The Cloister Walk (29 page)

Like prophetic language, the images of apocalypse are meant to make us uncomfortable. That is their value to us, especially in a culture that has come to worship comfort. Using an apocalyptic lens, one might say that the desolation of a slum reveals who we are as a nation, a people, far better than the gleaming stores of a shopping mall. We are forced to look at what remains when pretense, including our pretense to affluence, is taken away. But apocalypse as a form of prophecy not only reveals the fault lines of the status quo, it takes our true measure with regard to it: the discomfort we feel when the boundaries shift is the measure of our allegiance to the way things are.

Apocalypse takes us far beyond the usual bounds of language and custom. If you've ever experienced the strangeness of being a healthy person in an Intensive Care Unit, or a hospice or nursing home, then you have experienced apocalypse in this sense. The world turned inside out, revealed as radically different from what we thought we knew, all the things we value so highly—productivity, control of mind and body, the illusion of personal autonomy—suddenly swept away. And our response to this revelation—whether it depresses us and makes us want to run, or whether we can discern hope, and love, and grace in this strange, new place—is a measure of our true condition. It reveals us to ourselves.

And isn't this one of the goals of writing? Contemporary writers live at a far remove from John of Patmos, whose identity as a writer was inextricably bound to that of his community. Artists in the late twentieth century have come to lament the loss of a communal role. Yet it has not entirely eluded us; in times of crisis, apocalyptic times, people still look to artists for
something,
maybe even hope. There is the story about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova standing in the long lines outside the prison in—I'll call it St. Petersburg—waiting to leave letters and packages for loved ones caught up in Stalin's purges, not even knowing whether they were dead or alive. Recognizing the poet, a woman approached her and asked, “Can you describe this?” Akhmatova replied, “I can,” and notes that “something like a smile passed fleetingly over what once had been her face.” Akhmatova at that moment fulfilled a prophetic role, as well as an apocalyptic one:
I can describe this.
Just the act of describing can be defiance, in the face of terror; it allows the powerless a glimpse into another reality, one in which words and images (not guns and prisons) have power.

Akhmatova's story suggests that writing is an inescapably communal act, as it depends on both writer and reader (or listener). The writer must be willing to see, the reader to hear. Listening to John's Apocalypse day in, day out, I began to notice how much of it is concerned with the acts of seeing and writing. In the very first chapter a voice like a trumpet says to John: “Write on a scroll what you see” (1:11). When John turns to face the voice, he sees a figure that he describes, memorably, as holding seven stars, with a sword coming out of his mouth, and a face as bright as the sun. On touching John, the figure says: “Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, the one who lives. Once I was dead but now I am alive forever and ever. I hold the keys to death and the netherworld. Write down, therefore”—I love that “therefore”—“what you have seen, and what is happening, and what will happen afterwards.”

Moving with the unfathomable logic of a dream, which requires only that you give yourself up to it, the book continues, giving us angels who direct John to write, to not write, and even to eat the words of a little scroll. The angel who offers John the scroll warns him that “it will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will taste as sweet as honey” (10:9). This passage echoes both Isaiah and Ezekiel, and serves to remind the listener of John's prophetic call. The transition that follows, the word “then” sounding clear as a bell when one hears the passage read aloud, is a further reinforcement of John's authority as a prophet. He says: “I took the small scroll from the angel's hand and swallowed it. In my mouth it was like sweet honey, but when I had eaten it my stomach turned sour. Then someone said to me, ‘You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, tongues and kings' ” (10:10-11).

The Book of Revelation concludes as it begins, with a blessing invoked on those who hear it. This time, a warning is also given, against anyone who would add or take away from the words of the prophecy. The passage concludes: “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.' Let the hearer say, ‘Come,' let the one who thirsts come forward, and the one who wants it receive the gift of life-giving water” (22:17).

It seems to me that the crux of this passage is the invitation given to the one who
hears
the book, which echoes an earlier invitation to John to come and witness the endless praise and worship that takes place in heaven, around God's throne. Now the listener is asked to become an active participant in the continuing process of revelation, to speak up and invite others to receive the words of the book. As John was an evangelist, exiled to the island of Patmos, he tells us, for “giving testimony to Jesus” (1:9), this is not surprising. What might be surprising to people conditioned by cultural literalism is the way that the apocalypse of John functions as a radical act of biblical interpretation, or, as the
Oxford Companion to the Bible
puts it, “a rereading of biblical tradition in the light of the death of Jesus.”

Visionaries like John are at the mercy of what they see, and their visions bring them to the boundaries of language itself. But John is also a writer working out of a tradition. He tells us that his book is a record of what he has seen and heard, but clearly it is also a fruit of his own
lectio,
his imbibing of the Hebrew scriptures, and probably the literature of the gospel traditions as well. The
Oxford Companion
tells us that the Revelation may be seen as “a scriptural meditation, based perhaps on the Sabbath readings from the Law and the Prophets which has been cast in visionary form. Probably it is a mixture of genuine experience and literary elaboration. Biblical metaphors and images—dragon, lamb, harlot, bride—come to new life in his imagination.”

Isn't “new life” the point of the religion? And don't we get there by a mixture of experience and metaphoric exploration? Not by “adding” or “taking away,” but by continually reinterpreting what we've been given? And aren't metaphors part of that given, allowing Jesus to describe the kingdom of God in terms of mustard seed and yeast? The nineteenth-century mathematician Bernhard Riemann once said, “I did not invent those pairs of differential equations. I found them in the world, where God had hidden them.” When I stumble across metaphors in the course of writing, it feels much more like discovery than creating; the words and images seem to be choosing me, and not the other way around. And when I manipulate them in the interest of hospitality, in order to make a comprehensible work of art, I have to give up any notion of control.

