“This woman who troubles you, do you think it’s an attachment of the heart?”
“It may be. It’s not ordinary romance. It’s not sexual desire. I simply liked her and felt that here was a soul with whom I could find friendship.”
“Friendship? Many priests have fallen in this manner. Love is kind; love is charitable; but it must also be prudent concerning matters of the heart.”
“I know. How many times have I cautioned my spiritual directees about seemingly innocent attachments? Loneliness is the human condition, I tell them. Even the most happily married couples must face this condition at some point. Only God can fill this emptiness.”
“And yet you find it difficult to take your own advice?”
“It happened so fast. What worries me is the totality with which my senses reeled and my prudence evaporated.”
“You rely too much on yourself. You are a solitary man. But certain kinds of solitude are not truly monastic.”
Elijah agreed. And then protested. “Is there no human love for me? Must everyone I love be killed?”
“How could I possibly justify your many losses? But at least understand this: God didn’t kill the ones you loved. God’s enemies did.”
“I draw close to this woman’s soul, but from afar, only within the enclosure of my heart. I will never see her again, for if I were to love her, some enemy would kill her.”
“I’m sure she’s a fine person. I’m sure there was no sin intended.”
“Of course not! She is a very wonderful soul.”
“How swiftly the knight rises up to defend this lady.”
“Eminence, please don’t make more of it than it is.”
“Father Elijah, do not make less of it than it is. This woman, whoever she is, could demolish everything that is truly you. And yet, she has done you the good service of opening up your heart with a scalpel. Perhaps the Lord wants you to let Him reach inside and touch an old wound that didn’t properly heal.”
* * *
Some weeks after the foregoing discussion, when Elijah felt himself largely repaired, he went one evening to peruse the Jerusalem Times in the reading room of the House of Studies. He saw the face of Anna Benedetti looking at him from the cover of a news magazine on the periodicals rack.
The feature article recounted the appointment of Doctor Anna Benedetti, judge of the Supreme Court of Italy and advisor to the Commission of Human Rights in Geneva, to the position of judge of the World Court in The Hague.
* * *
A month passed during which the President made no attempt to pursue a meeting. Elijah assumed that he had failed once again, due to presumption on his own strength and lack of spiritual preparedness. He taught his classes, studied the Apocalypse, and applied the remainder of his energy to the exercise of monastic life in an urban setting.
After a warm autumn, a heavy snowfall came in December, covering the city on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Children everywhere ran outside, squealing with delight, soaking their feet, rolling snowmen, waging wars, and catching colds. The city’s traffic was impeded by the freak weather. Late in the afternoon, Elijah went walking in it, feeling deliriously happy, remembering the happiest days of his childhood in Poland, before the war. A city in winter sun. A city of many bells, of horses, and of children.
Bound temporarily in a gown of melting snow, even a monstrous metropolis such as Rome could become a beautiful thing. Its cacophony muted, except for the cries of children and torrents of water running everywhere off the roofs, the city was so quiet, so without frenzied motion, that it no longer resembled itself. It was restored to the human dimensions of a community.
In his mail slot there was a letter postmarked Brussels.
My dear Father Schäfer,
The duties of government have kept me from writing this letter. I am so sorry that you were unwell on the evening of the Galéone party. I had hoped to speak with you that night about a forthcoming event, to be held in Warsaw in the spring of next year. I am arranging, with the assistance of other concerned organizations, a conference on the restoration of the culture of the West. There will be a large number of workshops approaching the problem from several directions. It would be remiss of us if we were to overlook the cultural insights of the See of Rome. I would be grateful if you would come to Warsaw at our expense and conduct a workshop on biblical archeology in the light of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament codices recently discovered at the Dead Sea. Would you consider integrating this topic with your own valuable (and I think unique) insights into a new spirituality of biblical criticism? I await your reply.
The letter was signed by the President.
Elijah contacted the Cardinal Secretary of State. The cardinal was pleased by the proposal, and reminded Elijah that the conference offered a double opportunity to continue the contact with the President and to insert orthodox scholarship into what would almost certainly be a media event.
Elijah wrote a letter of acceptance.
He wrote also to his prior at Mount Carmel, and to various other contemplative communities where he was known, describing the spiritual ramifications in general terms, and asking for their prayers. In a longer letter to Don Matteo, he outlined the situation as it had developed and went on to describe in detail a dream or a “vision” that he had just experienced.
Don Matteo, I now turn to a phenomenon about which I am uncertain. I will describe it to you, and leave it for your discernment.
This morning, after a peaceful sleep, I awoke well rested. A few seconds after the return of consciousness, I saw an interior vision that was almost visual in its clarity. I was staring at the wall beside the bed, and I saw a sphere. I knew—I don’t know how I knew—that the sphere represented the structure of the book of Revelation.
