The Colour of the Wheat Fields
"But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"Then it has done you no good at all!"
"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields."
(I know I posted this a while ago, and I can't find where.)
My copy of Regina Dawn Akers' The Holy Spirit's Interpretation of the New Testament has arrived, and I am starting to read it, beginning with the commentary for Mark, the most direct section.
It is a challenging read. I am getting all sorts of emotional mixed messages: I like it, and I'm disturbed by it, and I'm not sure if I believe it, or not. It's definitely in the A Course In Miracles vein, but ACIM was much clearer to me. This one... bugs me.
And yet. Looking at Regina's Yahoo Group, I see this:
Last summer, I had a dream. I was standing and looking at a wheat field that stretched as far as the eyes could see. As I looked on the wheat field I heard a thought, "The cover of the book is to be this color." A few weeks later, I had the same dream again.
I am not an artist, so I called Phil Frisk, who is. I asked him if he would design a wheat-colored cover for NTI. He agreed. We didn't talk about it again and a couple of months passed, then I had another dream. In this dream I was talking to a young man who seemed to have some authority over the cover of the book. I was telling him that the logo for the Foundation for the Holy Spirit needed to be on the cover. He disagreed. I told him that the copyright for NTI belonged to the foundation, so the logo must be on the cover. He said that wouldn't do. I continued to insist, and he continued to say no. Then, he reached in his files and pulled out a picture of a sheaf of wheat. He said that this was
the picture that was to be on the cover.
The symbol of the wheat and the harvest is hugely important to me. And then this blog entry:
I saw the seeds, which had been planted in every mind, as they began to grow. Happiness sprouted in bushes of light that grew from the minds of everyone. And soon, although we still walked and lived in this world, we were focused on our minds. We knew that’s where our happiness was. We knew that Love was in our minds, and we recognized that our minds were one. So, we walked within the world of form, but we did not pay attention to it. It was no longer of value to us. We valued only the Love, Happiness and Oneness of our minds.
It bugs me because this Sunday I had a similar mental image during the sermon; the parable of the Mustard Seed. All these people with seeds of light growing within them; all good acts forming trees which shelter the world. How much of our society has already been shaped and sheltered by quiet trees of righteousness that we don't even recognise, without which we'd be living in a harsh, dead desert?
It bugs me because I don't want to believe a false gospel. I don't want to believe something that's too simple, too easy, feels too right to be true.
This Jesus attracts me, even as he scares me, and I am desperately afraid that I will find out that he's only an illusion. What he says is too radical. 'God is within you' 'We are all God's children' 'I am only an elder brother'. 'The world is not really there' 'Everything you have done is already forgiven' 'You are one with God'.
How many Jesuses are there? What was the message he taught, really? When we strip away all the layers of human interpretation, what's the core of it? 'Say the Sinner's Prayer or you'll die and burn forever'? Or 'God loves you'?
This Jesus teaches like an Easterner. Is he even a Christian?
If this is real, there's something very interesting happening this decade. The Harvest that was promised to the Pentecostals might be beginning. And, for now, they're missing it. (Though perhaps the rain, to mix metaphors, is falling everywhere.)
If it's not real, the implications are too horrible to contemplate, and I've not yet entirely freed myself of that fear.
A voice inside me says 'fear is not the Way'. But...
Meta: Desiderata
Here's a thing I want.
A canonical text encoding for blog posts: capturing time, date, user, categories, and markup including links and quotes. Preferably also an encoding for capturing comments.
I have to upgrade the web server here, and I need to be able to archive my posts from both Wordpress and Livejournal in a big dumb text file somewhere in case of meltdown. I don't trust webapps to not destroy my words, and some of these might be useful to look back on. Also, I need to somehow consolidate them into one big pile (or several small piles) at some point.
I'd rather not have lots of opaque XML markup, but I'm figuring there must be a canonical XML or YAML encoding by now for blog text, right? It's a simple, well-defined problem with an easy solution, so it's already been done, right?
(Crickets chirp).
Not bitter. Just very, very jaded.
Election
So we've had the NZ elections.
