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August: Acedia and Hope and Organic Growing

By D.Thomas

“Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both sides of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing,” [EZEKIEL 47:12].

June may be a month of hope, July of waiting; August can, alas, be of acedia.

In this season of the right wing GOP’s assault on reproductive rights and environmental protections, with Russia still attacking Ukraine, and new record heat buckling roads and threatening the integrity of steel bridges slowing and stopping traffic in London, England– it has been hard to know what to write about, what organizations to send emergency aid money to, what to hope, or what to hope for “this side of heaven.”

I found my first glimmer in the tiny green leaf tips that began to poke through some dead-looking branches on a mulberry tree in the back yard.

She had sprung up, a “volunteer” beside the house. Very very close to the house. Much too close to old basement foundation, where concrete walls were slipping a little bit apart here at the surface, near to where the back basement or fruit cellar walls were a little damp-stained, the whitewash curling away, and where there was at least one little chink to daylight. And water pipes, to the outdoor spigots and the plumbing of the house: mulberry trees will, I read, seek water anywhere, will find weaknesses in pipes, and leaks; she couldn’t stay there.

I love mulberries. I would love to have a mulberry tree feeding me and birds and bees and whomever would come dine; the wildflower patch out back is meant to be shelter, and to be food for pollinators and neighborhood herbivores and the eaters of bugs, and the soil itself. If I tried to move her, could she survive?

Her tap root– big as my wrist– turned like a giant pipe elbow ninety degrees to go under the sidewalk– going back far enough to bring a root bundle to transplant would require tearing up concrete and– more than I have equipment or muscle or mind for. I felt strongly that I had to do this now– the spirit (or Spirit?) was on me, and the tree, to whom I explained my plan, told me her name, and helped me, even though I had to saw her off at the root. I managed to move a decent boll from which her three boughs or trunks and a fourth, low, branch grew, some root, but not nearly as much as I hoped.

She was all green when I put her in her new ground on June 30, but over the next week she went brown, and soon looked like a dead tree. But I knew that what was happening invisibly, underground, was what mattered. I prayed that she’d dig in and live, watered and waited.

I do not have a garden per say, but a patch or “wildlife corridor” where there used to be a hemlock hedge, which snows had broken down and which had been removed. I bought a pack of zone-appropriate wild flower seeds last year and scattered them prodigiously, some to grow, some to feed the chipmunks. This summer have sprung sturdy, velvety, big, gorgeous Gloriosa Daisies and black-eyed Susans, and a crop of wonderful evening primroses which have grown six and seven feet high as if they imagine they are cornstalks.

I began to think that maybe I should try some vegetables, next year, Three Sisters and other companion combinations, as a vote for planet earth, our mother. I joined Facebook groups on native plants and organic gardening to start learning. Pictures from gardens, from windowsills and rooftops to small farms and greenhouses, posted from around the world– USA, Switzerland and Norway, England, Pakistan,New Zealand– and I have felt hope swell: there are people in all hemispheres restoring land and green life, bringing life back to the soil.

Hope: not for this nation at the moment, not for our civilization as we know it or see it in commercials, but– for Nature, Life. Humanity, if humans return to God’s and Nature’s ways and remembers how to participate, to return, to give thanks and to share and not only take.

Modern man has managed to destroy and kill a lot of soil.

Our industrial and war wastes and chemicals have ruined dirt.

Drinking Water Hazards by John Cary Stewart in 1990 tells how dumping and industrial and farm wastes have poisoned our waterways and our drinking water, how by 1989 the EPA had a National Priority List of toxic water sites to clean up, and “most severe” Superfund sites numbered over 1,160. Cancers and leukemias come with toxic pollution, and reproductive systems and fetal development have been shown to be affected: researchers found over 100 halogenated hydrocarbons and plastic compounds in human newborns’ umbilical cords, in levels even higher than those found in their mothers’ bloodstreams– PCBs and benzine, carbon tetrachloride– chemical names I ran across often in the studies of the dangers of hydraulic fracturing for cheap easy natural gas.

I’ve read about the air and water. I started Paul Bogard’s The Ground Beneath Us, but the thought of how we were paving, building on and digging under, blasting and stripping and “developing” the land, turning, thousands of feet out and deep, the very soil, which is made up of millions of living species and organisms, into dead clay or dirt with nothing living in it, was too depressing. If we ruin the ground, what is there? The more I learn of the wondrous workings and communications of the vegetable world, the more sad I am about our fallen state.

The Organic Gardening group raised my hopes and stirred my own compost heap of imagination, and at the Goodwill store I saw and bought The Basic Book Of Organic Gardening edited by Robert Rodale in 1971, who was declaring then the urgency of returning to organic– natural— farm and garden practices to feed and restore and maybe save the planet earth from our chemical and toxic ways. And in 1971 he was quoting the “Father of the Organic Growing movement” Sir Albert Howard, who in 1940 was writing warnings of the dangers in the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and insecticides.

My hope wavered, a little. None of the information about the dangers of our modern methods is brand-new, even if the internet makes it seem so. But EPA regulations are being rolled back, the Right– that nomiker is so hard to use! The far right, alt right, white trumpy right, Big Money right– wants its oil and fracked gas, wants its urban development, wants chemicals to scent the household air and the laundry for weeks, wants the cheap grocery items and the cancer drugs to sell, wants the money…

Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Ag– who is this, how is this, how can these Lobbies be? To what end, if the chemicals are killing us, like crack and heroin and meth, fentanyl and Oxy are killing.

My ever-naive, in despite, imagination asks, Why are there even artificial fertilizers? Don’t dead plants and waste from birds and rabbits and horses and cows and critters fertilize? Insecticides– don’t birds and bats and other bugs eat the insects? In deserts, in stricken places where the people are starving, humane science and technology would do well to step in– but the storing and transporting industries could also provide food and water directly; the Heifer Projects gives animals, seeds, birds which provide foods and materials for more foods and incomes for improvements of situations: helping others in fact works…

But the Big Ag farms– hundreds or thousands of acres growing single crops to mass market– using the chemicals which alter the plants themselves, spray by spray kills the organisms living in the soil and replaces the organic matter until only the crops raised with artificial aid will grow, and the insecticides that poison everything poisons the life forms who would eat the unwanted insects, kills the bees and butterflies that pollinate our plants. Vicious, deadly cycles thus begin– the developers and sellers of the chemicals making the chemicals necessary to the buyers and growers, meaning there is a lot of Money in it, and Power– if you own the chemical-making factories or the giant farms which have so taken over that only one per cent of the US population farms, yet one-hundred per cent of the world population must eat.

Terrorists may buy fertilizers and use the chemicals for bombs.

Timothy McVeigh used fertilizer and fuel to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995.

This seems a key to the Who and Why; my theory is:

The Military-Industrial Complex: the manufacturers with government and military contracts, who lobby and run much of this American Capitalist-Imperialist system.

In WWI, nitrogen was used in making explosives, and after the war was marketed (advertised, pushed) as fertilizer, because crops need nitrogen. Before it was Roundup which gets sprayed around our yards, the same was the Agent Orange defoliator used by America in the Vietnam War.The fertilizers– like the insecticides and weed-killers, worked amazingly quickly and well, and indeed European fields were devastated by the battles, the trenches, and help and hurry was needed for basic bread, after the Great War, but these are immediate and short-term treatments, unhealthy to all links of the food chain and threads of the feeding web, from algae to us.

We have arrived at Greed: each land crisis into which wealthy businessmen have introduced equipment and materials which poorer small farmers could not afford, forcing them to sell the land which they purchased or have banks foreclose on , has sent more people into the cities to serve as a supply of cheap labor in the factories and sweatshops, and turned them into consumers of food from supermarkets (wrapped in plastic, on Styrofoam) from growers of food. The rich grow richer at the expense of the rest.

“Then God said, ‘I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it.They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that that move on the ground– everything that has the breath of life in it– I give every green plant for food,” [GENESIS 1:29-30].

Our culture has made us sick, and hospital supplies such as sterile plastics are provided by petroleum concerns, drugs by multi-national pharmaceutical corporations who offer us vitamin supplements to replace what foods no longer contains in the amounts they once did (while growth and sex hormones have been fed to the cows and pigs and chickens bought in grocery stores since the ’50s).

You will say, we can’t all be farmers; everyone in the cities can’t grow their own food, and by now we need the cities, and what have you even eaten that you’ve grown, don’t you, also, get it at the store? Yes– and I know, and I am too easily, too often discouraged by it all. Humans have known, but done little. Change is possible– but not profitable enough for those in control, or comfortable. Many of us live comfortably– between rounds of treatment for our diseases…

And here is my worst and probably main or most dangerous sin: Acedia.

This is a spiritual despondency and enervation, self-disgust and apathy, sloth and depression, a temptation and a sin.

In the fourth century, it was one of the Eight Deadly Sins: the desert monk Evagrius of Pontius listed gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, vainglory, pride, and acedia, which he felt was perhaps the most dangerous of all. This was easily true to the Brothers and Sisters who were living ascetic lives in deserts and waste places as hermits or small communities, and while it has been knocked off the common “Deadly Sin” list, it remains. It pervades. It is what makes some of us know that something can be done, but we are not leaders or rich and can’t do it, can’t do enough to change anything or help anything.

Acedia tells me that it’s probably too late, humans won’t change until after the disasters when none of their known lives are possible and everyone will have to gather or hunt or grow to survive again. Then, it’ll like be like Mad Max unless God comes. When Jesus comes on His white horse…

Acedia, that sort of bad-taste-in-the-mouth disgust and hopelessness makes us dislike ourselves and others, bored to death alone, unhappy and dissatisfied with community, with work, with life and everything– this is the sin that can lead to suicide, unless you just don’t give a crap enough. Or to just doing nothing, because nothing is worth it.

Doing nothing for the glory of God; doing nothing through the strength of God within. Smothering Holy Spirit, losing connection with Holy Spirit– and bread and Living Water, becoming as dead as the clayey dirt that has no living worms or bacteria, roots or rhizomes in it, dead as the ground under Manhatttan or post-War London.

This is a temptation. This is the Demon that knows me best.

Acedia is the opposite of Hope, and the sin that allows the robber barons to snatch up, force out, exploit, poison and oppress others and ourselves, the land and animals, indigenous peoples and women generation after generation, the world over.

It may be the Sin that has reared its head again, after centuries of exploration and progress and education– look at how plastic water bottles, disposable goods and wrappers and our industrial waste has trashed our planet in less than a hundred years; even ten years ago you could get things in glass bottles and jars: does anyone remember powder detergents (no plastic jugs) and returning bottles or cans for the 5 cent deposit? Isn’t this tossing of everything into oceans a sign of not-caring?

Is this since the development of nuclear bombs? Ever since we’ve known that we can destroy the planet fourteen times over with our stockpiled nukes, we have been all about disposable diapers and razors– nothing needs to last anymore, because our military likes to use its best toys somewhere, eventually. The costs of those warheads and missiles and delivery systems could irrigate, seed, feed, clothe, house, and educate the population of the world, probably fourteen times over.

But we have tanks and pits full of radioactive waste; every stage of development, testing and transporting of nuclear weapons has created dangerous waste. Storage facilities leak into groundwater and the ground– it is hard to be hopeful about much of anything. It is very hard not to fall to that “noonday demon” as Evagrius called it, to give up even on God.

Which is exactly what the Devil, the enemy wants.

But the international members of the Organic Gardening group page on Facebook have been posting pictures of their plots and farms, bees and Monarch caterpillars, the summer’s produce, for some the first ever– oh the delight and joy of the first-ever watermelons, first -time harvests of carrots, potatoes, giant tomatoes, gorgeous leaves and blossoms, rainbows of flowers and green, and green, like acres of paradise, and jardiniers of Vrindavana, where Sri Krsna dwells and eats His lunch with His friends, a land spiritual to those who are not world- or illusion-conditioned, and only material to those who are spiritually blind.

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb…On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations,” [REVELATION 22:1-2].

The mulberry tree was all brown on July 1, her leaves had died– as they would have in the fall. I did not expect to know until next year if she had made it, and only thought to hope if she stood over winter.

But, on July 25, I saw a sprinkling of green on the low branch, and I was overjoyed: it seemed a miracle! Two days later, some tiny tips of green on one higher branch showed, and I almost cried with happiness. There have been more, two or three, now four more, and the leaves are spread over her– still small, but unfurling and bursting and bright green, and this, this “God-sighting” as we’d say at Vacation Bible School, delights my heart. This delight is a stem for joy, the kind that acedia may try to poison, may oppress, but, I pray, will not overcome.

“Be glad, earth and sky! Tell the nations that the Lord is king.

Roar, sea, and every creature in you; be glad, fields, and everything in you!

The trees in the woods will shout for joy when the Lord comes to rule the earth,” [1 CHRONICLES 16: 31-33].

Spiritus Sanctos

By D.Thomas

“He… showed them his hands and His feet. They still could not believe , they were so full of joy and wonder… Then He said to them, ‘These are the very things I told you about while I was still with you; everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the writings of the prophets, and the Psalms had to come true.’ Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, ‘This is what is written: ‘The Messiah must suffer and must rise from death three days later, and in His name the message about repentance and the forgiveness of sins must be preached to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And I myself will send upon you what my Father has promised. But you must wait in the city until the power from above comes upon you,’ “ [LUKE 24:40, 44-49].

The disciples themselves did not get it until they “got”– received— the Spirit.

Luke ends his Gospel three verses later, as Jesus walks with the disciples to Bethany and then ascends “as into” it says, heaven. Luke opens his second book, the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, with that same scene (reminding us that “rising” “up to” the clouds or heaven is metaphorical, not physical, by having two angels appear then and asking them why they are gawking up into the sky like that. [ACTS 1:10-11]):

“Dear Theophilus: In my first book I wrote about all the things that Jesus did and taught from the time he began his work until the day he was taken up to heaven. Before he was taken up, he gave instructions by the power of the Holy Spirit to the ones he had chosen as his apostles. For forty days after his death he appeared to them many times in ways that proved beyond doubt that He was alive. They saw Him, and He talked with them about the Kingdom of God. And when they came together, he gave them this order: ‘Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift I told you about, the gift my Father promised. John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit;” [ACTS 1: 1-5].

We are not sure of who Luke was– a Greek convert? a Syrian? from Antioch? Paul names him in several of his letters as his companion and refers to him as a physician; he was if nothing else a scholar and writer, and his authorship was accepted in the Muratorian Canon, a fragment of manuscript from 170 or 180 C.E. which lists New Testament writings accepted as scripturally authoritative; the fragment is written in Latin and was discovered by Lodovico Antonio Muratori in 1740.

This means that within two hundred years of the writings of testimonies, letters from apostles, and of Jesus’ life and death, manuscript copies, of which there were thousands, were collected and canonized.

They were codexes, written in Koine Greek, the language common in the Hellenistic, Roman world: papyrus bound like books, rather than stuck together in scrolls; they were written to be carried around, read out loud, recopied and shared as the apostles, witnesses, converts, Jewish and Gentiles, moved about the cites, villages, ports, markets, dusty roads, and stony islands around the Mediterranean Sea.

Questioning their truth is one thing, but I do not know why there is difficulty believing that John (which is the English version of a name which in French could be Jean and in Russian Ivan and in German, Johann), wrote the Gospel John , or the disciple Matthew/Levi, with his students and note-taking scribes, wrote Matthew, or Peter (Simon, Cephus, Pierre in the French, or Pytor ) the Letters from him. There is far less evidence of a man named Plato, or an actual Socrates who wrote nothing but was the philosopher character in Plato’s Dialogues.

