A Mystical Interpretation of the Seven Seals

A Mystical Interpretation of the Seven Seals

So, I’m going to talk about the seven seals today. The passage in Revelation about the seven seals is difficult to understand, at least for me, because it is hard to reconcile the idea of a loving God, indeed a God who is love, with the violent and terrifying imagery of the seven seals.

The seals, according to the fifth chapter, are on a scroll in the hand of God. So the seals are, as Wes Howard Brooks said, what keep us from receiving God’s word; there’s a word or communication from God that the seals block us from hearing. No one can open these seals except for Jesus. But when the lamb opens the seals, what do we get? Well, if God is love, when you now receive a fuller communication from him, you’d expect to get something like peace, joy, and compassion. But what do we get? The four horsemen of the apocalypse, earthquakes, and terror. Why? What’s going on? This is my main question about the book of Revelation.

Perhaps the answer is that God isn’t really love, or that God’s love is very conditional, as various fundamentalist interpretations would have it. If we basically deserve death simply by virtue of being born, and God’s love is only to be experienced by those who’ve said just the right prayer and believe precisely the right things, such as all 5 of Calvin’s points or whatever the critical beliefs are, then it’s easy to reconcile these things: the terrors of the seals are for those unbelieving sinners who deserve death and eternal punishment; the believers have been raptured out and are unaffected.

I don’t think this interpretation is correct, mainly because what it says about God is not consistent with my experiences of God. My own experiences of God’s presence have always been that of encountering love, a pure and transcendent love that loves and accepts me to the very core of my being. And this is compatible with what the great saints in our tradition – whether it’s Mother Teresa, Saint Francis, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and so on – have said about their own experiences of the presence of God. So, although I believe that this book and its interpretation needs to be approached with a great deal of humility, I feel that the weight of experience in our tradition gives us good reason to doubt the truth of the fundamentalist reading.

So how are we to understand it? In general, I think scripture speaks to us on several levels at once: there’s a literal reading of the text, several possible metaphorical or allegorical readings, and a personal transcendent level (where you let God speak to you personally as you read, as in doing meditative reading of scripture, for example). A couple of weeks ago, Wes Howard Brooks gave us a very worthwhile metaphorical reading, where the seals were understood as the violence of empire, and those who cowered when the seals were opened were those who supported the empire and its behavior; those who rejoiced were the believers who followed a different way of life. As I understand it, it’s a kind of political interpretation, seeing the seals in light of the collective human journey in societies and nations

I’d like to present for your consideration a different kind of metaphorical interpretation of the seven seals that sees them as a revelation of one’s personal spiritual journey, and what one is likely to encounter on it. And I’d like to suggest that both interpretations can be true at once.

How do we make sense of this on a personal level? If God is love, then why would a deeper and more complete communication with him show us things like war, famine, and death?

Let’s go back to the scroll for a moment: we have a scroll – a communication – from God, that has been blocked or sealed away from us. The only one able to take the scroll and open the seals is the lamb that was slain. This reminds me of the death of Christ on the cross, when the veil between the holy place and the most holy place was torn. Previously, only the high priest was able to enter the most holy place, and then only after extensive preparation to purify himself. So my suggestion is that the breaking of the seals is Christ’s breaking down the barriers between ourselves and God; he lifts the seals that we’ve put on our hearts that keep us from experiencing and expressing God’s love fully. The opening of the seals is Jesus is rolling away the stones that have entombed our hearts.

To see what these seals are, it will help to talk a little bit about our spiritual state. The bible tells us that while we were created good and lived in intimate communion with God (Adam and Eve “walked with God in the cool of the day”), at some point there was a fall from grace caused by the original sin, and a distance developed between ourselves and God. It takes Christ and his sacrifice to bring us back to Eden.

Here’s how I understand original sin, I present it to you for your consideration, I hope you’ll let me know if it makes any sense. One of the things the East Orthodox say is that each man is his own Adam, each woman her own Eve; in other words, each of us takes a bite of the apple that causes a separation from God. And what is the apple?