A big rightward swing: National displaces Labour as main party, ACT (effectively Libertarians for any Americans following the game at home) goes from one to five seats, Greens up two to eight seats. Maori Party goes to five seats, and Winston Peters' New Zealand First flames out entirely, game over. No tears there I'm afraid - poor Winnie has been a slick operator and told one too many outright lie to the press, as well as flirting with outright racism, and got justly burned for it.
I can quite understand why people might have voted against Helen Clark since she's pulled a few too many slick ones herself (such as ramming through prostitution decriminalisation with the slimmest of margins, I think it came down to one vote) and retroactively legalising illegal acts done by her MPs -- but given how National were fawning all over George W a few years ago and chomping at the bit to go bomb some Iraqis, as well as slavering at the chance to strip and sell off what remains of our country's infrastructure, I personally couldn't bring myself to vote for them for the rest of my lifetime. I guess it comes down to a matter of juggling priorities of evil; for me, war ranks at the top of the list, and trusting proven untrustworthy market forces right next to it. Other people presumably have different moral calculi.
But it's the people who voted ACT -- the hard-core Ayn Rand acolytes -- who I find it hardest to forgive. Surely the world financial crisis has demonstrated for all to see that bankers are not to be trusted with anything more real than a Monopoly set? How is it possible to NOT see that 'economics as usual' has brought the earth to the brink of destruction, and is pushing us beyond? I can't understand the kind of wilful blindness to reality which would make people say 'give us more of that good stuff'.
On social issues, yes, I can understand being torn. I personally vote with the Greens because they are the only party that values nonviolence and peacemaking, which seem to me to be at the core fo the Christian attitude to life. But I cannot yet bring myself to actively campaign for them, because they are also the party that fights hardest to 1) decriminalise prostitution, 2) keep on-demand abortion legal, and 3) make smacking illegal. I cannot understand that trio of stances as philosophically coherent.
I can understand being in favour of decriminalising everything, on principle, even acts I don't personally agree with. But in that case, smacking should remain legal. How can it conceivably be legally consistent to *kill* an embryo but not to *smack* a child? Only, it seems to me, if you have a definition of human life which is false, and which believes that the point of restraining family violence is to protect *society* rather than the individual - a dead baby won't grow up to be a child abuser, but a smacked baby might. Which is too much like pragmatic ends-justifies-means thinking -- and far too much, in its own mirror-image way, like the hard Right's 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' stance on crime -- for me to accept in a minority, consciously values-based party.
But of course I can't really argue, and don't particularly want to, that abortion should be *recriminalised*, since using state violence in that way also seems an anti-Christian way of approaching things, let alone the whole complexity of feminism and women's rights which would suggest that as a male, I should have no voice in what is ultimately a woman's choice, and to a point I can respect that. I believe I *can* make a principled argument that abortion can be best seen as a horribly misguided modernist medical procedure, like electroshock and lobotomy, which has massive consequences to the mother which the medical profession has not yet addressed, and that a more enlightened future society will view it with distaste. And the flip side of seeing abortion as an evil is also that I should be in favour of policies that support as much as possible unmarried mothers who choose to raise children, since it's a huge sacrifice being asked of them; and for that reason, the Labour and Green stance in favour of state funds for families with children seems like both a moral and just use of my tax money, and as a single person myself, not really doing much to further the human race, it seems like part of my income is justly owed to those who do have children.
So I have no problem with taxes, and in fact I'm very suspicious of any party offering tax *cuts* since it seems like that's the government asking me to turn *my* back on those who Christ is asking me to support. I'd much rather have higher taxes, as long as I knew they were being used wisely to purchase collective services at a fair price and supporting those who need them, than higher discretionary income, and then a casino-like maze of lying private hucksters that I have to waste *my* valuable time deciphering in order to work out where to best spend my money. Some things are best left to the individual; but buying large-scale services like national healthcare and housing and infrastructure, where I don't have any personal expertise, are probably not among them, and further privatisation will most likely hurt me rather than improve my life.
I'm frankly terrified of all the right-wing rhetoric about 'making our streets safe' and 'three strikes and you're out', because again, this seems like it will do nothing but increase the violence level in our society, and I'm definitely against that.
