Bread

Psalm 133

How good, how delightful it is to live as brothers in unity!

It is like a fine oil on the head, running down the beard,

running down Aaron's beard, onto the collar of his robes.

It is like the dew of Hermon falling on the heights of Zion;

for there Yahweh bestows his blessing, everlasting life.

The psalm is beautiful, profound. And yet there is a more distinctive meaning to this poetic exclamation than what is represented in our current English translations. 'To live as brothers in unity', in the original language, is achim yashab yachad, namely, to 'sit down at meal as brothers in unity.' When one puts this meaning to the first line, the following four lines take on whole new purport.

Is eating together so blissful and important as what this psalm communicates? Certainly in our culture the age-old tradition of sitting down together at a homemade meal as a family has been mostly forgotten.

Yet in the Bible, we find that the concept of the Meal is attended to in something of a sacred light. In the Old Testament records eating together was often symbolic of the spiritual. The very earliest chapters of the history of the world deals with food, and expostulates that before the Fall the fruit of the earth was a spiritual substance as well as a material substance. With the eating of forbidden fruit, Adam and Hevah knew good and evil, and were expelled to be prevented from eating of the fruit of the Tree of Life, and thus living forever.

This treatment of food as both spiritual and material continues. Abraham, when visited by Yahweh, feeds him a meal, and is given in return a blessing and a prophesy. When visited later by Melchizedek, the first High Priest, whose name means, literally, 'King of Righteousness', Abraham gives him the first documented tithe––ten percent of all he has; then Melchizedek, in return, feeds him bread and wine, thus showing forth the Eucharist which Jesus, the 'High Priest after the Order of Melchizedek' (Hebrews 5), will institute.

Afterwards, in the establishing of the Mosaic Law, Yahweh uses food as an integral part of His people's worship. He ordained His Temple to be a place that had fresh bread forever in His presence. The people's sins were to be paid for, their diseases to be healed, through the sacrificing of animals, through the burning of meat, and through grain offerings. The priests were to eat the acceptable parts of each offering. The congregation was to offer all the first fruits of their land as a sacred offering to Yahweh. Their years were to be filled with feasts and fasts which celebrated and recalled the sacred history of God. Their diet was to be one of purity and health, forbearing from unclean animals and vulgar substances rigidly, at risk of being expelled from God's favor if they disobeyed. God promised to reward their faithfulness with abounding harvests and to punish their spiritual adultery with devastating famines.

When the Christ came into the world, He also spoke of the spirit integrated in food. He proclaimed Himself the Bread of Life, and the One who gives Living Water. He established the Eucharist as the central sacrament in the Way, in which we partake of bread and wine that He pronounced His body and His blood. This eating of His flesh and blood is the action that He said would give us life in this world, and would make us 'live forever'. (John 6)

After Jesus' resurrection and flight into the sky, the apostles, as part of their constant worship of Him, practiced communion together at every gathering. They fasted twice a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays, in order to draw closer to Jesus. They kept the feasts, in remembrance of the miracles that Elohim had done for them. They instituted new feasts and fasts, to celebrate and recall the new wonders that Jesus had worked in and for them. They looked forward to the Heavenly Feast, the Supper of the Lamb, where we are to commune with the Creator of all, as is bespoken in John's revelation.

Such regard for the spiritual heart of the Meal has been lost to our society. Eating is a substance used for pleasure and sustenance, but not for spiritual benefit or the building of relationship. We call ourselves followers of the Way, and yet we have lost belief in the sacredness of the Eucharist, we have deserted the celebrating of the Holy-Days and the feasts and fasts of the Church in favor of secular holidays and traditions, and we have even deserted the delight that is found daily when 'brothers eat together in unity'.

Let us once again vow to recognize the weight of glory in even the most ordinary things of life. For there is life in communion.

The Earth-Riddle

We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.

- G.K. Chesterton

A Prayer

O fountain of Light, you are the Light and the origin of Light,
Listen with favour in your mercy to our prayers.
O Light, as we flee from the darkness of our sins,
Rescue us, whose bountiful and holy power first created us,
Whose justice condemned us and whose devotion has redeemed us:
Be in all things merciful, just and almighty.

May the power of faith so arouse us,
That the glory of hope may be kindled for the future:
May love infuse our longing for ages without end.
Be the kindly ruler of our life
That we may have time for work and rest;
And as each succeeds the other may we be refreshed.

Kindle us and make us vessels worthy of spiritual light.

~Alcuin of York, Counsellor of Charlemagne

Kol Elohim

Words mean things. When we speak, the sound-waves continue longer than we can hear them, resonating in a circular motion until the wave becomes stretched so thin that the human ear cannot detect the noise any longer. These wavelengths reverberate and build upon one another, creating invisible matter. What we say becomes a tangible force in the air. It creates an aura that all present feel. It feeds other edifices of power, adding to the forces for either evil or good.

The world was created through the Word. Elohim, the Godhead, spoke into the formless void, and the sound waves vibrated through the darkness into the formation of Light and Life. Words and sounds were established as instruments of creativity. On the sixth day He spoke into creation a man after His own likeness. He then spoke beneficence and instruction over Adam, thus instigating the use of words for blessing and discipleship, which is to be reciprocated by thanksgiving and praise.

