There are times when a voyage turns into a pilgrimage. Halfway through, you become aware that the presence of God has become palpable on what was meant to be an ordinary journey, that the details of breakfast, of doors opening and a breeze coming through the window have taken on a deeper resonance. For me, that pilgrimage was to Patmos.

It was the end of the summer, and I was returning with my husband and my two youngest children to the Holy Land, where we have lived for many years. I was uneasy about going back, even scared. With the war ongoing, there were still very few flights, so we decided that the easiest route would be to connect through Greece. My husband, who is a Syriac Catholic priest, suggested that we take a few days to travel to the island of Patmos, where St. John wrote the Book of Revelation.

My husband and two children would go ahead. I would drop my oldest child at university and meet them on the island. As far as I was concerned, it would be a few days of calm before we faced the unknown. I was looking forward to the beach—less so to thinking about the Apocalypse.

One can’t just hop over to Patmos. A tiny island, only 7.5 miles long, it has no airport and is only reachable by boat or ferry. I arrived in the middle of the night. It was not until the next morning that I could see where I had landed. I awakened to the sun lighting up the sea and clusters of white houses on the mountains. Boats gently rocked in the harbor. There were fig trees and bougainvillea in bloom, jasmine and tamarisk. Chapels hid around almost every corner, reminding me that Patmos is sometimes called the Jerusalem of the Aegean. We spent hours swimming, the water so clear that we could see fish beneath us.

By chance, we had arrived during the Patmos Chamber Music Festival, and that first evening we traveled to the town of Hora and found our seats in an open courtyard. The atmosphere was electric with anticipation. The festival organizer introduced the concert by explaining that Patmos, as the island of the Apocalypse, was a locus of mysticism and beauty. The musicians embarked on a program pivoting from Mozart to Ravel to Gershwin, violin to piano to clarinet. I cannot remember being so captivated by a performance.

Apocalypse. It was the first time I had ever heard the word used positively, as a source of wonder, even discovery. I knew that the Greek apokalypsis means revelation, or unveiling, but I had always associated it with the English word apocalyptic—which usually points to catastrophe. Here, it seemed to evoke the possibilities of the present. There is always something being revealed, even in a violin solo on a summer’s evening.

The next day, we drove the narrow roads to the Cave of the Apocalypse, where tradition holds that St. John, in exile in the first century, wrote what would become the Book of Revelation, addressing it to seven churches in Asia Minor. The cave has maintained its simplicity—a humble church of volcanic stone, with wooden benches and an iconostasis. It is easy to imagine him there.

Scholars believe that the Book of Revelation was meant to give the early Christians courage and warn them against assimilating into the Roman Empire. In the cave, I could better understand how the inaccessibility of Patmos became part of its power. Even if St. John found himself on a remote island, God sought him out.

In the same way, the opening lines make it clear that God is aware of each small church in Asia Minor, of what they do and why they matter. Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches, the voice tells John. Today, it feels like a whisper to anyone who feels invisible, whether in the church or in history, that their work has meaning.

We continued up the hill to the Monastery of St. John the Theologian, fortress-like and dominating the heart of the island. The monastery was founded in 1088 by Hossios Christodoulos Latrinos, who sought permission to build it in honor of St. John. For over 900 years, it has been a center of prayer.

As I watched pilgrims lighting candles and kissing icons in the chapel of the Virgin Mary, I felt a sense of consolation. A local guidebook describes Patmos as a place of theophany—where, as at Mt. Sinai, God revealed Godself. Pilgrims journey to the island to be drawn into that closeness. That was not what I had expected to find in the land of the Apocalypse. In fact, I had often shied away from the book—frightened by the images of war and famine, uncomfortable with those who have weaponized it to assume that they are on the right side of history. In particular, I despaired every time I saw it misinterpreted to diminish people of other faiths.

But in Patmos I experienced the Book of Revelation in a different light, as a message of comfort and connection, a reminder that God seeks us out, wherever we might be, and knows our struggles. I thought of my friends in Syria, faithfully attending church despite the bomb that had killed 25 people in a Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus. I thought of the clergy in Gaza, who had recently announced their intention to stay in their church compounds to care for those who could not evacuate. I thought of the families still there, celebrating Mass and sheltering.

I remembered the letters and messages of encouragement my friends have sent me from all over the world. Those that I, too, have passed on to friends facing uncertainty. We are still that same church, invited to remind one another not to despair. To persevere requires not only living differently, but also seeing the world in a new way, witnessing hope in the face of what seems hopeless, possibility in the face of what seems impossible.

My friend Father Michael Azar, a Greek Orthodox priest and scholar, calls the Book of Revelation the most misunderstood book in the New Testament. “It is a source of joy,” he told me. “At Patmos, St. John reveals that what seems like a defeat is a victory.”

During my last days in Patmos, I tried to be attentive. Local swimmers made the sign of the cross before diving into the sea. Pedestrians ducked into churches to light candles. My husband returned from the bakery holding spiced bread stamped with a cross, baked for a saint’s feast day.

As we waited for our ferry, a bus passed by with Apocalypse Tours written on the side of it, and I laughed. I would never think of the Apocalypse in the same way again.

“I suppose that we’re meant to understand that in the arc of history, love will prevail?” I asked my husband.

He thought for a moment, then responded quietly: “Only in the arc of history?”

He was right. Still, even as I write this, I struggle to reconcile that insight with the violence of this moment we are collectively living through. It is a daily work, to be attentive to love breaking through, in a violin note, a prayer before diving into water, a note of encouragement from a friend. A candle still lit.

“We know that one impulse of grace is of infinitely more power than a cobalt bomb,” wrote Dorothy Day.

Love is already stronger than death. If only we can live believing it to be true.

This article appears in January 2026.

Stephanie Saldaña is a writer based in Jerusalem.