If the Green party asks me to agree philosophically with a wider agenda of absolute sexual permissivism, and claim that all consensual sex acts are by definition *moral* and must be described as such, no, sorry, I can't agree with that, due to a fundamental conflict with my understanding of Christian values; however, that same Christian value system as I understand it tells me that society should be less violent, and to the extent that criminalising *any* activity adds to social violence, we should probably make more immoral things legal rather than less; and while I don't agree that morality is completely relative (that's a contradiction in terms to me - if something is *moral* it is by definition an *absolute*, otherwise it's just a *preference* or a local *adaptation* and talk of morals does not apply), I'm not in favour of *imposing* morality by law, since I don't believe it can be.
So I end up coming to a similar voting position to Greens on many social issues, except for starting from completely different axioms and not really being able to share a common language - which is why campaigning and discussing policy becomes hugely emotionally painful, because the religiously-based moral framework I come from is considered backward and frankly evil to many of my Left friends, and their moral system on sexuality is equally alien to me. (But I feel equally alienated not just from the Left, but from most of society today, even the Right.)
On the other hand, I'm deeply in favour of caring for the Earth, and working to make our society more energy efficient and locally-based, and the Greens are again about the only party which takes localisation, fair trade, ethical purchasing, animal welfare, and climate change seriously.
So that's my labryinthine internal anguish which leads me to my voting decision, ill-fitting as it often seems, and I assume other people make similar complex choices. At least I hope they do; sometimes I ungraciously suspect my fellow citizens of doing the equivalent of tossing darts at a dartboard and saying 'I'll vote for John Key because he has a nice honest face and a clean tie, and you can always trust a banker, can't you?
Well, I can't, and I fear for the next three years, because it seems like the same people who got the world into its current mess are going to be the ones trying to get us out; that doesn't seem like a recipe for success.
And in any case, I'm not sure that we necessarily *want* the economy to be 'functioning' again just like before, because even at full power it's still just a frighteningly efficient planet-wrecking machine. We need an economy based on *reality* -- ecology and spirituality, the things that underly all our social inventions -- rather than self-referential 'economics'.
Nevertheless, we've made our national political bed and are going to be stuck with it, and I'm no particular fan of violent insurrection, so the next question is how to reconcile my fears for the future and my distrust of the present and my bitterness toward those people whose choices of governance seem to me to be utterly without serious thought and moral merit -- how to reconcile all this with a theology that says 'actually, when it comes down to it, God is present everywhere in everything and even mistakes work out for good, and nothing is ever actually broken forever'. And love those with whom I disagree, on all sides of the political spectrum.
Mini-Brains
And here is one of the coming hard problems in spirituality and human identity, which would have been science fiction a few years ago but now is shoved right in our faces:
TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese researchers said Thursday they had created functioning human brain tissues from stem cells, a world first that has raised new hopes for the treatment of disease.
Stem cells taken from human embryos have been used to form tissues of the cerebral cortex, the supreme control tower of the brain, according to researchers at the government-backed research institute Riken.
The tissues self-organised into four distinct zones very similar to the structure seen in human foetuses, and conducted neuro-activity such as transmitting electrical signals, the institute said.
Embryonic stem cells are harvested by destroying a viable embryo, a process that some people find unacceptable.
Riken said cortex tissues were also obtained from "induced pluripotent stem cells," which are similar to embryonic stem cells but artificially induced, typically from adult cells such as skin cells.
The tissues can also be selectively induced to different cortex types controlling memories, visual sensation and other tasks.
Is a human foetus human? Does it have a soul?
What about a 'mini foetus brain' grown from stem cells?
If you don't believe in such a thing as a soul -- if you have the current standard consensus scientific-materialist framework -- the first question may well have an answer based on ethics, but the second is a nonsense and can only be answered in the negative: 'of course not, souls are abstractions, not realities'.
But evidence from evaluation of ESP, afterlife research, psi and mystical writings seems to be converging back toward the premodern religious paradigm again. That yes, there is such a thing as a soul -- some kind of meta-dimensional reality structure which *causes* physical effects or information ordering in biological systems, though there are what seem like paradoxes associated with the concept, such as that souls seem not to be entirely 'separate' from each other. One of the clearest elaborations of this idea seems to be in Mary Baker Eddy's works: there is one substance, but where consensus modern materialism would say 'the one substance is matter', it seems like it might solve more practical problems in explaining ESP and psi and 'miracles' and afterlife experiences to say 'the one substance is mind' and work back from there.
