The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [89]
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