I did go through the common doubt and distrust of the accuracy of translation and copy and transmission, was suspicious of the hands of humans in it, pulling the words we have to read the 20th and 21st centuries farther and further from the original texts and the spoken words of witnesses, and of Jesus himself, warping the Common Era Gospels and Epistles, let alone the ancient “Old Testament” literature and “history”. My biggest leap of faith was deciding to accept the Book along with Jesus, because Jesus quoted the Hebrew scriptures and taught his followers how to understand it– somehow the Psalms and Prophets were true to Him; I’d accept that, start there, and try to quiet the So-Smart arguments of my own head.

As I began to read through books, verses and chapters in both Testaments, I found lines, and passages leaping out at me that I had missed in my reading-to-disprove readings. Symbols, signs, references, allusions, all lit up and began to connect, braid together into a language of scripture which revealed lines that held it together, so that it could be the God revealed by Jesus saying “Love,” and the God of Jacob who “hated” nice, helpful, simple hairy Esau who traded his birthright for a bowl of food (Jesus, recall, fasted for forty days and was tempted by the devil, first of all to make himself some food).

Springs of water, living water, water into wine and wine as blood and blood as covenant, The Lamb of God, the Ram that replaced Isaac at the altar when Abraham was ready to go through with the sacrifice, the Passover Lamb, the firstborn of everyone including Pharaoh, and Jesus the Firstborn of God sacrificed, sacrificing; angelic pronouncements and miraculous births– of Isaac, of Sampson and Samuel, of John the Baptist in addition to Jesus– these run through the whole collection of books, weaving them into one.

The only one? It does not say so. I don’t think so. But, Truth. But, Word of God, yes, I do think. Humans tried to find their human words to describe or relate what the Spirit of the LORD spoke to them or showed them in their dreams and visions– but every artist can relate to the difficulty of translating the wonderful vision or concept into material– actual notes on scores, actual lines or strokes of pigment on a surface, actual words that mean something, out loud of on paper, papyrus, wax, clay, a computer screen.

Written languages came late to humanity. Pictures have been made for eons– the cave paintings in Europe are about 30,000 years old, and writing about 6,000 years ago. Marks made in clay in Mesopotamia, developed into cuneiform, the beginnings of records– of numbers of concrete, particular things (goats, bread loaves, wine casks), then pictures of things to differentiate kinds and relations, and by the eighth century B.C.E., inscriptions were engraved on vessels and drinking cups. , and scribes began to write down the stories, the songs, the poems, the legends and dramas and tales that their cultures had been telling since their beginnings.

According to Matthew Battles in Palimpsest: The History of the Written Word, scribes began to write grammatically in their languages to record the dramas and songs and told tales, the myths and origin stories told from their beginnings. They were trained, educated slaves or free secretaries, copyists, rather than inventors or poets themselves.

The Hebrew scribes who copied the Torah scrolls, and the Prophets and Psalms, were serving the LORD, God ALMIGHTY, Whose Name could not be pronounced whom they feared and worshiped; they would have been extraordilarily careful to copy sacred text exactly and precisely, and, later, to translate with prayerful care, every dot and tittle, for the words that came from the LORD were sacred and holy and had power.

The prophet Jeremiah had his scribe Baruch and chapter 36 of the prophet tells how the LORD spoke to Jeremiah and told him to dictate it to Baruch to write on a scroll; Baruch read it aloud because Jeremiah was banned from the Temple just then– ” ‘Tell us, now, how did you come to write all this?’…Baruch answered, ‘Jeremiah dictated every word of it to me, and I wrote it down in ink on this scroll,'” [JER. 36:17-18], and then he read it to the king; the king Jehoiakim tore it up and threw it into the fire. The LORD told Jeremiah to dictate His message again, and Jeremiah told Baruch, who wrote it again.

Paul dictated most of his letters to the new churches of believers, and in one to the Galatians mentions writing himself: “See what big letters I make as I write to you now with my own hand?” [GAL. 6:11].

I believe that this Holy Spirit, this God in us, guards God’s word, guides the writing down, the copying, the translating, the typesetting. This God of All Power, the Spirit of Truth Who Reveals the Truth About God, active and inspiring and working to this very day, has kept the Bible correct through translations. Not everyone who calls themself a Christian is, or is in the Spirit, and no one calling for the any genocidal “cleansing” can be, while others, who do not denote themselves Christian, know and live in the Great Spirit; those who want and love or have the Spirit and serve God, Love, Life– whatever name you give it, to be paradoxical– are true to the word.

It is Satan, the Enemy of Truth who is the liar and father of lies.

In short, I trust the monks who in their scriptoria have copied and translated and printed the words of the LORD Whom they Love and have given their lives to, have been correct. The Bible is not all of the truth or the only sacred text and truth, but is nonetheless True.

Jesus, Who is called the Word made flesh, did not write– except once, says John, in the dirt: when the Teachers of the Law and the Pharisees brought to Jesus a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery, for which their law said she should be stoned to death, and asked Jesus what he said they should do. “But he bent over and wrote on the ground with his finger” [JOHN 8:6].

(“LORD, you are Israel’s hope; all who abandon you will be put to shame. They will disappear like names written in the dust, because they have abandoned you, the spring of fresh water,” [JEREMIAH 17:13].)

“As they stood there asking him questions, he straightened up and said to them,‘Whichever one of you has committed no sin may throw the first stone at her.’ Then he bent over again and wrote on the ground.” [JOHN 8:7-8]

The earth is God’s palimpsest.

But Jesus said to the seventy-two disciples he sent out to preach, when they had returned hyped and excited, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven…but don’t be glad because the evil spirits obey you; rather be glad because your names are written in heaven.” [LUKE 10: 12, 20].

Jesus spoke about the kingdom of heaven in parables and stories because there is no earthly way to describe what is not of this world (this nature or this cosmos), although humankind can imagine there being something beyond their ken.

As is Holy Spirit. Can you relate if I say that when the choral group I am in at last sang our COVID-delayed concert, settings by contemporary composer Ola Gjeilo of Ubi Caritas, Christina Rossetti’s The Rose, W.B. Yeats’s Lake Isle and the Ordinary Mass as Sunrise Mass, the Spirit was singing in it? or if I say of the Spirit leading my reading of the Bible, “It was as if certain words and phrases were highlighted, and it began to make sense, I could –” does this tell you anything? The paper page did not actually glow, and I did not have or use yellow highlighter. We have imagery, symbolism; we have centuries of poetry and song and myth to allude to, dreams and the archetypes or collective unconscious to bring forth with all their levels and depths, personal and mythological, to help. A word or idea “lights up” and one “sees” meaning, “sees the light” or one plunges “into darkness” which is different than being “blinded by the light.”

Growing “like a seed” is one of the most common images that Jesus used, for they are buried in the ground and “die” to become, mysteriously, mustard plant or lilies or wheat stalks or Giant Sequoias; the kingdom of heaven is like that. And like yeast a woman kneads into her bread– only a tiny amount is needed and it spread through all the dough and rises. From inside out.

The Holy Spirit Jesus spoke of enters into us, makes us new creatures from the inside out.

But how? How is this? What is this? Why are we not healing diseases and blindness and lameness regularly, every believing or Christ-following Christian, by touching or praying? Where is the Power of God in us?

Luke began his first book:

“Dear Theophilus: Many people have done their best to write a report of the things that have taken place among us. They wrote what we have been told by those who saw these things from the beginning and who proclaimed the message. And so, Your Excellency, because I have carefully studied all these matters from their beginning, I thought it would be good to write an orderly account for you. I do this so that you will know the full truth about everything which you have been taught.” [LUKE 1: 1-4].

The end of the Gospel and first pages of Part Two, Acts of the Apostles, report Jesus, after his crucifixion and resurrection, just before His ascension to heaven, telling the disciples to wait in Jerusalem, and

“….when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, you will be filled with power, and you will be witnesses for me in Jerusalem, in all of Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,'” [ACTS 1 9].

That, the Holy Spirit which was the power that on Pentecost made the disciples speak in all the languages of the people in hearing range leading to the belief and baptisms of 3000 people that day, that power that raised Jesus from the dead, and is the source of the eternal life beyond the life-spanned animate earth we are, to those who open to it– that is the Spirit promised to the disciples– to us, if we believe, the power which changes us from the unseen dark waters in our psychic depths, and on up through to the order and light of our mind, when Christ is in our eyes as we look out, and in the people that we see– or so it is meant to be, but we all do manage to make our windows as dirty and smeared and distorting as our psychic mirrors get– we are works in progress, and the Spirit is at work urging us to house-clean and look again. To forgive and to feed and to love.

If Jesus defeated death, was victorious over sin, and heaven prevails against Satan and all his forces — in cosmic spheres, is it, only? What blocks or defeats it now, here, with Ukraine still under siege and over twenty mass shooting in the U.S. since that in Uvalde, Texas– where a legal adult went in and killed 19 children with a legal assault weapon and magazines of ammo, and evangelical so-called Christians supporting the NRA and inventing lies about homosexuals and promoting death penalties…

Carl Jung assures us that we can only change– our neurotic minds, psychotic breaks, anxious impossibility of living ordinary life like a normal human being with a little happiness– from inside out.

What blocks the Holy Spirit in us– our acceptance or its action, is ego. The ego is the part of one’s self that we know, are aware of– the center and organizing principle of identity and personality, what we think and do and believe about ourselves and world, and is our everyday, every-awake-moment consciousness and our sense of continuity, without which I would not really know if I was the same person today that I was two weeks ago, or who you are. It is necessary and normal, and much less of our psychic being than we can consciously realize. (We store all experiences and memories in back files in our minds and in our bodies, which ego-consciousness usually can, but we all learn as we get older, often cannot recall)

It is this ego that feels pleasure and shame, envy and lust and self-loathing, that tries to exercise will power to overcome habits, undergoes courses of self-improvement, attacks enemies– and in fear or when sensing any threat to itself, it will protect and defend itself at all costs– and the costs are often great. Neuroses and psychotic breaks from reality happen, Jung explains, when our idea of ourself cannot accept or tolerate something of ourself that is “wrong,” or “bad,” or “dirty” or “sinful,” or “wicked,’ or “disgusting.”

We make up mythical tales to protect us from what has happened to us that is terrible, or we project all the evils that we secretly desire onto others, who become our monsters, or our personalities split altogether into multiple personalities or into schizophrenia.

Any healing change, Jung insists, must arise from deep in the dark, creative, watery chaos of the unconscious, where dramas are played out among our images of inner Stepmothers and Old Kings and enchantments, teachers and tricksters, dragons and familiars, Evil Twins, shining Knights and singing Sirens, in our dungeons and castles, volcanoes and caves and mountaintops. In therapy, one seeks to break down ego’s fortified Tower walls of defense or prison by discovering, facing, owning our unruly but compensating unconscious elements, assimilating what we can to restore a balance or health, by shining some light into our dark mind and ongoing life story. “Shining some light”: metaphor again. By telling you that such awareness helped turn my golem-y lonely self-pitying shadow into a useful dragon which guards and shows me gems of our treasure, in our productive and creative times, but which can fall into whining and wallowing again, and which can erupt when threatened or outraged in all her fire-breathing, kingdom-decimating, green-eyed fury, which indicates the need to address some ego issues, again, –am I sharing anything you can understand? There is only metaphor, symbol to speak of the deep psyche– Archetypes.

Our own self-importance, this little ego, can block, can refuse, can smother Spirit, and that is what the Enemy wants.

The ego must surrender, must “die”, to allow the Holy Spirit to lead and move and work in one, according to Jung, the Buddha, and Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Richard Rohr, Francis Chan, and Jesus.

In the Last Supper scene of the Book of John (Chapters 13 through 17), Jesus tells the disciples eating the Passover meal together that when he, Jesus of Nazareth, is gone back to the Father, another, the Holy Spirit or Spirit of Truth, will come; he will not leave them alone to face the Jews and Romans and skeptics and Zealots. Jesus calls the Holy Spirit the Helper (TEV) “who reveals the truth about God” in JOHN 14, 15, and 16. ( The Amplified Bible lists the Spirit’s names as “Comforter, Counselor, Helper, Intercessor, Advocate, Standby”)

The Spirit Who Reveals the Truth About God will:

“stay with you forever, [14:16]

“teach you everything and make you remember all that I have told you,” [14: 26];

The Spirit Who Reveals the Truth About God “comes from the Father, and He will speak about me, [JOHN 15:27]

“prove to the people of the world that they are wrong about sin and about what is right and about God’s judgement, [16:8

“lead you into all the truth… He will take what I say,” Jesus said, “and tell it to you,” [16:13].

In Luke’s book of Acts, the Spirit of Truth Who Reveals the Truth About God came as Jesus had promised, on the festival of Pentecost:

“Suddenly there was a noise from the sky which sounded like a strong wind blowing, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then they saw what looked like tongues of fire which spread out and touched each person there. They were all filled (AMP: “diffused throughout their souls”) with the Holy Spirit,” [2:2-3]

And before Saul was struck and converted on the road to Damascus and became Paul, “Many miracles and wonders were being done through the apostles, and everyone was filled with awe…And every day the Lord added to their group those who were being saved,” [ACTS 2: 43, 47].

The Christ- followers healed the lame and even raised a man from death like Elijah of old, and,

“An angel of the LORD said to Philip, ‘Get ready and go south to the road that goes from Jerusalem to Gaza(This road is not used nowadays). So Philip got ready and went. Now an Ethiopian eunuch, who was an important official..of the queen of Ethiopia, was on his way home. He had been to Jerusalem to worship God…As he rode along, he was reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah. The Holy Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go over to that carriage and stay close to it.'” Philip and the Ethiopian began talking; the Apostle explained the passages and told him the Good News. “As they traveled down the road, they came to a place where there was some water, and the official said, ‘Here is some water, What is to keep me from being baptized?’..both Philip and the official went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the LORD took Philip away. The official did not see him again, but continued on his way, full of joy. Philip found himself in Azotus..” [ACTS 8: 26–40]

Peter was also given a vision and went to meet a Gentile man named Cornelius, and even went into his house and preached to them, which was as wild for a Jewish man, even a Jewish Christian, as anything Jesus had done, and Peter said,

“‘I now realize that it is true that God treats everyone on the same basis. Whoever fears Him and does what is right is acceptable to Him, no matter what race he belongs to.’ While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit came down on all those who were listening to his message. The Jewish believers who had come from Joppa with Peter were amazed that God had poured out His gift of the Holy Spirit on the Gentiles also,” [ACTS 10:34-35, 44-45].

Not all who desire the Spirit act from burning conviction, or faith, or love,

“A man named Simon lived there [in Samaria], who for some time had astounded the Samaritans with his magic….Simon saw that the Spirit had been given to the believers when the apostles placed their hands on them. So he offered money to Peter and John, and said, ‘Give this power to me too, so that anyone I place my hands on will receive the Holy Spirit.’

But Peter answered him, ‘May you and your money go to hell, for thinking that you can buy God’s gift with money! You have no part or share in our work, because your heart is not right in God’s sight. Repent, then, of this evil plan of yours, and pray to the Lord that He will forgive you for thinking such a thing as this'” [ACTS 8: 9, 18-22].

