Ideas - Apocalypse for Christmas: Thomas Merton and the Inn

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Modern mystic Thomas Merton helped to bring contemplative spirituality to the fore during the convulsions of the 20th century. He spins us a powerful, prophetic Christmas story that we don’t often hear, but one that is central to our modern self-understanding.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. They receive the message of the great joy, and they believe it with joy. Christmas is a time for stories. They go, and they see not a prophet, not a spirit, but the flesh, in which the glory of the Lord will be revealed. For Christians, that story is about a time when God became a person, a baby.

He had indeed emptied himself, taken the form of God's servant, man, but he did not empty himself to the point of becoming mass man, faceless man. Born to save the world and bring about an enduring peace. So what happened? Did we miss it? And what happens next? These are questions that Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and author of The Seven-Story Mountain, grappled with in his own meditation on the Christmas story. It's called The Time of the End is the Time of No Room.

When we read the Gospels and come to know them thoroughly, we realize there are other reasons why it was necessary that there be no room at the end and why there had to be some other place. that there'd be no room at the inn, and why there had to be some other place. His retelling of the nativity story is apocalyptic. When it was published in 1966, Merton himself called it a sober statement about the climate of our time, a time of finality and of fulfillment. On this episode of Ideas, Apocalypse for Christmas. When the perfect and ultimate message, the joy which is the great joy,

explodes silently upon the world, there is no longer any room for sadness. Therefore, no circumstance in the Christmas gospel, however trivial it may seem, is to be left out of the great joy. In the special and heavenly light which shines around the coming of the word into the world, all ordinary things are transfigured. In the mystery of peace which is proclaimed to a world that cannot believe in peace, a world of suspicion, hatred, and distrust. Even the rejection of the Prince of Peace takes on something of the color and atmosphere of peace. So there was no room at the end? True. But that is simply mentioned in passing, in a matter-of-fact sort of way,

as the evangelist points to what he really means us to see, the picture of pure peace, pure joy. She wrapped her firstborn son in swaddling clothes and laid him in the manger. Luke 2, verse 7. By now we know it well, and yet we all might still be questioning it. Except that a reason was given for an act that might otherwise have seemed strange. There was no room for them at the inn. Well, then they obviously found some other place. If you look at many of the paintings of the birth of Jesus, for instance, it seems to be almost another world.

It's kind of eerie. Everything is still and it's at peace. It shows everything in darkness except for this tremendous light coming out of the crib and the light shining off of the faces of the people around. There's a sense that at Christmastime, everything, the world kind of holds its breath. And this is the moment when the light comes into the world. I'm Scott Lewis. I'm a Jesuit priest.

I'm an associate professor emeritus from Regis College in Toronto. And for the last three and a half years, I've been a lecturer in Catholic studies at Campion College in Regina. Many people in the Renaissance period believed that the incarnation, the moment that the Word became flesh, was really the moment of our salvation. It wasn't the crucifixion. The emphasis in the Renaissance was placed more on the moment of our salvation. It wasn't the crucifixion. The emphasis in the Renaissance was placed more on the moment of the incarnation. That's when God and humanity were joined together. And the word was, the logos, it was one of those words with several

different meanings. But in general, it was used to signify order and reason and divine plan. And the word, of course, was the one through whom all things were created. It's kind of the expression, the active expression of God. And so the word becomes flesh means that the architect of the world actually becomes a human being. But when we read the Gospels and come to know them thoroughly, we realize there are other reasons why it was necessary that there be no room at the inn, and why there had to be some other place. In fact, the inn was the last place in the world for the birth of the Lord. The evangelists preparing us for the announcement of the birth of the Lord

remind us that the fullness of time has come. Now is the time of final decision, the time of mercy, the acceptable time, the time of settlement, the time of the end. It is the time of repentance, the time for the fulfillment of all promises, for the promised one has come. But with the coming of the end, a great bustle and business begins to shake the nations of the world. The time of the end is the time of massed armies, wars and rumors of wars, of huge crowds moving this way and that of men withering away for fear of flaming cities and sinking fleets

of smoking lands laid waste of technicians planning grandiose acts of destruction. The inn is where the world gathers and the inn is filled with people who are somehow trapped in the earthly way of doing things, and that there's, in a sense, there's never room for Jesus at the inn. He's always kind of relegated to the stable or the cave or wherever he was born, and that even many times people who claim to accept him kind of push him away. Jesus has never really, his teachings have never really gone down well with the world.

