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| Coptic icon of the Dormition of Our Lady |
On 29 April 2012 09:09,
Dear Father Donald,
Of course you can use the poem - if you think it will be of interest to your readers.
- - -
fr Edward O.P. + + +
Dear Father Donald,
Of course you can use the poem - if you think it will be of interest to your readers.
- - -
fr Edward O.P. + + +
-
From: Fr. Edward,
Dear Father Donald.
Dear Father Donald.
We would like to have this poem.
I used a book which had belonged to David - and which I had been
looking for over a long period - F.-M. Braun O.P., Jean le théologian
(Études Bibliques 1959). I could tell that he had read it.
I think that you might be interested in it.
The writer was the Confessor to King Baudouin of Belgium, after a long
period teaching at Fribourg.
I used a book which had belonged to David - and which I had been
looking for over a long period - F.-M. Braun O.P., Jean le théologian
(Études Bibliques 1959). I could tell that he had read it.
I think that you might be interested in it.
The writer was the Confessor to King Baudouin of Belgium, after a long
period teaching at Fribourg.
. . .
Blessings in Domino,
fr Edward O.P.
John and his Mother-Woman - an
exegetical poem
A
book is a survey linking big moments.
Were
it to represent the whole, or seek to,
its
length would dissuade from reading.
The
lecturer gains success by restricting himself to seeming significant
correlates;
the
whole woof and warp of history fails in great lengths;
few
minds could bear it to pose a problematic:
how
is it possible to increase the clarity
without
fictionizing the narrative?
I
sought this for the Apocalypse of Saint John:
how
to dissolve the patina of pastness
and
let reveal the actions in themselves.
But
note the order and the circumstance.
Thirty
years lay between the Apocalypse and the Gospel.
The
need of fidelity to what he saw and what he heard
interposed
a proto-ecclesial reality to which he must be passive.[1]
He
must be obedient to a mandate and its letter of the Lord
as
his inspired moment goes from word to word.
Hence
the treatment of the Asian churches:
the
viewpoint was divine
to
which he must make himself divine.
Mirjam
was known to him personally and most intimately for many years.
He
must see her now as transfixed by God to her action sequence:
Satan
and the Beast were evil's reality
expanded
from within the evil in the normally invisible;
simple
characters, their structures broken
by
ugly patternings left by twisted order
expressing
their inner pain in violence and threat.
John
was shown so much more than natural eye or ear
could
contemplate.
Much
had appeared already in Daniel's view.
They
treated their victims as playthings of no worth
-
projections in the sameness of themselves.
We
could blame a theatre of the absurd,
but
violence and contempt,
Impulse
driven and consented to.
From
beginning to end,
from
alpha- to omega-related
all
in a transhuman mode
when
seen by human eyes
and
heard by human ears.
Held
to his Patmos vision[4]
John
could only describe
but
not deviate
as
special member of the Apostle's college,
the
others being dead,
Their
living charism passed on - the Church must hear him out
and
grasp its inner inspiration and its form.
After
the Arc of the Covenant[5]
Mirjam
appears in a mode historical and exalted,
totally
devoted to soteriology - she its great agent,
showing
her great strength by intermingling with the persons and the forms
as
a great action in a higher mode
of
what was lived out by Ephesus and nearby,
and
in John's presence.
The
Gospel's presentation of the youthful, energetic John
was
re-discovered by him and displayed:
the
delicatest ambiguity with Peter,
the
badly prompted impulse of his mother to gain him
glory
unintended in that mode.
How
exigent were the Lord's instructions to the Churches:
who
could conform to those demands?
But
what had brought John to Asia with its multi-centred life
both
gnostic and gnosticising[6];
part
Gospel-holding,
but
later filled with half- and quarter-converted,
seeking
(and finding) local notoriety in numerous locales:
predominantly
Greek, with philosophers too of Ammonios Saccos type.
Braun,
our guide, gives the scene in a final "Dossier",
offered
in trails of evidence, fragments suggestive of a paideia
Imperfectly
compiled, but all too late to give the original contact.
We
suspect some person familiar with the many schools and private lecturers,
committed
to the faith yet open to the pagan Greeks and others,
a
bulwark of protection to John's domiciling of Mirjam and her private-to-John
Assumption.
From
48-70 returned from Jerusalem
and
preaching a rich Gospel
deepened
by reflection and experience,
shaking
the pieces of a kaleidoscope of incompleteness,
trying
to navigate an incoherent man
into
a new religion whose roots he knew much better !
After
a twenty-year mission undocumented
our
guide supposes an oil-boiling in Rome from which he emerged intact,
then
exile to Patmos.
Then
thirty years more
with
the breaking out from within
of
"the disciple whom Jesus loved".
Finally
those early memories
matured
in long reflection
and
structurally set into his gospel
preceded
by an anti-Marcionite prologue
where
the whole story's told with charity.
Our
guide accepts a burial at Ephesus
in
the basilica whose basic stones remain.
Justinian
was involved in the basilica's building.
The
glory's disappeared.
Their
adjunct remains - Mirjam's house -
visited
by a discerning line of pilgrims:
not
scandalised by the austerity-marks of centuries
or
its bare-rock structure,
but
drawn by its full honesty.
Fr. Edward OP
Stykkishólmur
Stykkishólmur
21-25 April 2012
[1] Hence the bad Greek noted by F.-M. Braun O.P., Jean le théologian et son évangile dans
l'Église ancienne (Études Bibliques,
Paris 1959), pp.50-52. But "The poverty of this style by no means excludes
sumptuous effects" (p.52). Whilst his Gospel allowed him to exercise considerable freedom
in the style, in the Apocalypse he was trying to reproduce the nuanced styling
of what was presented to him in its exact words, all as an ecclesial task.
[2]
Apoc 12,2 5 13.
[3]
Apoc 12, 17.
[4]
Braun quotes Tertullian (op. cit. p.341 and
n.3): he reports "for the first time , that John was taken to Rome under
Domitian, and that the torturers there plunged him into a container [chaudière]
full of boiling oil. He came out unharmed by this experience and was then taken to the island of
Patmos."
[5]
In the last verse of ch.11,
immediately preceding the appearance of
"the Woman".
[6]
Two words paired by Braun, intended
as a sumnmary.