This Spirit Who Reveals the Truth About God is the same Holy Spirit Who brooded and then moved over the waters of the formless deep at creation, and this ruach ha-kodesh is the same Spirit of Whom the angel Gabriel spoke to Mary, Jesus’ mother:

“Mary said to the angel, ‘I am a virgin. How, then, can this be?’ The angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and God’s power will rest upon you. For this reason the holy child will be called the Son of God,’ ” [LUKE 1: 34-35].

‘”Through the power of the Holy Spirit,'” Paul says in 2 Timothy, “Who lives in us, keep the good things that have been entrusted to you,” [1:14].

Ubi caritas et amore, Deus ibi est.

“In his disciples’ presence Jesus performed many other miracles which are not written down in this book. But these have been written in order that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through your faith in Him you may have life.” [JOHN 20: 30-31].

Disco Inferno

By D.Thomas

“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death–even death on a cross!” [PHIL. 2: 5-8].

Disco (“to learn”) inferno (“hell” or “lower regions”) can mean “learn through suffering” or “undergoing”, and if that doesn’t fit Jesus–!

Imagine the Creator of Universe(s) learning what it is to be human (Being, being human being); every human is and has been in a physical time and place. Each is every subatomic particle in every gas, liquid, and solid molecule in all the cells of their bodies, and is ever agitated or excited by wavelike forces holding some parts together and dissolving, dividing, and shedding others, digesting and excreting in life-long exchange. Each organism is constantly bumping against world and absorbing world and chemically altering world (with every breath); world is in us, makes us, and we, it; and this is the physical existence which Being-Which-Forms-Energies-and-Energizes-Forms took on– to experience, to undergo, to share with the living things.

We see him sleeping, in the crowded fishing boat (where he calmed the storm to calm his disciples); thirsty– on the way through Samaria, on foot (where he met and spoke with the outcast woman at the well); and hungry, — eating meals with Tax Collectors (Matthew, Zaccheus), and Pharisees, and friends all the time:

“The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and “sinners,’ “ [MATT. 11:19].

How strange it must have been for Elohim, Great Spirit, God Almighty, to only see, hear, feel, smell, taste what his limited-range body could see– how much light we do not see!– and hear (less than dogs!) and touch, which depends upon where the actual body actually is. How strange and small and sensitive is the frail physical being, which microbes can kill.

.…”Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows…But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed…For he bore the sin of many, and made intersession for the transgressors.” {ISAIAH 53: 4-5].

In this Holy Week, which is the week of Passover, (death passed over, and there was deliverance), and falls in the month, this year, of Ramadan, (the words of the Holy Book were given to Muhammad the Prophet), and is the week marking the last of Jesus’ earthly, human life, when he faced his arrest and crucifixion, death and Resurrection, his believers believe, I am writing again because Christ followers are told to share the Good News (which is the meaning of “Gospel”)–

The Good News that: Jesus died for us.

He came to live with those below (inferni; Paul often called those not yet saved, “the dead”, “dead in sin” ) and in this place of suffering (infernus ), Jesus put on (infero) flesh to bring on or bring into effect, remission of sins: Jesus died for our sins.

But how is painful, humiliating, undeserved death in any way good news?

“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;

We sang a dirge, and you did not mourn,” [MATT. 11:17].

In the 21st century, in this technologically “advanced” society and with all our scientific discovery, can we even discuss Sin? What is it? Does it still exist, does it still matter, is it a thing at all? If it even is, how did Jesus “take on” our sins and die for us, because of our sins, and how does this “free us from sin” as Christians are taught? We still die, we still suffer in life.

When Peter declared that he believed Jesus was the Christ, Jesus said that this knowledge came from God, and told them that,

” The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and must be killed and after three days rise again.

“ He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ he said. ‘You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.’ ” [MARK 9: 31-33].

Satan. More discussion for the ages: Is there a devil? Are there Angels? Are angels messengers and servants of God, are the fallen ones those demons so common in the Gospels’ accounts of turn -of -the- millennium Judea and the greater Mediterranean area? Most religions, most cultures, speak of spirits, some who are good, some malignant. Jesus exorcised demons, who knew him by name and purpose. (JAMES 2:19 :“Even the demons believe– and shudder!”)

Throughout the Judeo-Christian scriptures, and by Jesus himself, Satan is spoken of as very real, as a Liar, Tempter, Adversary, Accuser, and Enemy. A Power or force of Darkness, a fallen angel– a being of some kind, and so an energy, an influence; the flick of a sharp tail or tongue sends ripples through space and time as every sound, every gravitational and electromagnetic, strong, and weak force wave does, or as neutrinos do, still coursing through the universe from the first light, the scientists say.

As all our acts have repercussions, “butterfly effects.”

“As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread,’ “ [MATTHEW 3:16- 4: 3].

Was the Creator Of All Universes ever hungry, before? How strange to feel this body, tired, light-headed, chilled, slowed, brain-fogged by low blood sugar, weak, dry-mouthed: living bodies need nutrients, and human ones cannot photosynthesize. Satan went for the weakness, the new and uncomfortable sensation, the need which God would have had little practice managing: “You’re God? Excuse me, ‘God’s Son’. Make food, if you are hungry.”

God could make sons of Abraham from stones (MATT. 3:9), and on the parade entry into Jerusalem (now called Palm Sunday), Jesus said that if the people did not cry out, the stones would (LUKE 19:40); of course he could make bread. Later Jesus fed 5,000 men and who knows how many women and children from five loaves of bread and two fish. God (life, nature) makes many grains from one seed every growing season. That is not the spiritual food we also need, which is the Word of God. (It doesn’t say how long it took Jesus to answer the devil.)

Satan, described as the archetypal “ huge, fiery-red dragon” whose “tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky” in the heavens, in Revelation 12, was flung to earth:

“Therefore be glad, O heavens, and you that dwell in them! But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in fierce anger, because he knows that he has only a short time! And when the dragon saw that he was cast down to the earth, he went in pursuit of the woman who had given birth to the male Child,” [REV. 12:12-13].

Satan turns up in Genesis 2 and lures Eve (which means “living“) and Adam (“adamah”= ground; “adam”= man) into eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, telling Eve,

“You shall not surely die, for God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing the difference between good and evil and blessing and calamity, “[GEN 3:4-5, Amplified Bible].

Their disobedience was found out, and God cursed the Serpent and made him the enemy, They made Eve to crave her husband and to have pain in childbirth, and made Adam have to work and sweat, now, to grow food, but “Cursed is the ground because of you” (v 3:17).

God covered them with animal skins (animals died for our transgressions right away, in our place) and sent them out of Eden, where they had their first children, Cain and Abel, and Cain committed the first Sin.

“Abel became a shepherd, but Cain was a farmer. After some time Cain brought some of his harvest and gave it as an offering to the LORD. Then Abel brought the first lamb born to one of his sheep, killed it, and gave the best parts of it as an offering. The LORD was pleased with Abel and his offering, but He rejected Cain and his offering. “ [GEN. 4:3-5a].

I naturally have difficulty with this– why did God prefer a killed animal to crops? A footnote in the Amplified Bible reminds that God had just cursed the ground because of Adam; here was Cain, Adam’s first son, bringing fruits of this cursed ground, or just doing his job and bringing some of what he’d grown for food; they did not eat animals yet; that was not allowed by God before the Flood. The ground awaits the Lamb of God, the Christ, and salvation.

“Cain became furious, and he scowled in anger. Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? Why that scowl on your face? If you had done the right thing, you would be smiling; but because you have done evil, sin is crouching at your door. It wants to rule you, but you must overcome it,” [GEN 4: 5b-7 (TEV)].

Cain had a choice. He knew what was evil, and what was good; with this knowledge and this warning from God, he killed his brother anyway.

“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him…” Jesus told the Pharisees who wished to entrap him (JOHN 8:44); “he is a liar and the father of lies.”

The devil lied about the words of God, and both Adam and Cain lied to God about their crimes.

“Be self-controlled and alert,” Peter tells us (1 PETER 5:8);”Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him.”

What, then, is this Sin we are freed and saved from, which Jesus Christ paid for? Transgression– breaking sacred laws; debts– we owe God life and breath, gravity and energy and knowledge; all the good gifts of earth, sky, water and fire, the trees and grasses, and even our bodies which are God’s, not of our own making, not our own, Paul says in First Corinthians (6:20) “you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body!” Our spirits, as children of God, are not born from sex or human will, but by or of God, John’s Gospel says in his first chapter (1:13), and Jesus told Nicodemus (JOHN 3).

The Book of JAMES says:

“What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? you want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures….Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil , and he will flee from you,” [JAMES 4:1-3, 7].

I am not about to tell you, “This and this and this are sins, and this is not,” with an updated list of laws– go to Paul’s epistles if you want 1st century church rules. We mostly all know that wrongs are wrong, harmful acts performed with cruelty or malice are wrong, and things that make us feel guilty or ashamed are wrong for us, but these might not be universal, and personal feelings are not the best thing to go by, since these are changeable by circumstance. How we know or feel that there is right and wrong, and that this or this is right or wrong is, to Christian (and late convert) writer C.S. Lewis, one argument for a God which gave human beings a moral code in their design.

Our ideas of Hell come from the graphic-novel-esque details of Revelation and Dante’s Inferno, the first part of his poem, The Divine Comedy, where specific sins are punished in defined circles of hell; Dante’s persona was lost and walked with his guide, Virgil, through Hell and Purgatory and Paradise; he became more like the condemned while he was wandering the infernal regions toward the circle that was for Betrayers, and was Satan’s own.

Jesus remained sinless, while on earth.

I will suggest that, sins involve decision. Choice. One’s heart and mind, one’s thought and attitude, one’s desires and values– all this, the inner person, is where sin lies, and our hands and tongues act it out.

“From out of men’s hearts come evil thoughts” Jesus taught.

“A person is tempted when he is drawn away and trapped by his own evil desire. Then his evil desire conceives and gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death,” [ JAMES 1: 14-15].

“Is there any among you who is wise and understanding? He is to prove it by his good life, by his good deeds performed with humility and wisdom. But if in your heart you are jealous, bitter, and selfish, don’t sin against the truth by boasting of your wisdom. Such wisdom does not come down from heaven; it belongs to the world, it is unspiritual and demonic. Where there is jealousy and selfishness, there is also disorder and every kind of evil. But the wisdom from above is pure first of all; it is also peaceful, gentle, and friendly; it is full of compassion and produces a harvest of good deeds; it is free from prejudice and hypocrisy. And goodness is the harvest that is produced from the seeds the peacemakers plant in peace,” [JAMES 3:13-18].

Ecologists and plant biologists have found that many plants thrive most when they are carefully harvested, when deliberate, careful fires are burned, when they are thinned out but not clear-cut, when some of them are used.

In the Hebrew Book of Genesis, the first humans were given the job of “ruling”– stewarding, managing– the plants and animals so that they would thrive, be fruitful, not overgrow or overgraze, and we were endowed with imagination and intelligence for this work; those who claim to believe in and follow the Bible as the Word of God should recognize that, in that case, the current mass extinction of species and rising temperatures, polar ice melt, the rising and warming seas and disappearing habitats and health of the planet is on us: the planet, our climate, shows how we have done our first job.

Can our beautiful planet be saved? Will we ever know Peace and Harmony, as humans?

On the Friday, Jesus died.

Jesus said that nothing is impossible with God. God can do more than we can ask for or imagine. If we open to This, They will transform our minds, our hearts, our inner selves, healing our deepest psyches, reminding our cells that they are of the stuff of stars.

Christus descendit ad infero.

He descended to the underworld to tell the Good News of eternal life to, and to raise, the dead.

“The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. The creation was subjected to frustration not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” [ROMANS 8:19-21].

The Good News is that Christ will come to set this right, too– to restore creation.

I believe that:

On the third day, Christ rose from the grave, and appeared, alive, to some of his women disciples, then to some of the men, and to as many as five thousand people over the following month, and then,

He ascended into heaven, which is where He Is.

“See, my servant will act wisely; he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted. Just as there were many who were appalled at him– his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form was marred beyond human likeness–” [ISAIAH 52: 13-14]

“Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” [IS. 53:3b]

“Oh LORD, you brought me up from the grave…

“You turned my mourning into dancing, you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing to you and not be silent,” [PSALM 30: 3, 11-12a].

Ekphrasis

By D. Thomas

“But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by men and despised by people.

All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads: “He trusts the LORD, let the LORD rescue him.’

“…I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted away within me. My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death.

“Dogs have surrounded me; a band of evil men has encircled me, they have pierced my hands and feet.

“I can count my bones; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing” [PSALM 22: 6-18].

The Gospel of John opens with “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” ( 1:1).

God: Creator of Nouns, Sustaining with Verbs, “spoke” or maybe sang, and set vibration going; combinations of vibrations, waves waving at various frequencies, created beauty and by this verbing generated the particulates and forces, as String Theory suggests.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” [JOHN 1:14a].

(You may not believe any of the scriptures, any of the stories or records in the book– but if you can read it with at least the attention you would give to reading and noting the details of symbols, images, themes, as you’d read Four Quartets, Ulysses, Women of Bakkos, or Les Mis, unabridged, you might learn truths the way one learns from great poetry and literature.)

Christ Jesus, Logos, Word, man and star stuff– was born into a milieu where Rome ruled distant, scattered, desert places, defeated kingdoms and territories; Rome-friendly Jews ran the Jewish provinces, under Roman Governors; Roman soldiers stationed out in Judea were the local cops and jailors and executioners. Crucifixion was sentenced mostly to political or social agitators, though the Cecil B. DeMille image is of roads lined with man-bearing crosses. When men have wage-paid physical power over other, poorer, men and their families, they too often become brutal– scroll through any news source, look around the United States and watch the smart-phone recordings of cops killing suspects here in our twenty-first century for evidence of this.

“The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him” [JOHN 1:9-10].

The people praying for the Messiah imagined a great King who would free Judea from Rome; they did not expect a carpenter or poor rabbi. Jesus came, correcting traditional interpretations of Scripture at local synagogues in small towns, hanging out with fishermen, traveling by foot or fishing boat, touching unclean, sick, blind people, telling stories. They did not expect a Savior to die.

We are in the Christian season of Lent, the preparatory period established by the early church for new believers wanting to be baptized, and for believers to ready their hearts for Easter, after the Friday of Jesus’ death on the cross. People often “give up” treats, extras (chocolate, soda, screen time), or fast–from meat, from fat, from meals. I don’t know, I didn’t think of that much this year: it seems like the world has been in a long Lenten season already, and it feels like we must be at least at the Thursday, in this world.

I do scroll Facebook and Google Discover; recently, within a Facebook post, someone said that, religion is to make you feel good, and– I don’t recall the entire comment, but I immediately jumped to cry out, No, it’s not!

Although it is about Love (Love Itself came down to teach us), the Way of Christ Jesus is anything but a “feel-good religion”!

“The word of God is alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword. It cuts all the way through, to where joints and marrow come together. It judges the desires and thoughts of man’s heart. There is nothing that can be hid from God; everything in all creation lies open before his eyes. And it is to him that we must all give an account of ourselves.” [HEBREWS 4:12-13]

From the beginning, people who proclaimed Christ were arrested, jailed, beaten, persecuted in Jerusalem, Ephasus, Rome. They were taught to share their goods, control their lusts and tempers, pray for their enemies and instead of “standing their ground” with sword or weapon or fighting back,to turn the other cheek.