Revelation has always fascinated me, its lush symbolism, its drama, and majesty. But it is also frustrating because it is a mystery that refuses to be unlocked by analytical methods. All methods fail to make it understandable. Those that seem to succeed do so only by limiting the significance of the work, especially if one infers a linear historical structure to it. One can safely do that to the Gospels, which are derived from a chronology, an actual sequence of historical events. But the events in the vision of Saint John had not occurred at the time of its writing, and have not yet occurred in their fullness.
Without any rational analysis or knowledge imparted through words, I understood that the book of Revelation is the record of a series of visions that were given to Saint John in a multidimensional form. Yet, the evangelist was restricted to writing it down in a two-dimensional form—a string of letters on a page. Pages are read from one side to the other. Lines are read from one side to the other. Letters themselves are read in the same way. There is flow and consistency, all of which affects the sense of time and immediate reality for the reader. The work itself has a beginning and an end. And thus, through its very form, the written word impresses deeply within the subconscious of the reader a sense of chronology, a feeling of time’s passage from point A to point B in a linear historical process.
But the “sphere” of my interior vision (I hesitate to call it an inspired vision; let us just call it an insight) was a presentation of the end of history as a spiritual condition during a state of climax. The events it depicts are real. They will occur. They will one day become historical. Yet a repeated reading of Revelation imparts the sense that there is great complexity to this period. Because of its complexity, those living within it might be easily misled. Man perceives all things with varying degrees of subjectivity. He can easily miss the essential things, details, which in the pedestrian language of narrative may strike him as peripheral, when they are indeed central. He may over-focus on the flourishes of startling detail and miss that subtle core which is his most dangerous enemy. Thus, the Holy Spirit employs powerful symbols to help the reader suspend his normal ways of perceiving and draw him into a much larger awareness of the vast, multifaceted conflict between g
ood and evil that will occur as the culmination of history. He is interested not so much in imparting information as implanting in us the tools of awareness.
In the literary form of the book, we do not find only one chronology of events—though that is often how it is read. I saw that it is actually a layering of symbol-events, as if one were looking into a globe of glass, or into a sphere of water, in which numerous stories are taking place, many of them simultaneously. Many of them overlap, some in time, some in geography, still others in both time and place. The sphere contains a number of chronologies, but they are not strung out, one after the other, into a single line. Within Revelation there are, of course, a number of consecutive events following each other in rapid succession, but one must not conclude that the entire book is simply that, especially in the earlier stages where the various streams of the vision are gathering. Only gradually do they draw together toward the final events. Within the multidimensionality of the whole there is a gradual progression toward the “eschaton”, the final battle and the Second Coming of Christ. In this sense, it does have a beginning and an end. Yet, the primary structure of the vision takes the form of a creative being, a work of art that is not flat but rather contains depths into which the reader plunges for insight.
The vision is a prophecy, but more than prophecy in the sense of mere foretelling. It does not preoccupy itself with dates and lengths of time, except in an oblique way. Those believers who will one day find themselves living within the actual events predicted will see things laid out all round them, and then the times and places will become clear, like lenses coming into focus. Whether or not the revelation of John describes a period stretched out over three and a half years or twenty-five years, a century, or a millennium is as yet uncertain and remains the subject of debate among biblical scholars. Jesus Himself reminds us that no man knows the hour or the day of the return of the Son of Man. It would not be good for us to know. Most people would probably lapse into a kind of reverse legalism, indulging in all sorts of disorders, assuming that we can rehabilitate ourselves as the time draws near for His return. For the health of each individual soul, therefore, the Holy Spirit found it necessary to avoid overt descriptions, precise details.
The vision of John is not rendered in a purely literal approach for another, and perhaps more urgent reason. One day the Antichrist will come. But we often forget that in every age the spirit of Antichrist has been active, capable of deluding souls and dragging to perdition entire nations and peoples, without resorting to the high drama of an Apocalypse. There have been many apocalypses since the time of Christ—the reigns of Nero, Hitler, and Stalin, for example. They are prefigurements of the reign of the Man of Sin. They are also warnings. Reminders that we must not perceive the struggle against Antichrist as simply a magnificent mega-drama reserved for a distant future. The actual battle against that spirit is waged from the very beginning of human history and continues uninterrupted to this day.
If the vision of John had been rendered in literal terms, similar to many in the Old Testament, there would be an even greater danger of misinterpretation for those who are alive when the actual Man of Sin rises to power. Because natural human psychology tends to interpret the surrounding landscape and one’s own time as normal, however extreme it may be, it is difficult to recognize in it the decisive moment of history. Only the person developed in spiritual perception is able to interpret the warning and apply it to his seemingly ordinary universe. Thus the vision of John had to be delivered in forms that are universal.
Because it is materialized in symbols, the prophecy takes on its own life within the imagination of the believer of any era. It is not merely stored away as one more news item, one more piece of religious information, one more scenario—that would be especially unfruitful for modern man, who suffers massive oversaturation of theory, knowledge, and scenarios. Instead, the revelation takes a form that is a loud shout in a world growing deaf. The authority of its horrific imagery guarantees an absolute claim on the imagination. We are intrigued, puzzled, frustrated, alarmed, and ultimately encouraged. In short, we are aroused to a kind of attention before the mystery of human history as it unfolds, precisely because we do not know when or how the ultimate danger is to be incarnated. With prayerful reading, the book assists in the conversion of attention into holy vigilance, the spirit of the watchman.
