Babylon Again

The lesson was burned into my soul long before I was conscious of it: no two alike. Commonalities there must be, or communication and fellowship are utterly impossible. Those things are required, so they must be possible on some level, and that requires a certain measure of shared experience. However, there remains the unalterable and unquestionable principle burned into the very fabric of the universe that each is unique in some way.

There remains a vast stretch of dispute between one civilization and the next about what and how much is or should be regarded as commonalities. How much difference does a difference make? In our society today, there’s a heavy emphasis on commonalities, in the sense of, “Facts are facts; they are unalterable or they are meaningless.” If you can recognize that kind of statement as a matter of perception and orientation, and not as fundamental to the nature of things, you are on the road to personal spiritual growth.

So while I understood the statement and nearly embarked on a career in science and technology, something held me back, something inside of me that would not let go. I decided to heed that call. I’ve kept on heeding it, because it never was a call to place, but a call in a certain direction. I’ll never arrive. It was never a question of facts but of moral commitment.

Thus, since this blog began, a fundamental assumption is that I am telling you my narrative and it’s not possible for you to buy into everything I say. Some of what I experience will have no meaning for you, or may even be repugnant. That is entirely proper and righteous. If you don’t pull back at some points in my narrative, then you have not understood any of it. If you swallow everything I say, it’s a sign you aren’t even paying attention. Just because I am adept at expressing myself is no reason to hold me up as a model.

Indeed, of late I’ve been experiencing things I can’t even narrate. For example, how am I supposed to explain the sheer joy and love I feel when I grab the limb of an oak tree, even when I’m wearing heavy gloves? Yes, there’s a context to that experience, and that’s the part I can’t put into words. I don’t expect you to go outside seeking oak trees to shake hands with so you can get a thrill. Instead, I try to generalize about how your heart can be a sensory organ that discerns good vibes from Creation. Then I pray that you can experience it on your own terms.

For example, Our Savior was probably into rocks. Of all the physical objects in His daily life, He seemed to have more to say about stones than any other thing. For that matter, the word for His erstwhile secular job skill was “builder,” not “carpenter” per se. Given the record of what He had to say, it appears He was more of a stone mason than anything else. I’m a woodcutter, so trees are more my kind of thing. I can just look at a piece of our local wood and sense in my muscles what it will take to cut it this way or that. I’m sure stones spoke to Jesus like wood speaks to me, and I have no doubt He found the same blessed vibes climbing up into the rocky mountains that I get hiking in the woods.

Discover your native element. Need more examples? My wife tells me how food talks to her, including the natural supplements at the “health food” store. She isn’t just reading the labels on the packages; she’s reading the contents with her heart. She knows when her body needs one thing and not another. I suppose we could word it differently, saying that the Holy Spirit speaks to her through the food, but the so-called “anthropomorphism” of supposedly inanimate objects is modeled in Scripture. Discover your own native element.

I say that because there is a prophetic point to make here. We live in a time when genuine fellowship on our spiritual and moral levels is exceedingly difficult and rare. How many people around you are awakened and sensitive to Creation the way I described above? How many people can rejoice in the comforting power of the Holy Spirit of God by touching any part of nature? How literal for you are the lyrics to that Sandy Patty recording, “Was It a Morning Like This?”

Did the grass sing?
Did the earth rejoice
To feel you again?
Over and over like a
Trumpet underground,
Did the earth seem to pound:
“He is risen!”

While I don’t care for some of the cultural folderol that comes with such performances, that would be part of my point here. I would be very uncomfortable in that place where Sandy recorded that video; it looks like some monster church house. I don’t belong in such places because the environment is too alien to my faith. It serves little purpose to criticize them just now. Rather, I maintain that it’s hard to make sense of what I write here if you enjoy worship in that setting. If you are going to embrace a significant part of my narrative, you will be alienated from that religious mainstream.

We are in a time when rediscovering the ancient roots of humans calling on the name of God (Genesis 4:26) shatters the earth under our feet. Even the knowledge we have now within Western scholarship regarding those ancient people paints them as entirely alien to our Western world. Beyond that range of scholarly exploration is a whole world of daily reality for them at which we can only guess. And does it matter? How much of this must of necessity arise from our own context?

You decide for yourself. A core element in the sins of Ancient Babylon with Nimrod was the attempt to rope everyone together into a convenient mass to serve one man’s evil dreams. Unity under human power is inherently evil, particularly on the scale Nimrod sought. We can hardly guess at the particulars because the account avoids them. Rather, it emphasizes how God insisted on making sure it would never again be possible. It’s not a mere matter of different languages, but what stands behind linguistic differences. God intends for us to be each entirely different in how we experience Him and how we live for His glory in our fallen state.

My prophetic warning here is that we are back in Babylon again, in a certain sense. Men seek to control and organize for their convenience our very personal faith and interactions with God. It is not for any other man to say how you shall relate to God. The only thing I am permitted along those lines is deciding I don’t have to accommodate you and your faith, any more than you have to accommodate mine. But you also must not attempt to place limits on another when those limits are outside God’s grant to you. The thing we most need to learn right now is moral boundaries, and our Western culture is hideously perverted on that issue.

I can’t offer an antidote that will save the world. Changing the world is not in the cards, so let’s change what we can reach. What I do have is something you might be able to use to save your own personal sanity: Learn to worship alone. If it so happens that someone in your life shares a measure of your faith, then learn to worship in that tiny grouping. In my experience with other believers, I find that we don’t take seriously enough the promise of Christ, “Where two or more are gathered together in My name…” (Matthew 18:20). God takes it seriously when you worship Him alone or in pairs, so you should take it seriously, too.

So much so that I want to encourage my readers to develop skills for worship like that. Don’t ever assume any particular ritual is better than another. Explore, experiment or simply stick with what you know best. What works for you, to cause you to sense you have come into the Presence of the Creator? Don’t be browbeaten by anyone into accepting their answer. The only guidance I’ll give you is this: It’s not about an emotional thrill, though it’s hard to avoid getting that thrill when it’s real.

The other thing is that, if you have to question why worship at all, I can’t help you. If you don’t feel drawn into the divine Presence in a concentrated way where you leave your earthly existence behind in some sense, then I can’t make you want it. Nothing else in this life compares. Instead, I’ll warn you that a genuine experience of God’s Presence will be increasingly difficult within the mainstream for those who make any sense at all from my writing here. What I’m trying to offer here is a radically different path following that experience. Rather than try to leverage worship as the means to harness you to my wagon, I’m trying to help you build your own wagon. We are called to carry His message of how to live into this world; in a sense, that means carrying His Presence with us. Obviously, that means spending time with your whole attention focused on His Presence so that it actually takes you above yourself and this broken plane of existence. If you don’t experience some element of the Spirit Realm, you can’t do the work of the Spirit.

In these days, I find it necessary to emphasize individual personal worship over anything that men call “corporate worship” because the solitary encounter with God is the best way, and perhaps the only way, to escape from Babylon.