The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [90]
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