And the worldly are not attracted to the kinds of challenges he gives and even sometimes religious people are not attracted to the challenge which he gives. So it shows that he's always, in a sense, a stranger in this world, that he will never fit in. And a domesticated Jesus is not the real Jesus. And so he'll always be kind of the one for whom there is no room. When I read the essay, it seems as if it was written yesterday. no room. When I read the essay, it seems as if it was written yesterday. And, you know, I go back to the time. I remember the time. It was the 60s. And, of course, there were riots in the cities. The Vietnam War was on. The age of Aquarius was dawning, all this sort of thing. So there was a lot of upheaval and a lot of fear and a lot of sense that, you know, we were on the edge of something.

And so it kind of fits in with that sense of impending change, but in the minds of others, impending doom. It really speaks to the space people are in right now. It's not a very pleasant time right now. It's a rather dark time, and there's a lot of of fear and there's a lot of dread of the future. The time of the end is the time of the crowd and the eschatological message is spoken in a world where precisely because of the vast indefinite roar of armies on the move and the restlessness of turbulent mobs, the message can only be heard with difficulty. Yet it is heard

by those who are aware that the display of power, hubris, and destruction is part of the kerygma. That which is to be judged announces itself, introduces itself by its sinister and arrogant claim to absolute power. Thus it is identified, and those who decide in favor of this claim are numbered, marked with the sign of power, aligned with power, and destroyed with it. Kerygma means proclamation, and the kerygma is the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus and the message that he brings from God. What we see around us, the evil, the destruction and all that, it's part of everything. And in a

sense, even the evil that we see in the world is part of the divine plan too. The gospel is filled with stories about not pulling the weeds up because you're going to destroy some of the good plants too. Everything is kind of interwoven. Things are never black or white, good or evil. Everything is always intertwined with its opposite. And so we see all these negative things. It displays right in our face what we have created. And at the same time, it throws a stark relief to the message that Jesus proclaims.

Eschatology comes from the Greek word eschaton, which means the end. And it's about the end things, you know, death and the resurrection and judgment and all those kinds of things. But eschatology in the traditional Christian sense is the study of the end of life, what happens to the person after death and as they continue on their journey. But there's also the eschatology that has to do with humanity, and especially in apocalyptic eschatology, which involves whole societies and whole nations. Apocalyptic actually just means a revelation.

It's the unveiling. We always misuse it in the popular sense to refer to something that is horrendous, some kind of, oh, it was apocalyptic, meaning it was destructive and terrifying and so forth. But in reality, it's just parting the veil and showing us reality as it is. So the apocalyptic eschatology is the unveiling of God's hidden plan for humanity as it reaches kind of a crescendo in history. The supreme irony is that apocalyptic is considered by scholars as a theology of hope. It's really telling of beleaguered people who are suffering

and who seem to have lost their way and maybe even begin to doubt God's presence in their lives that all is well, that things are proceeding as planned, and to stand fast and to have hope and to be patient that God will see them through. So it's a theology of hope, and that's not the way it's treated many times. Why then was the inn crowded?

Because of the census, the eschatological massing of the whole world in centers of registration, to be numbered, to be identified with the structure of imperial power. The purpose of the census? To discover those who were to be identified with the structure of imperial power. The purpose of the census? To discover those who were to be taxed. To find out those who were eligible for service in the armies of the empire.

The Bible had not been friendly to a census in the days when God was the ruler of Israel. 2 Samuel chapter 24. The numbering of the people of God by an alien emperor and their full consent to it was itself an eschatological sign, preparing those who could understand it to meet judgment with repentance. After all, in the apocalyptic literature of the Bible, this summoning together or convocation of the powers of the earth to do battle is the great sign of the end. For then the demon spirits that work wonders go out to the kings all over the world to muster them for battle on the great day of God Almighty. Revelations chapter 16 verse 14. And the beasts

and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered to make war upon him who is mounted on the horse and on his army. Revelations chapter 19, verse 19. Then all the birds of prey gather from all sides in response to the angels' cry. Gather for God's great banquet and eat the bodies of kings, commanders, and mighty men of horses and their riders. Revelations chapter 19, verse 18. Anyone who says they've got the book of Revelation all figured out is dead wrong. There's a mountain, an absolute mountain of studies on the book of Revelation.

