Odds and Ends 05

Posted on January 6, 2019 by ehurst

The new phone came in Friday afternoon. It took hours at our local provider’s store to get it activated. We still have no solid idea why, except that part of it was the failure to get a UIC programmed into the device. Somehow it was sent out without an identifying code. But there were other issues. We won’t be ordering from our provider’s online store again. At any rate, I’m now back to a flip phone and it’s all good.

The last two weeks have seen weather too cold or simply too nasty for riding. We even got some 4 inches of snow a few days ago. Today I gave the bike a tune-up because tomorrow should be all warm and sunny. My body is rather unhappy with the lack of activity. Maybe I can get some pictures worth sharing; I’m heading out to Draper Lake.

Jack posted an interesting article this weekend. The idea is to climb up out of the pit of being a hen-pecked man. What has often disappointed me is the number of men who, having once been taught the truth, still refuse to be men. I’ve run into this a great deal over the years and have had to give up on some guys because they can’t be bothered to take the first step of introspection and laying claim to their divine heritage. They don’t know who they are, and somehow think it’s okay. Women can have similar problems; you’ll notice Jack’s article assumes a man is dealing with a woman who doesn’t know who she is in Christ, either. It’s not just a man or woman problem.

Pray with me about finding a job. I’ve learned the hard way that God won’t prosper the usual methods for me. I have to wait until someone approaches me. It doesn’t have to be a conventional job by any means, either, but I sense the need to be doing something.

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Teachings of Jesus — Luke 15:11-32

Posted on January 5, 2019 by ehurst

The story of the Prodigal Son has been long established in Western culture. It’s a message well worn and I won’t pretend I know so much as to somehow come up with a brilliant new interpretation. The lesson takes place within the context of the whole chapter, how God views penitent people as long lost children welcomed home.

First comes the grousing of the Pharisees and scribes that Jesus would mix socially with outcasts from Jewish society. It’s obvious the Pharisees fail to understand the purpose of their covenant. The rituals of Moses were aimed at awakening a sensitivity to our fallen nature. The rituals conferred no merit; there was no such thing in ancient Hebrew thinking. The goal was never ritual purity, but of dealing with the inevitable defilement. The purest heart is the one who goes looking for those who need redemption so they can worship the Lord together.

So we have the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin. The former is covered in Matthew, as well. The latter is a similar lesson from a distinctly feminine point of view — a peasant girl whose dowry was so small that any part of it was a treasure in itself. So it is how God views those of His covenant household. If any one of them has gone astray, it’s worth a lot of effort to restore them. Both of those parables represent a common experience among Israeli peasants, that some loss is expected, so life includes established procedures for recovery.

The story of the Prodigal Son drives that point home. We cannot allow ourselves to forget that every part of Israeli existence was tied up in tribal-feudal traditions. A man with two sons would keep an eye on how his property would eventually be divided into three parts: a double portion for the firstborn and a single portion for the other. The younger son has the audacity to press his father for his one-third share from the existing estate. Most fathers would have refused, and rightfully so. However, it was perfectly legal for him to grant this request.

Do you suppose he didn’t know his own son well enough to be surprised how it turned out? The younger son took his fortune and left the covenant lands to live in some exotic place, quite likely Mesopotamia or Egypt. He didn’t want to hear the nagging of his father or his Jewish nation. Fool that he was, the fortune was frittered away, just in time for a famine to strike the land. No longer independent, the boy hired out to some local agrarian. His job was feeding carob pods to pigs. This entailed knocking the pods out of the trees with a stick because the pigs couldn’t reach them, and having the pigs swarm around him to eat. This should have been utterly disgusting work, since Jews considered swine defiling just being near them. As he started thinking about eating those same carob pods, and how much work that entailed, something clicked in his memory.

Even the hired servants on his father’s property back home fared better than he did at this point. So he steeled himself for humility and memorized the speech he would say when he got back home. Eventually he arrived in sight of the place, but as soon as he did, it seemed his father had been waiting for him. The elder man ran to him and didn’t give the younger time to even spill his whole speech. Instead, he embraced the boy and welcomed him home with an extravagant party.

As if that weren’t enough, Jesus rubbed salt in the wound. He described how the elder brother was indignant about this whole scene. The wandering foolish younger sibling, now broke, was living it up. Had his father ever done anything like that for him, after all these years of being faithful to build up the estate? This was clearly the attitude of the Pharisees and scribes. They felt they had been faithful to God, so God owed them. These sinners deserved to be punished for the rest of their lives.

