After slogging through Revelation, I still don’t have a great deal of appreciation for it. Yes, there are some beautiful phrases that are uttered, and repeated in my traditional liturgy. “Splendor and honor and kingly power, are yours by right o Lamb that was slain... with your blood you have redeemed for God, from every family, language, people and nation”. Or “O Ruler of the Universe, Lord God, great deeds that you have done, surpassing human understanding”.
These are come from two ‘canticles’ or songs that are repeated weekly in our daily morning and evening prayer practice, and they are rich and meaningful me. And when I read them in context I get uncomfortable. The first canticle is sung by 24 elders with seven flames in front of them, and beasts with eyes in front and in back of their heads. The second canticle, splendor and honor, is sung by those victorious over the beast, standing next to a sea of glass and fire. Immediately before this, an angel swings his sickle and put what he gathered in a winepress that then flowed with blood.
While it is true that my literal brain struggles with these images, my bigger objection to Revelation is that it’s clearly a book set in a particular time, using analogies and allegories that may or may not make sense now. In my tradition, we’ve elected to take these songs of praise and use them in worship. But other traditions take other parts and use them – sign of the beast, 666, end times, horsemen of the apocalypse. But I do not believe Revelation was written to tell an objective story, full of facts and accurate predictions.
Rather, I think this is John’s vision, maybe his ‘thin place’. A thin place is a Celtic notion of where we can see through to the holy, where it feels like you’re in the midst of the holy. I’ve been to cathedrals and ancient ruins that feel like think places, where it feels like I’m closer to heaven than other times. John in his vision, it seems is describing his sense of heaven. That is no more descriptive of heaven than my description of a particular cathedral.
One of the places where I have routinely felt like a thin place was working at a community breakfast. I worked there reliably for years and got to know the down-trodden who attended. Heaven was absolutely there. And yet, if I wrote a story about it, it would include my own description of hard to believe stories – the hard life stories of the heavenly homeless who showed so much grace and love in the midst of their addition and illness. It may have never felt like a holy, thin place to anyone else, but it did to me.
All of this is to say that have a healthy skepticism of anyone or any tradition that relies on visions from Revelation. Without reading about the beasts and the frogs and understanding the analogies about Babylon and whores, it’s taking things out of context and probably shouldn’t be. I still love the poetry in my tradition’s self-selected portions of Revelation, and the whole book makes me uncomfortable because of what we humans hang on to as ‘truth’.
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