When Yahweh entered the world, He once more spoke life and light into the darkness. His words created forces of goodness in an aura formerly inhabited by the Lucifer, the prince of the power of the air. His words created commandments to return to His ways. His words blessed those whose hearts were receptive to the Spirit. His words cursed those whose progenitor was the father of lies––those who bore fruit in keeping with their forebear.

His words created new substances. The voice that spoke the world into being said, 'This is my body' and 'This is my blood'. He spoke that His Body and Blood would be the new Testament of the Faith He was establishing. Yeshua-Yahweh declared, "I am the bread of life. I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.' When the Jews disputed His word, Jesus retorted, 'In all truth I tell you, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life, and I shall raise that person up on the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in that person. As the living Father sent me and I draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will also draw life from me.'*

Many of His disciples left Him, but the Twelve remained. They did not understand how these things could take place, but they trusted in their Lord. They faithed that Jesus was the Word of eternal life, whose primary Sacrament was the essence of the New Covenant spoken into being by the Kol Elohim, the Voice of the Godhead.

Lord, sup with us in love divine;

Thy body and Thy blood,

That living bread, that heav'nly wine,

Be our immortal food.

Scripture from Luke 22 and John 6

Lyrics from Shepherd of Souls by James Montgomery

The Demi-God and Dido

It came to me as I sat in that theater that the culture of the West was most definitively returning to the model of the Greco-Roman. The movie had several themes running through it, echoing the same themes seen in seventy-five percent of the films pervading cinemas across the US.

There are two that encapsulate all others. The first is that of the demi-god. Whether it is Tony Stark or Peter Parker, these heros seemingly reflect the old legends of Hercules, Aeneas, Achilles, Hector, and other like demigods. In short, the heros of these films are people who come to find their inner god. They burgeon this inner god through technology (or magic) and intellect, and reach completion by acquiring such power as only God is supposed to have. This is then amalgamated with the same sinful nature that led to the ultimate death of the Greco-Roman hero, and likewise to the destruction of the Hollywood hero, though the film rarely ever confesses such a fate. They have not yet discovered that power without holiness kills.

The second theme is that of the family. These same Hollywood demigods are loners. They, like the old Greek gods, have given up the holy model of sacrifice: the father sacrificing himself for the mother and child, the mother sacrificing herself for the father and child, and the child rising up to call them both blessed. The Hollywood heros, however, still luxuriate in something that seems to be a sterile sexuality. They each have their Dido, and if they are lucky, their Helen, but their union never portrays the commitment of selfless love, and thus never brings forth the contentment that is birthed from giving, not receiving. Their supposed love does not bring forth the fruit of love, the child, and therefore it is not lovely.

These are the evidence of secular individualism. They are what characterized the culture of the Greeks and Romans once they deserted the hearth and the home for domination. Education became idolized above relationship. In this educational system men like Socrates taught a breaking up of the family in favor of the government. Thus the fertility of the home was replaced for the impersonal institution, the fruit of true loveliness superseded for the sterility of selfish passion, the holiness bound up in divinity exchanged for the Greek role models of vain conceit and corrupt power.

This culture self-destructed. So shall ours.

The Logic of Love

In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. (John 1:1)

It is the same Word, or Logic, that spoke the world into being in Genesis 1.

The same Logic, or Testimony, is one that he ordained in Jacob as a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children (Psalm 78:5), and again, (Psalm 119:88), Quicken me after thy lovingkindness; so shall I keep the testimony of thy mouth.

It is the same Testimony, or Witness, spoken of in John 3:33, He that hath received his testimony hath set to his seal that God is true.

The Witness, or Truth, of which Jesus said: Ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning. (John 15:27)

That Truth, or Faith, that is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). And in John 17, when that Logos, that Word, speaks: Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. And again: For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.

That Faith, or Knowledge, for which the Apostle Paul said: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. (Ephesians 4:13)

That Knowledge, or Love, which is God: for he that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love (1 John 4:8).

And that Love, for which the Apostle Paul said: We having the same spirit of faith, according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore speak. (2 Corinthians 4:13)

And that love, that knowledge, that faith, that truth, that witness, that testimony, that logic, that word…they are actions. Our obedience declares these truths. We love Jesus because He first loved us. We seek to know Him so that we might understand the power of His grace. We faithe in Jesus because He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. We bear testimony of that which we have witnessed: the Truth of what He has done in our lives, the lives of those around us, and the lives of those past, revealed to us by that Spirit of Truth, the Paraclete. We do not believe blindly. We do not take 'leaps of faith'. We believe because of the Logic of His ways and of His words, for His ways and His words are the life and light of men (John 1:4).

The Child in Dickens

'No, I hold myself in quiet and silence, like a baby in its mother's arms, like a baby, so I keep myself.' - Psalms 131:2

St. Aurelius Augustine once said that when he himself, as a baby, beat his mother's breast while nursing, it was really the showing of the secret desire rankling in his heart to murder his mother. He believed that a child's sin was determined before he ever acted sinfully, and would go to everlasting damnation if he died before his infant baptism.