But the father wasn’t having it. Sure, everything he owned now belonged to his elder son, so if had wanted to celebrate God’s mercy, he could have any time he wanted. But no, he was too obsessed with his share of material property, and cared not a whit about his own flesh and blood. The scribes and Pharisees were locked in slavery to the rituals, and boasted of how they piled on extra requirements, but what would they have when the Father settled His estate with the Messiah? The hellish attitude in their hearts would own them, and they would remain outside the final celebration in Heaven. They were already dead in their sins, and only those who repented were alive — such as the penitent publicans and sinners.

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Howling at the Moon

Posted on January 4, 2019 by ehurst

The New Testament (Colossians 2:16) points out that you cannot be judged for how you observe or do not observe any particular calendar of religious festivals. I’m not trying to add any burdens to your life, but to enrich your grasp of biblical living.

If you read modern calendars, Sunday is the New Moon. Perhaps you are aware that under the Law of Moses, this was taken as something like a Sabbath. They would blow the shofar and celebrate as a minor festival. It was commanded by God (Numbers 10:10; 28:11-15).

One minor problem here: Our modern calendar is Solarian. It all comes from the worship of the sun, and so does that notation about the moon. In Hebrew culture, the New Moon was not that point in time when the side of the moon facing earth was totally blacked out. It was when that first sliver of light began to show as the cycle began anew. It had to be observed by those appointed to keep an eye on that very thing, who in turn reported it to the priests in the Temple so the shofar could be sounded and everyone put on notice.

Biblical society was lunar, not solar. They kept track of how the lunar and solar calendars didn’t jive, but the point was to cling to the lunar pattern as part of their agricultural existence. In other words, the solar cycle affects you, but in a very real natural sense, the moon affects you more. Granted, modern science generally denies any significant effect, but science also denies a lot of things the Bible says. We know that God wove His divine moral character into the fabric of reality, so it’s not something science can measure until scientists start taking seriously the heart-led moral consciousness.

So the effect of the moon has long been noted in less scientific literature. I’m not all that concerned about such lore, but I am trying to get a sense of why it mattered for God’s plans with Israel. That Israel essentially failed those plans is not the point. This whole thing of Radix Fidem is a fresh look at things long forgotten. I’m seeking the Lord’s face on this, and for now, my convictions tell me to simply become more aware of the lunar cycle.

On my Linux desktop, I have a set of system monitors that can include all kinds of stuff, some quite frivolous. I’ve added a module that displays the moon phase and depicts what I would see if the moon was visible (it’s overcast where I am as I write this). Right now it’s the last tiny sliver of the previous cycle fading away. Sometime in the next few days it will show the first sliver of the new cycle, and that will be the biblical New Moon.

Right now I’m not doing anything special. But I can tell you that any police department will report this is generally a quiet time, whereas the full moon can be downright crazy. The most bizarre criminal activity comes during the full moon. Nurses in hospitals and prison guards will tell you similar stories about the folks in their care. It doesn’t much matter what science says about that because the effect is pervasive on humanity, and we still have to find ways to deal with it. Apparently God meant for the moon to affect us, so we need to play along to see what blessings come with it.

Even if, as the linked article suggests, it’s nothing more than the effect of the moon’s light on your sleep, it was still the default condition of humanity for most of our history. I know that modern lighting changes all of that, but I’m not convinced it’s a curse. Rather, I sense that there is something much more fundamental to our moral nature as creatures made in God’s image.

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Be Found Faithful

Posted on January 3, 2019 by ehurst

This is not prophecy, per se, but an exercise in sensing the moral drift of things.

The manosphere is folding, says Jack, and I agree. The lessons learned have hardly been lost, but the nature of the movement is evolving. When you begin to reassess issues like how we handle human sexuality, it beckons to other areas of life that need a little demythologizing. While there’s no doubt that sexual Red Pill consciousness is growing, it’s not a proper movement any more by itself.

The only part I ever had in any such movement was pointing out some elements of the Red Pill thinking as a reflection of biblical moral consciousness. My first attempt to talk about it used the term “game” (as in “Game Theory of Human Socio-sexual Response” — discovering the way the game works by testing it repeatedly). Some of the social rules and customs in the Old Testament reflect very much the same outlook as the Red Pill ways. But it was only ever a small part of what we teach here. Human sexuality in our society is far from the only thing that’s broken; the underlying failures are both far deeper and broader than that. Fixing only that problem accomplishes little that really matters, but it is likely one of the most noticeable ways we differ from the world around us.