And in the end, there's still a lot that escapes us, you know, a lot that we don't understand. And that's one of the reasons why in the very early church, it was very slow to be accepted into the canon because many were puzzled by it. Some were kind of turned off by it. And it kind of crept into the canon. But even today in the Eastern Church, those portions are not read during the liturgy. Most apocalyptic is based on the book of Daniel, chapter 7, and it's Daniel's vision during the night. Using these symbols, all of the evil powers, the powers that be in the world, the empires, they're demonized and portrayed in very fearsome forms. But right behind that is the statement that you look at them, they're fearsome, but they're all

going to come to naught because they're going to be crushed because God is really the one who is in control. And so in that sense, when one feels that one is being overwhelmed by forces beyond their control and that they are being swamped by evil powers. It's a reassurance that nothing can be more powerful than God. I remember my professor in Rome, from whom I took the course on the book of Revelation, his take on it was that these were meant to be acted out or sung or whatever during the liturgy, and the symbols would somehow come alive then. And that, to me, makes more sense.

We're very rational creatures now, but we've kind of lost our sense of symbolism and our sense of the transforming power of symbols. Symbols are something that link us into another reality. And so one has to approach the book of Revelation not on an intellectual level, but through the emotions, through the feelings, through the body, to the total person. It was therefore impossible that the Word should lose Himself by being born into shapeless and passive mass. He had indeed emptied himself,

taken the form of God's servant, man, but he did not empty himself to the point of becoming mass man, faceless man. It was therefore right that there should be no room for him in a crowd that had been called together as an eschatological sign. His being born outside that crowd is even more of a sign. That there is no room for him is a sign of the end. Nor are the tidings of great joy announced in the crowded inn. In the mass crowd, there are always new tidings of joy and disaster, where each new announcement is the greatest of announcements, where every day's disaster is beyond compare, every day's danger demands the ultimate sacrifice, all news and all judgment is reduced to zero.

News becomes merely a new noise in the mind, briefly replacing the noise that went before it and yielding to the noise that comes after it, so that eventually everything blends into the same monotonous and meaningless rumor. News? There is so much news that there is no room left for the true tidings, the good news, the great joy. I must admit, over the last few months, I've stopped watching the news. I've stopped reading newspapers.

I can't take it. But in the same sense, you know, if you look at it again and kind of force yourself to look at it and not get drawn into it. Yeah, you see horrible things. But you also see a lot of people coming to their senses. You see people quietly going about the business of comforting one another and helping one another. You see that there's these two principles at work in the world. There's the destructive part that human beings do, but then there's the other part, the other part of very quiet, very low-key. It's the day-to-day acts of kindness, the day-to-day acts of holiness, the day-to-day, shall we say, reflections of the light that if we look carefully, we see all around

us and that can kind of fill you with a sense of peace in the sense that, yeah, there's a lot of negativity here, but at the same time, there's a lot of light. And we always know that, you know, they say in casinos, in the end, the house always wins. In the end, God always wins. And so that can be something that's a great comfort when we realize that whatever happens, yeah, it's part of the stew. It's part of the plan. And we can't have one without the other, in a sense. Hence the great joy is announced after all in silence, loneliness, and darkness.

To shepherds living in the fields or living in the countryside, and apparently unmoved by the rumors or mass crowds, these are the remnants of the desert dwellers, the nomads, the true Israel. Even though the whole world is ordered to be inscribed, they do not seem to be affected. Doubtless they have registered, as Joseph and Mary will register, but they remain outside the agitation and untouched by the vast movement, the massing of hundreds and thousands of people everywhere in the towns and cities. They are therefore quite otherwise signed. They are designated, surrounded by a great light.

