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For most of my life reading has seemed like one of life’s most natural activities. Letter sending and receiving was an early-learned and often-practiced pleasure. And if you too are a book-and-letter person, then you know that moment of great anticipation when you hold an unread letter or a book in your hand, just before you open it.
Sometimes the feeling is one of longing—a desire to return to a familiar world that exists only within the pages of a much-loved story, or through a letter, to visit with distant friends. Sometimes you’re filled with interest as you look forward to learning something new. Sometimes you dread the terrible news a letter may hold, and yet. . . it must be read.
But what if you could never get beyond that point in time? What if the book in your hand remained closed to you? A scroll forever sealed; an un-openable text.
Words on a page are meant to be read, though perhaps not by just anyone. Humankind’s store of stories is filled with this motif: wizards’ books locked by a spell, ancient tomes written in unknown tongues we cannot decipher, diaries that must be opened with a tiny key.
And so when I read that no one is worthy to open the scroll or look into it, I feel the writer’s urgency and despair as he weeps. Is there truly no one? Have we come this far to go no further? Is it judgment? Is it terror? Who can break the seven seals?
It’s a moment that captures our measured progress through the scriptures this season on our way to Christmas and the Second Coming. A complicated Advent feeling. A longing, a hunger for revelation.
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