I’m not cold and dismissive of random females in my social life. I’m guarded. It’s necessary to be friendly with people in most situations, and to be aware of where they are and their expectations. Women are naturally drawn to men who walk in the Spirit. The why is a mixed bag of good and evil, so we are rightly guarded. However, kindness is part of our testimony. Sometimes the Spirit moves me to say something, particularly in my normal clowning approach to life. Most of the time I wait to see whom the Lord moves and how it can be exploited as an opportunity to speak something that points to the truth. But I’m careful to avoid anything that sounds like flirtation.

This is a necessary compromise; we are very long way from the more proper Ancient Near Eastern social structure where it was scandalous for women to address random males in public. There was always room for women to appeal for assistance of some kind when needed, but the protocols made it seem like she was supplicating some guy in his domain. This frame of reference is largely prohibited in American society, even though most females seem to know instinctively that this tends to work with men of obvious power. So the problem is for men to learn how to act regal enough to command this kind of treatment.

There are plenty of exceptions, but a general rule is that we don’t help people who don’t ask for our assistance. Otherwise, we are supplicating them, and there has to be a compelling reason for that. Despite all our social conditioning, the day of the White Knight coming to rescue the damsel is long gone. Guys, you can rarely do any good at all except from a position of dominion. That was a critical element in the recent series on pastoral psychology.

Women have their own brand of dominion, but very few can see it clearly through the fog of Western social decline. Even in the Red Pill society, I still see virtually nothing from women addressing this from a genuinely biblical perspective. Covenant women are exceedingly rare treasures.

Indeed, should the Lord take my beloved home with Him, I’m quite likely to become celibate in every sense of the word. By no means do I support the “Men Going Their Own Way” (MGTOW) movement. Very little of that is genuine moral celibacy; it’s mostly misogyny in disguise. It’s not hard to understand how those guys are bitter after dealing with the worst of feminism in the West, but very few men are genuinely fit for monasticism. Their movement is a deep deception. My point is that having a covenant wife is a blessing too great for words, but at this point, I can’t afford to undertake the truly significant effort necessary to find or cultivate another.

And the likelihood that there is anyone out there qualified in our American context is near zero. That is, it’s near enough zero that I would treat it as a miracle. There is simply too much to do.

Right now, things are slow. I’m struggling along, trying to feel my way through a dark spot — not sadness, but obscurity. I sense things in terms of broad generalities, but the details escape me until they are reality. There is a breaking point for all things; sudden changes are coming. A lot of people can sense this, but they don’t know what to do with it. That’s the reason so very many are so easily deceived into chasing visions of radical political change going in one preferred direction or another. They are all wrong about the direction, but right about the impending radical changes. This means they will all miss the timing, too.

On the one hand, things will take longer than most of them are ready to believe. But when stuff starts happening, it will be too quick, because they will all be facing the wrong direction. The changes coming will make no one happy, in that sense. Two years ago, who could have foreseen the manosphere folding? Yet it’s a tiny remnant still preaching that message now, and they aren’t getting much attention. That’s just a sample of the changes coming.

We are a part of that; let’s be ready as a community of faith. Let this thing find us faithfully walking in the Light.

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Pastoral Psychology and the Heart 07

Posted on January 2, 2019 by ehurst

Where do you suppose the term “pastoral” comes from in pastoral psychology?

It’s that shepherd thing again; the word “pastor” means someone who tends to sheep out in the pasture lands (pastoral means “out in the pasture”). In faith life, everyone is a pastor of someone else at some point. Everyone has some limited dominion over an activity and others become your sheep. You take on the responsibility for care and defense as they operate in your domain.

Sure, you get to play the boss, but this assumes you are gracious and magnanimous in doing so. If you understand that the blessings and goal of all the covenants in the Bible is a tightly knit tribal community, then it’s utterly necessary to seek out the means and methods of dealing with your fellow humans that reduces friction to a minimum. Zero friction isn’t possible, but there are ways to reduce it over the long term. That includes knowing how to be grand and noble when it’s in your power to do so.

Sometimes it must be flatly stated: It doesn’t matter what dreams and accomplishments people seek. There are no goals in the Bible. Just handle what comes with grace and trust God for the outcome. Everything you might do is viewed in light of instrumentality in keeping shalom alive within the flock.