The idea, termed original or ancestral sin, was not taken seriously until the Enlightenment, when Martin Luther and John Calvin took the words of St. Augustine to be theological truths. "Original sin," Calvin said, "therefore appears to be a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused through all the parts of the soul, rendering us obnoxious to the divine wrath and producing in us those works which the scripture calls works of sin.' God, therefore, was deemed a terrible deity who would damn innocent children for sins which they had not committed.

This belief developed. Sinfulness was said to be present even after baptism. We were deemed to be sinning all the time, even when we were not conscious of it, and therefore had an excuse to never combat our sin. As Martin Luther said, "Be a sinner and sin on bravely, but have stronger faith and rejoice in Christ, who is the victor of sin, death, and the world. Do not for a moment imagine that this life is the abiding place of justice: sin must be committed. To you it ought to be sufficient that you acknowledge the Lamb that takes away the sins of the world, the sin cannot tear you away from him, even though you commit adultery a hundred times a day and commit as many murders.'

Never mind the words of Jesus: 'Go and sin no more.' 'Be ye perfect, even as thy heavenly father is perfect.' 'Whoever holds to my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home in him.' Of Paul: 'Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.' Of John: 'We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commandments.' Or the fact that, if sin-guilt was inherent in all Life and not just in action, that Jesus Himself could not have been sinless, as He chose to enter the world through a woman's womb.

To the detriment of all this, the beliefs of Calvin and Luther and Augustine were widely accepted in the Protestant and Catholic church, and continue to be today. This belief in the evil propensities of a child was accentuated by the Enlightenment's divorcing of the spiritual and material aspects of life, of Darwin's treatise on the animalism of man, and the amalgamation of both of these in the Industrial Era, which treated the child as sinful animals without character, emotion, or goodness.

In fact, in the world of the early 1800s, children were not even viewed as human beings until the age of seven. Sanitation was so primitive that it was extremely rare for a child to live to seven-years-old, and therefore they would not be intellectually counted as mind-full until they were proved to live through their infancy. They were deemed as being the essence of sinfulness, thus disregarding Jesus' declaration to 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.' In the original Greek, the last part of the sentence literally reads 'the kingdom of God is this [the little child].'

However, there were some people who struck out against the Enlightenment's painting of children. They were a part of the Christian Romantics, who adhered to the belief that the spiritual was inherent in matter, and that whoever welcomed a Child welcomed Jesus and therefore welcomed Elohim. Thus William Wordsworth declared, "Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height." And William Blake expostulated, "When the voices of children are heard on the green And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast And everything else is still.'

The aggression against the Calvin-Luther-Augustine theology was continued with great force by the Victorian author, Charles Dickens. It was he that paved the way for the Victorian's return to the love of the child, the sacredness of the mother, the unit of the father-mother-child, when 'the Child is Father of the Man', as Wordsworth termed it. In his books he wrote about little children who possessed thoughts, feelings, goodness, and the longing for love and acceptance. Pip, Biddy, David Copperfield, Amy Dorrit, Little Nell, Sissy Jupe, Esther Woodhouse…the list goes on. He shows how the innocence of these children may be tainted by the sinfulness of their parents (Hard Times), through the cruelty of schoolmasters (David Copperfield), by the brutality of women (Great Expectations, Bleak House), or the negligence of fathers (Little Dorrit, Old Curiosity Shop). But he did not just make an example through negatives. He showed the true joy that might come when the family is as it should be. When the family models the Holy Family: the father as protector and provider, the mother as comforter and caretaker, the child as the holy fruit of their love.

This is seen in no greater book than in A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge––the epitome of the anti-emotion movement started in the Enlightenment and followed through in Industrialization––comes to realize the sacredness of Love and therefore the fruit of Love, the Child, through the example of the beautiful, lovely family of Tiny Tim. As Dickens said, 'It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.'

And thus Dickens ushered in the true enlightenment of the Victorian era.

O Sacred Head Now Wounded

O sacred Head, now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down,
Now scornfully surrounded with thorns, Thine only crown;
How art thou pale with anguish, with sore abuse and scorn!
How doth Thy visage languish that once was bright as morn!

What language shall I borrow to thank Thee, dearest friend,
For this Thy dying sorrow, Thy pity without end?
O make me Thine forever, and should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never outlive my love to Thee.*

In the days of the Middle Ages, the word 'pity' did not mean the milky, soft emotion that it does now. It came from the word 'piety', and meant a divine compassion shot through with strength and truth, inspired by the Father of all Piety. May we pray that on this day, a day of such gravity for the future of our nation, the Almighty may look on our prayers with his 'pity without end', and renew our nation.

*From 'O Sacred Head Now Wounded' by Bernard of Clairvaux

The Pursuit of Happiness

Last night, hundreds of thousands of people, in surfing their television, found themselves watching one of the most beautiful events that has aired in the last four years: the figure skating championship for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Of all the young ladies competing, though all displayed extraordinary beauty, elegance, and talent in the soaring twirls and spinning twists, two women stood out from among the rest. They were small, slender, beautiful girls, wearing sparkling leotards, with glitter framing their dark eyes and concentration molded upon their olive brows. They came from two different Asian countries, where the skill of their dancing has earned them the name of national celebrities. One, a small, Japanese girl named Mao Asada, dances to a simple, classical piece, and, though her dancing is flawless, the choreography has only a fraction of the fire and energy that sizzles over a foundation of breath-taking elegance when Kim Yu-Na from South Korea takes the ice, dancing to the theme song from James Bond. She wins the competition after the stunning, passionate piece, placing five points above her Japanese rival, and exceeding her own record by two points.

