Take No Prisoners

Moral reasoning is the master of all human knowledge. Without moral valuation, nothing else matters, because nature itself objects to moral vacuity. Reality will crush you unless you first establish a heart-led moral frame of reference. And the heart-mind alone is competent in moral reasoning; the intellect has no anchor point at all within itself for such consideration. Reason knows only the mechanism for finding what pleases itself, and that pleasure arise entirely from the various lusts of our fleshly being — Lust of the Eyes, Lust of the Flesh and Boastful Pride of Life.

The intellect is inherently pretentious. It cannot see clearly in the mirror of its own reason, but proclaims itself a separate party from the competing desires from below that imaginary floor of reason and clear thought. It pretends it can umpire between the various mindless demands of the fleshly appetites, when in reality, it only moderates them with crafty tactical considerations. The final question the intellect answers is, “What can we get away with?” Once the intellect accepts a demand from the lusts, it internalizes that demand as inherently good-right-and-just, and projects that outward as some kind of cosmic moral imperative. In the mind, reality itself demands this thing he or she wants.

No civilization in human memory has so thoroughly fallen for this deception as the West. Western Civilization was the first to discard entirely the supremacy of the heart-mind. Instead, it ensconced the intellect as lord of all. No other civilization rests so completely on the self-deception of reason. We have this vast, smothering pretense that reason alone is competent in all matters worth any thought at all. That each and every individual holds competing answers to life’s questions serves to indicate some presumably obvious need for the rise of a reasoning priesthood to establish the baseline for everyone else.

What no one seems to notice is that the flavor and shape of this alleged baseline of what is judged “reasonable” reflects the bias of whomever cares most about subjecting everyone else under their viewpoint. It’s that busybody impulse that rules Western society because the vast majority would rather back off, just live and let live. So the busybodies rule and their narrative is the default. Despite being an obvious minority, they insist that theirs is the majority viewpoint because no one else has that evil impulse to seize control and dominate the conversation before things can get out of hand. “We can’t just let people do what they want!” They seize the dominance without any of God’s moral justifications. Indeed, they demand to hold the authority of the shepherd without the slightest inkling of accountability for the sheep.

We reject this state of affairs. Not that we can dislodge the prissy busybodies from their dominance of Western society, but we are under no moral obligation to buy into their narrative. Indeed, the truly Christlike answer is to wisely consider from the heart that there are times to raise a prophetic ruckus against it. Given that the busybodies claim to own Jesus, too, we know better than to engage in debate about it. We learn that this sick blindness is equivalent to demon possession. Don’t argue, just act. And when you do, never apologize. Never regret, because that’s just buying into the Devil’s lie.

Genuine compassion is moral superiority. The compassion that gently binds up wounds is the same compassion that roughly snatches someone from the fire. It’s all one. It’s the same compassion that slaughters any army attacking your God-given dominion. It’s merely a question of tactics. What does it take to obey your divine call? What does it take to glorify His name in this context? Shape your answer from biblical morals, not from Western mythology.

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My Father’s World, Part 3

Cain lost his communion with Creation. The symbolism was that the ground would no longer cooperate with him and speak to him. The communion was blocked by unjust blood. The ground had only one thing to say to him, and it was the priority of calling for justice. It was unjust blood that silenced the ground against Cain. What would have saved Cain this sorrow?

Repentance. Had he confessed his sin and repented, there’s no doubt the cost would have been high, but mercy and redemption was available as long as he lived. We aren’t given much hint why Cain rejected that path, but he did. So he was sent into the Land of Nod, a symbolic name for moral wandering. His life was filled with sorrow and superstition because he refused to know God as God chooses to be known. He refused to hear the voice of his brother’s blood calling his name to live in the Land of Repentance.