This is our witness as a community of faith. In Western society in particular, everyone wants to know about your goals, as if some concrete end point is obligatory. We reject that. Our witness is not where we are going, but how we get there. It’s the beauty of how we live together in faith. So we view the discrete destinations and tasks as circumstance, whereas the whole business of the church is keeping ourselves together as a flock, focused on doing what His sheep do.

This is where we need to refer back to Ephesians 4 where Paul gives us a glorious vision of God giving people as gifts to the church so that the whole thing is pulled together into a strong standing community of faith. This is the whole point: Redemption is manifested chiefly in how we treat each other inside the community, and then extend that outward. It doesn’t matter at all what the body may plan and accomplish in other terms; the rich fellowship and familial atmosphere is the whole thing.

This is the key to wholeness and what is typically referred to as “mental health.” This is the goal of pastoral counseling. This is what the Bible tells us we all need.

Circle back around to that part about the heart of faith and convictions. If you go searching your convictions and what your faith will empower, it starts from this basic assumption that this covenant family thing is the whole point. You’ll be looking for your convictions to steer you toward the kind of choices that lead to a stronger family communion.

That is the language of the heart. It’s building out the ego to include all of Creation in your protective dominion, and every human who shares that same love. Can you imagine a fellowship where your hearts speak so clearly to each other that everything your mouth says pales in comparison?

This is the only valid dream of pastoral leaders.

End of series (unless someone asks a penetrating question).

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Skype Me

Posted on January 1, 2019 by ehurst

I’ve got Skype installed on my laptop, the only system that has a webcam that works properly. If you find the need to see my face for a chat, I’m at br073n@outlook.com. Obviously you’ll have to get hold of me in advance because I don’t run it unless I need it.

As always, you can also text or call me on my cellphone at (405) 503-1692. Once I switch to the new flip phone, the only effect is that it’ll be slower typing on SMS, so don’t get impatient. Also, the built-in emojis probably won’t display properly on my phone, so you’ll have to use the old text-style emojis. But I will still be able to receive and send images. My provide claims it will do email, but that remains to be seen.

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Pastoral Psychology and the Heart 06

Posted on January 1, 2019 by ehurst

Dominion is love and vice versa.

A critical difference between the Ancient Near East (ANE) and the West is that in the former, even slaves were regarded as having some dignity. It arises from the way the ANE approaches life itself. ANE people would have ridiculed the notion of a passive and inert universe. There is life in everything; it was entirely appropriate for them to personify everything that had a name. It is within that setting that God chose out a people and built their culture so that He could reveal Himself. It wasn’t just picking out a useful nation; it was a nation He built from scratch and the culture to go with it. Divine revelation includes the packaging in which it was given; the means of transmission are critical to the message.

Thus, a Hebrew adult would have viewed the world in terms of persons and dominion. The Bible assumes you understand that ANE feudalism is written into nature itself. It’s not a dominion of turf, but of activity. The Hebrews came to self-awareness as a nomadic people, and it remained a part of their language long after they settled in the Promised Land. People living in stone houses would say, “To your tents!” The issue was not ownership of the land, but ownership of the activity on it. If you passed through without interfering, you remained free. If you got involved in any way, you had to be conscious of whose domain it was. Everyone served someone else; it depended on the context.

Granted, there were plenty of idiots with dominion they couldn’t handle, but the ideals were quite clear to everyone. Unlike the Western model, where the king is a hunter-warrior, the ANE king was always modeled on the shepherd-defender. To exercise dominion in the Bible meant caring about all of those who entered your domain. It also meant recognizing the limits of your dominion. It meant you recognized that even the most powerful dominion spread across a vast empire was still a grant from God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth who ruled all things.

Think about what is required to shepherd. It means getting off your lazy duff and extending a very limited control over a vast number and protecting them from things they could hardly be bothered to notice. It’s not meant to be an insult to those under your care to notice that sheep are incredibly stupid animals. It’s meant to humble you and keep your expectations realistic. You have to lead by voice, knowing that some will always wander off on their own, and that it requires a very stout defense against threats they hardly see coming. Sheep do two things: eat and make more sheep. The the place where they really excel is in being eaten by predators unless you stay alert.