The disinterested onlooker enjoys watching these prodigies as they perform; they rejoice with Yu-Na in her success, and, though they pity Asada for her own great talent being superseded, the performance of Yu-Na has left them so breathless that they know the score is fairly won. No one realizes the enormity of the expectation and the extreme responsibility that has been placed on these young, small shoulders by the people of their country. The competition between them does not begin and end with the Olympics: it buries deep, plunging down the course of a hundred years, through the histories of their people. The two countries, and the two girls who stand as the sacred representations of their cultures, are enemies of old.

In the early twentieth century Japan experienced great economic upheaval when the new emperor, Meiji, rose to power. The Koreans insulted and rejected Emperor Meiji in their trading with Japan, and the emperor, seeing that the samurai army was jobless and posing a threat to his regime, sent them off to conquer and colonize Korea. The Koreans experienced great hardship through their slavery to the Japanese over the course of thirty-five years, until America, after the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II, came into Korea to free the Koreans. The people, government, and economy of Korea were utterly devastated after Japan's autocracy in their country, and, though the Americans helped them back to their feet, Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't finish the course of regeneration. He, on the advice of the general in charge of the mission, deserted the northern precinct of Korea to a socialist Russia, a communist Mao Zedong, and the new Marxist upstart Kim Il Sung to take over the government in that section of the country. Thus ensued the divide of North and South Korea. This history, branded in the minds of the Koreans and the Japanese, lies in the worldview with which Yu-Na and Asada compete. The angst of their countries' expectations is overwhelming in the very force of this age-old feud.

I once observed a young Korean conversing with one of my brothers about how he saw common ground between America and Korea, in that they both had a mutual enemy in Japan because of Pearl Harbor. I was shocked by this idea. In my thoughts, the tragedy of Pearl Harbor was such an incident of the past that the guilt correlating to it has been forgotten, and that this feeling predominates in America. Japan has been wholly forgiven, just as the memory of the enmity of the Revolutionary War between the English and the Americans is rendered obsolete in our present function as allies. In the same way, the Pearl Harbor incident has been wiped away from our consciences, so that now Japan is one of America's greatest allies. But to the young Korean gentleman, Japan––disregarding the fact that the grave offense paid them is one dating to almost a century ago, and that the Japanese have seen great retribution for their tyranny and are a wholly different people––is still a very grim enemy.

Thus I see how the worldviews of the Western and Eastern worlds utterly clash. Christianity, though started in the East, has spread like wildfire, until, coming to the West, it has conquered and revolutionized the European world. Because of Christianity, we are endowed with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that happiness is made by the practice of Christian virtues. The Ten Commandments are instilled in our minds, and this moral creed has given us the ability to rise above all other countries in the corporate wisdom that has led to freedom of religion, liberty of speech, and the high-minded principle of love that has led us to be renowned for our 'short memory': for our forgiveness and for our willingness to give succor to those countries who have not had the influence of the Zoë to give them Life and Light.

In the Eastern world, however, the cultures are steeped in the religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Atheism, all creeds wholly selfish, either in the self-centered pursuit of forgetting self, the megalomaniacal pursuit of a god that sanctions genocide and hate, or the egocentric mind that believes there is no god and therefore that man is the master of his own destiny. Their worlds are old: newness is not welcomed, freedom of thought and independence of belief is denied, and the sins of the fathers are punished in the children. They nurse their hate, for they have never learned the joy that comes from obeying the words:

"Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you."

Photo of Kim Yu-Na

The Tabernacle of the Godhead

O worship Yahweh in the beauty of holiness: tremble before him, all the earth.

- Psalms 96:9

Incense lies heavy in the atmosphere. It swirls through your senses, tickling the nose, tasting the mouth, touching the eyes. It smells sweet, dark, rich.

You open your eyes. The gold glints in the shadows, making your irises sparkle with the glory of its wealth. The mercy seat stands in the womb of the temple, before your eyes, borne by majestic creatures whose colossal wings span out and above in dazzling grandeur, arching over the throne of God. The faces of the creatures are turned to one another. Fire burns in their eyes. They perch upon the Ark. Majesty reigns. Intense spiritual presence wrestles around the gleaming gold overlay. The sweet smell of acacia wood hangs faintly in the atmosphere. To touch is death, for the Cloud Fire prevails sovereign on the throne, above the stone tablets of His Law, the Law that brings life and light. The Law that frees.

You tear yourself away from the throne where visits the God who is Love. You fold back the thick curtain of finely woven linen, richly colored violet-purple, red-purple, embroidered with the great winged creatures who guard the Ark of the Testimony. You leave the Holy of Holies, the Qodesh-Qodesh, and enter the Holy Place.

A gleam in the dusk catches your eye. The glimmer of gold, the scent of acacia wood. You come round the curtain and see, sparkling against the rich tone of the maroon drapery, the table of offering. Beautifully moulded, crowned with bowls and goblets and jars and platters of pure, fair ore. The loaves, baked of fine wheaten flour, crushed-olive oil, and ground incense grace the gold plate.