Pay attention here: Repentance is not simply satisfying the accounting of some great cash register in the sky. There’s nothing objective about it; it’s entirely personal. Repentance is a way of life in the shadow of God’s mercy, covering you from the heat of His wrath on sin. God is not an accountant, but your Father who wants you near Him. There is nothing you can do in this life that would make it impossible to repent. You can certainly blow away some one-time moral opportunities, but if you are able to want repentance, it’s there. Repentance restores the Father’s covering.

If you move out of that covering, God’s wrath falls on you. Covering is a Hebrew concept of moral affinity, making you a family member with certain privileges. When we toss aside the false mythology of Western Christianity, we realize that Satan is not able to threaten us with much. He has been confined to this realm of existence, and is bound under the same basic moral imperatives of God’s divine justice. That is, if you live under divine moral covering, the Devil is constrained. You aren’t allowed to see the whole picture, but the point is that you are supposed to walk in that covering with confidence that comes from a high moral privilege. Yes, God plays favorites and He’s quite eager to make any of us one of His favorites.

People who don’t commune with God will hide from Him like Adam and Eve after they chose reason over revelation. That’s what happens when you don’t have your heart-mind on the throne of your soul. When spooky stuff happens, the mind can only guess what it means, and is usually afraid because it’s usually wrong. But the heart recognizes spooky stuff as just another way for moral truth to manifest to your attention.

Nature is not fallen; we are. The earth has a form of sentience and recognizes God’s divine moral character as its own. It knows when you are penitent and seeking a godly moral character because it reads your heart. It surely recognizes injustice. It also remembers people, every soul whose soles trod upon it.

You see that ghost of someone who died unjustly? It’s just like blood crying out from the ground. And while there may not be much you can do to restore justice, chances are that what registers on your eyes as a ghost is simply some manifestation of that moral memory. Nature speaks to us of God’s glory. At a minimum, it is your moral duty to recognize it and savor it for what it is. Once you get it through your thick head that most paranormal stuff is either a word from God or fakery from the Devil, or simply something outside your experience, you’ll start deferring to your heart to let you know. And while the answer may never be quite what your mind is expecting, that’s not the point. Give it time and don’t fear. God won’t hurt you and won’t let Satan mess with you beyond certain moral boundaries you can probably discern if you try.

Stop getting spooked about that stuff. You cannot discern what it might represent for you until you stand firmly under His covering. Nightmares? Most of them signal some moral issue not yet resolved in your soul. Visions and other odd manifestations may not mean much right away; our culture has crippled the faith God intended for us. But that stuff is likely to register somewhere inside your soul and comes back out to remind you later when the moral fruit ripens.

You won’t be growing thorns and thistles in your garden, but harvesting sweet fruit from the Lord’s Garden.

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My Father’s World, Part 2

The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.” (Genesis 4:10-12 NKJV)

One of the keys to recovering a distinctly biblical perspective is correcting the false cosmology of mainstream American Christianity. It’s a deeply schizophrenic mess. On the one hand, buying into the materialistic Western epistemology (assumptions about reality) means we are locked in a single universe. Because of the odd way that Greco-Roman mythology mixes with Anglo-Saxon-Celtic mythology, we end up with a religious assertion that there is a Heaven and Hell, but the doctrine of afterlife is highly afflicted with materialistic reasoning. Thus, we have assertions that our understanding of Heaven/Hell must conform to this materialistic logic, but it is also larded with spooky superstition. In the end, you have something you cannot perceive with your senses, but it must be here somewhere inside our material universe.

So the first step is pointing out how the Bible presumes that fundamental reality is the Spirit Realm, and it’s not spooky. It is ineffable, but wonderful. Meanwhile, our reality here in this universe is a temporary bubble, a constrained existence with restrictions and problems. We are not in a context that God intended for us. We chose something else, tantamount to rejecting revelation and closing off our hearts from dominance, and choosing to enthrone our human reason over our hearts. All this blather about how faith must be intellectually reasonable is actually confirming us in our fallen state. Western Christians have locked themselves out of contact with the Spirit Realm, because they have this a priori assumption that the mind isn’t a part of the fallen nature, and insist that God must address us on the level of our intellects. There is an unconscious demand that God agree to our decision to pull truth down onto our human level of control.

