The Donkey Path

Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part Three)

When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the West, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain.

Nicholas Black Elk

Behold, I Make All Things New.

Revelation 21:5

Car, plane, taxi, boat. It shouldn’t be that easy to get to Patmos - Island of the Apocalypse - and it’s not.

I arrive at Kos in the middle of the night to a hotel where no one is up. I was promised somebody would be up. I hate arriving at night. It’s always such a throw of the dice. Time passes. Nothing. I bang on glass. I finally call a number: for once I’ve included the international code. An old woman suddenly erupts out of the depths of a sofa and lets me in. She’s so tired herself she barely opens her eyes. She sort of unwinds towards me, sliding along the walls like a spider. I’m stuffed into what clearly is someone’s living quarters, not a functioning hotel room. I leave early and stagger off without caffeine into relentless sun to try and find my boat.

Kos port is filled with ships – hundreds – but I haven’t a clue which one is going to Patmos, several hours away. I start at the wrong end – these boats are going to Turkey – and I rapidly walk the entire mile or so crescent-shaped bay until I finally - with considerable relief and salty with sweat – get to the catamaran that I am informed will take me to Patmos. If it turns up. The official waves vaguely in the direction of a long slab of concrete jutting out in a lively Aegean sea. There are no other passengers so I have to take his word.

As stated, it is to the island of John of the Apocalypse I am heading. You will remember a few weeks back the Dartmoor forest told me to quest, and so I am questing. Questing to know more about what is emphatically the wildest, flat out strangest book in the New Testament. If I’m really looking for a liturgy of the wild, I better begin to approach the multi-eyed, bleeding Lamb-God that’s cosied away at the end of the bible. It’s not an image you see on many tea-towels.

I have a commentary of John’s Apocalypse in my tiny travel bag, by the fantastic theologian William Barclay. Barclay says there’s a difference between prophetic writing and apocalyptic writing. Prophetic sees the world as fallen but locates a way through it, the apocalyptic proclaims a completely clean slate is required. A cleaning of the global closet. All change, likely terrible, but with something phenomenal promised. I’m more acclimatised to the prophetic. I’m so in love with the earth I can’t quite make the switch.

John had his extraordinary missive sent to seven churches in Asia. It’s filled with horses with the heads of lions, seas of blood and lots of angels playing trumpets. Finally there’s a new Jerusalem at hand, and a tree of life and a light that never goes out. God dwells amongst us. These images would have seemed far less strange to the original receiver of the words. To the early Christians, the symbology would have been rooted both in the Old Testament and also the corruption of Rome. It wasn’t as hallucinatory as it seems now, it actually has an interpretable narrative. And the Apocalypse style of writing didn’t emerge with John, it was a long-established Jewish genre - there’s The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, The Ascension of Isiah, The Apocalypse of Baruch and so forth. So what today seems largely baffling, back then – less so.

Whilst Martin Luther wouldn’t have even allowed Revelation in the New Testament, others (Philip Carrington) would claim that in John we are experiencing an artist on the level of Bach or Coleridge, that it is the fundamental masterwork of the New Testament. It’s a ‘marmite’ read - compelling or majorly unsettling. As a mythologist I find it fascinating, but I’m too recent to its images to say more. It’s high-frequency stuff, of a heavenly, unsettling vibration and not exactly intimate in tone. But I’m grateful to be studying it, and excited to be heading to the island where - after excruciating labours in the mines - John was said to have received it.

And it gets me thinking:

It’s clear to many we are also living in apocalyptic times, but do we speak an apocalyptic language, down at the deepest level? Apocalypse is more than a horror show, a perpetual unease interspersed with flat out terror.

Media tells us every moment of every day that catastrophe is omnipresent. That part we get: climate emergency, war, poverty, plague. We get the outward manifestation of the ‘revealing’. Which often feels more like falling apart than emerging wisdom. So what about the inner? What we rarely have is the symbolic field through which to glean deeper meaning. We get the rupture but we lack the rapture.

If John turned up with a new letter, could we even understand it?