Opposite the table a shimmering lamp-stand sheds forth light upon the magical surroundings. You marvel in the beauty of the golden form, beaten forth in the loveliness of calyxes and petals, branches crowned in almond blossoms, red-flamed lamps standing in the cups. Light shining in the Temple of the Light of the world.

You become aware of the sun filtering through the opening of the Holy Place, filtering through the screen of fine, twisted linen, tinted blue and purple and scarlet, wrought with skilled needlework. The heavy, soft cloth hangs upon five strong pillars of acacia wood, overlain with gold, socketed with brass. You walk through the doorway, and out into the court.

Splendid color surrounds you. Violet, crimson, and azure draping create the boundaries of the court. The finely twined linen garlands columns of gold, poles of silver, hooks of bronze. A golden lamp, burning continually with pure pounded olive oil, flickers purple shadows on the richly stained curtains. The red light is attended from dusk to dawn by the sons of Abarone, before Yahweh, as an endless edict for all ages of Israel.

Your attention is brought to the middle of the court where stands the altar, by the bleat of animals being lead toward the mizbeach. Built of hollow acacia wood, crowned with four bronze horns at each corner, complemented by bronze pans for carrying away the fatty ashes, bronze shovels, bronze sprinkling basins, bronze hooks, bronze fire pans. The flame from the lamp mirrors in the metal.

You see Abarone and his four sons surrounding the altar. Awe strikes you at the splendor of their raiment in the light of the sun, the fire of the lamp. Robes and embroidered tunics adorn them, giving dignity and magnificence to their strong, tall frames, the color glistening in their brown eyes. A turban crowns each regal head, covering their brown locks. A flower of pure gold, engraved with the words Qodesh Yahweh is attached to a violet-purple cord, which hangs from the winding cloths of the turban. The clothes are made of dyed linen to match the curtains surrounding them, hemmed with pomegranates and golden bells which tinkle at all times, so the sweet sound foreruns their entrance into the Holy of Holies. Below their thick, long beards rest the ephod and the breastplate, spun of violet linen, swung with gold chains of rosettes and purple cords. Two cornelians, engraved with the twelve names of the Princes of Israel, hang in gold settings upon the straps of the ephod. The crimson-violet linen is set with twelve rare stones to represent the names of the Tribes, glinting with all the colors of the rainbow that surrounds the heavenly throne of God.

The Urim and the Thummim adorn the breastplate over his heart, thus giving Abarone the judgment of Israel to bear, in the presence of Yahweh, forever. In the holy flower upon his brow he carries the shortcomings of the things consecrated by the people of Israel, to make them satisfactory to Elohim. Avarone bears the remembrance of the names of Israel's sons upon his shoulders before Adonai. Avarone supports the chosen people of El Shaddai upon his heart, always. Avarone is the Priest of Jehovah.

You hear the bleats of lambs and goats, the coo of doves and pigeons, echo through the court. You see the white wool and grey skin, the white feathers and the grey, burn upon the altar, sending up a pleasing aroma to the Godhead. Their blood is poured around the altar, their life spilled out for the souls of humanity, so that they might possess Life Eternal. The garments of Abarone and his sons are sprinkled with the blood, anointing oil, incense. They are purified. Israel is purified.

You step outside the court, through the lovely linen drapery, and see God's creation all around you. Green grass. Blue sky. Golden sun. A sweet wind blowing through the trees. You worship Elohim, the God Who Is.

Thine, O Adonai, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine, thine is the kingdom, O Jehovah, and thou art exalted as King above all.

- 1 Chronicles 29:11

The Medieval and The Post-Modern

'Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.'

~C.S. Lewis

'Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.'

~C.S. Lewis

Medieval World-View

The medieval man believed that the world was set up in a way that inverted our natural experience. He believed that the universe was a chain or set of graded planes, the top of which was the highest Heaven, in which God dwelt in timeless, undeviating unity.

The second link of the chain was the high angels, gradually grading down in an intricate theology of numbers to the lower angels, who dwelt in the realm of Aether. The Aether was described as the means through which God communicated with the Earth. It consisted of all living intelligence beyond the moon. Rather than being Space, as we term it today, the Aether was a dazzling world of light, filled to overflowing with miraculous planets, stars, and spiritual beings. The medieval man believed the darkness with which we see it was only a shadow cast by the earth in the light of the moon, and that, in reality, outside the shadow, it was a sphere of glorious light. Aether and the high Heaven were at the top of the chain, and the medieval man praised them for their very unchangeable quality, their fixedness.

Below the moon there came Air, through which the Aether communicated with the Earth. The Air, in the medieval mind, was directly influenced by the warfare that went on in the Aether and the highest Heaven. Thus, birth, death, sickness, health, were all contributed to events taking place in the spiritual realm. Therefore doctors would blame sicknesses on what they named 'Influence', which, in the Italian, is 'Influenza.' Thus the beginning of the term.