So we struggle against Western Christians who demand a literal meaning backed by some bogus theory of “propositional truth.” At the same time, these same Bible wonks insist certain crucial Hebrew phrases cannot possibly be taken literally because our culture makes no room for it. Western Christians read the heathen mythology of the heart back into the Bible. Thus, it becomes a symbol for something quasi-emotional, and not easily known or trusted. This is directly contrary to the Hebrew belief that the heart is a superior faculty of both sensing and knowing, separate from the sensory and intellectual faculties of common conscious awareness. This is not a deep dark secret of Hebrew mythology; it’s common knowledge among those who take the trouble to study Hebrew intellectual traditions. It shows up in consumer grade commentaries on Scripture, but most people cannot absorb it because it’s just too contrary to the social conditioning.

When Scripture says God could hear blood crying out from the ground, that’s as close to literal as you can get. It’s not spooky superstitious nonsense, though Western minds cannot avoid associating it that way on some subconscious level. That’s where the schizophrenia comes in, with the conscious orthodoxy fighting a priori assumptions. God heard that cry. It stood as living moral evidence before Him. The problem is that our society has no place for the faculty of heart-mind, and it is in the heart where moral reality registers.

So it’s not enough to see a clear and distinct separation between the Spirit Realm and our universe, but there is a boundary layer where the two intersect, and it’s fundamental nature is moral. God created all things, and it stands to reason on any level that His Creation would reflect His personal nature. Anything He makes would bear the imprint of His character. In order for us to understand that, we have to throw aside the image of the universe as some kind of inert material, and embrace the blunt Hebrew language saying that Creation is a living thing. At the same time, we experience Creation as a jillion living things. Every living thing is discretely a person on some level. And the Hebrew Scripture goes on to assert that God made it like that intentionally, that His Creation is a living thing that depends on His life. So the dirt can talk, but its language isn’t a matter of cerebral facts; it speaks the language of revelation, which is moral truth.

Cain’s killing of Abel was unjustified. Scripture makes it plain that killing is no sin in itself. There are too many places where He flatly commands executions of individuals, and established that principle in the Covenant of Noah. Noah stands as long as there are rainbows. Taking human life is not the issue, but that it must serve a morally just purpose — it must meet God’s approval. And that justice bears little resemblance to Anglo-Saxon mythology about moral justice, since God is not some Germanic pagan deity. His is a moral justice that characterizes the “primitive” ancient Hebrew people. That culture just happened to be the one God designed and formed specifically as the best place to reveal Himself. Knowing God starts with knowing that culture and it’s definition of justice.

Of course, that means you don’t have a clue about Jesus without understanding something of that culture, because Jesus insisted that His teaching was implicit in that ancient culture. Jesus used that same terminology of living from the heart, while the intellect was designed to serve instead of reign. Most of the stuff Westerners find spooky is connected to that moral boundary layer between this world and the Spirit Realm. If you deny that the heart is superior to the intellect, you deny that the moral boundary layer exists, and you cut yourself off from understanding that God is speaking through such paranormal manifestations.

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Paid

Rejoice with me; the City gave me a check today to settle my claim. And because they share the same bank, I was able to immediately convert that into cashier’s checks for EMSA and the sporting goods store. Now we just have to wait for the bike technician to come to work Wednesday and we’ll get this thing wrapped up.

Whew! Almost done. All I need now is to heal up. God is good.

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My Father’s World, Part 1

When we read the Bible, we are facing two layers of false mythology.