So far so good. But given this idea, suddenly the story above starts getting complicated.
Does a human embryo 'have' a soul, or does a soul somehow 'inhabit' or attach to the embryo during pregnancy - in the same way that a human player might 'log in' to a character in a 3D virtual world and start receiving sense impressions from it?
Does a blood cell have a soul? Does a brain cell have a soul?
Does a cluster of brain cells grown from cultured adult-skin-cell-derived genetically engineered stem cells have a soul?
If it doesn't have a soul, yet it behaves functionally identically with a similar cluster of neurons in a standard living-human, soul-inhabited brain, and processes memories -- where does that leave us as humans?
Frankly I think it's pretty darn creepy that we're playing with human brain tissue in such a way without having anything like a philosophical framework to answer these questions (other than 'no humans are alive unless they can speak', which seems scary dangerous to me).
But we are, and questions from Star Trek, tacky vinyl eyebrows and all, are now staring right at us. It's like one of those horrible nightmares where you get asked impossibly ridiculous questions for your final exam, and you're naked, and the thesis examiners are circus clowns. We can't be being asked this bizarre kind of ethics rule -- and yet, there it is.
Stem-cell human mini-brains.
We could build computers out of them, or stick them in missiles. We probably will. We possibly are already. These aren't computer circuits. They have human DNA. They might have the potential to be human. They might literally have *souls*. They might be children of God.
Fully grown *humans* are children of God too, and yet we enslaved them, and still do. Some cultures ate them. Might still do. Ancient Rome had infanticide; in the civilised West today we routinely abort foetuses with beating hearts and functioning brains and destroy them like medical waste, and the practice (and the definition of human life which it entails) is defended vociferously by the triumphant, progressive Left, and anyone questioning it is knee-jerk slammed as a Neanderthal hater of women.
The Right deserved to lose the US elections, Bush was a moral disaster, Palin freaks me out, and the Obama phenomenon is a historic and staggering victory for grassroots democracy -- but that doesn't mean the Evangelicals are wrong on abortion or that Markos Moulitsas is right. There are philosophical twists here with daggers in them.
Stem-cell human mini-brains.
These things might be tasty-delicious little medical tools, clones grown for spare parts, or organic computing machines. They'll probably be patented, and sold in packs in corner drugstores like disposable razors. Killed without mercy. We'd like to think they're not us, not a possible vehicle for our souls, not part of our reality... but they *are* literally our flesh and blood, and there *are* such things as souls.
The science fiction writer Bruce Sterling wrote some chilling words in his essay Cyberpunk in the ’90s:
We’re just not much good any more at refusing things because they don’t seem proper. As a society, we can’t even manage to turn our backs on abysmal threats like heroin and the hydrogen bomb. As a culture, we love to play with fire, just for the sake of its allure; and if there happens to be money in it, there are no holds barred. Jumpstarting Mary Shelley’s corpses is the least of our problems; something much along that line happens in intensive-care wards every day.
Human thought itself, in its unprecedented guise as computer software, is becoming something to be crystallized, replicated, made a commodity. Even the insides of our brains aren’t sacred; on the contrary, the human brain is a primary target of increasingly successful research, ontological and spiritual questions be damned. The idea that, under these circumstances, Human Nature is somehow destined to prevail against the Great Machine, is simply silly; it seems weirdly beside the point. It’s as if a rodent philosopher in a lab-cage, about to have his brain bored and wired for the edification of Big Science, were to piously declare that in the end Rodent Nature must triumph.
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it’s the truth. It won’t go away because we cover our eyes.
The Dali clock is melting and the angry clown with Spock ears wants our thesis. How do we answer? What philosophy will give us the resources to answer sanely?
Blumhardt on Wheat and Tares
Still working my way through the Blumhardt reader, Thy Kingdom Come. It connects in many ways with the strands of mystical theology I've been tracing through Spiritualism, Christian Science / New Thought and the roots of Pentecost -- as well as the Anglo-Catholic contemplative tradition, such as Merton, and the postmodern/emerging church -- that emphasise oneness and the love of God.