That, my dear father in the spirit, is all the sense I can make of my “dream-vision”, but I submit in peace to your discernment on the matter. Is it vain imagining, a deception, or merely an intuition? Is it a teaching from the Holy Spirit?
I do not suffer the blows that you endure in your battle with the enemy. Mine are interior, and not the least of these is an abysmal self-doubt. I have asked the Cardinal Secretary, and through him the Holy Father, to relieve me of this mission, but they have refused. And so I must proceed in a condition of total weakness. How close you must be to the Savior, if He has given you the task of bearing His wounds in the world. When you speak with Him, beg for strength for me.
Your son in Christ,
Father Elijah Schäfer
* * *
A reply came on Christmas Eve, a hand-written note delivered by a young Franciscan friar.
“Hello Father, I like it to see you again.”
“Jakov!”
“I want it you get letter from Don Matteo. I carry it on train. Sorry for mess it.”
Elijah clapped him on the shoulder in welcome. The giant bobbed his head repeatedly.
“It’s good to see you, Jakov. Is all well with you?”
“Everything good. My head it not break; my heart it get fix.”
He assisted at Elijah’s Mass, during which the young man’s face radiated such light that several of the novices could not keep their eyes off him. Throughout the liturgy, Elijah half-expected to turn around and find Jakov floating above the ground, but nothing of the sort occurred.
He would not stay to dinner and refused a ride to the friary where he was to spend the night before returning to Assisi.
“This Christmas night, Father. Tonight the Holy Family walk on the earth. I look it for them, maybe find a place for them can sleep. The Holy Family, they like to play. They come to us but they not look like the Holy Family. But I find them”, he said grinning, wagging his index finger as if to scold the Holy Family for such tricks.
He went off into the maze of streets with a backward grin and a wave.
After vespers, Elijah remained alone in the chapel and read the note.
My brother, Elijah,
Your vision is from the Lord. Trust in Him and He will act. Fear nothing, yet guard your heart in all things.
With constant prayers,
Don Matteo
X
Warsaw
The jet banked, and he saw the city.
He had anticipated this moment many times in his life. He had been sure he would feel excitement, or terror, or joy.
He felt nothing.
Warsaw simmered in the spring sunshine, a sprawling metropolis of close to two million people. As the wheels of the aircraft hit the tarmac, many faces arose in his thoughts. His mother. His father. Brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, and aunts, childhood friends, neighbors—all missing, perished in the fires of the Shoah. He saw children at hopping-games on sidewalks. He saw Mother wafting the smoke of shabbes candles and covering her face. He saw Father stitching, stitching, stitching as Grandfather read to him from the tractates. He smelled the rankness of fish and the narcotic aroma of baking bread. He tasted the sweet stickiness of purple wine. He heard the babbling tongue of hagglers in the market, the whinny of horses, the shouts of brave youths hurling words at tanks, the screams of the violated, the whine of bullets, and the crack as they chipped the sidewalk beside him.
He saw many other faces. The guards at the ghetto gate. The bookseller, Pawel Tarnowski, his face turning white as he hid him in the recesses of the attic. And the other one, the bent one, his face burning red in the ac
t of betrayal. Faces, faces flying through memory like birds flushed from deep woods, where light exposes certain details only on the bleakest days of winter, when everything is stripped down to its essential form.
The taxi driver who took him into the center of the city kept up a running commentary, pointing out this or that tourist attraction: religious monuments, the grandiose architecture of the communist regime, the new theatres and nightclubs sprouting on every corner. The cultural center of Poland, some called it, though Krakow, the ancient capital, probably deserved that title. They passed many street exhibits, painters, musicians, acrobats, old people selling flowers, smiling, shouting, laughing, grumbling; countless young people in groups, chatting boisterously. A city of the young and the very old.
The streets careened with heavy traffic. Jerozolimiski Avenue was as crammed with the roar of automobiles as any major thoroughfare in Rome or Tel Aviv. The driver dropped him at the Marriott Hotel, and within minutes Elijah was checked into his room on the top floor. It had all been arranged. The paper work had been completed by someone—no, the management could not say who precisely—would Father care for some coffee? No? Father should please ring for whatever he wishes.
After his experiences in Israel and Rome, such politeness was a pleasurable surprise.
When room service was gone, he sat on the luxurious bed and stared out the large plate-glass window at the treetops punctured by office towers. This city which had been home to him for the first seventeen years of his life had become completely unintelligible. The Nazis had destroyed it, but a new city had risen on the gridwork of the streets. Only Old Town and New Town, the ancient medieval core, had been painstakingly reconstructed from the rubble left in the wake of the invasion.
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