Below the Air there came the Earth, on which Man, with his supposedly disgusting inconstancy and fickle purpose, dwelt. Man and Earth were distorted mirrors of the Heavenly realm. Thus the medieval man's fetish with creating as much beauty on Earth as possible, in order that he might come closest to the vast glory above the moon; thus the medieval man's staunch belief in the spiritual properties of the stuff of Earth, and his loyalty to magic-lore. For where the Astrology of the planets and the Aether forced upon man a changeless Fate, Magic was developed as a means to cast off the icy clutches of serendipity.

Beneath Man came the Animal world, which the medieval man viewed as a grotesque shadow of himself, through which he could learn spiritual lessons. For example, the ant was a lesson for the sluggard, the rule of the queen bee a lesson for the monarch.

Lower than the Animal was the Plant, filled with life and yet inanimate.

And below the Plant, at the very outskirts of the medieval world-view, lay Hell and the daemonic world, as far away from God as was possible in the intricate planing of the spheres.

Post-Modern Worldview

Interestingly, the post-modern man has a fully different view of the world. In fact, it is inverted. Where the medieval man believed in a world of utter order, absolute truth, the post-modern man believes there is no truth, and that each person's absolute is made up only of his mysterious experiences. Rather than God being at the center of the universe, with the sinful Earth being at the very outskirts of the Heavenly Realm, the post-modern man believes that the sinful world is the center of the universe.

As time goes by, the post-modern worldview becomes more and more obsessed with what to the medieval man was the low rung on the ladder: the Plant. Thus, the Green movement. The post-modern man has intellectually negated the possibility of either a Hell or a Heaven, and, instead, has endowed the realms of Plant, Animal, and Air with a strange, god-like authority which must control the actions of Man.

On the next link of the post-modern chain is Man, which, with the Animal as his god, is seeking to become more and more like an Animal himself. Just as the medieval man sought to become like his Creator, so the post-modern man seeks to become like his supposed predecessor, the Animal. Thus, the post-modern man has negated meaning in the universe. There is no spiritual realm, there is no truth, there is no creativity, there is no intelligence except to prove intelligence non-existent, for the Animal is not in the image of the Divine, the Animal has no reason or emotion, the Animal has no creativity, the Animal has no intelligence. With all divine impartation, with all sub-creational responsibility, with all wisdom gutted, the only thing left for the post-modern man is his gut appetite. His chosen life is one of wandering purposefulness, constant changeableness, the very thing the medieval man detested as a part of the Fallen realm.

Below Man is what the post-modern man terms Space. It is a domain of nothingness. Even the stars, the planets, and the miraculous lights that inhabit the world take a background view to the blackness that was only a shadow hiding glory in the medieval man's mind. The post-modern man believes in no beauty, no glory, no virtue. He believes only in a sadist mentality… the savage instinct for survival.

Summary

So, we see that the medieval man, embracing his God-given desire for the Kingdom of the Spirit, did everything he could to minimize his Fallenness by enveloping himself in the realm of Glory. The post-modern man of today, by completing the negation of the Dark Ages begun in the Renaissance, has minimized the spiritual to the utmost degree, in order to more wholly embrace the Animal in the Flesh.

The Blessings of Yahweh Sabaoth

It is El Shaddai who blesses you…

blessings of heaven above…

blessings of the deep lying below…

blessings of the breasts and womb…

blessings of the grain…

and flowers…

blessings of the eternal mountains…

bounty of the everlasting hills…

may they descend on Joseph's head, on the crown of the one dedicated from among his brothers.

Genesis 49:25-29

Thoughts on the Euangelios

The incarnation shocked humanity. Never before in the history of religion had divinity shrunk to infancy. The magic of the event terrified the world. The God of the universe who created woman, impregnated a common peasant girl and grew from embryo to infant in the womb that He had molded with His own hands. The girl who carried Yahweh in her belly, who was scoffed and mocked by the world of the time and treated as a sinner and outcast, journeyed to Jerusalem with her faithful husband, and, being refused even by the country inn, was forced to birth the Son of God underground. 'In the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the earth,' Chesterton states. The Voice of Elohim became the most vulnerable creature in our world––a new-born baby, crying in the arms of a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl, whose tiny arms couldn't reach up to touch the noses of the cattle that He had spoken into existence. Yahweh came to earth, and suddenly the family that God had instituted in the beginning was turned upside down, for the mother and father became the children of their Son, and their son was their Father and Creator. And they called His name Jesus.

Jesus' life was hounded from the beginning. After being anointed by the Magi, confirmed by Anna and Simeon, praised by the angels, and worshipped by the shepherds, Joseph, following the command of God, the father of his adopted child, escaped to Egypt with the precious mother and baby to escape Herod's wrath. The age-old war of the demons against children asserted itself once more in a mad effort to kill the Child, but was thwarted by a simple carpenter's faithfulness to God.

Jesus grew up, and threw off the stagnant and sinful customs of the time. Though He was the most intelligent and promising students in the educational system, and wanted as a disciple by the leading rabbis of the day, He rejected the complacency and legalism of the priests and stayed at home to learn the trade of a simple carpenter until His time came. And then the Son of God asserted Himself.

