t worry, everything is going to be OK.” In her story I heard the echo of “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” People need to be comforted.
In speaking of revelation to others, remember who they are, counsel from your heart and give comfort to those who are seeking. Above all, it is a message of love to be communicated lovingly and not something to be preached by argument. I hope you will find some of my poems and quotations useful. Thank you.
