Song of the Angels, Fox and Revelation

Angels in Revelation

In the words of Peter Carrell, angels function as “heavenly beings distinct from God and from human beings, who exist to serve God as messengers, as the heavenly congregation at worship and as agents of the divine will.”

When I decided to travel into the Book of Revelation, I chose to link myself to the angels. In popular culture, these benign and non-threatening creatures flit invisibly through the air to aid and comfort humans. Perhaps they would—gently-- protect my journey through the violence of the apocalypse.

Angels abound in John's Revelation. If Eden existed as a serene garden, overseen by a single couple, with God occasionally strolling through to observe, Revelation’s heaven is a city, populated by a multitude.

In Revelation, however, angels provide little comfort: they are mighty, they speak in loud voices, they blast trumpets, and they wield instruments of doom. They unquestioningly obey the divine commands. They never argue with God over the horrendous damage they’re instructed to inflict on the earth. They are not Lot, pleading for Sodom and Gomorrah, and they stand in stoic contrast to John, who weeps when he thinks the scroll secured with seven seals can’t be opened. They’re not the graceful, winged bird-people of Renaissance annunciation paintings or the disarming cherubs of Baroque ceiling art. Instead, they are the powerful, masculine figures painted by William Blake.

George Fox wrote about Revelation and claimed to understand it. Its apocalyptic imagery saturated his writings as he anticipated the establishment of the New Jerusalem in his lifetime. Most interestingly, he interpreted Revelation through the lens of the peace testimony. He writes “Now the holy angels of God are spirits, so then they had spiritual weapons, and not carnal swords, muskets, pikes, and pistols, &c. to fight with the dragon.”

We're told to enter the "conical spiral" of Revelation imaginatively, and many artists have done so. Apparently, Fox did so, reading through its violent imagery to a message of spiritual warfare overcoming carnal weapons.

The William Blake painting above of a mighty, muscular angel with his arm upheld captures the imagery of Revelation's angels. I have also included a Turner painting, highly impressionistic, of an angel blocking the sun, a tenth-century miniature of an apocalyptic angel playing a zither in heaven, and a 14-century tapestry of an angel blowing the second trumpet, causing the seas to rage. None of these paintings, however, show heaven as a city teeming with angelic beings.

I particularly like the way the poems below echo the hard, grinding ethos of these angels who poured woe on the earth. This is how Revelation's angels look from below, from earth's perpective. In heaven, they are a different story, mighty and loud but part of the divine harmony, tens of thousands of them singing praises to God and the Lamb.

Interestingly, the first of the two poems below speaks of silence:

O, clanging choirs of angels,
pour your holy cataract of echoing silence
into our deaf listening ...

Yet, we as Quakers, don't gravitate anymore to this strange, poetic and sometimes terrifying book of the Bible. Why not? Should we reopen it?

What do you think of these angels? Of the book of Revelation? Of these poems?

Song of the Angels II

by Hildegard Elsberg

Earth axis grinds,
shutters of the netherworld rattle,
gates of Heaven creak in their hinges.

Approach fast, you lyre-bearers, with rhythmic step.

Air whispers at offenses with baited breath,
waters moan under their insult.
fire, the lions, roar revenge.

O, angelic voices, begin humming now,
from afar, break into sound.

Rocks crack open, stones split hissing,
grasses shake, flowers weep,
shrill birds shriek, foxes yelp.

O, empyrean melodies, draw near,
ring in, ring in, reach our ear,
break our soul's sound barrier.

Men sigh, women grieve, children whimper,
prisoners scream, the insane muffle their outcry,
the old wail, the lonely sob.

O, clanging choirs of angels,
pour your holy cataract of echoing silence
into our deaf listening,
rend our disused year with your high harmonies.

Song of the Angels III

Hildegard Elsberg

Sword-carrier of justice
wings frosted by cold air of divine detachment,
before your implacable presence
our passionate lifeblood is stayed,
our ardent pulse numbed with terror.

Celestial strider, rider in glory,
pouring out vials, wisdom filled;
parched fields of our comprehension ravaged gardens bereft,
their fruits of knowledge fallen, gnawed by the worm,
stretch wide beneath your dew.

You, planter of the heart-tree,
ruby on your holy forehead, perpetually plummeting
charity from your infinite perspectives,
by your fire melt, you, our floes,
grip, you, formidable, in piercing pity, those roots.

Angel of the great Turning,
meet at crossroads the voyager,
step in the way of a mountaineer, flung into spiraling descent,
who wring from themselves lonely return;
your glowing joy is their viaticum.