Where in modern Christianity are the apocalyptic listeners? The ones reporting back? The canaries down the mine? I doubt the divine world has decided to abandon this register of communication. We need the contemplative and hermetic traditions more than ever. I’m suggesting taking the mystical road within Christianity seriously.

I think many Christians are slightly embarrassed of it. It’s so far from their daily lives it’s effectively in exile. It’s too unwieldy, asks too much, speaks in tongues of fire. But shun that and you’ve exiled your own God. You’ve exiled the Holy Spirit because it’s simply not convenient.

It’s heartening to me that the early Christians could ‘think’ in the way John was laying out.

Another thing about biblical apocalypse is that it involves the return of Christ, rather than resulting in bleak nothingness. Something astonishing is coming. The Divine King returns. This is something that happens over and over and over in the life of a spiritually awake person. So revelation is actually a passage not an ending, it’s leading somewhere. If we hear about the apocalypse these days, we are more likely to hear about zombies than Yeshua. Nothing grows from it. It’s a diminishment not an alchemy.

And there are times in our lives when everything must go, nothing must stay the same. There are points of no return. And the bible seems to track those moments. Every time I pick it up it seems to highlight an issue that is flared up in my life right now. It swoops along beside like a hawk. It is wonderfully and troublingly alive. So whilst I ask about what a modern apocalyptic letter may look like, I still return to the old book for the most up to date news. Amazing how it does that. Nothing in the bible has stopped happening.

These days people often shrug and suggest John was high as a kite, completely ignoring the almost forensic composition of the narrative and images. And as Christians would believe, John is reporting back, not inventing. He’s repeatedly harried to keep up! with what’s being disclosed, grammar be blown.

Let’s widen the lens a little. Where does one have to be in oneself for such an experience to happen? Almost all indigenous cultures have given credence and space to the visionary, it’s a key component to the wilderness vigil. Aboriginal culture states that modernity is “three days deep”: after that cracks appear and the deep interior reveals itself.

And if we do get the vision, what then? It can get heavy. It’s rarely a walk in the park.

It’s a different kind of Yeshua we meet in Patmos, not the cherub, or American Bee Gees looking Jesus. Hold onto your hats:

“His head and his hair were white, as white as wool, like snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire…his voice was as the voice of many waters; he had seven stars in his right hand; and out of his mouth there was sharp two-edged sword; and his face was as the sun shining in its strength. And when I saw him, I fell at his feet like a dead man.”

Revelation 1: 14-18.

Ok. I fell at his feet like a dead man. Hmm. I gaze out at the Aegean and briefly reconsider my visit to Patmos.

Some kind of Albino God with eyes of fire, face as strong as the sun with a sword erupting out of his mouth may be waiting for me. Well, here comes the Christian wyrd. Patmian Yeshua is a wild looking fellow.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m still waiting for the bloody boat.

I’m heartened at my concrete outpost to be joined by an Orthodox priest. Surely Patmos is the only place he could be going. The boat arrives, late, and I clamber on. I love the fact that it’s still tanned sailors lobbing huge, sea-weedy ropes over massive iron posts that lands the boat. Everyone’s speaking rapid Greek and I realise that there are a few islands we have to visit before Patmos. I settle down by a window seat, enjoy roughly three seconds of the view and fall into a catatonic and blissful sleep (shaking off the horror of the night in Kos).

I love waking up on a boat, just love it.

I look over the waves and think of Odysseus, tied to the mast, hearing the song of the sirens.  I think as a culture we pressed the wax too tight in our ears. We have a memory of the sound but have ended up on the island of the Lotus Eaters instead. (You may remember the scene: Odysseus’s men, knackered after Troy, chomping on a kind of opium-fruit that helps them forget.)

They say that after hearing the sirens for the rest of Odysseus’s life all human music was the sound of a shield being hurled on a stone floor. That can be the price of too much epiphany.

