The Revealer - A Review of Religion and the Press

A daily review of religion and the press

"For everything hidden must be revealed, each secret longs to be disclosed, each love yearns to be betrayed, everything sacred must be desecrated."
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER, "The Mirror"

''For true and false will in no better way be revealed and uncovered than in resistance to a contradiction.''
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

This true falsehood -- or maybe it's the other way around -- is revealed to us from the works of Aquinas by Tom Kreitzberg, of Disputations.

"It's an old light, and there’s not much of it. But it's enough to see by."
MARGARET ATWOOD, Cat's Eye

"Seeing myself well lost once more, I sighed,
'Where, where in Heaven am I? But don't tell me!
O opening clouds, by opening on me wide.
Let's let my heavenly lostness overwhelm me."
ROBERT FROST, "Lost in Heaven"

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."
ALBERT VON SZENT-GYORGYI, "Irving Good, The Scientist Speculates"

"The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing."
PUBLILIUS SYRUS, Roman writer, 1st Century B.C.

"Everything is perfect, with much room for improvement."
SHUNRYU SUZUKI-ROSHI, Japanese Soto Zen master

"A dime held close to the eye eclipses the sun."
JOHN UPDIKE, A Month of Sundays

"Mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding."
LAO TZU, Tao Te Ching

"Be a lamp unto yourself."
GAUTAMA THE BUDDHA, last words

"Apokalypsis. Revelatio. The word sounds so grave now, with good reason, but what We mean to give is as simple as a sigh. The bridegroom lifts the gauze, and there She is. She was there all along."
HAVEN KIMMEL

Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible, Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet, eds. (The Free Press, 2004)

"Of a truth it is, that your God is a God of gods, and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets..."
BOOK OF DANIEL, 2:47

The Hebrew Bible's Daniel is one of the great revealers of scriptural history, the first person to read the writing on the wall. He was also a great reporter. Or at least, an honest one — he wouldn't compromise his perception for political gain even at the risk of his life. Of course, he had an advantage — either God was on his side, or he was insane.

"[E]very new kind of media has been and will always be a blind, blunt, crippled effort to make the past into the present, the far into the near, the outside into the inside, to turn us all, for a moment, into supernal beings."
MICHAEL LESY

Michael Lesy, Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943 (W.W. Norton, 2002). Lesy is one of those rare practitioners of literary journalism who makes little distinction between word and image; to him, everything is a document to be read, all journalism a form of documentary intended to reveal. This quote is taken from his book of photographs from the Library of Congress' Farm Security Administration's collection of 145,000 images of American life compiled during the 1930s _ one of the strangest, most startling, and revelatory journalistic endeavors of all time.

"The literature of illumination reveals this above all: Though it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise."
ANNIE DILLARD

From "Seeing," an essay in Dillard's first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper's Magazine Press, 1964). Dillard's essay is as much a meditation on how to see frogs, bugs, and the movements of streams — that is, the natural world — as it is about perception and revelation. But then, the latter necessitates an ability to do the former, and while much of this essay is dedicated to the proposition that "this looking business is risky," that "darkness appalls and light dazzles," that "the scrap of visible light that doesn't hurt [one's] eyes hurts [one's] brain," The Revealer likes this quote for the promise of insight it holds out to old hands and the novices alike. Writing about religion is like that — revelation is as likely to strike a reporter visiting a church for the first time as it is an essayist returning the hermit's retreat in which she's meditated for years.

"...art that redeems the world appears at first ugly, inappropriate. It is the mutant creature crawling up onto the land, the opposable thumb, the sixth finger…. It says, 'Look,' and 'Look again.'"
BIA LOWE

From "Raptures," an essay in Bia Lowe's collection, Splendored Thing: Love, Roses, & Other Thorny Pleasures (Seal Press, 2002).

"...everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and centrally and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands...."
JAMES AGEE

From Agee's and Walker Evan's book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; p. 10 of the 1988 Houghton Mifflin edition. Agee and photographer Evans made their strange document of the lives of tenant farmers during the Great Depression for Fortune magazine. The night he received the assignment, Agee wrote to his mentor, an Episcopalian priest named Father Flye, "Best break I ever had on Fortune. Feel terrific personal responsibility toward story; considerable doubts of my ability to bring it off; considerable more of Fortune's ultimate willingness to use it as it seems (in theory) to me." Agee guessed right about the last at least: Fortune killed the story. Agee kept writing, "intoxicated," John Hersey later wrote, "by the blessedness in spirit of the poor, dizzy with the intensity of his feelings of admiration, love, humility, and guilt." Which is to say, Agee wrote a book of revelations and confessions, every bit as overwrought as those by John of Patmos and St. Augustine, and every bit as true to the reporter's calling. Not that Agee had much love for his vocation. "The very blood and semen of journalism... is a broad and successful form of lying. Remove that form of lying and you no longer have journalism." What you have, Agee wrote, concluding the statement quoted on the main page of The Revealer, is "all of consciousness... shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what it."

"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."
PIP, MOBY-DICK

A depressingly true comment from Pip, the stowaway of Herman Melville's theological whale-tale, Moby-Dick; uttered after Pip had been temporarily lost at sea and made mad, and in response to Captain Ahab's own maniacal pursuit of the great white whale (one could argue over the identity of the whale, but for the sake of shorthand, let's say: God). So a boy's insanity reveals the truth of a man's. We all look, for God or a god's absence, either because we believe or because we serve those who believe or because we're certain we can stop believing if we can just find God. Say it again: "I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look." Such is the life of whale hunters and religion reporters.