They receive the message of the great joy, and they believe it with joy. They see the Shekinah over them, recognize themselves for what they are. You can sense that Shekinah, which is the localized presence of God that the Jewish people believe in, the divine presence. And you can almost sense it. You can sense it in the words in the gospel, you can sense it in the artistic depictions, and in the effect that something like the birth of Jesus at Christmastime, it has on many people. Go back to the story of World War I in 1914, where there was the Christmas truce and so forth. It didn't last very long, and there were no truces after that, but just the same, people were moved and touched.

They are the remnant, the people of no account, who are therefore chosen, the Anoim, and they obey the light, nor was anything else asked of them. They go and they see not a prophet, not a spirit, but the flesh in which the glory of the Lord will be revealed and by which all men will be delivered from the

power that is in the world. The power that seeks to destroy the world because the world is God's creation, the power that mimics creation, and in doing so, pillages and exhausts the resources of a bounteous God-given earth. The poor were the poor of the land. The Anuim were people who were special to God. They were people who were marginalized. There were people who had no power, who had no one to defend them, who had no real resources, but they had one resource that they never let go of, and that was God. They depended strictly on God. They clung to God. God was everything to them.

And the Anoim are the ones who are faithful, regardless of what's going on around them. the Anuim are the ones who are faithful, regardless of what's going on around them. That regardless of the collapse of the world, regardless of who's in power, regardless of what the economic conditions are, they remain faithful and they remain close to God. And the Anuim are the ones who are always favored by God. Mary, in the Magnificat, when she talks about herself being a lowly servant, she's one of the Anoim too. The shepherds are Anoim. We don't even know their names. They're nobodies in the eyes of the world. Jesus did not appear or God's plan was not unfolded in front of the high and mighty, not the high priest, not the king. It was

always the people who were marginalized, the humble people, the simple people. We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power, and acceleration. The primordial blessing, increase and multiply, has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, enmasked together, marshaled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves,

nauseated with life. As the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The city is crowded off the face of the earth. As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet. There is no room for solitude. There is no room for quiet. There's no room for solitude. There's no room for thought. There's no room for attention, for the awareness of our state.

In the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for man. Those that lament the fact that there is no room for God must also be called to account for this. Have they perhaps added to the general crush by preaching a solid marble God that makes man alien to himself? A God that settles himself grimly like an implacable object in the inner heart of man

and drives man out of himself in despair. The time of the end is the time of demons who occupy the heart, pretending to be gods, so that man himself finds no room for himself in himself. He finds no space to rest in his own heart not because it is full but because it is void yet if he knew that the void itself when hovered over by the spirit is an abyss of creativity he cannot believe it

there is no room for belief the emptiness there He cannot believe it. There is no room for belief. The emptiness there, it's potentiality, it's possibility. And going back to the book of Genesis where, you know, there's the void, there's the chaos, there's the formlessness and so forth. And it's God's divine breath moving across that that begins to bring things into harmony and beauty. And I think at those moments of an individual feels the emptiness, that's the moment when you can kind of turn and begin to ask questions and begin to open the mind and the heart

and invite the presence of God. And this is the time when even our emptiness and our depression and so forth can become something very rich. It can become an act of creativity. It's almost like the ground that is being tilled and ready for planting. And so this is the time when perhaps once we've emptied ourselves of a lot of the garbage that's in there, and we say, well, what's there now? Well, there's space, and there's invitation, and there's a room for growth. And all of these end time things, this eschatology and so forth, should not be a time of fear. The image that is used in the Gospels and in Paul is the image of childbirth.

Paul says the entire creation is groaning in agony of birth pangs, giving birth. That is part of apocalyptic. They looked upon it as birth pangs. And it's not pleasant to undergo. And it's painful. And at the moment it seems awful, but when you kind of stay with it, the result of that is the birth of a child,

the birth of new life, and then the pain is forgotten. The New Testament uses that image so often that what they were going through then was the birthing of a new world, a new age. And I think we're on the verge of that now, the birthing of a new world and a new age. And it's not a pleasant time to be because you don't know that. You haven't seen over the top of a hill yet. And yet individually and collectively as a people and as a world, this is the time when perhaps we are readying ourselves for the birth of something far greater. Scott Lewis, Jesuit priest and author of How Not to Read the Bible,

on Thomas Merton's 1966 Christmas essay, The Time of the End is the Time of No Room. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and on World Radio Paris. You can also find us on the CBC News app, or wherever you get

your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus, and being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds.