Consider the possibility that the apple is a basic lie that we’ve accepted about ourselves, a lie that goes something like this: you are deficient in some way, and therefore undeserving and unworthy of love in your present condition; you are flawed in some deep and fundamental way, and there’s something just basically wrong with you. In the garden, the snake tempted Adam and Eve by comparing them to God and implying that, by not being God, they were therefore deficient; when they tried to become like God and inevitably failed, they lost Eden. This is typical of how the evil one works in our own lives: at some point, we come to believe that our value as a person is conditional, and that there is some standard that it is necessary for us to meet in order to be loved or valued. Unfortunately, the standard – whether it is the continual approval of one’s peers, one’s parents, society, or something else – is something that’s impossible to meet, either all the time or even once, and so we come to believe that deep down there is something wrong with us. Who we really are, deep down we (often unconsciously) think is someone unacceptable and unlovable. This lie or something similar, I’d like to suggest, is the apple of original sin that we bite into. We don’t have the eyes to see or ears to hear or hearts to feel God’s love, if we believe he doesn’t or can’t love us. And so we lose Eden.

To escape the pain of this lie we unconsciously build what Thomas Keating and other mystics call the false self, a fake persona that we present to others – including God – that we think will be acceptable to whatever the fake standard is and get us what we want, or at least think we want.

Many of us are so adept at creating this false self that we often identify with it, and lose touch with who we really are as children of God. At that point, our journey out of Eden is complete. That’s why I appreciate it so much when Rich asks us, “People of God, do you know who you are?” It’s a good question.

Now it takes Christ to get us out of this mess, we can’t do it on our own power. However, we have to agree to let him save us from it. Jesus never forces himself on anyone, and we have the free will to refuse the healing he very much wants to give us. And the hard truth is that we are refusing grace most of the time: our false selves puff us up with pride and make us think we don’t need God, or we ask for things from God as if trying to change God’s mind, without risking change in our own hearts. As an example, here’s something I do sometimes: I’ll be praying, and the thought of how angry I am at someone will occur to me, and I’ll wish them harm. I know this isn’t a good wish to have, and I’ll try to repress it and put it out of my mind, and internally I’ll say something like “oh I’m not really like that”, and turn my attention to other things that I like about myself instead. I hide part of myself from God, and try to say to God, “hey, look here, don’t look there”. And I don’t confine this behavior to God.

Entranced by the illusion of the false self, we’ve lost sight of who we are, and additional layers of deception that reinforce the false self are cast upon us all the time by society, in particular the media with its constant fear mongering and its badgering us with messages of inadequacy (that can all be resolved if we only buy the right products). The loudness of the voices of the false self and its supporting cast are such that the sound of our true self and that of God’s voice become so quiet that we can’t even hear them, unless we really stop to listen.

And that’s what spiritual disciplines are all about. The practice of a spiritual discipline is meant to help us transcend the illusion of the false self, to get beyond thinking or talking about God to actually experience an intimate relationship with him. In the Christian tradition we have practices such as saying the rosary, Taize chanting, centering prayer and lectio divina (a meditative reading of scripture), all night vigils, the contemplation of icons, and the Jesus Prayer, to name the most commonly known ones. When we choose to begin a spiritual discipline, we are choosing to surrender ourselves in a spirit of trust, to God. We start listening to God’s voice instead of the false self: we start having the ears to hear, and Christ opens the seals that have been preventing us from hearing God’s communication to us.

Because God is perfect love, Truth with a capital T, and we are not – we’re living in the darkness of identifying with the false self – an experience of the presence of God can leave us deeply shaken. The light of God reveals the false self and it’s associated evils, or as John puts it, the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Here’s another way to put it: remember the beginning of Revelation: when John sees the risen Christ, he falls down in fear. This is a perfectly understandable reaction: Love with a capital “L” is not something cute that gives you warm fuzzies, it’s the greatest power in the universe. When we experience even small glimpses of perfect Love, of the one who loves us beyond our ability to comprehend, we are quickly confronted with our own imperfections.

So my suggestion is that on the individual, experiential level, the terrors of the breaking of the seals are the terrors we experience when God embraces us more deeply with his love. The horsemen of the apocalypse are within us, parts of ourselves that are inevitably brought to our attention when we walk the Way of Christ on the road to spiritual maturity. Yes, there is imperial behavior and injustice out there; but what about in here, in my own heart?