The first is the underlying bias of the translators. In the US, our religious culture is largely the product of the Anglo-Saxon biases behind the King James Version (KJV). It’s a particular branch of Germanic tradition deeply affected by contact with the Druid religion of the Celts they conquered when invading the British Isles. In order to Christianize this odd mixture of culture, the missionaries continued a long tradition of perverting the gospel message by transplanting the image of Jesus into a mixture of heathen assumptions about morals and reality. This made it easy to reduce the shock of Christian conversion, consistent with what it really was, a mere political campaign. The church officials of that time were simply trying to convert these powerful heathens into a political asset of imperial conquest.

If you dig into the background of other European translations, you’ll find a similar dose of heathen mythology arising from slightly different flavors of Germanic tribal culture. But the one that affects America the most is the Anglo-Saxon KJV Bible.

The second and more subtle issue is the mythology of the Pharisees that shows up in the various manuscripts typically used for translation into European languages. It’s really difficult to summarize this problem because it’s horribly complicated, and the study of it forms a massive field of research all its own. Just tracking who did what with their favored collection of manuscripts is mind boggling. We have no original manuscripts from those who wrote the Bible, so we are forced to estimate between varying collections of sources, trying to recover as best we can what was likely something close to the originals. The whole effort is beset with some of the nastiest partisan wrangling and it’s dominated by church folks. But that bias shows up when you read a popular English translation and realize that what the New Testament writers were quoting from the Old Testament is often not quite like the English translation of the Old Testament source in the same translation.

The Pharisees represented a departure from the ancient Hebrew culture, as I’ve tried to outline in my book, A Course in Biblical Mysticism. Oddly, the collection of Scripture manuscripts most popular with American Christians is the one most thoroughly entrenched in Pharisaical biases (it’s call the Masoretic Text). It’s the same one used in producing the KJV. If nothing else, this serves as a warning that we cannot really trust the mainstream of American Christian belief to reflect the truth of the Bible. However, the problem is not wholesale deception, but a particular collection of errors that are consistent and easily spotted with some training. The problem is more one of a well-know agenda, not a total perversion.

And then we have all that big pile of American entertainment culture built on top of that when we are confronted with words in the Bible like “witchcraft.” It’s enough to wear you out slogging against multiple layers of culture and false bias just getting an accurate glimpse of what was indicated in the Scripture. In general, it bears not the slightest resemblance to neither our popular American imagination of witchcraft (influenced by movies and TV), nor what witchcraft actually is.

Finally, we have a vast layer of dismissive scientism when we encounter something that appears paranormal. Did you see a ghost, or hear something that had no discernible natural source? Did you encounter some other sensory experience that simply does not fit into the cultural regime of our society? The ignoramus viewpoint popular with American Christian religion is to dismiss it all as something satanic. All that does is make you feel like the Devil has a hold on your life and you are obliged to pass through a lot of baloney ritual abuse at the hands of your “Christian” brethren to escape that evil clutch on your soul.

Stop. I realize what a massive job it is rebuilding a biblical faith that forsakes the ocean of sewage promoted as mainstream Christian religion. But we aren’t designed to handle wholesale changes in one fell swoop like that. It’s a process. Genuine faith and holiness demands we rebuild whatever is in front of us right now. Some of you, dear readers, have encountered spooky stuff and we cannot claim to offer an antidote to falsehood unless we explore what those events should mean to you.

The first step is asking you to take up an awareness of the issues noted above. Immediately I need to remind you that I am hardly the ultimate expert in all of these things. I’m just someone who has found a vast landscape of sweet moral peace and I’d hate to live out here all by myself. You will have to approach it on your own path, but I’m convinced that a certain amount of my experience will overlap with yours. I’m further convinced that if you truly seek peace with God through your own heart-mind awareness, He will not fail to show you what He requires. Our virtual community of faith should not shrink from any subject that affects so many of us, and right now I’m burdened with addressing the various paranormal or supernatural phenomena we experience. I’ll tell you what I’ve discovered and we can compare notes.

Feel free to ask questions or tell your own stories. We shouldn’t fear anything in this world, because it’s our Father’s world.

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Come On In

If you are going to be excluded, it will be your choice.

