The Omega

I woke early and rose while it was still dark. In the harbour below me, the orange streetlights made triangular reflections like a row of skinny, upside down Christmas trees. I made coffee. Lit a fire. Sat down at about 5.30, and by 6.25 this journey was over.

During the last week or so, reading the epistles, I knew I was looking over people's shoulders as they wrote into arguments that are millennia gone. I was aware I was not consulting an oracle, but hearing brief snatches of one side only of long and complex conversations. I was aware that the intended hearers were seldom individuals, but, usually, groups.

And, then, this morning, the Book of Revelations

It was hearing the account of a dream. It was as troubled and as violent, as you would expect from someone dreaming in a troubled and violent time, but there is a pattern and order to it and a progression. In the heavens which give meaning to this world, says the dreamer, all the seeming haphazard danger around us unfolds according to some vast script, and leads, not as some of us fear, to ever deepening chaos, but to order and restoration and redemption. In the middle of wantonness and savagery we are held and loved and delivered to a safe shore.

So I close the last volume of Bibliotheca and put it back into its slipcase. I look over the rest of my shelves at all those other books, and know that I will probably never read any of them again. Once the last page is turned we have chalked that one up, read it, know how it will turn out. It takes an effort of will to read it again, or perhaps the intervention of many years. So I close the Bible. It is clearer for my making of this brief journey, but I am still puzzled, still annoyed, still mystified by it. I am well aware of its flaws and repetitions and long opaque passages. But tomorrow morning I will be picking up the books of Moses, and beginning all over again.

Comments

Merv said…

Puzzling, annoying, mystifying ... why do we still read it? What is it's magic? Are we drawn or have we been pushed?
In any case - congratulations are definitely in order!

10 September 2017 at 12:35

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