The first Christ-following martyr was Stephen, who, says the book of Acts Of The Apostles, was “a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit” [ACTS 6:5], and ” full of God’s grace and power” [6:8].

For proclaiming Christ Jesus in Jerusalem and before the Jewish Sanhedrin, he was tried and stoned to death; Saul, not yet struck and converted into Saint Paul, witnessed Stephen’s death, and was zealously arresting Christians himself.

Stephen, ‘“full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. ‘look,’ he said, ‘I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’ ” [ACTS 7:55-56]

This is the only place where Christ is said to be standing, rather than seated at the right hand of God.

James, the elder Son of Zebedee, one of the three disciples who were closest to Jesus, and his three witnesses, was put to death on the order of King Herod, recorded in Acts 12: 2.

The early Christians in Rome were persecuted and thrown into lion’s dens, famously by Nero, and met in catacombs. The colorful roll of Catholic Saints is a list of martyrs who were executed for holding fast to their faith and testimony.

Not all Christian martyrs have been killed by non-Christians: think of Joan of Arc. William Tyndale, who translated and printed the first English-language Bible. Anti-Nazi Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a German concentration camp; Martin Luther King Jr. (It is no secret that “The Church” and “Christians” have waged wars, sacked and pillaged, raped women, bought, sold, and flogged slaves, and committed all the catalog of killing.)

In the 21st– and this is an easy search on any search engine, one can read lists: Kim Sun-il, a South Korean interpreter and missionary, in Iraq, 2004; Ghorbon Tourant, and Iranian convert hosting a house church, in Iran, 2005; Sing Jong-nan, North Korean defector, killed in Pyongyang Prison in 2008, and Gayle Williams, an aid worker shot in Kabul, Afghanistan, 2008; Pakistani Clement Shahbaz Bhatti in Islamabad, 2011. In 2015, twenty-one Coptic Christians, construction workers, were kidnapped and beheaded by the State of Iraq and the Levant, in Libya.

“Blessed are you when you are persecuted and reviled for my name’s sake” [MATT. 5:11].

The Way of Jesus is about Transformation, change from the cellular and unconscious levels, out. Within the Gospels are many hard sayings, and a lot of people who followed his entourage for the healings, the exorcisms, the miracles and signs and the food, left when he warned of the cost, the meaning of following in earnest.

“Take up your cross and follow me” [MATT. 16:24].

Christian belief is that Jesus had the power of “God” because he was “God;” he used his power to heal the blind, deaf, lame, sick, hungry, demon-possessed, epileptic, leprous, insane, and even dead ,but when he was a man he lived as a man, and did not use power to warn or punish or provoke fear. In his most angry and most desperate moments, he held back, remained meek.

The scene of his temper told in all four Gospels is wonderful for Jesus’ restraint:

“It was almost time for the Passover Festival, so Jesus went to Jerusalem. There in the Temple he found men selling cattle,sheep, and pigeons, and also the moneychangers sitting at their tables. So he made a whip from cords and drove all the animals out of the Temple, both the sheep and the cattle; he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and scattered their coins; and he ordered the men who sold the pigeons, ‘Take them out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!’… The Jewish authorities came back at him with a question, ‘What miracle can you perform to show us that you have the right to do this?’ Jesus answered, ‘Tear down this Temple, and in three days I will build it again.'” [JOHN 2:13-19]

No thunderbolts or lightning.

John’s Gospel tells us that “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God” [13:3]

(Again: though I believe, I don’t insist that you, reading, do, but hope you can read the story as story and open to the truths one learns from antique literature, as from Ovid, Sophocles, Shakespeare…)

Jesus rode into Jerusalem the High Holy week of Passover, knowing that at this time, he must turn himself over to the authorities and powers of that city and province. He wept over the city– the people of the city, all the people who had lost and do lose their ways and don’t even know to call out or where to look for light anymore and so are blind.

On the Thursday night , the evening of the Passover Feast, Jesus and his innermost circle of “the Twelve” ate their last meal together, including Judas; this was the night that he was arrested by the Jewish guards in Gethsemane, and began the trials that led to his being executed for blasphemy.

..“…so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him…

“When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. ‘Do you understand what I have done for you?’ he asked them. ‘You call me “Teacher” and “Lord,” and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.'” [JOHN 13:4-15]

Washing someone’s crusty, sandaled, city- and road-dirty feet was one of the filthiest jobs there was, which the lowest of the low slaves or servants performed. Can anyone picture a robber baron, or financier or dictator–a Henry Tudor, a J.P. Morgan, a Rothschild, a Putin, changing a diaper, cleaning up puke, washing feet?

“Offer your body as a living sacrifice” [ROMANS 12:1].

After dinner, Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray and wait.

He prayed that if it was possible, he could escape the pain and death to come? But he said “Thy will, not mine,” and he was obedient to the No, it must be this way for their sake. I do not know why it had to be this way for our sake, but through it, Jesus, punished like a traitor, experienced the worst beatings of the day, the most painful, public execution; he was insulted, mocked, spit on, pushed around, humiliated and hurt– before he even started the walk to Golgotha with his wooden cross. Like the two with him, he had to carry the beam he was going to be spiked to. .

“Then Jesus said to the chief priests and the officers of the Temple guard and the elders who had come there to get him, ‘Did you have to come with swords and clubs, as though I were an outlaw? I was with you in the Temple every day, and you did not try to arrest me. But this is your hour to act, when the power of darkness rules.’ “

Before the last meal and the arrest and trial,

“Jesus replied, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. The one who loves his life will lose it, while the one who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.

” ‘Now my heart is troubled — and what shall I say? Shall I say,”Father, do not let this hour come upon me”/ But that is why I came– so that I might go through this hour of suffering. Father, bring glory to your name!”

“Then a voice came from heaven, ‘I have glorified it, and will gorify it again.’…Jesus said, ‘This voice was for your benefit, not mine. Now is the time for judgement on this world; now the prince of the world will be driven out. But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” [JOHN 12: 23-32]

Darkness does not have the last word:

““Believe in the light while you have it, so you will be the people of the light.” [JOHN12:36]

Braiding Sweetgrass :Indigenous wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer is a book like a psalm of praise and rejoicing and thanksgiving to the earth, the plants , the spirits, which feed and teach us, and the Great Spirit which gave the Original Instructions. The plants communicate with each other, share sugar and water and nitrogen so that the various species thrive and flower. The book tells about reciprocity: Nature, Earth, feeds us, and will thrive if we plant and tend and harvest, use, and if we give thanks, we and our habitat thrive. There is enough for all if we steward and if we do not waste or lay waste, if we raise and do not raze, if we do not take more than we need.

Planet Earth was designed to offer up enough seed and grain, fruit and grass and root to feed all, and fish and flesh and fowl eat and are eaten, and skins and bones and fibers can be used for shelters and tools and clothes, and there could be plenty.

Until now, maybe. Humans’ psychological and intellectual separation from “nature” or “the rest of nature”– which we eat, drink, breathe, process, are and need, to live, and industry, stripping and digging and detonating, mining and smelting and burning and filling skies and waters and soils with polluting by-products, may have gone on too long, enroached too far for balance, for earthly provision– the climate scientists say we are in crisis now, Antarctic ice shelves are melting, people and birds have been dying in road-melting summer heats, there is famine around the globe, and hunger in every nation, storms, fires, and floods destroying cities, islands, homes. The humans chugging over vast factory farms and clear-cut forests must not know to give thanks, to respect or appreciate the wonderful life-filled ground, the plants and microbes that fuel and feed all.

I think that we need Divine intervention to heal World–our mother earth, the garden, us– which is the promise of the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

In the chapter “Learning the Language of Animacy,” Kemmerer points out that, as science speaks a language of objects, “out there” –or in the lab conditions– to be observed and measured and predicted through quantum mechanics or particle physics, and the English language is based on nouns {sentence subjects verb, or perform verbs), American Indigenous languages such as Potowatomi and Anishinaabe use over two times more verbs per noun than English; different verb forms describe things that are alive than those not alive. They see as alive: trees, rocks, mountains, ponds, streams, lakes, rivers, valleys, grasses; the only things considered non-alive things are man-made; the God-made beings are beings; selves, even persons; there are human people and tree people, and a lake is a verb– water being in the form of a lake now, if I understand correctly. One would not ask “What is that?” of an apple or a deer, but “Who is that?”

The Potawatomi verb “to be”, for living beings, is Yawe.

The modern, industrial/post-industrial objectification of and separation from nature is not of Yahweh, and is not Christian. I fact, Levitical law included days of Sabbath and years of Jubilee: each seventh day, the households including servants and slaves, and the working animals, and the fields all had days of rest; in the seventh, Jubilee, year, fields were to lie fallow, to rest and recover:

“For six years sow your fields, and for six years prune your vineyards and gather the crops. But in the seventh year the land is to have a sabbath of rest, a sabbath to the LORD. Do not sow your fields or prune your vineyards. Do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the grapes of your untended vines. The land is to have a year of rest. Whatever the land yields during the sabbath year will be food for you–” [LEVITICUS 25:3-6].

“You may ask, ‘What will we eat in the seventh year if we do not plant or harvest our crops/’ I will send you such a blessing in the sixth year that the land will yield enough for three years. While you plant during the eighth year, you will eat from the old crop and will continue to eat from it until the harvest of the ninth year comes in.” [LEV. 25:20-22.

(Jesus said he was the Living Water; the vine; the Bread of Life; “Take and eat, this is my body…drink this, this is my blood of the new covenant, poured out for you...”)

The languages of owning and using living beings is of Traders, Retailers, Kings, Accountants, and Capitalists.

Empires– Roman, British, Spanish, American Industrial, Russian, are built on Money, Guns, and Plentiful Cheap Labor to extract and work resources into commodities for sale for the owners’ profit.

Invaders, conquerors, colonizers overrun the territories and provinces, sack the cities, dynamite the mountains, dam the rivers, send young and able-bodied and Mighty Men to war to acquire and defend oil, gold, uranium, plutonium, diamonds, poppies– slaves, and sea ports, railroads, passages to oceans.

Jesus did not come with military might, when he was Being being a human being, but with stories and talk of the Kingdom of God being like a mustard seed. He invited any and all to the Feast. He was born to a poor girl in a barn. He did not call upon the Hosts of Angels to sweep in and lead Jerusalem against Rome, or even to rescue him from his death.

On the very cross he cried out, Mark writes, ” ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ –which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'” [15: 34], which is the first line of Psalm 22, quoted as my opening.

But Darkness does not have the last word, even now.

“I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.”[JOHN 12:46]

Friday, he died. Then there was Saturday, and then Sunday came, and He was not dead.

“” ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘Who is, and Who was, and Who is to come, the Almighty.'” [REV. 1:8]

“Then he placed his right hand on me and said: ‘Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold! I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades,” [REV.1:17-18].

(Let me quickly put in, before the verse, that he meant: such as the women at the tomb, and, about baptism, these verses do not say “and no one else will.”)

“Later Jesus appeared to the Eleven as they were eating; He rebuked them for their stubborn refusal to believe those who had seen Him after He had risen. He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved'” [MARK 16:14-16a].

“For He has not despised or disdained the suffering of the afflicted one; He has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.

“From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly; before those who fear you I will fulfill my vows. The poor will eat and be satisfied; they who seek the LORD will praise him– may your hearts live forever!

“…Future generations will be told about the LORD. They will proclaim His righteousness to a people yet unborn– for He has done it” [PSALM 22: 24-26, 30-31].

Love is a Verb.

27 Teeth

By D.Thomas

“So there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and free men, between men and women; you are all one in union with Christ Jesus.”[GALATIANS 3:28]

I was going to write an “About Page”– and got writer’s block, sort of, but maybe this is–. I keep a journal, my record of life in the world and in my head, and don’t want to write about myself more.The life-long journal is practically life-sized, and with it I am an observer, recorder, historian– and psychologist, sociologist, philosopher, theologian, autobiographer–

My first birth scarred my mother,

My second scarred my Lord,

And between or after was another, third,

the Me on paper, I in words,

The Narrator.

So I was going to write around that January full moon, the Wolf Moon, and was thinking of wolves and fangs and Women Who Run With The Wolves because I had just had a tooth pulled, and had the metallic taste of blood in my mouth.

But I don’t really run with the wolves, much as I love them, and ideas of them (I once wrote a full-length play about a Dostoevskiian Werewolf and the woman who loved him). I run with deer. I see them on my walks and sing “Amazing Grace” to them, so they know it’s me, and when I passed the whole extended family, a herd of at least twenty white tails lying down for noon naps, they looked at me, but none even bothered standing up.

I had my fangs pulled when I was eleven, so that wisdom teeth would have room to come in; they took the milk teeth that hadn’t yet come out, and the permanent canines as well. I have not eaten red meat since I woke up from that, my only surgery so far.

My scars and stitches have been from spiritual warfare and cat bite.

Another moon, the Snow Moon, has gone by, and I have been re-reading Dostoevsky, and watching the Olympics regularly, and the Russia- Ukraine border glancingly.

I was nervous, in the beginning of the figure-skating, for all those girls–like the summer games’ gymnasts– with the eyes of the world and the pressures of competing, underground- warring Nations on them– fragile perfectionists on skates– The Winter Games all seem dangerous– bobsleds, skeletons, the big jumps on blades, the arials, insane flights!– boards, skis–. (Except for the gymnastics, the Summer Games don’t seem as dangerous to life and limb, ankle and neck!)

And the Super Bowl in the middle; I remember reading the the Super Bowl occasions the biggest annual international sex-trafficking event in the world, and when Kamila Valievna cried about missing one landing in her incredible first free skate, looking more stress-haggard than Olympic excited, I began to wonder what happens to those gorgeous girls if they do not succeed, flying away with golds? Is she terrified that if she falls and fails she’ll be sent to work the Super Bowl? Maybe I saw Scarlet Johansson’s Black Widow too recently, but–.

Meanwhile, there was Putin putting more troops at Ukraine’s border, and newscasters saying that Putin had invaded Georgia during the opening ceremony of 2008 (Summer) Games, in Beijing–.

Putin said that he had a responsibility to protect Georgians from, apparently, Georgians, since the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, which is an agency formed to prevent genocide, found no legal cause. In 2014, Russian troops seized Crimea, bordering Ukraine and the Black Sea.

I am not prejudiced against Russia.( I said I’m re-reading Dostoevsky? I have read the major novels eight to ten times each, but now it has been at least ten, perhaps more, years since I have, so I have just gone back through Crime and Punishment and The Possessed ) In the late Soviet Socialist Republic days, I was not pro- U.S.S.R., but was and remain anti-capitalist, fervently anti-Reagan, and zealously anti-nuke. The Vaganova trained ballet dancers, the decades of gymnasts and figure skaters are amazing, set the standards of excellence– the Russian Pairs skaters have been dynastic, and there are the girls– in ballet, in rhythmic gymnastics, and standards in crime procedurals and cop shows –. I am extremely worried about nukes, and I am worried for the young women.

Alina Zagitova, gold medalist of the class of amazing, unrivaled Russian skaters of 2018, and her teammates, who were 15, 16, and 17 then, have all but disappeared from figure skating; Zagitova “Took a break” from skating, after. I have not yet found out more, but noticed that she was never mentioned by commentators this year.