By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short-sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. We're in the middle of what might seem like an unusual sort of Christmas story, an apocalyptic one. But a first century audience probably wouldn't have batted an eyelash. Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, mystic, and popular author, recounts the original Christmas story, the birth of Jesus in a manger,

because there was no room at the inn from his vantage point in the tumult of the 1960s. There is no room for him in the massed crowds of the eschatological society, the society of the end, in which all those for whom there is no room are thrown together, thrust, pitched out bodily into a whirlpool of empty forms, human specters, swirling aimlessly through their cities, all wishing they had never been born. In the time of the end, there is no longer room for the desire to go on living. The time of the end is the time when men call upon the mountains to fall upon them because they wish they did not exist.

Why? Because they are part of a proliferation of life that is not fully alive. It is programmed for death. A life that has not been chosen and can hardly be accepted has no more room for hope. We begin with the pushing out the little things and the things that we think we can do without. And, you know, one after another, they get jettisoned along the way. But the very end, with hope, I mean, without hope we do not survive. And hope is not wishful thinking.

Hope is being seized by a power greater than yourself, being seized by a vision that God has within God's mind and heart, and allowing ourselves to be swept up by it, beginning to live today what God has in store for us tomorrow. And if we begin to kind of push away the things that are of God, push away the things that we know to be true and so forth, if we give in to the kind of the enticements that were offered so many times, we wind up with that ultimate step where there is no hope, and without hope, we do not survive. Giving in to despair, giving in to the darkness is probably the most dangerous thing that we can do,

because then all hope goes out. You know, I often remember my father, who was a prisoner of war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in the Bataan Death March, and he said that his faith was the only thing that got him through. And he continually repeated the 23rd Psalm. It didn't pull him out of that POW camp, no, but at the same time, it let him know that he was not alone, and he survived. And there were those, he said, who gave up, who lost hope, who didn't survive. I always kind of encourage people to, as I give a talk or something on spiritual principles and how to live them out, I say, don't take my word for it. Put them into practice. And that's

the important thing. Whatever we learn about spirituality, whatever we learn about God has to be put into practice. It has to be lived out. And if we're not willing to do that, then there is no hope for us. But for those who actually live things out, who actually do apply these things, the power is multiplied. It's like practicing nonviolence. Gandhi was able to bring an empire down. These are the tools of the Sermon on the Mount. And I always tell people that the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, they're not, they sound beautiful, yes, but don't put them on a fridge magnet

or a poster or something. Live them out, because when you do, they become powerful tools. You can move the earth with them. And the few people who do take them seriously have found that out. A life that has not been chosen and can hardly be accepted

has no more room for hope. Yet it must pretend to go on hoping. It is haunted by the demon of emptiness and out of this unutterable void come the armies, the missiles, the weapons, the bombs, the concentration camps, the race riots, the racist murders, and all the other crimes of mass society. Is this pessimism? Is this the unforgivable sin of admitting

what everybody really feels? Is it pessimism to diagnose cancer as cancer? Or should one simply go on pretending that everything is getting better every day because the time of the end is also, for some at any rate, the time of great prosperity? The kings of the end is also, for some at any rate, the time of great prosperity. The kings of the earth have joined in her idolatry,

and the traders of the earth have grown rich from her excessive luxury. Revelations chapter 18, verse 3. Prosperity ain't got nothing to do with it, despite the prosperity gospel that you see around and so forth. It's only when we admit things that we can do something about it. And it's not that everything's going to be nice, not at all. It's being able to be honest. Let's see, it says, is it pessimism to diagnose cancer as cancer? It's not that everything is going to get better and that certain things have to kind of pour themselves out. If we look,

for instance, at many of the revelations that have come about in recent years about racism, about colonialism, about sexual abuse and all kinds of things. It's something that is very depressing and something that many people would say, well, why talk about it? I think because out of that comes hope. Out of that comes reconciliation. Out of that comes cleansing and healing. And it's in a sense like taking something that is infected and beginning to heal it. The emptiness that so many people feel is natural, of course.

