1st Sunday of Advent
The Oxford University’s note on Apocalyptic literature reads rather clinical and dry. It was composed, it says, by Jews and Christians in antiquity
… to offer information on God's purposes by means of revelation. In these apocalypses, understanding of God and the world is rooted in the claim to a superior knowledge in which insight of the divine through vision or audition transcends the wisdom of human reason.
While this may be true, the word’s Greek derivation simply means an unveiling, an unmasking a revealing of a truth which has been hidden, often either by human ignorance, self-deception or a deliberate cover-up. And that needn’t necessarily be a traumatic moment, because as Jesus said, the truth will make a person free, and if we follow the true Jesus of Nazareth, the true Christ, we will find life and find it more abundantly, and find a way forward, and not a maze. Indeed, we find a labyrinth where it is impossible to be lost and if followed diligently, against all appearances – even if at times we feel we are moving further and further away - we eventually discover the centre of ourselves and within that centre … we find ourselves in God – “our lives are hidden with Christ in God.”
But it may also be a time, when stripped bare by a traumatic apocalyptic moment we come to the realization that we had got it all wrong, that we were deceived and self-deceived.
Professor Ganeri also of Oxford in quite a different context and a different manner describes such a different moment this way:
“It is [possible] that we have got it wrong about the relationship between ourselves and the world … the possibility that we are massively, colossally, in error about the world we inhabit and the nature of that habitation, about our station in the world of things, about our lives, hopes and destinies. The mistake we have made is not catastrophic but tragic. Its tragedy lies in the fact that there are lives to be led that are so much better so much more to the point than the ones we in fact lead.” [1]
And just in case, we are in any doubt about what that means, Ganeri follows it up with this Hollywood allusion: Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen, ‘exhaust[ing] [themselves] in the effort to shove [their own] home-made boat along meandering gullies,’ blinded by [the] sheer exertion in futility to the fact that just over the enormous bank occluding [their] view […] [lay, unnoticed]a great ocean – an ocean which could have saved them their heart ache. An ocean which isn’t something far way beyond ourselves. Indeed, it is closer to us than we think.
Exemplar 1: riding back on a Murray airconditioned bus after a more domestic apocalyptic moment… a completely disorienting experience… but like a labyrinth, when persevered with… leads you home. When you follow Jesus, you always find yourself at home. You only feel disoriented when you don’t TRUST the process of real truth.
Certainly, Jesus on this morning’s Gospel of Luke reading, suggests that if we trust the PROCESS of truth, even the traumatic way when
25 ‘There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations … in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. 26 People … fainting from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world [as] the heavenly bodies are shaken. 27
We must, nevertheless, continue to trust the process and allow it to accomplish its intentions – whereupon we will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. 28 because when these things do begin to take place, Jesus assures us we are to stand up and lift up [our] heads, because [our] redemption, [the redemption of all things] is drawing near.’ 29
All we need to do really is to sensibly and not stupidly read the signs…
Exemplar 2: Gorbachev was touted as the Antichrist… or that a certain American politician is another Christ figure, because he too was being crucified in his innocence, even though imperial disobedience, maiestas was not his crime but the crimes of felony and sexual depravity and dishonesty mounting to more than 90 convictions but now, strangely, mysteriously immune to any crime because now he is soon to be the leader of the most powerful country in human history – and so impervious to any legal challenges because he has appointed by the largest majority ever, who have decided that he, like Barabbas is free to go, while the INNOCENTS suffer.
So as Lord Dunsany also rightly points out:
The hooded stranger doesn’t have to be the bearer of bad tidings
Be open to the night…
Pray with open hand, not with clenched fist…
Shapes loom out of the darkness, uncertain and unclear: but the hooded stranger on horseback emerging from the mist need not be assumed to be the bearer of ill…
The night is large and full of wonders…
No there’s nothing to fear here except … when faced with the truth …. We find ourselves powerless to utter it. Like Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, knowing full well the depravity of Kurtz, tells his wife and now widow the big LIE…
"I felt like a chill grip on my chest. 'Don't,' I said, in a muffled voice.
"'Forgive me. I—I have mourned so long in silence—in silence.... You were with him—to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear....'
"'To the very end,' I said, shakily. 'I heard his very last words....' I stopped in a fright.
"'Repeat them,' she murmured in a heart-broken tone. 'I want—I want—something—something—to—to live with.'
"I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The horror! The horror!'
"'His last word—to live with,' she insisted. 'Don't you understand I loved him—I loved him—I loved him!'
"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.
"'The last word he pronounced was—your name.
"I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain.
'I knew it—I was sure!'... She knew. She was sure.
I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due?
Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether...."
Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha.
Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director suddenly.
I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
But as TS Eliot puts it- he knows that the process of TRUTH, like the course of true LOVE never runs smooth
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.”