The first conquering horseman is like the ego, the pharoah, the king, our inner emperor: the ego wants to be on top, and beating down others in various inventive ways is the primary way to accomplish this. Hence War: we take peace from ourselves and others when we take a sword to their hearts and their self- esteem in an effort to make ourselves be top dog. We starve ourselves and others spiritually and physically when we are too self-centered and greedy, and the ultimate result is we ourselves become Death; we can hate others and wish for their death for relatively small reasons (say, talking during a movie or cutting us off in traffic, or just being generally annoying in some way we don’t like). When we are persecuted or treated unjustly, instead of counting it a joy or a blessing we want revenge. Experiencing these things in ourselves can shake us to the very marrow – like being in earthquakes where everything changes around us – and we may try to flee from God and hide. It’s not just those bad guys out there who try to run from God, sometimes we do it too (or at least I do!).

When the seals are broken and we receive the message of God in our hearts, all the ways in which we are not the perfect love of God are brought sharply to our attention, and all of our rationalizations and excuses fail as we are forced to confront ourselves honestly. This can be absolutely terrifying, as our very conception of who we are or who we think we are is shaken to the very core. We can’t help but change when we experience God’s love, and we aren’t sure what we’re going to change into.

For me, I usually present myself to the world as a basically nice fellow, and for many years I actually believed this was true, that that’s who I was. However, as I’ve grown more spiritually experienced, I’ve been shown that many of my thoughts and actions I do not because I’m genuinely compassionate and expressing real love, but because of some largely selfish motive, and a fair amount of the time I do things to deliberately hurt others and cause them pain. I’m not really very nice at all. For example, I’m very angry at my soon-to-be-ex business partner, and I wish her business ill. That’s not nice or good, but it’s the truth. I can try to rationalize or repress it, but that solves nothing and just creates new problems. First I need to see the truth of what I’m doing before anything can be done to change it, and the fact is that I’m not trusting God enough to take care of the unjust situation in which I find myself.

And things do change. If we’re willing to trust and surrender ourselves – who we are, who we think we are, including all our pain and wounds – to God’s love, through this process of painful revelation the picture Revelation presents in the sixth seal is very positive: multitudes of people of every description, in clean robes, singing to God in gratitude and praise. At this point, the truth of who we really are as children of God is fully revealed to us. And what is that? Here’s what Mother Teresa has to say about it:

What does God say to us?, Mother Teresa asks, and answers by paraphrasing Isaiah 43 and 49:

‘I have called you by your name, you are mine; water will not drown you, fire will not burn you, I will give up nations for you. You are precious to me, and I love you. Even if a mother could forget her own child, I will not forget you. I have carved you in the palm of my hand.’

I would add this: your love always has value. How God expresses love through you is unique and infinitely valuable, no matter what anyone else says or does. It is this kind of truth that the evil one tries to keep us from.

So the end result of this process, of going through our own tribulation – our individual revelation – is good. We are at peace, knowing that we are fully accepted and loved. We know that in spite of our imperfections God’s love for us never wavers – God IS Love. When we trust God enough to surrender to him in any situation, we reach true spiritual maturity. We learn this kind of trust (which I guess is faith, or produces faith) through experiencing God’s presence, by getting to know him more and more, which I suppose is the only way we learn to trust anyone.

The end result is I believe the kind of love Thomas Keating describes as expressed by the Algerian Trappist monks. These monks lived in a monastery surrounded by destitute Muslim peasants, and felt called to reach out in dialogue and charity to their impoverished neighbors. The monks didn’t see them as people to convert, but brothers and sisters who they could help create a community with, by also helping materially with their agricultural skills. Rebels showed up and ordered the monks to leave, but they refused. The monks’ concern for the local population prevented them from seeking their own safety. They didn’t want to become martyrs, because they didn’t want to be the cause of anyone’s punishment. They were, in fact, concerned for the damage to the souls of those who might kill them. Unfortunately, the rebels came again and abducted 7 of the monks, demanding the government release some rebel prisoners. When this wasn’t done, the monks were killed. Father Christian, one of the maryred monks, very well aware of the possibility that he might be abducted and killed, left this note for whoever might kill him:

“And you, too, my last-minute friend, who would not have known what you were doing; yes, for you too I say this thank you and this goodbye: to commend you to the God in whose face I see yours. And may he grant to us to find each other, happy thieves, in paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.”

I’m not anywhere even close to there yet – if I had even 10% of that kind of love I’d be very different – but with your prayers and God’s help, maybe we can get there together.