In the USA, over 300 gymnasts, including superstar Simone Biles who was strong and wise enough to not risk her neck for the sake of gold, have spoken out, accusing the US Gymnastics team doctor, Larry Nassar, of sexual misconduct and abuse. This did finally get him sentenced to 300 years in jail, but— The team doctor used his authority, his title, his power, his work, to frighten, threaten, and molest minors in his charge. Their bodies’ health and well-being were in his charge, for decades.

Children are abducted and coerced, and are even sold, around the world, by despairing and impoverished families, but– who buys? Buys the services? Buys people ?

So much is hidden, reporters are kept dark, are silenced.

Around the world, journalists and whistle-blowers are imprisoned and silenced, 293 in 2021, 24 killed and 18 more dead, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

In China, 50 journalists are behind bars.

Extremists, Autocrats and megalomaniacs holding dubious power do not like Truth.

“Pilate replied ,’Do you think I am a Jew? It was your own people and the chief priests who handed you over to me. What have you done?’ Jesus said, ‘My kingdom does not belong to this world; if my kingdom belonged to this world, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish authorities. No, my kingdom does not belong here!’ So Pilate asked him, ‘Are you a king, then?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. I was born and came into the world for this one purpose, to speak about the truth. Whoever belongs to the truth listens to me.’ ‘And what is truth?” Pilate asked.” [JOHN 18:35-38].

In this Black History Month, I remain worried about local girls– Jaquanna must be in her mid or late twenties now– and I am appalled and grieved that it was only hours later, reviewing my rough draft, that I looked up terrorist abductions of children and women, rapes and forced marriages– that it took four separate searches and scrolls to remember Joseph Kony and the LRA, and three Human Rights Watch and United Nations Security Council pages, and BBC reports to recall and spell Boko Haram–.

These armies exist today, most recently active in Cameroon. The extreme Christian Terrorist Lord’s Resistance Army, formed by Joseph Kony in Uganda in 1987, is infamous for attacking schools and abducting or “recruiting” wives, concubines, slaves and child soldiers, including the nearly 200 Aboke girls from St. Mary’s College in 1996, and continuing such pillages after being forced out of Uganda into Central African Republic, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon, traveling with their enslaved porters, child soldiers, teenaged “wives” and targeting schools and churches– this so-called “Christian” army–, killing over 800 people and abducting 160 from a church in the Congo on Christmas Eve 2008, repeating over days in December in 2009, looting diamond and gold mines, poaching elephants for ivory, and this LRA is still listed as dangerously in violation of international human rights and humanitarian laws.

Boko Haram– Jama’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihad— is similar, and similarly active. (“Boko Haram” means something close to “Western Education Is Forbidden”). It was begun in Nigeria in 2002, and is an Islamic terrorist group targeting schools, children and women especially, and most notoriously in April of 2014, when forces attacked and abducted 200 girls from Chibok, Borno, Nigeria. They have also moved into Cameroon, Chad, Niger.

Back in 2016– the date on one article, Amnesty International reported that 2000 children were still in captivity– forced labor, forced killing, forced sex.

The world has not gotten better since 2016.

COVID 19 has worsened the conditions of the world’s poorest, the displaced, refugees and slaves.

Oxfam International reminds and warns us that inequality kills.

Look up “Who got richer during COVID?”:

“US Billionaires got 62 percent Richer During Pandemic”; “the richest Americans became 40% richer…”;”World’s 10 Richest Men Got Richer During Pandemic…” and so on.

It is easy to forget the world outside our own circles, especially when we are the privileged, the safe, those secure enough to watch the Olympics on TV and to speculate and write personal essays for– fun? For talking about the Gospel of Christ Jesus, which my blog is still for, but Jesus said,

“Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.

“There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs.” [LUKE 12: 2]

The hard line, would-be Soviet, nationalistic pomp of Putin, and the white European “Populist” and “Nationalist” movements, the white-supremacist, MAGA, and neo-Nazi groups in the United States, are criminal in my personal lexicon. People who can see their “type” or “kind” as superior by DNA to other humans of other “kinds” or “races” or colors or genders are the great danger: to them, lesser creatures can be used, can be bought and sold and manipulated, they exist for use to the owners/masters/ “Master Race”. They can bayonet and shoot children, and traffic children as slaves in sex work and hard labor– because minors and females are not their equals, in their eyes, or at any rate, not as important as wealth and profit.

Ivan Karamazov, in The Brothers Karamazov, has made a study of child abuse in Russia, and tells his brother, novice monk Alyosha, that he does not find Christ or salvation worth the suffering of children– if even one child must suffer on earth as the cost of heaven, he does not want God, he “returns his ticket.”

Yet to Christ Jesus, and those who would “put Him on” as a garment, who take Him into their hearts, who try to see and love as He taught, will see no different worth in different people; each one of us, like each dog, each leaf, each snowflake, is unique and singular, and no one is better, worth more respect, or more deserving of abuse or negligence, none is lower, none is higher– to the Creator, life-provider, molecule-arranger, and physical-law-sustainer, all human beings are equally human, equally worth trying to salvage, save; yes, even__.

The “Powers” and “Rulers” and “ruling spirits” of groups and nations seem to me the evil ones, and we have often seen what these spirits can do, transforming groups of people into mobs– in Black History Month, this should be obvious. Mobs lynch men. Mobs smash windows, bomb and burn churches. People in groups respond with non-violence; self-discipline, self-control, non-violence..

Today’s English Version uses “Mob” where my other Bibles have named the demons “Legion” at Gerasa in Luke 8 and Mark 5, and I think “Mob” suits our days:

When Jesus, crowded by the followers who wanted the bread he had miraculously multiplied, and the wondrous healings and exorcisms of demons and diseases, got into a boat, he fell asleep while they were crossing; a storm came up, wind and waves, and the disciples, including the professional fishermen, were terrified and woke him up. He shook his head at their lack of faith and “Jesus stood up and commanded the wind. ‘Be quiet!’ and he said to the waves, ‘Be still!’ The wind died down, and there was a great calm.” [MARK 4:39].

When they landed and got out of the boat, a man possessed by demons was there to meet him, a man who lived among the tombs, whom no one could control, who screamed and cut himself and broke any chains put on him.

“He was some distance away when he saw Jesus; so he ran, fell on his knees before him, and screamed in a loud voice, ‘Jesus, Son of the Most High God! What do you want with me?For God’s sake, I beg you, don’t punish me!’ (He said this because Jesus was saying, ‘Evil spirit, come out of this man!’) So Jesus asked him, what is your name?’ The man answered, ‘My name is “Mob”– there are so many of us!’…There was a large herd of pigs nearby, feeding on a hillside. So the spirits begged Jesus, ‘Send us to the pigs, and let us go into them.’ He let them go, and the evil spirits went out of the man and entered the pigs. The whole herd– about two thousand pigs in all– rushed down the side of the cliff into the lake and was drowned.” [MARK 5:1-13].

I like to think that the pigs killed themselves rather than be possessed by demons.

Dostoevsky used this scripture as the epigraph to The Possessed, and in the chapter known as “Stavrogin’s Confession,” Stavrogin asks the holy man Tikhon to read to him from Revelation, about the Church of the Laodiceans, who were “lukewarm”, recognizing himself:

“This is the message from the Amen, the faithful and true witness, who is the origin of all that God has created. I know what you have done. I know that you are neither cold nor hot. How I wish you were one or the other! But because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I am going to spit you out of my mouth! You say, ‘I am rich and well off; I have all I need.’ But you do not know how miserable and pitiful you are! You are poor, naked, and blind.” [REV. 3:14-17]

My favorite scene by Dostoevsky is in Crime and Punishment, where the murderer Raskolnikov goes to the poor prostitute Sonia, and asks her to read to him about the raising of Lazarus (JOHN 11). Lazarus, the friend of Jesus and brother of his friends Martha and Mary got sick and died, and Jesus intentionally went to them after, when Lazarus had been dead and entombed for four days. Jesus wept over death, but told the people to open the tomb, and he called him forth, and the dead man walked out of the grave, alive.

The point in the novel is that Sonia believes in this wholly. She believes in the miracle, and she believes that God can and does work miracles.

“Jesus said to her, ‘Didn’t I tell you that you would see the glory of God if you believed?” [JOHN 11:40].

In the thin woods on the hillsides of this part of town, where humans and other animals are still co-habitating,it looks like there have been wars, as if the demons tried to win influence over earth and tree and other animals before whispering to humans, and the demons were defeated: the thick leaf cover, the grassy mounds and hullocks, the fallen limbs and dirt-packed uprooted trunks are now providing food for funguses and bugs and worms and saplings, and providing nests for birds and squirrels, dens for deer and foxes, thatch-roofed cottages for racoons and skunks, burrows for rabbits, and beds for bears. Provision: enough for all if we cooperate.

Watching Valievna’s nervousness before the doping scandal broke, back in the team competition, and then the stress in all three Russian teenager’s faces– the Mother Instinct was–remains– alarmed. Will world media keep an eye on them, after these falls, failures, eruptions– to keep a maternal eye on what does happen to them, these Zagitovas, Trusovas, Shcherbakovas, and the next ones? while watching nuclear forces’ exercises and amassed troops at the Ukraine border?

Maybe I am more wolf than I think– when I think children are endangered.

It was a broken wisdom tooth with a long curved root that was pulled at the dentists’ that Monday morning, a snow day, the week of the Wolf Moon.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” [MATT. 5:3-8].

“Unto Us A Child Is Born”

By D.Thomas

“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end ” [ISAIAH 9: 6-7a].

The fact the Jesus died on the cross is less mysterious and miraculous to me than that he chose to be born into humanhood, and those happy Hallmark-type movies about finding love thanks to a “Christmas spirit” don’t cut it. They do not approach the Christmas Spirit.

I have always loved Christmas, the Christmas season, the music and rehearsal of the music for services and concerts, and I have always cried at Christmas: Poverty and Sorrow, War, Hunger, Loneliness, Grief, and Pain are highlighted by the sparkly lights and silly jingles and ads with oversized gas-guzzlers sporting giant red bows– the over-indulgences and overdone-ness of this land of commerce and conspicuous consumption and the whole sad, displaced world..

Last year and this, the whole world has suffered under the isolation and loss of quarantine and sickness and death during COVID. We have all lost loved ones, dear friends– to death and to other causes not less painful. There is not a lot of happiness around this Advent season; Christmas is about finding joy in Jesus even in the darkest times.

Yes, Jesus. The Christ-mas(s) is not about family gatherings and laden tables and giving gifts, though these are surely good things; the celebration of the birth of the Christ is the point.

Most gods of bread and wine and lands and kingdoms died and were reborn, or the king or priest was representationally killed to give way to the new, the green rebirth of the spring– any glance into mythologies will show Osiris and Dionysus, and anyone or -thing that represents seed dying in the ground for the stem and the grain, the grass, the fruit, to grow and bloom, and I have written a lot about this in earlier essays.

Jesus’ death is like ours; like every animal’s, like every star’s and cell’s; what is born dies, what is, changes; the earth turns and wobbles on its axis a little more as it ages, yet the seasons cycle; orbits in the solar system have altered, fallen out of the round, and their speeds have changed, yet the galaxies continue to spin: this is how it still is.

Jesus’ birth– why, why would Almighty God, the LORD of Hosts, Creator of the universe, Spirit and breath of all things, want to live one short, hard, ugly, itchy, dusty human life in a backwater “kingdom” at the edge of the Roman world?

Or anywhere, or time?

We’re always told: “Love”. Because He loves us; “God so loved the world that He sent“, They became, the Son “so that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (JOHN 3:16).

Eternal life is not the houred human kind. Now, it is true that our molecules, our atoms of energy and stuff shall not, according to laws of science, disappear– things change and shift and conglomerations of things dissolve and re-congeal in new formations and thus forms; maybe you stop there, and are happy enough with that.

Eternal life must be outside the natural, clock-marked, human life; it is not endless life, which would not be heavenly at all. It is– Being -with-God (“God”)? The writings of the prophets attempt to describe what they saw in their visions of the LORD and “His Throne” — but our minds and language and the experience and knowledge upon which we base our ideas, the senses and experiences from which we and they project imaginations are not quite adequate to describing that which is Holy– apart from and different than anything temporal, physical, motion-and-change-ruled or gravity-held. We cannot even name the highest possible number, because, however big a number one can get to, we can add one (1) to it. Or however small the particle, we can try to smash it and record where the pieces fly.

Eternal life is the Good News–the matter of Joy, whatever else it is.

Love; what does love want? “Withness”? We want to be with those we love, or to know that they are well; we want our loved ones to be whole and healthy and happy, and do what we can to make them so: we give, we do for, we feed our beloveds.

What is “love” to The Creator of all heavens and all earths? Evidence suggests: creation, creating living things and feeding them. Forming energies and energizing forms, generating nouns and verbs, numbers and functions.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men.” [JOHN 1: 1-2.]

This Word, this Son of God, is incarnation.

All that is, is of Him, in Him, made of the stuff of Him by Him. God Who Spoke this Word did and does and will provide star stuff, hydrogen, oxygen, helium, et cetera, the fiery gasses and cooling atoms and building blocks of all things. God formed from Themself the sun and the planets around this sun, and the water and soil on this sphere, the plankton and algae and moss and worms and fish and birds and animals; every reptile and amphibian and every chordate, every grass and every fruit tree, every lion and wild ox and human ancestor, and then, too, this particular man Jesus in this specific time and place (I believe).

“In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria). And everyone went to his own town to register” [LUKE 2: 1-3.]

These are probably the most famous opening lines of a story in the so-called Western world.

I really don’t have much to say about this text, except that while scholars nit-pick about exact years of the census and the death of King Herod in Julian or pre-Gregorian dating, most agree that the census was taken, and the history truthful.

I don’t know that many people think that a man named Jesus was not born in a town called Bethlehem or a province called Judea when Augustus was Caesar.

Only two of the four New Testament Gospels tell about Jesus’ birth. They all include his baptism, his temptations by Satan, his feeding of “the five thousand” with the few loaves and fish, and his arrest, crucifixion, and appearances after death. Even Luke puts Jesus’ nativity in Chapter 2: he opens with Zechariah and Elizabeth, who are childless and elderly; they are told that Elizabeth will at last bear a son, who will be named John and will be a prophet and will go before the LORD, preparing the way for him. When Elizabeth is six months pregnant, Mary is told that she will have a baby who will be the Son of God; when she has agreed to let God do this through her, she goes to see Elizabeth, a cousin.

The older and the young mothers- to -be spent time together. Their greeting and the hymns of praise that leapt from their hearts and throats swell through Luke 1; and to me it is wonderful that neither Mary nor even Jesus himself was sent into this mission in this world alone.

(**Woman Washing the Feet of Jesus**; *painting by D.Thomas)*

When Jesus was born, there was a great astrological event seen in the sky– perhaps a great planetary conjunction like that of December 2020 C.E., but probably a singular “star”, for astrologers even then would have observed two planets approaching each other before appearing to meet, and separating after. Magi– philosophers, astrologers, scholars, scientists of their day– saw and charted the star and believed that it meant the birth of a great King. They followed the light to Jerusalem, and asked Herod , who had been appointed by Rome to rule Jewish Judea, where this new King was in order that they might see and worship him. Herod had his people study the place and time prophesied, and sent his soldiers out to kill all the male children in Bethlehem born within the two-year time frame, in an attempt to kill Jesus ( Matthew 2:1-18).

This Herod the Great killed all the baby boys in Bethlehem.

Was the birth of Jesus important enough to the world for that devastation and death, the slaughter of the innocents?