But even in the midst of that, someone once asked Mother Teresa, how can you be joyful in the midst of so much suffering? And it's because her joy came from within. And it's something, if she only looked at the suffering, then she would have given in too. But in a sense, to look at the suffering and to know that God was present in all of that, and that God is experiencing the same pain that we are experiencing, is something that is very comforting. You know, it comes to where the rubber hits the road, just one-on-one people helping others, people being kind and loving to others. It's all the murders

and the riots and all of those things, they're very real, of course. But at the same time, so are the people who awake from that, like aw a nightmare and begin the very painful and very rather difficult act of loving and forgiving. And I think that's one thing that perhaps we need too is also forgiveness. And we hold so much anger, so much resentment within ourselves individually and collectively. into this world, this demented inn, in which there's absolutely no room for him at all. Christ has come, uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it,

and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room,

Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. For them, there is no escape, even in imagination. They cannot identify with the power structure of our crowded humanity which seeks to project itself outward, anywhere, in a centrifugal flight into the void, to get out there where there is no God, no man, no name, no identity, no weight, no self. no weight, no self. Nothing but the bright, self-directed,

perfectly obedient, and infinitely expensive machine. For those who are stubborn enough, devoted enough to power, there remains this last apocalyptic myth of machinery propagating its own kind in the eschatological wilderness of space. While on earth, the bombs make room.

But the others, they remain imprisoned in other hopes and in more pedestrian despairs. Despairs and hopes which are held down to earth, down to street level, and to the pavement only. Desire to be at least half human, to taste a little human joy,

to do a fairly decent job of productive work to come home to the family desires for which there is no room. It is in these that he hides himself for whom there is no room. he hides himself for whom there is no room. We've heard it so many times that it's lost its shock effect. The people who respond to Jesus are people you would never expect. Tax collectors, who were the most despised people in Israel.

Prostitutes, sinners, Roman soldiers, the centurion, and those who were quite self-satisfied, you know, religious people, they were the ones who didn't have much use for what he said. That the people who have had everything stripped away, all the pretense and all the self-illusion, All the pretense and all the self-illusion, self-delusion, and the arrogance, the pride, they are the ones who, in many cases, carry the Christ within them. And they will be very quiet. It will be unrecognized many times. I know many people who, poor people on the street, who have very little and will share what they have. This is something that always amazes me, that the ones you would not expect to somehow get it are the very ones who get it. It is about being connected, being connected first of all to one

another, then to Christ, and then to God, and not just on 45 minutes on Sunday, but 24-7. And it's a way of being in the world, and it's a mysticism of everyday life. And people who are connected that way recognize one another. There's a kind of a hidden language. Everything seems to click. And it's not churchy at all, and it might not even be recognized as being explicitly religious, but it's there nonetheless. The time of the end? All right.

When? That is not the question. To say it is the time of the end is to answer all the questions. For if it is the time of the end and of great tribulation, then it is certainly and above all the time of the great joy. It is the time to lift up your heads for your redemption is at hand. It is the time when the promise will be manifestly fulfilled and no longer kept secret from anyone.

It is the time for the joy that is given, not as the world gives, and that no man can take away. For the true eschatological banquet is not that of the birds on the bodies of the slain. It is the feast of the living, the wedding banquet of the Lamb. The true eschatological convocation is not the crowding of armies on the field of battle, but the summons of the great joy,

the cry of deliverance. Come out of her, my people, that you may not share in her sins and suffer from her plagues. Revelations chapter 18, verse 4. The lamb, of course, was eaten at Passover, and it's a powerful symbol in the book of Revelation. The lamb who was slain, the lamb is the one who kind of lifts the veil from our eyes and our hearts and allows us to see that we are all one. And at least that's my take on it. I don't know how that would go down

in other quarters, but that's my take on it, is that the Lamb is the one who takes away the sin of the world. And what is the sin of the world? The idea somehow that we're separate from one another and separate from God. Life with God is always looked upon as a banquet. It goes back to Isaiah 25, where he's going to gather all these people on his holy mountain, and he's going to provide them a feast of the very richest foods and none of the cheap wine, the very best wine. And that's used consistently through the Old Testament. We get to the New Testament, of course. Through the Old Testament, we get to the New Testament, of course.