One of the features of the theology of both Christian Science and A Course In Miracles is its take on 'judgement' as being something very different from the 'separation of good people and bad people' which it is often read as in modern evangelical/Pentecostal churches -- and which fuels much of the right-wing political movement.
The parable of the 'tares and the wheat' recurs as a key metaphor in several of these theologies (particularly in Frances Bird's 'The New Dispensation' and in Rick Joyner's 'The Harvest'). Here's the Blumhardts -- at the dawn of the Holiness/Pentecostal revival movement -- on the subject:
My friends, you must never look upon people as being weeds, or tares. The tares which are harvested as the sheaves (Mt. 13:24-30)—those are not people themselves. We would make a great error if we were to say, “These men are tares, and those are wheat.� No, oh, no! Consider that what we see as evil, as criminal, as sinful in people—of all these things we also bear the trace, even though we lready venture to call ourselves children of God, body and soul. Who presumes to look into the depths of human nature? There, we are all alike.
Yet, on the surface, in the outer sphere of life, the lawbreaking that shows up often is directed against human laws, not divine ones. There, pushing up, is the vile, criminal nature which is the outgrowth of the tares, crowding out the wheat kernels and stalks so that even a truly noble person
becomes an evildoer. I venture to assert, indeed, I dare say it before God: we must guard ourselves from making this malicious distinction. Strike out against evil we must—but, for God’s sake, don’t damn people! These old tares that have been scattered throughout Christendom—for God’s sake, don’t see them as being people! We poor people, we are all tangled up in them.Have you ever seen the wind in a grainfield? There is little one can do to stop it; it tears up the delicate plants and destroys them. And so it goes with many people. Somehow a seed has come into their neighborhood and now is growing in an inhuman and unnatural way. It grows all through people, pushing into their feelings, influencing their wills. Often we label them as fools because of their behavior; and, consequently, they are put down and considered by us as “sinners.� Yet, if we were to think about it, the trace of those scattered seeds could be found even in our own lives.
Therefore, in all we are called to do in the way of holding human society together, the greatest blessing is this: although humanly we have to distinguish between righteousness and unrighteousness, these distinctions go no further than our own opinion. Would you go so far as to damn people for eternity? Do you want to take over the work of God? Is it then, O man, that you would make eternal decrees?
What I don't yet understand is what such a theology of infinite human value -- which I've come to believe is the true Christian belief -- implies for politics, particularly our society's treatment of criminals, prisoners, the sick, mentally deficient and poor. It is easy to ignore obviously 'wrong' prejudices such as racism. But what if *none* of our standards of measuring and classifying people -- even the 'rational' and 'scientific' and 'just' ones -- are actually right? That seems like it would deconstruct all of the values on which civilisation itself is built -- all the divisions that separate the violent from the gentle, the insane from the sane, the destructive from the productive, the liars from the truthful.
What would it mean, for a whole society to live forgiveness as if it were real?
And how many people would die as a result?
MLK and Black Elk
FiveThirtyEight.com is calling the US Presidential election for Obama.
There's a black man in the White House. I don't think I ever quite believed it could actually happen. But it did. Martin Luther King's dream is vindicated. This day will go down in history.
They're dancing on Daily Kos and someone posted a quote from the 19th century Sioux leader Black Elk It resonates with an image I've felt since 1999.
From Black Elk Speaks, the first vision when he was nine (around 1872). The imagery is similar to that of Revelation:
Then I heard the white wind blowing gently through the tree and singing there, and from the east the sacred pipe came flying on its eagle wings, and stopped before me there beneath the tree, spreading deep peace around it.
Then the daybreak star was rising, and a Voice said: "It shall be a relative to them; and who shall see it, shall see much more, for thence comes wisdom; and those who do not see it shall be dark." And all the people raised their faces to the east, and the star's light fell upon them, and all the dogs barked loudly and the horses whinnied.
Then when the many little voices ceased, the great Voice said: "Behold the circle of the nation's hoop, for it is holy, being endless, and thus all powers shall be one power in the people without end. Now they shall break camp and go forth upon the red road, and your Grandfathers shall walk with them."