But this assumes you understand the gravity of your mission as shepherd. It requires some training and confidence to wield the weapons of protection. It assumes you assert your dominion over the sheep. You’ll take a lot of guff from the sheep because they don’t see what you see. That’s part of the job, and there’s no point in taking offense. It’s not a matter of personality, but of duty before the Lord. It’s your role.

And while I’m not going to chase that rabbit here, there were plenty of good shepherdesses in the Bible. The style is different, but the job and outcome are the same. So ladies, you have a part in this, too. And to be honest, Scripture assumes you understand that no one ever tended sheep alone. When you read that so-n-so did this somewhere, unless it specifically says they were alone, they had servants and slaves and bodyguards. They got their lackeys to actually do most of the hands-on work, but it was all their decisions and dominion. Thus, the Bible says so-n-so did this or that, but often it was that person commanding those who served them.

So we have to ditch a lot of Western stereotypes about what was good and noble, and start reading things from a Hebrew perspective. Their manner of conduct and personal expression took into account the utter necessity of keeping the community stable. Indeed, one could boil down the concept of shalom as community stability. It was both a goal and a blessing granted by God. It meant necessarily that someone was exercising feudal dominion, but that everyone else did so, as well, but in their own domains.

God’s revelation presumes a tribal existence, because that’s how Creation itself is designed.

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Pastoral Psychology and the Heart 05

Posted on December 31, 2018 by ehurst

If you filled your memory with the knowledge about God, you would still not know Him.

If you explored the entire universe and could analyze every detail, and all cause and effect, you would still not know reality. If you could artificially create life in a laboratory, you would still not understand living. All of that would be meaningless if you didn’t get to know Creation as a person. But if you really got to know Creation as God intended for us, even in this fallen existence, you would understand life and living better than anyone who had all the factual knowledge about the universe, and the technology to manipulate matter. That person would still die without a clue about what really mattered, while you could in theory skip death and go Home to be with the Creator.

We know of at least two individuals who did not die — Enoch and Elijah — and we suspect Moses didn’t pass like most people. Yes, it is possible to become so totally led by faith in this life that God will simply take you out of this world and your body will be translated directly. If “ambition” is the right word, then that would be ours. But of course, ambition as normally understood is a disqualifying moral attribute.

It’s not that we do nothing in serving Christ, but that all of what we could do is not really the point. We choose what to do because of who we are in Him. Questions of being and doing are impertinent; it’s a question of playing the role for which God made you. Who are you?

If you and I had an acquaintance in common, we could talk about the person and both recognize him/her in each other’s description of our encounters with them. Most people are fairly consistent, even when our roles in that person’s life, and vice versa, varied widely. At the very least, most of us could describe visible features to be sure we are talking about the same person. And if it turns out we are both on friendly terms with this person, it’s hard to imagine how we wouldn’t have some common experiences with him/her.

That’s how it is with God and His Creation. Even though we know for certain God treats no two of us exactly alike, we would still both know Him as God. Reality is the same way. No two of us have the exact same experience or impressions about reality, though our experiences are bound to overlap some. We should be surprised if reality treated any two of us exactly alike, because that’s how people act.

One of the biggest impediments in building a community of faith is the damned nonsense about fairness and equality. In the current Western mythology in America we suffer from extremists who insist that no one gain any advantage at all for any reason. Fairness in that sense equates to taking away anything anyone has gained that isn’t available to everyone. What this mythology actually brings us is a net loss; everyone will suffer equally and nobody has any joy. The biblical culture teaches us the very opposite lesson: Everyone has something special from God that makes them unique. If you are wise in the ways of moral wisdom, you can see how it all balances out in the long run. Everyone gets God’s individual attention, and it works the same with all of Creation.

As long as you are seeking fairness, God cannot and will not help you much. You need to get to know Him individually. You will surely experience things not even mentioned in the Bible, and you will forge an interaction with Him that establishes beyond all doubt that He loves you.

We often hear the admonition to not take things personally. Not everything is about you. That’s a good reminder in most cases, but it steps past the real issue that all of Creation wants a good friendship with you. Instead of demanding everyone come to you and bow at the shrine, broaden your ego to make room for people to comfortably participate in your life, to be blessed by the power of God thundering in your soul.

In that sense, everything is personal.

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Hear Here

Posted on December 30, 2018 by ehurst

I need to stop kidding myself. My hearing has declined enough that I have trouble picking up things like the notifications and voices over a smart phone. I’ve noticed this is an issue with both Android and iPhone. I know from experience I have less trouble with flip phones because they are a good bit louder and more distinct on sound. So I’m planning to “upgrade” to a newer flip phone. I’ll probably try to find a tablet to tether when I really need that much screen space for anything. That can come later; I’ll be glad to accept a good used one if anyone wants to donate.