“Therefore the LORD Himself will give a you sign; the virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” [ISAIAH 7:14].

This classic verse, written 800 years before Jesus was conceived, makes me think of a section of Revelation, chapter 12, about the woman and the dragon:

“A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon…His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born” [REVELATION 12: 1-4].

The woman gave birth to a son who was snatched up to God, the woman sent to earth to be hidden in a desert, and “Then There was war in heaven…the great dragon was hurled down–that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan

“Who leads the whole world astray” [REV 12:7-9].

The earth helped the woman to escape the dragon, who, in Rev. 12:17 “went off to make war against the rest of her offspring– those who obey God’s commandments and hold to the testimony of Jesus.”

Was it Satan through Herod trying to stop Jesus’ work of salvation? Satan possessed or influenced or was equated to several kings in Biblical history, such as Pharaoh and the King of Babylon and the Prince of Persia ( Exodus, Isaiah, and Daniel), and tempted Jesus later with the offer to give him all the kingdoms of the earth– somehow, humans or God let Satan become the ruler of this world– temporarily. This Satan is not an equal of God the Father Son Spirit, but seems– with the use of Kings and Emperors, politicians, and Rulers of the Wealth and Weapons of the world, to be co- creator of havoc, of corruption, fear, and exploitation and theft and terrorism and war, and of lying about motives for war.

I think that Jesus was born, Godhead became human, to experience our humanness, to share and know our physical and spiritual battles with sickness, irritation, pain; hunger, cold, indigestion, blisters and boils– he suffered flogging, beating, and being nailed to wood– and sweated blood trying not to give in to the temptation to skip the whole death-on-the-cross thing–. Bodies and spirits fight, fight to stay alive, and on the cross he had to resist the temptation to call on those angels to rescue him now, especially as one of the thieves beside him, and the people watching, kept taunting him and telling him to save himself; and there was that horrible, last proposal: “Save yourself now, before our eyes, and we’ll believe in you.” Echoing the temptations in the wilderness before he began teaching publicly; “You could say no to me then,” one can hear Satan saying; “how about now?”

Jesus on earth was waging open war with Satan, casting out demons from people– and the demons always recognized him and knew who he was.

He lived to destroy the enemy that has always been hard at work destroying us and our habitat, twisting our human minds and bodies, throwing natural cycles and solar orbits out of wack.

These wars are waging all around and in us– and– the armor of God is heavy.

Sin in Eden (mythologically, symbolically, spiritually, and psychologically [– and here is where we see that “eternity” is not time: in our psyches and imaginations and in the prophetic writings, all times are jumbled, existing at once]) brought death– which might not mean the physical death that is natural and part of process, but spiritual death. Some who have been plunged into deep, overwhelming suicidal Despair have had a taste of this– and what if there was nothing, not even suicide, to help one escape it? Christ the LORD came and does come and will come with a sharp sword to defeat that enemy so that we might have whatever that Eternal Life is, and healing of our minds and psyches here. Hope. A little light. Darkness cannot overcome it.

Jesus was born to heal the sick, broken souls (and soils– the earth will be restored to goodness), to reconcile sinful humanity with holy God the Maker. and to issue the New Commandment under the New Covenant which he ratified with his blood and body. The commandment is “Love one another.”

Everything else in the Mosaic Law, and most cultures’ laws of morality, after Love God, comes under it, and can be followed through this: love each other.

This loving is not the warm fuzzy feeling of sappy movies, but acting in ways that heal rather than harm, that put the needs of others before the wants of one’s self, that tend and care for and share with our fellows– our neighbors and fellow creatures and this community upon the communal earth.

“And do this, understanding the present time. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over, the day is almost here. So let us put aside deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.” [ROMANS 13: 11-12]

The Nativity story is full of blood, dirt, discomfort, fear, awe, joy and wonder; the division between Earth and Heaven, Divine and Earthly, was overcome; the Holy Spirit of God took the blood and bone and body of a woman and the life conceived was man and god. Glory filled the sky and those shepherds outside town saw the Angels who were singing Gloria as they had at the beginning when the earth was formed (stars and angels sang!) The whole book from Genesis to Revelation is full of blood and bodies an dirt, earthquakes and wars, pestilence, violence, sickness, rape– all our history is the same, and if there is not love there is despair.

“And there were shepherds living out in th fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the LORD appeared to them, and the glory of the LORD shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the LORD. This will be a sign to you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.’

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.’

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the LORD has told us about.’

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him,, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.” [LUKE 2: 8-20 (NIV)]

Yes, December 25 was chosen to fit Jewish and Gentile festivals of lights, of Hope and Life and Light in darkness, times of distress, and in the cold. And yes, many of the traditions, from the Christmas Tree down, have pagan origins– so people can have a jolly time arguing themselves out of cheer and decorations all they wish: the evergreens are made by God for water, shelter, warmth and food and joy.

May all the forest gods and faeries, dryads, and naiads and our dogs and cats come delight in our tree, green with life all season, while the leaves of the oaks and elms and ashes cover the burrow entrances, and keep safe and warm the winter-sleeping creatures. May all that has life and breath praise.

“Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; and let men say among the nations, the LORD reigneth.

Let the seas roar, and the fulness thereof; let the fields rejoice, and all that is therein.

Then shall the trees of the wood sing out at the presence of the LORD, because He cometh to judge the earth.” [1 CHRONICLES 16: 31-33]

Hallowed Be

by D.Thomas

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation…” [ROMANS 8:18-19a]

Hunter’s Moon: here in the northern hemisphere dawns are later, twilights, darker and sooner. The full moon was brilliant at seven in the morning, when I took that picture, and last week the half moon was radiant when I was out at six a.m. There were deer out, then, too, crossing the street ahead of me.

It has been rainy more days than not, and October was near-record warm, the leaf-change late, but the colors are gorgeous– vibrant, magnificent reds, oranges, golds, aglow like stained glass on the wet sidewalks, and yellow like tongues of flame.

The season is of the gathering in and laying up for the winter.

How do we know to do that? Watching the squirrels of urban parks and suburbia, the trees shedding leaves to conserve water during the freeze? Or just because it’s Football?

The generations pass down knowledge, information: what has been observed and noted, measured, learned, and practiced: when to plant and when to prune and what to cover, what to eat, what to avoid, and what soothes, what heals, among the vegetables, herbs and leaves as we forage and farm; where and when to catch the fish, to hunt, when the animals are fat from harvest times, the spring babies big enough to run, the does and cows not nursing, maybe not carrying yet (I saw a slim, young lady doe and a newly-muscled, six-point buck following: there will be fawns come springtime).

We still pass down information– our languages, maths and sciences, how to cure, salt, pickle, can, preserve so that over the winters we can eat; how to run our machines, boil water on a stove, drive; and traditions of heroes we recognize and holidays we celebrate, teams or sides we’re loyal to or hate.

Children are taught the skills of survival by the adults of the community; the elders hold knowledge and wisdom, and it sometimes breaks my heart that because the technologies change so fast, the screens on the desktops change with the updates, rendering old programs archaic, obsolete: nothing known yesterday is very useful today in cyberspace– you have to keep up or you’re left behind and, not lost, nothing on the ‘net is lost, but– out of touch, out of reckoning, out of the loop; the middle-school aged kids explain or run the tech, and shake their heads at Granddad– and: who learns the deep, abiding lessons if the very elders who have the wisdom of the life of mind, spirit, and nature are the lost, bewildered children in the Western World? How lost our older parents and friends must feel– everything they have lived and learned is laughed at, and they can’t keep up with all— their role in the community is not even wanted anymore, it seems. And if we live we’ll each end up there, facing winter with nothing but the blanket around our shoulders, a bundle of dry sticks on an ice floe, if that hasn’t melted.

To hallow means to honor, to keep holy.

Yesterday was Halloween; before COVID, I loved the chance to tell the little kids in Bible class that the trick or treating holiday comes from All Hallow’s Eve, or All Saint’s Eve before All Saint’s Day, when we honor the dead. We honor the “saints who have gone before”– who are “believers”, not only those especially good ones sanctified by the Catholic Church. We honor our ancestors. Parades and costumes, and dead people represented with masks and bones, combined with early twilights and bright big moons, became more and more of festival and bravado defiance of the unholy or restless, unsatisfied dead. People dressed as witches and monsters and fiends to keep the real dangers of dark nights at bay, and, like the dark tales that ended up Disney Princess movies, All Hallow’s Eve became the kids’ dress-up to get candy, merchandised fun, and the pranks of older kids, and the horror movies people like to be scared by.

“the creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the One who subjected it, in hope that creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” [ROM. 8:19-21].

Human fear and human pride have led us to think that we are the ones who should and do subject Earth– and as much Creation as we can– to our will. Western civilization has built itself up subjecting the land and animals and water and other humans to men’s, Kings’ will– . Muscle and mind were power, and then accumulated wealth– food enough, food stolen, food hoarded, food shared or not, and water and materials of clothing and shelter and then of ornament; stone and iron weapons for hunting and fishing and fighting, protecting and invading. Wealth owned land and labor, and passed it down to sons, and when only so-called nobles were allowed to farm or hunt or fish upon the land, the poor could pay rent or tribute, or starve to death or be hung for poaching; Wealth bought the swords and guns to take over land, to chase off, kill off, enslave people with weaker weapons; wealth and the weaponry used to gain and protect wealth, and the ships and wagons to carry the materials that were bought, traded, sold, the silks and spices and poppies, diamonds, gold, oil; uranium, plutonium– thus the commercial centers , the city states, the capitalists, went out and conquered much of the world. Philosophy and religion followed, although the capitalists often set out with banners declaring “freedom” or “faith” or “democracy”– rather than “conspicuous consumption” or “disposable income”. We have Silk Roads and Spice Roads and Trade Winds.

Consider: “Holy Roman Empire”. Worldly, earth-conquering Rome spread through North Africa and Europe, and, via Italy (city-states and Merchant Princes), Portugal, France and Spain, and thence across oceans, around continents, to the “Far East” and “the Americas” (the Eurocentric names) and brought home tributes and goods. Wordly “Christian” Rome called itself Holy and the Seat of the Church–. But one cannot be a worldly Empire Power, and Holy, according to the Gospel words of Christ Jesus. He told His followers to go and make disciples, through Jerusalem and Judea and to the ends of the earth, but never by dominating:

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” [JOHN 13:34-35];

“Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example, that you should do as I have done for you” [JOHN 13 :14-15];

“Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave– just as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” [MATTHEW 20:24-28].

And I think of the East India Company with its private army, the Dutch East India Company which was the biggest company on earth, or the Hudson Bay Company which was founded in 1670 and owns Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor, still; the Robber Barons, and the Apples and Amazons and 3Ms now…

“Then he said to them, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” {LUKE 12: 15].

We can learn history and math and how-to, all technical knowledge, from books and sites on search engines, but the things of the heart and of the spirit are not known until they are experienced. Like solutions to problems, things of the Spirit cannot be seen until they are seen, until one’s eyes are opened. One cannot understand suicidal despair if one has not felt it, or forgiveness, or love so desperate you could die for loss of it, or wish to–.

Childbirth pain, withdrawal, insanity; wind on skin, immersion in salt or silken water, the taste of mango— you can read all you like, but some things must be undergone to be known. Suffered and survived.

Here, I think, is much the point of the Fall in Eden story: humans must taste, must experience, must live, suffer, to learn and know to their depths Good and Evil. Our sin is how we know evil– when we see and feel and realize the wrong, or the results and consequences of the transgressions we commit. We know Good by the good done to us and that we somehow do– or God does through us. We can weep with thanks for forgiveness. Jesus was the example of Good, and the Christ in us is Love loving through us. Humans were set on their courses of Individuation– lived experience, assimilation of the lessons. On our own, forgetting to acknowledge the Creating, Generating, Sustaining God, we become mired in error, in dirt and muck, in hatred and fear and fighting, tearing the others down to gain a foothold to keep our own mouths clear– look at how “civilization” spread, how “western civilization” overpowered “savages” and “heathens”, took their lands and their natural resources to hold the idea of its own superiority or goodness. In Goodness, out of Love, God incarnated Themself as a human to learn, to undergo, to endure, to suffer human life, to know what it was to be human, the loftiest-thinking, highest-reaching, strongest, smartest, richest, and most beautiful of whom must defecate or will die. God experienced the hungers and pains, the itch and stink and sweat, the thirst, the temptation, the loneliness of human being.

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

As I was letting ideas roll around and begin to build blocks, I glanced at the Google Discovery page and saw that scientists have found a new, apparently beautiful and charming tetraquark that lasts for longer than any other known, exotic quark, which interests them because it does not have the normal two quarks plus two antiquarks, but two charms and no antiquarks (at CERN); that scientists have failed to find the expected “sterile” neutrino, a type of neutrino that does not change flavor, which they were hoping for, for their math to make sense, meaning they will have to rethink their theories; and that, some particle physicists are beginning to think that everything– even those neutrinos, those hadrons, baryons, neutrons, electrons, protons, mesons, quarks, have consciousness of– an elemental sort; that everything that has mass or spin or charge has the experience of mass and spin and charge. “Panpsychism,” this idea is called.

(Very Hindu, this sounds: that everything is of the Mind and Being of God. Hinduism also suggests multiverses, and bounces rather than a bang at our beginning.)

Not that everything is God, but is in God, Creator and Sustainer and Reality; God gives the charge to the charge, the flavor to the flavor, the spin to the spin; and these become all that is.

Wherever there is being, each being that is abides in Being, and Being is the is-ness, life, of beings.

” The morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy” in Job 38 (v7).

There is hope or promise built into this cyclical earthly life, in the nature of things: while in the northern hemisphere the season is turning to dark and cold, spring is stirring, warmth and light are quickening life in the southern. The whole earth is never in darkness at once.

“All creation waits.” The storm calmed when He Who could walk on water and multiply bread loaves and fishes, heal the sick and rise from death, spoke.

“…since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–His eternal power and divine nature– have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” [ROM. 1:19-20].

I was thinking that breathing– by animal lungs, fish gills, mollusks, trees– is the exchange of gases. Gases are molecuaer chains, composed of atoms composed of muons and gluons and mesons and quarks; detachments and re-attachments of subatomic particles or charges or spins in new configurations is, then, a sort of “breathing.”

“Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD.”

[Psalm 150:6]

Hallowed be Thy Name.

Thunder Moon, and Trees For Healing

by D. Thomas

“Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing.” [EZEKIEL 47:12]

High summer: the heyday of the first fruits and berries has passed, and we are in the time of afternoon: the season of insect chirping, of growth happening out of notice, deer lying down; of waiting. The leaves and later fruits and the grains are fattening, and here it is green and green and lush and humid. I am lucky here in this niche of Pennsylvania, luckier than most, with no floods this summer, no wildfires– although we have been breathing the “haze” from the blazes ravaging so much of the west. My mind has been quiet– and it means I have peace that I have not been freaking out or despairing, that it has not felt like desolation and tumbleweed in the desert, that I do not feel like bleached bone in the sand. I have been working, instead, with hands, yes, and brushes and mops, and with my legs and my back.

High summer– Mission weeks and works, if one is so inclined; vacations, if one can. Summer, we sense, will be leaving, the seasons and skies will turn.