A fundamental image of God’s Kingdom on this earth is the boundaries of human cooperation. I keep harping on how we are wired to be tribal, that the family feel under Eastern feudalism is the very breath of holiness and shalom in this life. So we can’t easily describe the boundaries that will keep one person or another from feeling at home, but it will surely register in the convictions just how deeply you will want to be involved. Nor is it static, but a living thing where your sense of inclusion waxes and wanes. That’s all normal and right.

Kiln of the Soul is our parish, our close-knit virtual family in the Spirit. We share a lot of things that most readers can’t absorb easily. Indeed, if you could see over my shoulder and read some of the chatter behind the scenes, you would sense we are just a dozen or so at any given time who are actively involved. There are another dozen or so silent followers who genuinely love what we do, to the point they could support almost everything we promote.

But in a much broader sense, we try to publish our faith under the heading of Radix Fidem. You can embrace the principles of that little pamphlet and still not feel at home with our cozy Kiln parish. So you might feel you understand heart-led living but not find our specific choices easy to like. You can embrace Radix Fidem as an approach to forming your religion without sitting outside and conversing with trees and birds, but us Kiln parishioners all do that. It’s not a requirement; it’s more like a trademark. It’s the kind of thing we talk about often and take quite seriously. Radix Fidem doesn’t require that, only indicates it broadly.

So you can be totally cerebral and decide that Radix Fidem is right, but without that full heart-led awareness, the Kiln fellowship will be tough to handle. And hanging out with us here on this blog, as well as following the Kiln blog, is really your call. The active volunteers are trying to do several things at once. We are trying to maintain a close virtual communion with each other, and always eager for more folks who can handle it. We are also aware that what we do is not for everyone. And we know that established religion itself is quite a boondoggle, as it has been for each of us, but not everyone belongs to our little household of faith. Nor should they, so we try to offer some wider principles on how to approach religion.

Radix Fidem will help you discover the power of conviction in the heart, but it won’t give you much practical guidance in using it. That requires coming close to other folks who use it. You have to experience it with us to discover how it works for you. It’s caught, not taught.

So here’s a parable: Radix Fidem is the territory, the way you can find us. To actually live inside the walled city, you have to join the covenant family of Kiln. You can also camp outside as a welcome ally. The walls aren’t made of stone, but of experiential moral truth. They are not cerebral or conceptual. They are formed by our love for each other as tested and tried in the fire of human sorrow. We stand ready to walk with each other through our personal hells. I don’t stand in the center dispensing truth; I’ve been helped through my own internal vales of death. But I am the head of the household in the bonds of moral affinity. To really join Kiln requires that you embrace the discipline of moral duty to the covenant that holds us together. You have to find a way to lovingly embrace everyone already here. Meanwhile, nothing keeps you from forming your own household and walled city in the territory of Radix Fidem.

You can be as close to us as you like.

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Psalm 109

We are hard put to understand an individual imprecatory psalm in this final book of public worship songs, but must trust the wisdom of those who acted within that ancient culture. It’s for sure that all of us have experienced the underlying core of this prayer — a betrayal by someone we trusted, and for whom we cared. At least in that sense, we understand using this as a common ritual, since it is such a common experience, and the solution modeled here is clearly seeking a pure heart.

It is this business of heart-led faith that remains so foreign to our Western sensibilities. It is so very central that there is no need to speak of it directly here. Yet without it, we would miss the meaning of the curse David prays on his enemies. It seems a little extreme. On the one hand, we cannot forget that hyperbole is rather the norm in dramatic poetry like this. On the other hand, if this symbolic enemy has truly closed off his mind to the moral leadership of his heart, then the curse simply lays bear the awful things this man has done to himself and to those who depend on him for life. Thus, the attitude of the psalm is, “Lord, let him have the fullness of the evil he has chosen!” David prays this for the very reason that it reveals the moral character of God most clearly.