The 'morning star' is often a term associated with Jesus, and the phrase 'who shall see it shall see much more' is reminiscient of the Gospel phrase 'to those who have, more shall be given'.
And a Voice said: "All over the universe they have finished a day of happiness." And looking down I saw that the whole wide circle of the day was beautiful and green, with all fruits growing and all things kind and happy.
Then a Voice said: "Behold this day, for it is yours to make. Now you shall stand upon the center of the earth to see, for there they are taking you."
I was still on my bay horse, and once more I felt the riders of the west, the north, the east, the south, behind me in formation, as before, and we were going east. I looked ahead and saw the mountains there with rocks and forests on them, and from the mountains flashed all colors upward to the heavens. Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.
The word 'hoop' jumps out at me, because the image that's been in my mind since 1999, since reading about the Seattle WTO protests, and that guided me through the 2001-2003 anti-war protests in Christchurch, is of overlapping circles: each circle being an identity group, and where they overlap being where we can join together.
But Black Elk himself fascinates me, again because of those spirit visions. He converted to Catholicism later in life and there are aspects of his visions that ring huge bells with me in relation to accounts of near-death experiences, the afterlife and who I believe Jesus to be, such as this one late in life:
There was a ridge right in front of me, and I thought I was going to run into it, but I went right over it. On the other side of the ridge I could see a beautiful land where many, many people were camping in a great circle. I could see that they were happy and had plenty. Everywhere there were drying racks full of meat. The air was clear and beautiful with a living light that was everywhere. All around the circle, feeding on the green, green grass, were fat and happy horses; and animals of all kinds were scattered all over the green hills, and singing hunters were returning with their meat.
I floated over the tepees and began to come down feet first at the center of the hoop where I could see a beautiful tree all green and full of flowers. When I touched the ground, two men were coming toward me, and they wore holy shirts made and painted in a certain way. They came to me and said: "It is not yet time to see your father, who is happy. You have work to do. We will give you something that you shall carry back to your people, and with it they shall come to see their loved ones.
Because of my vision and the power they knew I had, I was asked to lead the dance next morning. We all stood in a straight line, facing the west, and I prayed: "Father, Great Spirit, behold me! The nation that I have is in despair. The new earth you promised you have shown me. Let my nation also behold it."
After the prayer we stood with our right hands raised to the west, and we all began to weep, and right there, as they wept, some of them fainted before the dance began.
As we were dancing I had the same queer feeling I had before, as though my feet were off the earth and swinging. Kicking Bear and Good Thunder were holding my arms. Afterwhile it seemed they let go of me, and once more I floated head first, face down, with arms extended, and the spotted eagle was dancing there ahead of me again, and I could hear his shrill whistle and his scream.
I saw the ridge again, and as I neared it there was a deep, rumbling sound, and out of it there leaped a flame. But I glided right over it. There were six villages ahead of me in the beautiful land that was all clear and green in living light. Over these in turn I glided, coming down on the south side of the sixth village. And as I touched the ground, twelve men were coming towards me, and they said: "Our Father, the two-legged chief, you shall see!"
Then they led me to the center of the circle where once more I saw the holy tree all full of leaves and blooming.
But that was not all I saw. Against the tree there was a man standing with arms held wide in front of him. I looked hard at him, and I could not tell what people he came from. He was not a Wasichu and he was not an Indian. His hair was long and hanging loose, and on the left side of his head he wore an eagle feather. His body was strong and good to see, and it was painted red. I tried to recognize him, but I could not make him out. He was a very fine-looking man. While I was staring hard at him, his body began to change and became very beautiful with all colors of light, and around him there was light. He spoke like singing: "My life is such that all earthly beings and growing things belong to me. Your father, the Great Spirit, has said this. You too must say this."
Then he went out like a light in a wind.
The twelve men who were there spoke: "Behold them! Your nation's life shall be such!"
I saw again how beautiful the day was - the sky all blue and full of yellow light above the greening earth. And I saw that all the people were beautiful and young. There were no old ones there, nor children either - just people of about one age, and beautiful.
And I can't help but think of Don Francisco's song Vision of the Valley, which has been with me since the early 1990s.