I have been wanting to write about Trees for Healing since I wrote the last entry about wells of water– and the fires, before that, for: there is always so much more. When I read, when I walk, when I look up at treetops, branches and leaves against sky, at the fireflies within arm’s reach, deer with new antlers, and look down at flowering weeds, growing plants, and running water over rocks, I have wanted to speak of, but have not had words. I did see– which annoyed it I think– a groundhog (Biblical rock badger-?) coming out from amid flat big rocks to the water, beside one under-street culvert, and in a friend’s yard by the little woods I saw and touched a little brown frog one morning, and a little toad that afternoon.

There are more gnats and mosquitoes than luna moths or dragonflies; deer ticks follow deer; and there is poison hemlock as well as Queen Anne’s Lace,(in addition to poisons oak and ivy). And, sometimes, copperheads amid the garter snakes and ground frogs.

The Thunder Moon was two weeks ago– and indeed we were having thunderstorms every day, deluges, brief downpours, light rains, wild winds, and intense heat. Mushrooms and strange fungi have sprung up everywhere, plentifully in lawns along root systems, at the bases and on the trunks of trees. Outlandish looking, yet of the very land and life here and wherever plants grow: Mycorrhizal fungi live in symbiosis with most plants and trees. The mushrooms and toadstools grow up through the soil to the surface and collect nutrients which they carry to the tree roots. Trees communicate through the networks of roots and fungi, even with trees of other species: ecologist Suzanne Simard (Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest) notes how they share information about damaging insects, for example, so they might produce defenses, and they share nutrients with other trees which humans thought to be competing for sunlight: the trees live together and cooperate for the health of the forest. The old Mother Tree feeds water and carbon to the seedlings to help them grow.

Throughout human history we have relied on trees and plants for our shelters, clothes ,musical instruments and dolls, tools, our food, our medicines; wine to make us glad and oil to moisturize our faces. Herbs of all kinds for helping with fertility and easing birth, to abortions and anointing the dead; stimulants and relaxants and hallucinogens, vitamins, fever-reducers, pain blockers, sterilizers, purges…And now, in that inclusive America that does not out and out swim witches, Ayurvedic medicine, herbal medicine, holistic medicine, has re-emerged. (When the “MMJ” dispensaries have Rewards points, I have to “get political”: legalize it, release the prisoners, expunge records, change lives and change the world. Change the country– which is exactly what White Supremacists dread; Fascism says, “We want to keep you incarcerated because it serves us well.”)

( Fungus growing at the base of a tree out front. )

There are sacred trees in most if not all religions, and often and often they impart Words and Wisdom– .

The Bhagavad Gita says of the ancient and giant fig tree Ashvattha “the everlasting,

“Rooted in heaven, Its branches earthward; each of its leaves is a song of the Vedas, and he who knows it knows all the Vedas.” [XV. 1]

In the Hebrew stories, the Tabernacle or movable Temple of Exodus, and the poles for carrying the gold-plated Ark of the Covenant and the Ark itself were made of wood, possibly acacia wood, sacred to many Greek, Roman, Mediterranean goddesses, and the poles which hold Torah scrolls are of wood, and the scrolls are of parchment or animal skins and this is very like Christ or Odin or Osiris hung on a tree for bringing written Words, Wisdom, and Fire to humankind. The seven-branched Menorah is a tree of Lights or Light– as is the Cross of Christ, the Light of the World.

The water of life feeds the Tree of Life which was that left in Eden and identified with Christ, and is in many, most, mythologies– the mother tree, the golden bough, again. The druids knew the medicinal benefits of trees and harnessed their powers and named seven of them especially sacred; there is a Celtic Tree Alphabet with letters named for trees (A–fir or pine; E–aspen; I–yew; O–gorse; U– heather; M is vine, and apple is Q.); there is the older Ogham script, which is of vertical lines crossed with certain numbers of lines slanting up or down, which remind me of the hexagrams of the I Ching, or Book of Changes, with arrangement of solid (Yang) and broken (Yin) lines, made by throwing three coins or, originally, yarrow stalks. Odin hung himself upon the Tree of Life Yggdrasil for nine days and nights to learn about the other worlds and to understand the Runes.

One of the several Runes I remember is the symbol for the Yew Tree, meaning protection (upside down it is the peace symbol)

The Yew is sacred in several traditions, and the Pacific Yew’s bark produces the chemical from which is derived paclitaxel, the chemotherapy drug for treating breast, lung, and ovarian cancer.

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse” [REV. 22: 1-3].

It is my thought that, perhaps, the eating of the “apple” (Q–for “question”?) and subsequent Fall was– not of evil, not against Omniscient Omnipotent God’s plan, but the Eve and Adam and Serpent story–(“eat any fruit at all except that, don’t eat that--” seems a set-up) is a myth of human evolution or education: when the humanoid species were developed enough– after whatever ages and generations of waiting and abiding and intermixing, the “breath”, the Spirit, quickened the species to the next, new, revelatory level of intellect– and it was not good for this human to be alone; the helper possibly was the Serpent, and the knowledge seeking was and is in each one of us necessary for individuation: becoming wholly ourselves, mature and reasoning and self-controlling, and aware of, assimilating, all the Shadow side, all the forces, passions, emotions, memories, germs and dreams of our unconsciousness, our devils and demons and our better angels, our inner needy child and bossy know-it-all, our wise women, old kings, princes, tricksters, wise men, muses and Graces and pantheons of gods and beasts, our innerscapes of mountains, plateaus, caves, swamps, sloughs, gardens and deserts, and places within where we remember the comforting, feeding arms of the Mother.

This “Mother,” womb and grave, all nutrition and decomposition, this World Tree, Life Tree, Mother Earth or Mother Nature, A.T. Mann suggests (The Sacred Language of Trees), was carried along with all the Jewish and Christian myths, histories, tales, in the artifacts and symbols, and in the Shadow-y reversions to idolatries which are themselves corruptions of worship– I don’t know that the feminine energy or aspect or Yin was ever supposed to be written or driven out: after all, from Genesis to Revelation, off the top of my head: the Serpent talked to Eve; Sarah was blessed to be a blessing to all; Moses’ mother and Pharaoh’s Daughter saved him for the Exodus and the Law; Solomon referred to wisdom as feminine Sophia; prophetess Huldah identified and interpreted the Holy Scripture, long lost and found (2 KINGS and 2 Chronicles); Mary was chosen to bear Jesus, and Mary Magdalene was the first person to see Christ, risen; Timothy owed his learning and belief to his mother and grandmother according to Paul; and, in heaven, the Wedding Feast of the Lamb is with the Bride, the Church or the restored World.

God is Spirit, not male or female. Humans were created in Their image, male and female. We are nature, we are of the earth, we cannot live without the humus of which we’re made, the microbes we share our space and existence with, without mitochondria, without algae, without trees. We cannot be born without mothers. Jesus and even Paul tried to say that in Christ there is no male and female– no social order of one above the other, one more important, one subservient. No slave or free– no “higher” or “lower” or better, and, to followers of the Way (of Jesus)– no Jew or Gentile any more.

This World Tree, Life Tree, reaches up to heaven and down into the underworld, to highest consciousness and to deepest unconscious where we meet, where all are one, we dream of the same monsters and saviors and cities and rainbows and lights in their many guises.

We humans with these minds are designed to learn– to study, to take apart, examine, learn, build, make things from materials at hand– temples and statues, paintings, symphonies, plays, spaceships. We all leave the womb, that dark water, formlessness, brooded over by the Great Mother and each mother, born in convulsion into great light, murky eyes and nose and airways clearing, sensing soon individual lights and faces, discovering up and down and front and arms and our own feet, our own edges– an infant’s birth and coming into awareness is very like Genesis 1, is it not? We must all be expelled from the womb, or we will die, the mother will die. We must grow up out of infancy to some self-determination, and there are struggles and dangers, the world is no Eden… Experience runs us up against pleasure and pain, cooperation and contest, sickness and health, fear and courage, love and hate, all opposites and all ambiguities between.

“No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven–the Son of Man” Jesus said [JOHN 3:13]. The New Earth and New Jerusalem, or, rather, in Ezekiel 48:35, the City named The LORD is There described in the Books of Ezekiel and Revelation have these trees for food and for healing, which means there is hunger and potential sickness or injury or poison, this new world is not “purely spiritual”– and here I want to be very clear that I mean in these visions recorded in these Books of the Bible, strictly; I offer a level of interpretation. and I hold that Christ and “The Kingdom of God” is an eternal, spiritual existence, and “eternal life” is, too.

And so: we are in a biological realm, somehow still, in these visions. The Kingdom of God as it can be here, as it can be among us, brought by those of us who can see it. The wars, Gog and Magog, the plagues, the poisons and fires and meteors and fighter planes of Armageddon– all the horrors might be human-made, and the third only may survive– but the new reign, the heaven-on-earth time of Peace, the King of Kings, Prince of Peace, Christ reigning– might be here? Christ Jesus, the Light of the world is also the Water of Life and the Tree of Life, and the Tree He was hung upon represents Him: we speak and sing of coming “to the Cross”, worship “at the foot of the Cross,” and He identified His body and blood with the grain of the earth that makes bread and the fruit of the earth which makes wine, He bids us eat and drink him, and every day we eat Mother Earth, which They made and declared Good: Incarnation reminds us that we need this Incarnated God to live at all, to sustain life on all levels, here in our present realm. We humans might make our way through the knowledge of Good and Evil and accept the Grace and healing offered, and wash in the water, drink the tea made from the leaves, live in love and peace–

We can, we can, we can. We could if we would. With generosity– of goods and services, of food and clothing, of sheltering and love. With help. The help of the Spirit, God within. And I know this will be saccharine to those who do not believe.

Seeds, according to geobiologist Hope Jahren in Lab Girl, are curled green embryos contained within the husk or hard nut, waiting for a crack, a weakening, to unfurl and become a green shoot, ready to grow into an oak or alder or yew or Easter lily. The seeds wait– as Jahren says, only they know what for– and some can wait for hundreds of years.

A lotus grew from a husk found in a peat bog in China where it had been waiting for two thousand years.

This makes me weep for joy.

And plant seeds:

” The Spirit and the bride say ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say ‘Come!’ Whoever is thirsty, let them come; and whoever wishes, let them take the free gift of the water of life” [REVELATION 22:17].

Wells of Water

By D. Thomas

“The cove was a cool, deep pool in a ring of evergreens. The green-gold water flowed over everything and remained itself, seamless and whole. In the water she was free. The water made room for her, welcomed her, closed protectively around her, soft and warm and silky like the water of a womb, with lily stems like umbilical cords from the cold mud bottom to the sunlit surface air. She had not realized how cut ad bruised she was until she felt the water’s healing …

“Water seemed to be her element, her home, left sometime long ago but remembered deep in her cells; all her life her sweetest dreams were about swimming rather than flying, and she regretted the loss of her ability to breathe underwater.” (D.Thomas)

The earliest dream I can remember, which for some reason I think I dreamed at my grandmother’s, whose house, in many many dreams, has “the secret playrooms” which I might know are here somewhere in this dream landscape or that, so I will look for them, but which did not in fact exist– the first dream was of water. I was best friends with a prince, which I suspect comes from Saint- Exupery (The Little Prince) or Twain’s Prince and the Pauper ; I was the pauper, and it had come time for the prince to learn to be one, and so iron gates were to be closed between us. In rebellion, we ran away, and we dove into the water because we were being chased, and we swam down and down, and I lost all sight of my friend and soul mate; he vanished, but I discovered that I could breathe underwater, and it was cool and silent, the most peaceful state in the world.

In many dreams since, there have been oceans and storms and turbulence, and I have remembered that I can breathe under water, and have dived down under the turbulence to the peaceful quiet safety.

There is nothing as refreshing as clear, cool, unpoisoned water.

Salt water heals– cuts, scrapes, gerbil bites ( ah childhood!), sore throats. Salt water heals hearts when they well in tears of gratitude, of joy, of grief, of sorrow, of anger, of repentance.

Our bodies are mostly water, and we need water more than food to live; we need water as we need air.

Water is a primary symbol of the unconscious in Jungian psychology; the archetypes of humanity’s collective unconscious he calls riverbeds for the waters of life, those ways of understanding which flow through stories, histories, dreams, myths; particular images and symbols fade out of use or dry up from loss of meaning, from loss of value, but which can rush back, which can flood the riverbed, its banks, the cracked dry plains around it.

The Nile valley was fertile because of her yearly flooding.

If a soul or a nation is in a spiritual drought and prone to fires, when rain does come, there are too often torrential floods and mudslides, one disaster changed for another if the psyches will not be transformed in gentler ways. Transformation, from the first life on earth, has begun in water.

The Earth herself began with water, it is said.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was brooding over the waters.” [GENESIS 1:1-2]

Then, this sounds like an ancient or alchemical text intuiting the steam and vapor from the cooling planet clearing, or the hydrogen and oxygen molecules and atoms acquiring bonds to carbon and selenium and salt:

“And God said, ‘Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.’ So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse ‘sky’… And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry ground ‘land,’ and the gathered waters he called ‘seas,’ And God saw that it was good. Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation…’ [GEN. 1:3-11].

And, I am diving into the Bible again because I do believe in Christ Jesus, wholly man for thirty- three years in Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, and wholly God, ever and always, and this man Jesus read, quoted, taught, and fulfilled the prophecies within the Hebrew scriptures, the Christian Old Testament, and inspired all the New.

“I will trust and not be afraid. The LORD, the LORD, is my strength and my song; he has become my strength and salvation. With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.” [ISAIAH 12 :2-3].

Water was and is for baptism, ceremonial cleansing away of the sins one repents of– symbolically for infants– in preparation for the coming of God, for any sitting at the table with God, the Wedding Feast of the Bridegroom Christ, the Love Feast. Communion– remembering Jesus with the bread and wine which represent his body and his blood, is also called the love feast, shared by all who desire Him ( small h for the man, Jesus state, capital H for Christ the LORD, the Godhead); turning water to wine at the Wedding at Cana (JOHN 2: 1-12, his “first sign,”) was turning the water in jars used for washing hands into wine that, at every love feast since his death and resurrection, symbolizes the blood he shed to wash us clean of sin.

(At the very human wedding, his mother Mary asked him to help the groom and the family out– they’d run out of wine, which probably meant they were poor, and this late, better wine, was for joy– and signals the better joy. He multiplied bread and fish to feed crowds more than once, but he did not turn stones to bread for himself when Satan tempted him in the wilderness, when he had been fasting and was very hungry. He said that man does not live by bread alone, but by the words of the Father. He told the crowds and followers that he was the Bread of Heaven. He referred to the Father’s will as his food again later, in JOHN 4: 34: “‘My food,’ said Jesus, ‘is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work.'” Food: what feeds us.)

Most of the Psalms and hymns of praise, and prophetic verses of restoration and healing mention the springs of water flowing in the dry and desolate lands; water springs and trees are planted and flowers bloom in deserts, and the animals come to drink and eat. God provides the water for the wild donkeys and all the animals to drink, and at the wells the people have established, men and camels drink.

Tears are prayers, of sorrow and want, of thanksgiving and Joy. They well up from our souls.

Two of my favorite Bible stories involve possibly sketchy women– with whom I identify– and wells.