The format presumes at least some political authority. The office of king is merely the chief elder of the nation. It is his duty to take some risks in parceling out the vast moral duties of shepherding to feudal servants. With all the care he could take, David still finds himself suffering the presence of fakes who seek unjust personal gain. Sadly, he doesn’t always find out until rather far down the line of trust. Thus, David begins by setting the scene of betrayal of a trusted subordinate, someone he elevated to high trust and some power. This person used their position to bring David down for personal gain. In particular, they have falsely accused David in a very public manner. We presume David would hardly balk at a justified accusation, as we know from the record of Scripture, but this was something that was done all completely wrong, and it was false in the first place.

David responds with a detailed curse. We note that it is a long string of common images and standard idioms from those times. It starts with asking God to make his life hard, and then to make it short. And to ensure that no one learns from his evil ways and takes up his selfish thinking, David prays that his family suffer as well. We forget how dangerous it is to the whole nation if people who close up their hearts and commit themselves to mere human comfort are allowed to prosper and multiply. It is a common presumption of the Ancient Near East that the bad morals of a head of household corrupt everything he rules over — people, property and all. David goes further in asking God to withhold mercy and not forget the moral evil that brought forth such a traitor.

Such a man is presumed to curse vainly at others, since it was so common. Without a heart-led moral awareness, all that’s left is the lusts of the fallen soul. David prays that God return all those vain curses back on the man who uttered them. Let them wrap themselves around his soul, and soak into his very being — like excessive water a man drinks that overflows his stomach and is absorbed through his bowels, like oil wastefully lavished on everything until it soaks through his clothes and skin into his bones.

By contrast to this, David looks to his Master to save him from such accursed people. Better to face the wrath of God on his genuine sin than the “help” from people like that. David pours out the depth of sorrow and pain from this awful betrayal. There is also that common note, “O Lord, how long shall I endure this sorrow?” Then David asks the God deliver Him in such a way as to let people see he stands in God’s favor. Let them be ashamed of all their unjustified cursing and plotting secretly against him; expose them as liars. But as for David, his focus is on reflecting back the glory of God before a watching world.

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Guest Post: Azure Ides-Gray

Another slice of our booklet project. Tell us what you think.

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3. The Spirit Realm is real and beyond comprehension (this universe is not everything)

My intent with this writing is to bring some doubts to the table as they relate to the Spirit Realm. This is inherently difficult territory to navigate through a medium like writing as the topic is, inherently speaking, beyond description. However, beyond description is quite different from beyond actuality. The Spirit Realm is capable of being recognized by humans in the sensory world, though it doesn’t exist in the same way and is not contingent upon the world as we know it. In addition, this reality will only be convincing to those who make the decision to listen to Christ first, for it is by His grace that humans might be imbued with a change in understanding (Ephesians 1:7-10). Systematic arguments are only successful to a certain point with topics such as this, and so I shall, rather loosely, let my thoughts stream.

In no way whatsoever does the observation of natural phenomena discredit, at base level, the possibility of supernatural reality. Roger Trigg makes this point with clarity in his book Rationality and Religion: “It does not follow from the mere fact of human rationality that there is no transcendent reality… That assumption was the product of the Enlightenment” (1998:27). Fellow philosopher Peter Kreeft is correct in rebranding this historical period as “the Endarkenment.”

Though there are numerous ways in which one can reject the reality of the Spirit Realm, the atheist Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach, seems an apt example of someone who pushed this quasi-Enlightenment philosophic notion right to the edge. Despite being alive post-Enlightenment, Feuerbach’s thinking was nonetheless tainted by materialism. He maintained that the human collective was God and that the supposed qualities of God were mere human qualities being projected to a “false zone of reality” (Singer, 2000:23). Whether one takes the ideological route of Feuerbach or a different path, any path that deviates from the narrow road is the wrong way (Matthew 7:14).

