Inaugural Visions
The great prophets of the Old Testament had what scholars call “an inaugural vision”, an experience that lifted them out of the monotone jargon of their everyday world to utter polyphonic oracles that widened and deepened the range of human destiny. Their tongues became the instruments of divine music, defying the complacent and unjust status quo of society in favor of horizons of justice and compassion unlimited! Today we read of Jeremiah’s inaugural vision – triggered by the corruption of Jerusalem’s leadership and the influence of idol worship upon her citizens (akin to the worship of materialism today).
Such an inaugural vision confronted the ancient patriarch Jacob when he dreamed of a procession of angels ascending and descending a ladder reaching into the night sky. It happened to Moses in the shape and voice of a blazing tree. The prophet Isaiah was approached in the Temple by a fiery angel who touched his lips with a red-hot coal so that when the Lord said, “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah was promptly able to say, “Here I am, send me!” despite the agony his calling would entail.
You could say the poet Walt Whitman had a similar inaugural experience. In his poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” he tells of observing, as a boy, a pair of mockingbirds nesting in May along the desolate beaches of Long Island. Two feather’d guests from Alabama . . . four light green eggs . . . And everyday the he-bird flew back and forth while the she-bird crouched on the nest. Then one day the she-bird was gone and, watch as the boy might from day to day, she never returned. Whitman then watched the behavior of the he-bird over the summer months. He imagined him crying out: Loud! Loud! Loud! . . . I call to you my love! . . . Land! land! O land! Whichever way I turn . . . give me my mate back again . . . For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look. But all to no avail.
This was Whitman’s inaugural vision, inspiring him even as a boy to become a poet, a prophet – to vow: O you singer solitary . . . never more shall I cease perpetuating you . . . Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me. Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night, By the sea . . . The messenger there arous’d, the fire, the sweet hell within, The unknown want, the destiny of me.
I remember such a moment, the loss of someone cherished – beyond a certain day, a certain hour of the day, beyond an entry in a son’s diary dated April 27th: blank pages. No entry evermore. And at such moments suddenly a line is crossed between monotony and a never-ending longing, a quest for someone, for serious meaning, for God? I’m sure you, too, have had such an inaugural moment or moments when what really mattered began to really matter.