It's the heavenly banquet is kind of foreshadowed in the people Jesus chooses to eat with. It's kind of a sneak preview into what the heavenly banquet is like, you know, where it is inclusive and not exclusive. And then, of course, the Last Supper, the Lord's Supper, that becomes the model of the heavenly banquet. And the early Christians in the Book of Acts, when they share their bread with glad and joyful hearts and are not grasping and are not possessive and truly care and love for one another, that again becomes the image of what God is like. The cry of the time of the end was uttered also in the beginning by Lot and Sodom to his sons-in-law. Come, get out of this city, for the Lord will destroy it. But he seemed to them to be jesting. Genesis chapter 19 verse 14. To leave the city of death and imprisonment is surely not bad news, except to those who have so identified

themselves with their captivity that they can conceive no other reality and no other condition. In such a case, there is nothing but tribulation. For while to stay in captivity is tragic, to break away from it is unthinkable. And so more tragic still. It's the fear, you know, that if I let go, I won't have anything. And to be able to trust is to be able to say, well, I know that I don't know where I'm going. It's the going back to the journey of Abraham. He didn't know where he was going. He didn't know anything except that God had promised that if he did what he said and went on the journey, that he would be blessed. And to be willing to kind of walk away from everything is very important. You know, some people just cannot conceive of the life any other way. And so they'll laugh, they'll explain things away, they'll make excuses, and we do it individually, we do it as a society too.

The time when things fall apart is actually a moment of grace. It's a moment of grace because you don't want to get up and put things back the way they were. That's the last thing you should do. And that's our first impulse is to do that. Let's make everything just the way it was before. But when things really fall apart, that's the moment of grace because suddenly you see that, oh, I can see things in a different way. I can live without this or that. Or I don't have to do this or that. And it's a time and sense to put it back together in a way that's new, in a way that's life-giving, and to strike out in a new direction. In the apocalyptic theology, they believe that as

they approach the final decisive moment when God would intervene in human history and would put things right, that things actually get worse. That if you really wanted to spoil their day, tell them that things are getting better, because then they would know that the final moment is receding and slipping away. But things will actually get worse. It reaches an absolute crescendo when you get close to the actual fulfillment of everything. And that's the very moment, that's when a lot of people bail. That's when a lot of people say, I can't stay with this. But for those who hang on,

who are patient and so forth, that's the moment of grace. That's the time when you will break through, in a sense, to a new reality. What is needed then is the grace and courage to see that the great tribulation and the great joy are really inseparable, and that the tribulation becomes joy when it is seen as the victory of life over death. True, there is a sense in which there is no room for joy in this tribulation. To say there is no room for the great joy in the tribulation of the end is to say that the evangelical joy must not be confused with the joys proposed by the world in the time of the end. And we must admit it, these are no longer convincing as joys. They become now stoic duties and sacrifices to be offered without question

for ends that cannot be described just now since there's too much smoke and the visibility is rather poor. In the last analysis, the joy proposed by the time of the end is simply the satisfaction and the relief of getting it all over with. That is the demonic temptation of the end. For eschatology is not finis and punishment the winding up of accounts and the closing of books it is the final beginning the definitive

birth into a new creation it is not the last gasp of exhausted possibilities, but the first taste of all that is beyond conceiving as actual. But can we believe it? He seemed to them to be jesting. ¶¶ ¶¶ So so On Ideas, you've been listening to Apocalypse for Christmas, produced by Sean Foley, featuring Jesuit priest and professor Scott Lewis of Regis College, Toronto, and Campion College, Regina. The Time of the End is the Time of No Room by Thomas Merton is from the book Raids on the Unspeakable, used with permission from New Directions Press. Readings by Bob Luguerre. Special thanks to Paul Dornstotter in Regina. Our technical producer

is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.