However, the Enlightenment should not be our main focus; the focus is the Spirit Realm, particularly, how its reality might be denied. Doubts made in relation to the Spirit Realm come in a variety of forms, and they are not only committed on behalf of unbelievers but also Christians. What form does this disbelief come in for the Christian? It is my suggestion that Christians are at risk of what might be considered one-sided supernaturalism. What I am referring to here is that many Christians sincerely believe that the evil dimension of the Spirit Realm is very accessible and dangerous, and yet regard the good dimension as being quite distant and ineffective. Think about it for a few minutes and be honest with yourself. Is it not easier to tremble at the thought of witchcraft participation and its consequences, for instance, than to imagine oneself being in awe when praying to God or taking scripture into account? Why is that so?

Again, there is nothing I can write here that can prove the reality of the Spirit Realm. This writing is a structured expression and the Spirit Realm is beyond structures, so it’s intrinsically inadequate to make so great an achievement. But there are some points that I hope would resonate with you. First, tread with caution in a world that’s brimming with vain philosophies. Second, be serious about your beliefs – especially in relation to the supernatural. Belief in the Spirit Realm need not be reduced to a type of misguided Gnosticism. The Genesis account informs us that natural reality was intended by God (see chapter one) but it is certainly not an end in itself. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13 verse 12: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” Hold fast to Christ while you exist in this world of temporality. But remember, your knowing of Christ is not intended to be a temporal, this-world experience, but rather, an eternal knowing (John 3:16, 36).

Azure Ides-Gray

Works Cited:

Singer, Peter. “From God to Money.” Marx: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 23. Book.

Trigg, Roger. “A Defense of Religious Realism.” Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings. Ed. Michael Peterson, et al. 4th. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 27. Book.

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It Ain’t Just a Pony Ride in the Dark of Night

In terms of clinical psychology, a “dream” is drawn from the contents of your human experience. There’s a lot of stuff stored in your memories, and not all of it is conscious. If you remember a dream sequence once you are awake, it provides a snapshot of subconscious stuff that might have been forgotten or submerged. Most of us could, given the right preparation, recognize what our dreams are telling us in symbols. It’s typically something inside of you trying to correct a moral imbalance. Neurosis arises most often from fleeing that inner moral awareness, trying to drown it out. People who medicate their sleep are often hiding from a moral truth.

This contrasts with a “vision,” in which some portion of the story is apparently sourced outside your own mind, and it tends to pass through your consciousness in a half-aware state. It might well include a lot of dream material from inside your own slush-fund of memories, but something inside of you recognizes that this experience is not just a dream sequence.

So I sit here in the wee hours of the morning, wide awake and feeling compelled to discuss a vision that awakened me. I’m not talented enough to write it out in full dramatic fashion; it would probably make a novelette. All I can do is summarize and characterize, and that’s good enough for the moral purpose that drives me to write about it in the first place.

The story: A group of amateurs are working on a film, using a facility that has seen better days. A lot of stuff clinging here and there from previous uses never got completely removed. They were doing some difficult work on a scene involving a large water-tank for underwater filming. It was unheated, but tolerable, and almost funny was that this tank had a lot of fake ice encrusting various parts. This was the last bit of unfinished footage and it took the actors, who were also the producers and writers, quite some mutual encouragement to get it finished and into the final editing phase.

They revived a shared joke about how their film project betrayed such genius that it would change the world and humanity would never be the same.

So they got into costume, splashed into the water and worked through a quick review of the scene. Then they recorded the scene and prepared the exit the tank in a grudging celebratory mood. As they all stood near the ladder, the whole world around them flickered. The first thought out of someone’s mouth was a power flux, but then another member of the group realized that the tank lights didn’t flicker at all, and they were on the same circuit as the rest of the staging area.

Just beyond the confines of the tank, the world itself went utterly black, as if in the emptiest part of outer space. Then, you would have thought it was a filming trick, with the background supplied by software, because it looked as if someone had turned on the back-lighting, there as a flicker of the display with some distortion and artifacts, then quickly it all blinked back into place. But there was no green-screen background outside the tank.