Majestic messenger from the land beyond the river,
you, of fierce mercy, by our hair,
from the bowels of our yearning, pull us across.
Blow, on your resounding trumpet
splendor of sunrise in a new land.

Quakers and creeds

Oswald Chambers My Utmost for his Highest, a book of devotionals published after his death in WWI, fascinates and perplexes me. In today's reading, he sounds much like a Quaker:

"When we become advocates of a creed, something dies; we do not believe God, we only believe our belief about him. ... 'Believe also in Me,' Jesus said, not 'Believe certain things about Me.' Leav[ing] the whole thing to Him, it is gloriously uncertain how He will come in, but He will come."

I see the problem with creeds that Chambers spells out: Our beliefs about God or what God "should be," can block our direct, unmediated experience of what God IS. Quakers are rightfully concerned about having that direct experience. However, I also understand how in Quakerism the lack of structure or framework can lead to a spreading, anything-goes dilution, like wine spilled out from a container. We learn in the Bible that we need new wineskins not no wineskins.

I also wonder if Quakers make an idol--or a creed--of not having creeds.

What do you think? Leaving aside our own sense that "creeds are bad," does it help or hinder Quakers to be adamantly against creeds?

Query: Mary and Quakers

I am working on Mary, as in the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Quakerism. From what I can find, the Quakers have more or less routinely ignored Mary, except for early Quakers like Fox, who excoriated Mary worship as exhibit A in their challenge to idolatrous papacy. Am I missing any strain of Mariology in Quakerism?

Crossan, Jesus, Fox

Apologies for the long gap in posting, which has been a function of lack of internet access rather than lack of time or (heaven forfend!) thoughts ... :)

John Dominic Crossan, author of The Historic Jesus, visited ESR this weekend and was a riveting speaker. He placed Roman ideology side by side against early Christian ideology. The Roman ideological (or theological) paradigm was war leading to victory leading to peace leading to (distributive) justice. In other words crushing the enemy established peace and in a peaceful world society could be ordered in a just way so that people's economic needs were met. Jesus and his followers claimed that to achieve peace and justice, one had to start with non-violence. Non-violence leads to economic justice, which in turn leads to peace. Needless to say, we know which paradigm still dominates today.

Caesar Augustus was worshipped as human and a divine, a God and a son of God because he unified the Roman Empire and brought peace through victory. Jesus, Crossan says, who brought peace through non-violence, was worshipped in the same terms because those were a construct a first century audience in the Roman world would have understood. Further, people in those days would not have challenged Jesus' resurrection--"wonders happened all the time"'--but would have asked, " what does it mean for me? What will it do for me?"

Crossan's most important point--and one he pounded on (and one I happen to strongly agree with)--is that history matters. Jesus arrived in a moment of opportunity, where, because of historical circumstances, his ministry was allowed to flourish for several years. Twenty years earlier or later, Crossan said, and he would have been crushed instantly. That brought mind to the Quakers and their emergence at another "window" of opportunity--the era of relative religious freedom during Cromwell's reign. Twenty years earlier or later and they would have been flattened by a state apparatus designed to keep people in conformity with the dominant ideology. (I might conceptualize this a little differently but that's for another post.)

I remember several times hearing people say, "If George Fox had been born in China, he would have been a Buddhist." OK ... yes, one's faith expression is obviously influenced by one's society. But the point is, George Fox wasn't born in China, Spain or the Ottoman Empire but England. History matters. I remember Tich Nat Hanh writing that if Buddha had lived in the Roman Empire, he, like Jesus, would have been crucified. Well, perhaps ... but the point is, he wasn't. If he had been, I imagine Buddhism would be much different today.

So I wonder: what would Quakerism look like if we were more willing to embrace the possibility of miracle and more rigorous in insisting that history matters? What miracles do we miss? What realities do we distort?

The Beatitudes: A Black perspective

I am working on a small group project at ESR looking at the Beatitudes from different social locations. I have very much appreciated the comments on the first Beatitudes post. Below is a look at the Beatitudes from a different social location. This is a bit more formal than my usual more spontaneous posts, but still readable, I hope--and short. I'm interested in what you think--I believe Hayes's view align with the responder Steven, even though he looks at the Beatitudes from a Torah-based location. Both see the Beatitudes as a radical call to change.


In "Through the Eyes of Faith : The Seventh Principle of the Nguzo Saba and the Beatitudes of Matthew," Diana L. Hayes views the Beatitudes from the perspective of an African-American Roman Catholic. She identifies the Beatitudes entirely with the oppressed and enslaved, and places them within a context of African religious beliefs, rejecting Eurocentric readings that spiritualize their message as otherworldly.