He gathered the outcasts to Himself. He insulted the leading figures of the day. He ransacked the false religion pervading the Temple. He forgave the sins of people who faithed in His Father. He called Himself the ancestor of Abraham. He healed the sick. He outsmarted the scribes. He was faithful to His Father. He loved purely. He gave freely. He professed to be the Son of God. He spoke words of truth that were shocking to the darkness of that time, and yet conquered the barbarian sinfulness of the time, and have forever resurrected throughout history, and are still living and speaking today. For they are words of universal and timeless truth. The world will try to take some of Him and leave the rest, but He was the Man who encompassed all Truth, all Holiness, all Power, all Righteousness, all Faithfulness, all Love.

There have been many philosophers in the history of this world, but the smarter they were the more they knew that they were not a god. Yet Jesus spoke words of intelligence and verity, and He proclaimed Himself to be God. He was a Man directly distinct from the sophists and philosophers of His time, a Man who had nothing to do with the wild and distorted mythologies and hero-worship of the time. And yet He complemented both sides. He was a philosopher, He was a hero, His life was a Story, but a true one. He vanquished the lies of the World, and rose up as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

His creed spread like wildfire throughout the world, and the only people groups that would have none of Him were the Middle-Eastern Muslims and the Hindus and Buddhists of Asia. And these are the two countries that are living examples of stagnancy. The West has blossomed, grown, died, and resurrected as the Flower of Christendom, but Asia and the Middle-East are too old to die.

In fact, the modern example of the ancient war between mythology and philosophy are the creeds of Asia. Their worship is why Asia is infirm, stale, and oppressed, whereas the West is equally as historical, but has experienced the resurrection of life that is following Christ. For Christianity is the only religion that is the key which fits the questions of this world. It is Life, and it is like life. It embraces life when Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Fatalism, Optimism, Mythology, and Atheism all refuse to be intellectually honest and choose to strive to negate certain aspects of life in order to hold on to their mistaken ideals. Christianity bridges all these religions because it is a story and it is a true story. It is the freedom that comes from the free-will which is the essence of a story, the truth which is the longing of our intellects, and the divine supremacy of God which satisfies the yearning in our soul to know our Creator.

Islam, too, is a stagnant religion. Islam and Christianity are similar in the fact that they are the only monotheistic religions stemming from Abraham, but in very little else. For where Islam worships a solitary and therefore self-centered and uncharitable god, without even the ability to love because he is lonely, Christianity worships the Triune God. He is the God that is the embodiment of the Family. He is the essence of power, and yet is wholly selfless because the Son, the Father, and the Holy Ghost are forever loving each other and the world in Sacred Communion.

For just as the mythology and philosophy in Asia is too tolerant to die, and the selfishness and hate of Islam is too bitter to die, Christianity is continually experiencing rebirth. Over and over again, the Faith has been so diluted as to die, but it has always risen again in new power at the pivotal moment. We worship the God who rose from the grave, and who has given us the power which raised Jesus Christ from the dead.

El Shaddai

'It is El Shaddai who blesses you:

blessings of heaven above,

blessings of the deep lying below,

blessings of the breasts and womb,

blessings of the grain and flowers,

blessings of the eternal mountains,

bounty of the everlasting hills––

may they descend on Joseph's head,

on the crown of the one dedicated from among his brothers.' - Genesis 49:25-26

The bottle changed society.  

Billy Sunday raved at the increase of alcoholism in the early 20th century.  He toured throughout the nation, he preached from every pulpit and stage available, he published in every newspaper, he proclaimed his beliefs, and ultimately succeeded in stopping alcoholism for a season.  And yet there was no opposition when 1950 began, and another sort of bottle came to the forefront.

Bottle-feeding had been in some fashion seen since the Middle Ages.  It was not very common.  The limited and unsterile supplies available made bottle-feeding a very arduous task, causing many babies' deaths from the unclean effects of horn bottles and dried cow teats.  For this very reason the practice was unpopular.  Even when the rubber nipple was invented in the mid 19th century, the contraption was hardly used because of the pungent smell of the black India rubber.  

It was not until the 1950s, when Pyrex and soft rubber were first introduced, that Dr. Spock published his famous manual on baby and child care, and, in an instant, 80% of all women across the US had embraced the progressive model––bottle-feeding.  The fad was quite in keeping with the times.  Between processed cheeses, new inflammatory polyester combinations for fabrics, canned and powdered foods, preservatives to give food a longer shelf-life, immunizations, birth-control, and Caeserean Sections, the '50s were a time of great modernization.  How is it that, though every one of these fads have been proved as extremely unhealthy and risky life-style choices, bottle-feeding has not been paired with them?

Today it is known that breastmilk holds every nutritional ingredient that a baby needs for optimal growth.  It is the perfect temperature, it is clean, and it is extremely beneficial for the mother.  When a mother breastfeeds her baby she is protected from osteoporosis, breast cancer, and ovarian cancers.  It releases hormones that reduce stress, allows her to bond with her baby, produces estrogen, and gives her femininity and gentleness.  It is even better for her baby.  Breastmilk jump-starts a baby's immune system, builds strong bones, reduces the risk of developing diabetes, prevents food allergies, protects against heart-disease, cancer, obesity, asthma, unhealthy teeth, Multiple Sclerosis, ear infections, and even weak kissing ability.  Breastfed infants have higher IQs than bottle-fed infants and they grow up to be more independent and capable.  Most importantly, breast-feeding creates a child that not only holds an intense bond with his mother, but easily bonds with other people and is more capable of loving.