For a long time I had no idea why I was so attracted to the Benedictines, why I keep returning to their choirs. Now I believe it's because of the hospitality I've encountered in their communal
lectio,
a hospitality so vast that it invites all present into communion with the text being read. I encounter there not a God who rejects me because I can't pass some dogmatic litmus test but one who invites me to become part of a process, the continuing revelation of holy word. Heard aloud, the metaphors of scripture are roomy indeed; they allow me to relax, and listen, and roam. I take them in, to my “specific strength,” as Emily Dickinson put it in her poem “A Word made Flesh is seldom.” And I hope to give something back.

Toward the beginning of the Book of Revelation, John is called to say to the church at Ephesus that God “[has] this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember from what you have fallen . . .” (2:4-5). These are words of conversion; taking hold, they can change a life. When I first heard them in the monks' choir, tears welled up in me, unexpected and unwelcome. I remembered how completely I had loved God, and church, as a child, and how easily I had drifted away as a young adult.

I realized suddenly that I'd been most fortunate in being given another chance to encounter worship, in middle age, in a context that restored to me the true religion of my childhood, which was song. For me, participating in monastic
lectio
has meant rediscovering a religion that consists not so much of ideas or doctrines but of song and breath. It's encountering the words of scripture in such a way that they become as alive as the people around me. As Emily Dickinson put it, words that “breathe.”

And listening is the key. Isaiah 52, which echoes throughout Revelation 21, the “gemstone chapter” that is known to be Dickinson's favorite in the Bible, says simply, “listen, that you may live.” Listening to the hard stuff, the words of Jeremiah and John of Patmos, I was able to return without fear to that other childhood god, the one my fundamentalist grandmother Norris had unwittingly imposed on me, and hear a different message in the metaphors of judgment and terror. “Who can stand?” (6:17) John asks, in a grim passage depicting the world's powerful scrambling into caves and behind rocks to hide from the wrath of God.
No one,
is the answer, and it's a comforting one—at the end of human power, of human control, we find a God of love, who desires to dwell with humanity, and “wipe every tear from [our] eyes” (21:4).

Somehow, the simple magic of hearing the Bible read aloud opened my eyes to recognize the extent to which I had, in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, allowed “the resistance of the world to good [to shake] my faith in the kingdom of God.” A secular worldview, terribly sophisticated but of little use to me in the long run, had taken hold of me in my early twenties, and in Teilhard's words, I had come “to regard the world as radically and incurably corrupt. Consequently [I had] allowed the fire to die down in [my] heart.” Writing kept the fires of hope alive in me during the twenty years I never went near a church. But in the Benedictine choir, as I allowed the words of John's revelation to wash over me—to be repulsed, offended, attracted, and moved to tears of grief and anger, joy and wonder—my full sense of the sacredness of the world revived. I had begun to learn to listen as a child again.

The radiant faith of childhood demonstrates that the opposite of faith is not doubt but fear. Children don't doubt; they fear. Throughout John's Apocalypse, as the frightening images unfold, all the angels and the figure of Christ himself continually tell John: “Do not fear.” I find the angels of Revelation refreshingly terrifying—calmly they stand at the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds; they plant one foot on land, one on the sea and, roaring like lions, invoke seven thunders. No warm, fuzzy gift-shop angels, nothing for the New Age or “personal spirituality” markets. I love the story of the red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and his defeat at the hands of the archangel Michael, and wonder if this story would interest children much more than Barney the dinosaur. (In a children's sermon, in a mainstream Protestant church, I once heard Christianity described as a version of the Barney song, and all I could think was: Where is John of Patmos when we need him?)

At the moment when the new heaven and earth are revealed to John, Christ speaks from a great throne: “ ‘Behold, I make all things new.' Then he said, ‘Write these words down' ” (21:5). Hearing this in the monk's choir, I gasped. No wonder this chapter is Dickinson's favorite. Christ's commission may well have helped her define her calling, her vocation as a poet (and I would claim, one of the great biblical interpreters of the nineteenth century). I gasped again, as a phrase entered my mind: “Ezra Pound thundered, ‘make it new,' and Jesus said, ‘I will.' ”

I had just experienced a healing, a joining together of what had been pulled apart in me for many years, when I thought I had to choose
between
literature and religion. It was my encounter with the Benedictines, after I had apprenticed as a writer for many years, that taught me otherwise. Much to my surprise, their daily liturgy and
lectio
profoundly intensified my sense of metaphor as essential to our capacity to hope, and to dream (not to mention to transcend the banalities of the Barney song). And it was free for the asking.

Dragons within, dragons without. Evil so pervasive that only the poetry of apocalypse can imagine its defeat. And to do that it takes us to the limits of metaphor, of human sense, the limits of imagining and understanding. It pushes us against all our boundaries and suggests that the end of our control—our ideologies, our plans, our competence, our expertise, our professionalism, our power—is the beginning of God's reign. It asks us to believe that only the good remains, at the end, and directs us toward carefully tending it here and now. We will sing a new song. Singing and praise will be all that remains. As a poet, that's a vision, and a promise, I can live with.