After several island stops (where I almost dismount prematurely), we get to Patmos. It was a choppy crossing but I snooze on. Every time I wake, there’s someone different sitting next to me. Girls, old men, animals. It’s like I’m waking up in different decades of my life. But three pleasant hours are up, and I’m on land. I’m met by my friend Felix, and a fresh wind that keeps old Helios the sun a delight not a monster.

I love this place.

That first night, the moon is full ruby, blood red. I have never seen anything remotely like it. The photo in no way does it justice. And I sit on the shore, my ears full of waves sloshing back and forth, the sea whispering old swashbuckling stories.

James Strahen says that Revelation overflows with “the sights and the sounds of the infinite sea.” Barclay points out that the word Thalassa - sea, is mentioned twenty-five times. Tomorrow I will visit John’s cave, but tonight I - thousands of years later - bend my head to the same sea that washed over his imagination.

I wake early, and have the joy of an island in no kind of hurry at all. I dreamt I was wrestling a demon I could not defeat. Some element would reconfigure into the old, terrible shape. At the last moment Yeshua shows up. He doesn’t bellow at the demon or act ugly. He talks quietly to it and plays it music.

I have a couple of cups of coffee, and it’s time for my appointment up at John’s place. There’s a few folks milling about, but it’s remarkably un-flashy. Just above it is a monastery, looking out at swathes of boggling-blue ocean and sandy coloured hills. Crows caw from bleached out branches. There is the sense that the monastery and the cave are open to visitors, but tourism is in no shape or form the name of the game. They really aren’t selling anything.

I descend. After a few white tunnels there is a gorgeous waft of incense, and we move from brick to cave. It is deliciously cool. The roof slopes dramatically and the far end is sealed off behind large wooden iconic partitions. On them, John is shown in various stages of epiphany and transmission, revelations and recitals. The icons are sometime worn dark through holy smoke, the floor worn by prostrations. Beeswax candles burn, casting shadows and I sit quietly for a long time. Seven silver lamps swing.

I become aware of a noise coming from behind the icons, in the hidden area. It sounds for all the world like the beating wings of a huge bird. The icons’ rusting metal casing rattles every few seconds. I’m fascinated, perplexed. Most tourists are through in a couple of minutes, but I hang on in there, and soon the mystery is resolved.

Once the cave is empty a monk slips out of a small crack between icons. He’s holding a carpet beater. This chapel of chapels (and I glimpsed a tiny, candlelit altar in there) was getting a good going over by the monk. This guy looks more bandit than bishop: hair to his shoulders, great bush of a beard, crooked nose, all in black.

But only bandit till you see his eyes.

So filled with care and attention, utterly focused they are to his task and quite what it is he’s cleaning. He encourages kissing of the icons and is quite happy with me sitting in the half dark, doing all I can to absorb it to memory.

Watching him work, thinking of what may have happened in the cave with John, it all just suddenly sloshes into me, like an Aegean wave. I could stay for days.

I realise that the revelation waiting for me in Patmos was not a slain lamb with many eyes, but an old monk delightedly polishing a chalice.

He looked like the luckiest guy in the world, in the deep peace of the cave. It’s one of those rare moments when one’s suspicious heart is gently arrested, wrestled into peace. He seems in heaven.

This is a huge moment. I realise I’m learning about devoted repetition as much as I am visionary recitals. Tough it is for the saint stretched on the rack of revelation, lucky the one who quietly attends to its legacy.

In them the apocalypse - the revealing - can occur at a slower, quieter pace. A much slower theosis. I would wish for such a slow apocalypse, were such a thing possible. Revelation is happening always if we can just behold it. I begin to come back to myself. I look around.

I know to stay longer in the cave would be some type of spiritual greed.

I blink my way out of the byzantine darkness, and into a world of light and shouting kids and sea breezes. I want to go back and help the monk with his tasks. I want to go back.

Leave it alone Martin, leave it. 

I take the donkey path down into town.

* As noted, with my fledgling experience of Revelation there’s not much meat on the bone I can add. There’s many commentaries, just two are:

Sergei Bulgakov:

The Apocalypse of John

William Barclay:

The Revelation of John