In the Old Testament, when Abraham, who was a friend of God, who followed God’s instructions and who argued with God on behalf of the possibly virtuous residents in the cities God was going to destroy for their wickedness, was waiting, waiting, waiting for the promised son who would be a blessing to all; Abe was pushing one hundred, with wife Sarah getting near to ninety. Impatient, he had a child by the Egyptian maidservant, Hagar. Sleeping with her had been Sarah (Sarai)’s idea, but then she was annoyed by the pregnant girl’s superior attitude,

“Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her. The angel of the LORD found Hagar near a spring in the desert; it was the spring that is beside the road to Shur. And he said, ‘Hagar, sevant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?'” [GEN. 16: 6-8]

Hagar received a blessing and said, 16:13, ” She gave this name to the LORD who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the One who sees me.'”

I love that.

After Sarah had borne Isaac she threw Hagar and her son Ishmael out of the household and camp, jealous for Isaac’s inheritance ( no one is perfect). Hagar and Ishmael then wandered in the desert, and when they had run out of water, she put the boy under a bush and began to cry.

“God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, ‘What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him a great nation.’ Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.” [GEN. 21: 17-19.]

A sermon could be built on that paragraph: God hears you. Open your eyes, open your eyes. And when you see the well of water, fill your container, give the kid a drink. Take his hand, lift him up– this is faith.

Ishmael is the patriarch of the Islamic peoples: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all begin with Genesis, these People Of The Book all come from the same Abraham.

But there has always been trouble in and between human kingdoms with mortal kings or emperors, with children born of mortal women and men, by blood and the will of the husband, to many wives and concubines, and the long history of the Hebrews’ division into the Northern and Southern Kingdoms after the deaths of David and his son Solomon, born to Bathsheba with whom David committed adultery and for whom he committed murder, the corruption and idolatry and covenant breaking led to the Assyrian exile of the Northern (Israel, later Samaria) about 720 B.C.E. and the Southern (Judah or Judea) in 586 B.C.E.

(Bear with me as I “geek out ” a minute: The Prophet Isaiah, who is the one most quoted by Jesus and at Christmas [“For unto us a Child is born...”] lived and wrote in the late 8th century (B.C.E.) during the reigns of Judean kings Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah; he foresaw the Assyrians’ conquering of Israel and the Babylonians defeating Judah if there was no repentance, and also, that Cyrus, the King of Persia, would permit the Jews to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild their Temple. Nebuchadnezzar invaded and destroyed Judah in 586 B.C.E.; the exile or captivity lasted seventy years. Daniel and Ezra and write of this (Daniel lived in Babylon from the time of Nebuchadnezzar [ DAN. 1:21] to the reign of Cyrus [10: 1], and Ezra was in charge of the rebuilding when Cyrus decreed it around 530 B.C.E. [ EZ. 1:1- 6:14]). The cool thing is that Isaiah mentioned Cyrus by name:

“(I am the LORD) who says of Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd and will accomplish all that I please; he will say of Jerusalem, ‘Let it be rebuilt,’ and of the temple, ‘Let its foundations be laid. This is what the LORD says of his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of to subdue nations before him… I summon you by name and bestow on you a title of honor though you do not acknowledge me…” [ISAIAH 44:28-45: 1, 4-5, 45:19, and, several verses later, 45: 19:] “I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness.”

“See, the former things have taken place,” God said, in 42:9, “and new things I declare: before they spring into being I announce them to you.” )

Springs and wells of water. Streams run to rivers.

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse.” [REVELATION 22: 1-3]

Jesus called Himself Living Water.

The Woman at the Well in the Gospel of John was a Samaritan woman. The Israelites who stayed in the area and intermarried with Assyrians and other Gentiles worshiped differently than the Jews who did, thanks to King Cyrus of Persia, rebuild their Temple, and the descendants, Samaritans and Jews, loathed each other. However, Jesus and his fellows often traveled through the land, for it was between Galilee and Jerusalem. One day, Jesus got tired and thirsty. He sat at Jacob’s well near Sychar, and while the disciples with him went into town to buy food and provisions, a woman came to the well at about noon to draw water.

“…Jesus said to her, ‘Will you give me a drink?”..The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?’…Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink you would have asked him and he would give you living water….Everyone who drinks from this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.'” [JOHN 4: 7-15].

She did not understand quite yet that he was not talking about physical thirst, but, although she was a woman who had had five husbands and was living with a man she was not married to– on top of being a Samaritan ad even just a woman–, Jesus told her:

“a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is Spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and truth.’

” The woman said, ‘I know the Messiah’ (called Christ)’ is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.’

” Then Jesus declared, “I who am speaking to you am he.'” [JOHN 4:23-26].

Tears are prayers. The Spirit enters us– and is spirit but is the creator of molecules, of atoms, of electrons, of sky and of seas and of earth and bodies; Jesus the Word through which all things that are made are made became a human with a body of calcium and carbon and hydrogen and salt; this Spirit enters our cells. We are transformed from within, in our very cells, and in the deepest darks of unconscious mind, before, below where we we even know of it– from which we might dream, from where we act, where we break forth and pour over walls and dams and riverbank, destroying old ways– if uncontained, misunderstood, unacknowledged, damage can be done– canyons are carved, the known world (of the Fertile Crescent) was flooded– and tears well up; life and joy can bubble up. We can drink deeply, we can swim, swim ourselves clean.

The end of a story, a paragraph of which I opened with, is:

“She had to wash. She slipped down the dark stairs, out the unlocked front door, and ran across the road, down the dirt path to the lake. She threw her stained night dress onto the dock and dove into the black water. Its cooling warmth closed around her, closed over her softly, dark and quiet like a womb, protecting her and taking her tears into its great bosom. She swam and swam, and the lake washed away the sticky filth, the sweat, the blood, the fear– as the sea sloughs off the skin of a dolphin so he can swim faster, ever clean and ever new…

“When the sun rose, it painted every needle and branch with gold leaf and varnished the surface of the cove with gold dust in its medium. A night dress lay crumpled on the wooden dock like a discarded skin, and the white water lilies on green pads opened like lotuses.”

I do not want mine to be a last word, however, so I’ll offer a sip more of Isaiah:

“As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth. It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” [Is. 55: 10-11]

Rings Of Fire

by D. Thomas

“Were our hearts not burning within us while He talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” [LUKE 24: 32]’

I’d had intentions of writing weeks ago: I wrote about the Holy Spirit appearing as fire, and wanted to jump in with the Ring of Fire solar eclipse created by the new moon, two weeks after the Blood Flower Super Moon lunar eclipse, another noteworthy celestial event in the year of conjunctions and alignments and plagues, insurrections and rumors of parties that still think trump won.

The photos of that solar eclipse here in Pennsylvania (I could not see it from where I was) show the bronze, bright crescent which looks to me like a darkly burnished, burning moon, and makes me think that something cosmological might be being born.

The name, “Ring of Fire,” first brought to mind the Johnny Cash song.

The June Carter song. June Carter wrote it; Johnny Cash, the Man In Black, made it famous– a devout, faulty Christian who worked hard on prison reform.

Brynhilde, the Valkyrie, sprang to mind even as I was humming the chorus of the song: She was a favorite of the god Odin in the Old Norse Eddas and Volsunga and the Germanic Nibelungenlied,( made famous by in the Wagner Ring Cycle opera). She took to Valhalla a warrior who was loved by Odin but barred from the halls where the brave fighters were hallowed after honorable death in battle. For her disobedience she was put into a sleep, and surrounded– protected and imprisoned by fire; the hero who could leap the flames would wake her, as a type of Sleeping Beauty, but then this immortal woke mortal, and forced to desire and marry this Sigurd (Germanic Siegfried). Her “hero” later fell in love with another woman and tricked and abandoned her, and Brynhilde ended up committing suicide by throwing herself on his funeral pyre.

This reminds me of the curse upon Eve as humanity was expelled from Eden, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” [GEN. 3:16, NIV.] ( Interestingly, the New Living Translation of the Bible says “And you will desire to control your husband” and the English Standard Version puts it “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband;” all three seem to fit Brynhilde. Glancing at thirty translations here, two say that she will submit to her husband, and the remaining twenty-six are “desire“.)

Rings of Fire: Brynhilde and Johnny Cash, Prometheus and The Inferno and The Fire Next Time; global warming, the two heat waves, here, in June, and, the Comet C/2014 UN271.

“Then the angel took the censor, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it on the earth; and there came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake.” [REVELATION 8:5]

There was too much, and then, I was going through fire. Sin and self- torment (where I’m a Bergman film– Ingmar). My head can burn and can generate heat and darkness; in relationships, I too often imagine things, invent, and overreact– which is “borderline personality” disordered; I sin, and I fear the LORD, and it is sometimes not “reverence” and “awe” (which it is), but fear. I condemn myself, damn myself for my unrepentance; desire can be like impalement on a lit flame and hot melting wax– hellfire exists within myself, like acid, like bile, like shame.

“God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with His powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of His power.” [2 THESSALONIANS 1: 6-9]

Are our hearts not burning within us?

Oh yes, and scientists have found that the largest comet ever known is heading our way, will enter our solar system in 2031, a comet with a diameter of about 100 miles– 1000 times the size of any others so far known, which turned up in archived images taken during a survey of “dark matter”. The Club of Rome (Limits to Growth) reports put our end-of-life-as-we-know it at 2030: on Facebook now I’ve been seeing a movement to conserve 30% of the earth’s natural resources by 2030. To conserve 30%. 70% will dry up, burn out, be poisoned?

“As I watched, I heard an eagle that was flying in midair call out in a loud voice: ‘Woe! Woe! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth, because of the trumpet blasts about to be sounded by the other three angels!’ The fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth….A third of mankind was killed by the three plagues of fire, smoke, and sulfur that came out of their mouths….The rest of mankind that were not killed by these plagues still did not repent… ” [REV. 8:13, 9: 1, 18, 20a]

I had no intention of reading the Book of Revelation– I was looking for the reference to the Fire Next Time, which James Baldwin used; the rainbow is the Biblical promise that the world will not again be destroyed by flood. Peter says “By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgement of ungodly men” [2 PETER 3:6-7]. He was speaking of scoffers who forget that God made the world with a word ( a “sound”, a bang, and the Word making wine and blood, flesh and bread) , scoffers who forget that the earth was formed out of water and by water– as is everyone born.

He says, “the world of that time“– that area? There was flooding, the earth was covered with water, it was cataclysmic when the earth plates separated, the continents appeared and drifted– the myths of oldest humanity tell flood stories– some earth memory recorded in our matter, in our cells– our fetal development is in water, our bodies are mostly water. Global warming and greenhouse gasses will melt the surface in four billion years, science suggests; nuclear war, nuclear holocaust, would be fire of Biblical proportion and I never read Revelation without seeing that, and I always suspect that, if you can line up any of the images from John’s trippy visionary dream with reality, the locusts like fighter planes and bombers and the eagles are probably us. The U.S. is as like Babylon as any kingdom on earth– and why, with all our CGI, has no one yet made the movie?

I do not think we are supposed to line things up point by point, but if you start, you can make a good argument for the U.S.A. also being the last, different from all others kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel 2 and Daniel’s dream in chapter 7, and you can fear that we are indeed in End Times.

Which people have thought countless times.

We all do face our own End Time, at our own ends.

This does not mean that sinners and “unbelievers” will all go to Hell– Hell is not a Place; it is a state of mind or psyche, it is burning and twisting, in obsessive love or self-loathing or addiction or clinical Depression, it is the dark caverns of suicidal despair and dread of the Beast within, at the bottom of the self where mind is brain stem is body which is part of us or, to materialists, what one is; Hell is regret, is guilt and shame. Hell is being trapped in a room with no windows, only mirrors, all warped but one but we don’t know which one…

Prometheus took Fire, which had belonged to the gods, and gave it to Humans. Warmth in winter, cooked food, light to read and sew and tell stories by. Fire to burn houses, forests, books, martyrs, heretics, witches, KKK crosses, by…

The Club of Rome is a group of scientists who programmed computers to project what would happen if agricultural and population trends, if industrial development and manufacture continued on the twentieth century trajectories, and determined that the Earth could not sustain the continued economic and population growth. The study results were first published as Limits to Growth in 1972; I own a 30-year-updated version, and I think we have passed our window of radical change for healthy sustainability. A few of the very rich will be more or less okay, of course, but the rest– well, isn’t it happening? Record hot years, year after year, and more and more species dying out and spreading diseases to humans as they seek food before expiring. Biodiversity is disappearing under parking lots and industrial one-crop farms, rainforests are being razed for fast-food cattle grazing and junk food ingredients, and–.

The wild dreams and visions of the Biblical Prophets don’t seem so crazy. They also tell us that we cannot judge each other– we do not even know or control ourselves. Obedience to God is choosing to act as Love suggests, not as hatred, fear, and wrath do. Not lashing out like jealous or avaricious monsters, our Shadows grown king- and queen-sized and taking us over. Wait, be still, pray and yell and weep in secret until the rage is spent, and preserve its victim/cause from it, and act, more rationally, later– after the nap, the run, the smoke, the bellowing to punk or metal or P.J. Harvey, and some cooling down. Love is the choice to refrain from harming, from lashing out, from hitting “Send;” and sometimes that is one’s best effort– often, when one is wrong about whatever sparked it, and as often when one is the one in wrong in the first place, sitting on one’s hands is loving.

The Holy Spirit causes much of our burning. “Convicts” us of our sin, our wrong. And frees us: shows us the way out of torment, is and shows the Light. Light, Truth, Life. If we can imagine “Justice” and something “better”, I think a God can, and one has to sometimes leap–. Oh, seek justice, work for social justice, advocate for the animals and plants and streams and oceans and earth– yes, anger is not all bad, anger drives, anger and outrage directed to growth and health are of the Spirit. Spirit opens a room with windows, eyes that see with compassion, a heart wanting to help, to heal, to care for, to shelter, to feed, to release one’s bitternesses and charges against– to forgive.

Can one forgive what was done to someone else?

James Baldwin took his title from a slave spiritual:

“God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”

In the first part, My Dungeon Shook: Letter To My Nephew On The Hundredth Anniversary Of The Emancipation, he tells his nephew to not believe that he is what the white people tell him that he is, and that he must pity and love those very whites who try to keep the black people down, in the ghettos and kitchens (and jails) out of their own fears for themselves and their places and their guilt, their fear of change admitting Truth; it is the white people who need to be freed, because their minds are the ones imprisoned . (And just look at the Jan. 6 crowd!)

How many times will we have to weep and protest against White Northern European racism? How long must anti-racists sing this song? Because or though I am cis-gender and white, my heart breaks, my heart breaks. There is a movement with promise in the world, so, there might be hope. There is, daily, war.

I cannot celebrate the Fourth, when a private militia made of Colonizers rebelled against the Home offices, the absentee King, but left the natives of the continent disenfranchised, savagely murdered and interned, imprisoned, enslaved, as their brothers and cousins did all over Africa and India for Empire and Profit. Juneteenth celebrates the days that the last (known) slaves, in Texas, were informed that they were free— two years after the law made it so.

The most stunning verse in Revelation is 8:1:

“When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.”

As Heaven is existing in/experiencing the Presence of God (“God”), Hell is– existing without, experiencing not being with God. The Creator, Life itself, Love. The outer darkness where the worms gnaw at, the fire burns, consciousness, and there is the gnashing of teeth: living with oneself– alone. No one to hear you, see you, love or fear or want you or serve you or think of you at all.

The Tree of Life in Eden is protected on all sides by an Angel spinning swords of fire.

“The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of the saints, went up before God from the angel’s hand,” Revelation [8:4] says, just before the angel hurled the burning censor onto the earth.