Yet the majority of new mothers are told to nurse their babies for a couple weeks and then give them a contraption made of Pyrex, plastic, and rubber.  To put in their babies' new and fresh bodies a formula that is not only extremely expensive, but is made up of additives, preservatives, chemicals that are harmful to the baby's health, and vitamins and minerals that the baby is not even capable of digesting.  The great health and spiritual benefits of the natural, divine way of baby growth is completely overlooked.

Thus we see, in the '50s, the start of a new family model that had never been known before.  Safe sex was the safe thing.  The human race was discouraged from bearing too much new life.  The fruit of the womb, the procreation of souls, was suppressed through the newly legalized birth-control, forgetting the fact that the pill aborts the sperm and egg after they have joined together to create the human embryo, is catastrophic for the health of the woman, and is the cause of many defects in children today.  The government became more influential, and, in their widened power, decided to take on more and more of a child's development, cheating the mother and father out of their God-given responsibilities.  Mothers were encouraged, if they were so selfish as to bear a child, to let the doctors get the baby out of her through a surgical procedure that would not only be extremely unhealthy for her and the baby, but would cheat her out of the toil and labor that is the birth of true womanhood and spiritual maturity.  The mother was supposed to have only one month in which to bond with her baby, and then she must put her baby on the bottle, re-enter the work-force, and give her job to an impartial worker in a day-care.  At four-years-old the child would be sent off to pre-school, and for twenty thousand, one hundred sixty hours of the rest of their childhood, the mother's responsibility would be taken off her hands and the government would indoctrinate her child in the way that they pleased.

This was the new model of family.  Even the terms for children were changed, and the words 'kid' and 'teenager' became widely used.  Children, not experiencing any of the divine bonding instruments in infancy, were raised in schools with a sterile atmosphere, and soon found themselves to be more influenced by their peers and teachers than by their parents and siblings.  At thirteen, the child began to act strangely.  They rebelled against their parents.  They flocked with their friends from school.  They adopted all sorts of habits that were extremely unhealthy psychologically and physically.  

Doctors and psychologists pronounced this a natural phenomena, forgetting the fact that for thousands of years the 'teenager' psyche had never even been heard of––that the term 'teenager' had been non-existent till very recent years.  In every culture of ancient times, from the East to the West, the child became an adult at twelve and thirteen, the time when, scientifically, the brain changes, the child's learning fashion takes on the form of an adult's, sexual maturation begins, and they believe the world-view that, according to statistics, they will die believing.  Rebellion had been scathingly rejected in these cultures.  In ancient Judaism it was a sin punishable by stoning.  Yet these facts were forgotten, and parents were, instead, told to let their children 'go their own path.'  Yet in third-world countries, where these medical habits were mostly unheard of, children from thirteen to nineteen were the best workers, the best helpers, and were generally close to their parents, grandparents, and siblings.

The wealth of the nation was such that parents, after having been told to step out of their children's way, were expected to send their children to college.  It was a very new phenomenon.  Never before had both women and men received such an education.  They were shipped off to universities where socialist, communist professors taught them to believe all the doctrines their fathers had spilled blood to purge from the world in the last decade, and in those government institutions sins were introduced through the close association of their peers that had formerly been only known in the very darkest, most secret of places.

And thus the '60s ensued.  We have seen what the '60s brought forth, when the hippies reigned, with their free sex and free drugs that were supposed to bring peace to the world, and yet brought nothing but riots and sexually transmitted diseases.  We see and taste the fruit in our leaders, our government, and our culture.  We know that our families are broken, that our government is weak and oppressive, that our education is ungodly, that the Church has melded in with the World, that every new generation becomes more and more engulfed in sin, and that we have accepted these things as the norm.  Yet God would have us taste and see that His ways are good––He would have us know life, and know it more abundantly.  He is El Shaddai, which, in Hebrew, means the God of the Breast.

Photo by Ann Geddes

On the Nature of Faërie

'Western culture as a whole has grown so rationalistic that it is difficult to even get your head around its influence.  If you look back at the time in which the Old Testament (and even the New) was written, the world was seen as a place of mythological forces where everything from disease to wealth and success was seen as a personal statement about one's relationship to God (or the gods).  We in Western Christianity have taken our faith out of its natural context of a spiritual and mystical universe into one of rational science.  The transition is uneasy to say the least.' - Benjamin Wolaver

'My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery.  I generally learnt it from a nurse; that is, from the solemn and star-appointed priestess at once of democracy and tradition.  The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.  They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things.  They are not fantasies; compared with them other things are fantastic.' - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

'The more I think about Scripture, the more "implausible" our cosmic story seems.  Two magic trees, a flooded world, the Promised Land, ten ludicrous plagues, the fire on Sinai, the voice of God, the Holy of Holies, power-wielding prophets, the God Man, twelve apostles for twelve tribes, a global mission, a villainous "Man of Lawlessness", a final battle, a future resurrection.  If you think about it, it seems pretty outrageous…which is why it's so brilliant.' - Benjamin Wolaver