But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is near.’ Photo: Camp in Gaza courtesy of Care International
Breaking camp: James Gordon’s ‘divina lectio’
‘I wondered about the wilderness camps to which the earliest Christians fled.’
As a Christian-shaped Quaker, I sometimes perform a procedure learned from my Catholic mother. I take a valued book, open it at random, and put a pin in a passage. Anglicans who use the New Testament in this way refer to it as ‘divina lectio’, one of the rules of Benedict of Nursia. Using this method with my Greek Bible recently, I fingered Luke 21:20, where Jesus predicts the ‘end times’. I once believed that biblical prophesy of this kind was in conflict with Quakerism, and felt secretive – guilty even – about holding these apparently irreconcilable sets of beliefs. But more recently I read that early Friends had no such conflict, and even that George Fox made the book of Revelations central to his understanding – it was the only book that he ever wrote a commentary on.
