The entirety of today’s Gospel reading in The Catholic Church is Rev 5, 1-10. Within those verses is the following passage: “Each of the elders (who stand before the Throne) held a harp and gold bowls filled with incense, which are the prayers of the holy ones.”
The bowls are not “golden”, but “gold”, which is reasonably taken to mean that they are actual bowls made of actual gold. They are filled with incense. Is it the bowls or the incense “which are the prayers of the holy ones”? That is not clear. The clear and important point is: it doesn’t matter if the prayers are the gold bowls or the incense within them. The important lesson of this passage is that human prayers take actual form in Heaven.
We may wonder who prayed the prayers of “the holy ones”. We know that we, ourselves, are not especially “holy”, so those prayers in the gold bowls may not have come directly from us. But we know people who are actually “certified” to be holy. They are the Holy Saints whom we ask to intercede for us.
When we ask, for instance, St. Mary or St. Joseph to intercede for us, we can be confident that those prayers will end up in one or more gold bowls held up to God, The Loving Programmer, where they are presented and answered at His pleasure.
Additional puzzles: We see that each of the 24 elders “held a (one) harp and gold bowls (plural)”. So, how many bowls of prayers does any given Elder hold up to God? Those not as clever as they think may answer, “As many as He wants”. But, beyond that, we are told that each Elder is holding more than one gold bowl, so there are a minimum of 48 bowls of prayers being held before the Throne of God.
On earth, those in the business of making bowls know that classic bowls are two/fifths of a sphere, a shape that has worked well over the millennia. We may suppose those to be the dimensions of the Elder’s gold prayer-containers.
If the elders are our size, and the bowls they hold are of a size that can be held in one hand, are they about the size of cereal bowls? Or, are they stacking bowls with protruding rims or handles, stacked on top of each other, with each Elder holding several above the bottom bowl? On the other hand, there may be at least two smaller bowls held in one hand. Or, are there three, four, or half-a-dozen thimble-sized bowls that can be held in one hand? And, we must consider that several bowls may be resting on an unmentioned tray. And, we have to consider the possibility that the bowls are covered, possibly with hinged lids, more than one bowl, maybe several, hanging from a chain.
Since each Elder is described as holding at least two bowls and a harp, is the harp strapped over the shoulder? Hooked over a forearm? Slung over the back? The word is “held” is used, so it would seem that the harp is being held in one hand, and the bowls in another. Are the harps playable while the elder is holding the gold bowls? Or, do the strings simply resonate to the glory of God? Or, is the harp some sort of highly miniaturized instrument, like a playable I-Pod, that fits in among the gold bowls? It’s also possible that the harps are held sideways, like trays, with the bowls resting on them.
Sometimes, we are grateful for the “Spirit of Quantification” that drives Catholic Fundamentalism to find as much hard reality as possible in both Church and Bible, but it can be extremely frustrating. On the other hand, wanting to know the answers to such questions does encourage us to behave in a way that will increase the likelihood of finding those answers first hand. In this case, one would hope, and pray, to find such answers as a permanent member of an audience that praises Him forever with genuine and overflowing joy, sometimes, as a hymn says in a slightly different context, ‘around the glassy sea”.
O, that we may be found worthy!
