We being with a prayer:
We are but no one; but a particular without a name, and for a name we take Job; as your faithful servant; a clay figure brought to life; your hands that are our world-life. Amen.
It has come to us that we shall no longer take the Apocalypse to be an external sign, as progressive history, as a yet site of a yet to come. We shall not take it to be or mean the end of history, the heaven on earth as such for all eternity (but we cannot yet discount this last statement, we may only bracket it away for now). Man does not know the time of the coming of the Lord. We do not know that day that marks for us the end; we shall not be magi looking to the sky for our signs. We reject all talk of a future date, be it 2012 or 2023. We instead embrace, first in thoughtful contemplation, and then in action that must ensue, the notion that the Apocalypse is an internal revolution, a process of struggle of being more of what we are; of moving towards our perfection (from passion to reason) as Spinoza suggests in Ethics. We take the Apocalypse as an internal struggle against internal and external forces, it is a personal, particular struggle, a tarrying with the supposed universal of history which represent the evils of the world; that which hinder or pulls apart our Catholic unity. While the document of St. John is historical, and much of it is past accounts; for it to have value now, and increasingly so, we have been inspired to take a literary approach, as a system of enlightenment (perhaps); for greater understanding of revelation. As a process we see it a kind to what Islamic folk call Jihad (not as external war, but as discipline and strife from the inside out). We will be taking this view as we being to re-examine the work attributed to St. John. For many the last book of the Bible. Amen.
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