I saw a man come walking, and his heart glowed like a flame
All the sheep began to run to him, he called each one by name
He spoke to them with gentle words, and soothed their fearful minds
He healed the broken hearted, the crippled lame and blindAnd many others like him, all with hearts that glowed the same
That before I hadn't recognised, from the farms and fields they came
They weren't famous, wise or noble but they spoke a common word
A word the flock could recognise, and follow when they heardAnd the news went out around the world, in every street and town
That something wonderful was here, that heaven had come down
And millions gave their hearts in trust that long had been betrayed
And the Bride at last was ready and the trumpet call was made.
Blumhardt on the Kingdom
As a precursor to a post I want to write about Sarah Palin, the Latter Rain, Dominionism, and the New Apostolic Revival: here's a take on the 'Kingdom of God' from the Blumhardts (probably Christoph, the son), one of the earliest healing revivals and precursors/parallels of the Pentecostal movement. The Blumhardts had experience of literal exorcisms and healings, and yet see how their theology differs from what is often touted today as straight-down-the-line Pentecostal values. Christoph was politically active but leaned significantly leftwards; and he took this political stance from his religion, not despite of it.
The work of the kingdom of God must stand under two laws. First, you dare never again be angry at anyone, for the kingdom of God is love for all men. Therefore, you may not belittle anyone, even the least. Indeed, you are a miserable fool if you vex or annoy one of these little ones, demean him, or treat him as nothing. Thus, we must always look with God’s evaluation upon what I like to call “the pennies of God’s capital investment.� They belong to God, of course, although the value lies in the persons themselves. As man, you are of value to God; yet, your value is not a hair greater than that of some little guy of no status, e.g., a day laborer. We always must bear in mind the worth God attributes to a small, low-ranked, despised human being; such people we must guard and protect.
The second law is that we remain slaves. Slaves we want to be; lords we want never to become. We would be slaves under God’s hand—yet, that I not be misunderstood: slaves of men we will never be!...If I serve God, then God will stand by me and men must give way to me. I shall not yield as much as a fingernail to any man. And if empires and kingdoms of men multiply until the very heavens and earth itself fall, yet shall I stand like a rock in the sea. I hold fast to God, I am his slave; and all must break itself to pieces upon me, because I serve God.
We should be priests, i.e., we who have become firm in grace should stand firm for others, praying for them and the world so that the whole might be filled with the glory and power and grace of God. If we are steadfast in this priestly sense, then we bear a kingly power. We can cooperate in overcoming the dark powers of this world...You are not to be priests for yourselves but for the world in which you live.
That world should move your heart; and if you see something of its misery and death, then you should protest against it, saying, “That cannot be; indeed, it must cease, because Jesus lives.�
Subdivisions
Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown
Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone
Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone
Subdivisions
-- Rush, Subdivisions (1982)
I never really understood the trendy American hipster terror of suburbia: you have to live *somewhere*, and anywhere seems as good as anywhere else. Hating on the middle class McMansion seemed like a kind of snobby elitism. I preferred Steven Spielberg's suburban magical-realism, of the suburbs as a place of light, where the weird glow from a window might be just the TV or it might be aliens come to visit; and the two might actually be one and the same, technology as spirituality.
But I wandered today through a subdivision site near what used to be the Sunnyside mental hospital in Addington, and something of that emptiness, the dark side of suburbia, came over me.
Linden Grove, the ornamented gate proclaimed. A park-like setting! And it is. I walked past trees, a river. Birdsong all around and the quiet of grass and small insects. From a distance, I could see the Southern Alps: a rare sight at ground level here in the city. Usually the houses block the mountains.
But as I approached, I could see the fences. The lots, around two hundred of them, have already been assigned, carved up. Access cul-de-sacs and footpaths are laid in asphalt. The tiny patches of dirt are raked and covered with lawnseed. Clusters of utility feeds emerge from the ground like fruiting bodies of a vast fungus: telephone, electricity, presumably water and sewerage there somewhere. Real estate billboards. There are still no houses built to block the view of the majestic mountains, but once they're up it will be just a chunk of expensive residential street like any other.
And the cars will come, and the patio furniture, and the mortgages, and the financial crashes, and the foreclosures, and another layer of toxic human unreality will settle over the sweet green truth of soil and grass and birdsong that really makes the world run.