To Hayes, the introduction of slavery into the New World overturned the prior assumption that all humans, regardless of race, were equally part of the human family, and replaced it with an ideology of racial superiority and inferiority. Conversely, the Beatitudes (along with the rest of the Sermon on the Mount) represented a “dramatic shift in understanding from … ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ … to the calling down of God's healing grace upon those who suffered trials and tribulations for the sake of the Kingdom of God.” (20)

The Beatitudes, to Hayes, are nothing less than a call to revolutionary change. (20)

For Hayes, the Beatitudes, in both Luke and Matthew, address slaves and former slaves, but not the rich. Both versions are equally important: Luke speaks to material needs, but Matthew calls the downtrodden to internalize their own significance: “For, as the poor, as the mourners, as the oppressed and marginalized … Matthew's audience was in the unique position of having the freedom to see clearly what was good, what was just, and what was righteous before God, because they had no vested interest in the outcome.” (21)

Further, Hayes identifies Jesus with the subject of the Beatitudes. He is not simply the speaker from afar: “Jesus knew how hard it was to be poor, because he was poor; to thirst after justice, because he did and died still thirsting; to mourn the loss of loved ones, because he brought Lazarus back to life. Jesus knew … .” ( 33)

Likewise, the American slaves understood the Beatitudes through lived experience and drew comfort from Jesus’ promises in these verses.

Hayes also aligns the sermon on the mount with the African Nguzo Saba or Seven Principles: unity, faith, purpose, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics and creativity. (These principles are celebrated in Kwanzaa.) (26) Like the Beatitudes, Hayes says, the Seven Principles call for revolutionary change in this world, not an afterlife. (22)

Finally, Hayes understands Jesus as black. “The Jesus of history … was and is black himself in his very being, if not physically, because he was born into and identified with the poor and marginalized.” (31) She quotes from James Cone’s God of the Oppressed (New York: Crossroad/Seabury, 1975): "It is in Jesus that blacks see the validation of their humanity; Jesus is, therefore, black because we, as the oppressed, are black. It is because the black community is an oppressed community, because—and only because—of its blackness, that the Christological importance of Jesus Christ is found in blackness.” (31)

Hayes’s social location is quite different from mine and offers a powerful reading of the Beatitudes as a text that excludes me and my peers. By marginalizing my group—whites, the well-to-do, the not-oppressed—Hayes challenges me to understand Jesus’ message in a more radical way and to knock on a door that is closed to me, whether or not I realize it. If Jesus is black and is himself suffering oppression, mourning, spiritual brokenness and persecution—and if I love and align myself with Jesus—I must also align myself more closely with the marginalized and suffering. Hayes’s message is humbling: whites must join blacks and other afflicted people, and not vice versa. In the circle around Jesus, whites and the wealthy stand on the periphery. Blacks and the poor are closest to Jesus.

Do you agree that Jesus was "black himself in his very being?" IS Jesus the Beatitudes embodied?

Why we blog?

This from the New York Times:

"It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.

“We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you’re happy, and if you go into the existential depths you’ll be unhappy,” Dr. Mehl said.

But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people."

Is this true for you?

What should we talk about?

How would you respond?

Recently, a blog asked the question: Should the government get out of the business of charity and leave that work solely to faith groups?

The conversation was civil. Some answered that government help should be avoided because it's inherently immoral to give people goods they have not worked for. One line of thought went as follows: it damages the recipient to receive something for nothing. We are helping people more to insist they pull themselves up by their own efforts.

As humans, I think we're expected to do many things simultaneously, rather than either/or, so I support both private charity and government help. I also believe that as a civilized country, we're morally obligated to establish an economic baseline so that people don't have to go hungry, naked or homeless. I understand that some will cheat the system, but I accept that as the price of doing the right thing.

On the blog, I asked whether there were not two sets of standards, one for the rich and one for the poor. If receiving money you haven't worked for is morally destructive, what of inheritance? Should young people --or any people--become fabulously wealthy from money they didn't earn? Should we block (tax) inheritance to encourage people to work?

I received this response, which was a polite attempt at discourse.

"Thank you for your comments. I do think it is different when money is passed down from one family member to another. We can hope that there was some teaching/training/modeling about charity and sacrifice going on before the money was passed down. The teaching the government is doing is that there is no accountability to use the help offered and get back on your feet- thus allowing people to become more and more dependant [sic] on the government funds."

What would be a helpful response?