And even NATURE itself as Ernest Hemingway in the Old Man and the Sea, knows that simple truth:
Then the fish came alive, with his death in him and rose high out of the water showing all his great length and width and all his power and his beauty. He seemed to hang in the air above the old man in the skiff. Then he feel into the water with a crash that sent spray over the old man and over all of the skiff. (72)
Or in the words of Zarathustra:
It is strange, then, that in the face of … inevitable mutual defeat – the irreparable and ultimate defeat of understanding, which life will never allow to tame and for which life will always remain insurmountable, alien; and the inevitable defeat of action which will never succeed in ordering the world which would pacify the longing for order, for structure, for stability inscribed in every action – is it strange that tasting the bitterness of the defeat on their lips, [Life and Zarathustra] should look at each other and gaze on the green meadow over which the cool evening is running just then and … weep together? Is it strange then, that [exactly then] life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was?
"The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty drawing-room with three long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and bedraped columns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner; with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a sombre and polished sarcophagus. A high door opened—closed. I rose.
"She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk. She was in mourning. It was more than a year since his death, more than a year since the news came; she seemed as though she would remember and mourn forever. She took both my hands in hers and murmured, 'I had heard you were coming.' I noticed she was not very young—I mean not girlish. She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried her sorrowful head as though she were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say, 'I—I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday—nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time—his death and her sorrow—I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together—I heard them together. She had said, with a deep catch of the breath, 'I have survived' while my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled with her tone of despairing regret, the summing up whisper of his eternal condemnation. I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold. She motioned me to a chair. We sat down. I laid the packet gently on the little table, and she put her hand over it.... 'You knew him well,' she murmured, after a moment of mourning silence.
"'Intimacy grows quickly out there,' I said. 'I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to know another.'
"'And you admired him,' she said. 'It was impossible to know him and not to admire him. Was it?'
"'He was a remarkable man,' I said, unsteadily. Then before the appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more words on my lips, I went on, 'It was impossible not to—'
"'Love him,' she finished eagerly, silencing me into an appalled dumbness. 'How true! how true! But when you think that no one knew him so well as I! I had all his noble confidence. I knew him best.'
"'You knew him best,' I repeated. And perhaps she did. But with every word spoken the room was growing darker, and only her forehead, smooth and white, remained illumined by the inextinguishable light of belief and love.
"'You were his friend,' she went on. 'His friend,' she repeated, a little louder. 'You must have been, if he had given you this, and sent you to me. I feel I can speak to you—and oh! I must speak. I want you—you who have heard his last words—to know I have been worthy of him.... It is not pride.... Yes! I am proud to know I understood him better than any one on earth—he told me so himself. And since his mother died I have had no one—no one—to—to—'
"I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even sure whether he had given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care of another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed I don't know whether he had not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.
"'... Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?' she was saying. 'He drew men towards him by what was best in them.' She looked at me with intensity. 'It is the gift of the great,' she went on, and the sound of her low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of all the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had ever heard—the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the wind, the murmurs of the crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness. 'But you have heard him! You know!' she cried.
"'Yes, I know,' I said with something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her—from which I could not even defend myself.
"'What a loss to me—to us!'—she corrected herself with beautiful generosity; then added in a murmur, 'To the world.' By the last gleams of twilight I could see the glitter of her eyes, full of tears—of tears that would not fall.
"'I have been very happy—very fortunate—very proud,' she went on. 'Too fortunate. Too happy for a little while. And now I am unhappy for—for life.'
"She stood up; her fair hair seemed to catch all the remaining light in a glimmer of gold. I rose, too.
"'And of all this,' she went on mournfully, 'of all his promise, and of all his greatness, of his generous mind, of his noble heart, nothing remains—nothing but a memory. You and I—'
"'We shall always remember him,' I said hastily.
"'No!' she cried. 'It is impossible that all this should be lost—that such a life should be sacrificed to leave nothing—but sorrow. You know what vast plans he had. I knew of them, too—I could not perhaps understand—but others knew of them. Something must remain. His words, at least, have not died.'
"'His words will remain,' I said.
"'And his example,' she whispered to herself. 'Men looked up to him—his goodness shone in every act. His example—'
"'True,' I said; 'his example, too. Yes, his example. I forgot that.'
"But I do not. I cannot—I cannot believe—not yet. I cannot believe that I shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never, never, never.'
"She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure, stretching them back and with clasped pale hands across the fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see him! I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see this eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her, too, a tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in this gesture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms, stretching bare brown arms over the glitter of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness. She said suddenly very low, 'He died as he lived.'
"'His end,' said I, with dull anger stirring in me, 'was in every way worthy of his life.'
"'And I was not with him,' she murmured. My anger subsided before a feeling of infinite pity.
"'Everything that could be done—' I mumbled.
"'Ah, but I believed in him more than any one on earth—more than his own mother, more than—himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance.'
[1] The Concealed Art of the Soul, Theories of Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology (Oxford University Press [2007] 2011).