They realize that the ice on the edge of the tank is now real, and the air is cold enough to make them shiver. One of the people in this troop theorized that reality itself had shifted, and somehow their oddball setting had allowed them to experience a moment of shared awareness. “Well, we did say that this would change the whole world.”

They climb out to face a world still synchronized time-wise, but it requires a struggle to keep track of what has changed in their world as they compare notes against their memories over the next few days. Then I came fully awake as the brief chunk of storyline faded out in my mind. Sorry, but I didn’t write that story, so don’t beg me to pound out that novelette. It didn’t come from me. Feel free to steal the story idea if you like, but it’s not my kind of thing.

Rather, I knew right away the whole thing was a reminder that reality compares favorably to that kind of story. That is, you never know when everything around you will become surreal. I know it can get tiring to read it if you don’t feel it, but I’ve been writing about walking in a very high moral tension for some years, an increasingly powerful sense that our world is on the cusp of radical changes. A huge portion of our planet has been manipulated into surrendering that moral awareness that is the human default, and as God begins to keep His promises of blessings and curses after His patience runs out, people will go mad in the false certainty that the world has gone mad.

So when you see things like the terror truck on the French Riviera, and the next day an attempted coup in Turkey, and God-only-knows what is coming over the weekend, it doesn’t throw you off. Sure, mourn the sadness of human slaughter. While you are at it, mourn the sins that brought us to this place. Though we are equipped to recognize the meanings of our dreams, and to discern when a vision occurs, we are also wired to recognize when the nightmares are “real.”

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Decay Is Renewal

RecoveryIslandUrban decay is a renewal of nature. Today I was testing my iPhone camera and I’m embarrassed to discover it is roughly as good as the little pocket camera I used the past two years, and it’s smaller and comes with a lot more functions. The first image is a parking island out behind the old Heritage Park Mall.

WardsGarageAlmost directly behind me was this shot of the old Ward’s auto repair shop. You can just make out the “MW” logo on the handle of the pedestrian door. Right now the garage is just storage with vehicles and equipment inside.

FencelineYou can’t say Life Church doesn’t splash out the cash on facilities. They replaced the fencing along the outer edge of the mall parking lot, but stopped at some obvious point, beyond which they make no claim of ownership. The original fence in exactly the same style continues on hidden inside the shrubbery and trees.

SomethingburgerWhen LifeChurch first opened this Midwest City campus, there was a Whataburger store out in the very corner of the parking lot, within walking distance of the front entrance to the worship center. It died and someone bought it with good intentions of turning it into some other kind of fast food place. They used the color scheme from what was then our brand new NBA franchise, the Oklahoma City Thunder. But it never happened. Nature is slowly reclaiming the place, and the grass between the cracks in the asphalt is just one small indicator.

AaronsPoolThis was also an exercise walk, the first longer walk since the knee surgery. After strolling all the way around Heritage Park, I walked behind a still active strip mall across from Sears on the east side of Air Depot Boulevard. One of the shops still open here is one of those rental places that offers appliances and home electronics of the lowest possible quality at obscenely high prices. It’s loan sharking in disguise.

Last night was a very heavy rain. While I don’t recall seeing evidence of flooding on previous occasions walking by here more than a dozen times, it served to emphasize how nature is seldom denied doing what it does despite all sorts of human efforts to “tame” things. The slope drops to about a meter in depth back against the dock.

Let me reiterate something: In each case Creation spoke to me about these shots. “See what I can do?” In each photo, I am sure nature will also speak to you through the images. Sure, there may be some talent for photography here, but it would hardly be worth your time to see the shots if it rested solely on my abilities. In everything we do as people, in our divine calling from God, nature will speak to your heart and help you bring forth the full power of shalom in your heart-led desire to bring Him glory. This is why I’m praying for some way to get back out there in the countryside with an even better camera, because it keeps calling my name.

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