We read Robert Frost's Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening in high school. Our teacher suggested it was about the temptation to suicide. I disagreed then and still do, because I think I know the emotion that poem relates. I think that poem is not about the wish to end life but the intense desire to join it mixed with the frustration that we can't, yet. It's about the sort of melancholy I felt there in that subdivision today, an ache as deep as life: the sense that as a human, I really don't belong in the world of arbitrary business and schedules that we make for ourselves; but neither do I fit in that world of quiet green things that know how to cope. I am not an animal; I have rules and a mind and heart and obligations and can't just go back to the woods and live there. I have been ejected from Eden but have yet to find a way into Paradise.
I want to go home, is the thought. I don't want to be here. I want to leave a world where the need to survive and make homes for ourselves -- a need that's not wrong in itself -- makes us trample on beauty in order to fit our petty little schemes. One plus one equals two but the answer is wrong. I want to be where everything glows with light that doesn't just attract bugs and zap them.
If we are to take some of the mystics seriously, God is really and literally at the heart of everything: consider the lilies how they grow might be not just a sentimental phrase but a description of how living things somehow are tuned in enough to take their life energy -- their patterning, their fractal organisation, their unfolding -- from an infinite data/energy source which is a Person. If I walk in a grove of trees and can see mountains I can feel something different, a lightness about the air, a sense of space and structure. Invisible frequencies modulating the very nature of shape around me. Reminding me that there is a home that we come from which is not this confusing world we find ourselves in, there is a bright centre to the universe, there is a way of living that makes all of life unify and make sense. Even if I can't presently see it.
When I take a photograph at dusk with my digital camera, and I bring the image into Photoshop and play with the contrast setting, it is amazing how much light I can find. Scenes which are dark to my natural eyes show as bright as day to the camera.
If a mere mechanical device can so amplify ordinary light as to reveal that what we think of as 'night' as just a lack of our own vision -- what might that mean to the other kind of light, the light which comes from God and carries that information, that patterning, that quiet patient joy which the plants and animals seem to be able to tune into and use to structure their DNA? Might we not see it flowing all around us, making our world actually as bright right now as we sometimes dare to dream it might one day become?
How can we learn to see that light, and no longer fear the dark, the casual cruelty of the world, our own casual and blundering trampling of beauty and order? The closer we look, the more it seems like the source of darkness is woven deep inside us; but if like the camera, God can turn the brightness up to infinity and see only his Light -- what might those eyes show to us?
Life Review
While dreamhunting, I've been flicking back through my last three years on Livejournal, and it's depressing. I wrote a lot more back then and now I seem to have dried to a trickle. Also, setting up a Wordpress site was possibly a mistake, as was interrupting my main blog with my Dataspace notes. Most of my main writing has been there, but I seem to be grinding to a halt and my very first Dataspace posts seem to be much in the same territory as I'm in now. I've done a lot of comp.sci reading but not managed to pull anything much together clearly enough to get a functioning model (other than a few sketchy notes on a Lisp syntax). The whole thing might be an illusion; probably not entirely, but I'm just tired of going over the same ground. I don't have such a system, I'm losing faith that I have the ability to describe it, much less build it, and time goes on.
(Ie, my very first Dataspace post on June 11th 2007 pretty much outlines the fundamental vision I'm still looking at. The rest is fussy semantics about storage and processing details, yet without those, nothing is buildable. It's like I've got half of a brilliant idea but no idea of where to find the other half. And after sixteen months I can't fill in those missing bits on my own. So maybe I just need to let it go.)
I wish I had what I want Dataspace to be, right now: a kind of distributed filing system where I could simply copy weblog posts from one system to another, and make new categories at will. I want a Social Web that works. But I don't have one, and now I'm scattered between Wordpress and Livejournal. And the new version of Wordpress doesn't seem to allow backdating of posts, which means I can't cleanly port bits of my online life from one place to another.
Bleh. It might be time to move back to Livejournal.
Meanwhile, my life in the local church and neighbourhood is taking more and more of my energy, which is probably a good thing, but means I'm somehow finding less and less energy to think about what I'm doing.
There are heavy things I need to work through about spirituality, religion, sustainability, and politics, and instead all I'm posting are dream logs and meta rants.