I’ll be trying to buy this stuff used or refurbished, but if you want to contribute to my PayPal, this would be a good time.

Update: I have received sufficient donations to cover the devices. Thank you, folks.

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Pastoral Psychology and the Heart 04

Posted on December 30, 2018 by ehurst

Moral truth was firmly established before Creation.

The fatal flaw in choosing the Forbidden Fruit is that the human intellect is utterly incapable of being objective. Reason leading to objective truth is just a myth. Inevitably the traffic feeding into your consciousness includes influences that pollute the process. The brain cannot function any other way, so it will always include in its calculus things you only wish were true, but it comes out of the reasoning process as quite logical.

That’s because there has to be something giving moral value to everything. The key to knowing and doing rests on first deciding what matters. That is the definition of moral judgment. And the human soul without divine input cannot possibly come up with the right answer, because the right answer can only come to us from the One who made all things.

Instead, everyone comes to adulthood decision-making with a load of conscience, the collected nagging of those who helped us socialize and adjust to life on the way to adulthood. Typically that would be our parents, but plenty of other people step into the role, knowingly or not. The result is a collected and conflicting body of moral principle that registers in our memory as a person; that’s how we are designed. It serves as our conscience, and it’s okay to call it the superego, because that personifies it as someone inside your head who isn’t really you. This person has a ton of influence, but it isn’t you.

It’s quite possible to sort through the stuff this person says to you, and eventually learn to ignore some stuff that makes no sense. However, that tends to drive his/her influence into the background of the subconscious and you still haven’t really dealt with it. This is what neuroses are made of. If you manage to keep it all conscious, you’ll still have to get used to being conflicted.

God has granted us a much better mechanism, but it requires first expanding your ego to include the heart/will. There is no clinical explanation of how to do this. Once you become aware of the possibility, it either happens or doesn’t. Most of the problem is that the ego will have to recognize that it is not only separate and independent from the intellect, but that it is actually above it. You have to learn that you aren’t required to listen to the reason and intellect, that your brain can be wrong and should not run the show.

The proper interface between ego and will is the conscience. But if we associate it with the conscience, it is also a repository of its own, collecting all the nagging (sadly) along with the good guidance (hopefully) and presenting a presence that is hard to ignore. Such as it is, this is your starting place for restoring sanity as God intended. Obey your conscience as best you can, because this breathes life into it and makes it correctable. Keep pushing your conscience to double check against your will. This requires you first become conscious of a body of conviction hidden somewhere in your soul.

Your opinions are reasoned and subject to amendment with better information. Your convictions are written in your soul by the finger of God. They clearly have a far different quality from mere socializing influences. They are the imperatives that can be heard in the voice of your conscience. The idea here is to keep directing your conscience back to the convictions until, given time, the mixed up crap from human nurture is eclipsed in the voice of your superego. The message will gradually become more consistent and reliable.

The process can be enhanced by speculative polling. That is, when you hear about a moral quandary someone else is having, ask your conscience what your convictions have to say about it. What would you do in their place? If you should repeat the same question again later, you may well find a different answer, as the superego matures.

Of course, this all assumes that your spirit has been raised from death. None of this will work any other way, because convictions come to life only when your spirit is alive. It’s not that spiritually dead people have no convictions, but their convictions aren’t necessarily from God. They don’t speak with the same force as convictions in communion with the Creator.

An underlying point I’ve already slipped in here is that proper progress in moral discernment means you must learn to view reality as filled with persons. You must learn to personify everything possible; that is how the Bible views the world. Indeed, the only sane approach is to start with personifying reality itself. It can be an ally, but it requires you to cultivate a friendship and treat it with respect. And so it goes, in that your conscience is a separate person, the person your nurturers tried to make you be. And the grass under your feet, the bushes and trees, birds in the sky, rocks on the ground, the moon at night, the wind and the very molecules and subatomic particles — all of them live individually and in communities, each with a unique personality and will. Without that approach, you cannot properly grasp the mechanics of anything that matters.

God revealed Himself in such terms. He is the one who taught humanity to regard all Creation as alive, individually and in community. This is the proper frame of reference for understanding the whole of revelation.

The divine moral character of God is woven into the fabric of reality.

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