Apocalypse

One of my favorite movies is The Princess Bride. I remember seeing it for the first time, when my children were in elementary school. They fell in love with it, and we saw it over and over and over through their adolescent years. It was and is a "feel good" movie with just enough wicked humor to engage all of us at whatever age we were each time we encountered it.

There is one line from the movie that resonates for me -- probably because of my love for words and language and meaning. The character that Wallace Shawn plays, keeps exclaiming, "Inconceivable!" each time something happens that runs contrary to his plans and assumptions. Finally, the Spaniard, played by Mandy Patinkin, responds: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does."

I've been pondering the word "apocalypse" in the last few days. It is a word that, in my experience, has religious connotations, and is particularly evocative of a sort of rigidly evangelical, and even end-times focused sort of theology. As such, it has always had a sort of "creepy" feel to it for me. But then I stumbled over a bit of writing that indicated that the word, in its original Greek, referred to a lifting of the veil or a revealing of a mystery. Apocalypse (Greek: Ἀποκάλυψις Apokálypsis; "lifting of the veil") is a term applied to the disclosure to certain privileged persons of something hidden from the majority of humankind. Apocalypse, is a revelation of hidden things. Apocalyptic literature is regarded as a specific literary genre and has specific characteristics. It is concerned with dreams or visions, and the experience of the one who receives the vision is usually prominent and spectacular. The mysteries, revealed in the vision, are often foreshadowed by preliminary events. Apocalyptic literature is powerfully focused on the personal experience of the seer.

There it is -- that moment when we discover that a piece of the language doesn't mean exactly what we thought it did. For me, that sent me off into a, perhaps predictably, kinky thought stream...

I'll explain.

For me, the journey from the "vanilla" life I led, through all the years of my marriage, into the life I have chosen and embraced in these last years was truly, and precisely, a lifting of a veil and a revealing of mysteries. The transition was about agreeing to see clearly and experience deeply the things that were actually true about me and about my life and my world. What I had only dreamed about for decades, I began to experience in actuality, and that shift was full of power and spectacular events. I became the dreamer and the seer of a reality only imagined prior to that apocalyptic change. It is true that there were those who had insights into the mysteries that I would encounter, but my experience of each new revelation was absoluely pristine and paramount to my coming to understand the truth of it all. That has, over time, come to feel like a gift and a privelege -- something granted to just a few, and so I am coming to see my life and my "kink" as wondrously and marvelously "apocalyptic."

swan