Torn Up

 

Image by Bugguyak

I have a problem, which is that many of the things I used to take solace in, I understand are worldly and often work on my weaknesses. Food for instance: I can very easily geek out on matters of cooking and world cuisines, but I understand that I also have had past issues with foodolatry.

And it is not even a matter of choosing to ignore such worldly connections in my pasttimes and practice them relatively mindlessly. I cannot ignore it. This world prickles me constantly; I am constantly reminded of its darkness, that the world both maims and enslaves. I cannot distract myself as relatively "innocently" or unknowingly in diversions as I might once have done.

The fallenness of this world and of human nature constantly tears at me. I used to think that when the Apostles spoke of the "World," they were only speaking of the world of human sin. Not really the WHOLE WORLD. Planet Earth in toto. Human sin is a big part of it and a part that is very relevant to us, but indeed the whole world including the natural world is fallen. I have always thought of wild nature as a refuge from the evils of the human world, and there is something restorative about nature, some degree of freedom from human BS, but it is the difference between unconscious evil and conscious evil. The closer I have gotten to nature in my rural refuge, the more I understand that Nature herself is exceedingly vile. It's not human viciousness, but it is viciousness. Humanity and the world it lives in, the animal world, are of a whole cloth, and that whole cloth is fallen. The whole created world and heaven are of different natures. And Nature as it turns out stabs at me in some ways just like human society would. My adopted cat Socks has had one kitten that survived out of 6 in the litter, and that one kitten looks like half its face is melted off. Something clearly attacked it, and that something is probably one of its own kind, one of the feral cats. Feral cats who also probably munched it's five late siblings. And yet this poor kitten is still surviving, with half its face looking like it has melted off. My beloved adopted cat Stripes had a litter, and apparently ALL of them are gone. This is but one of many reminders I have had of the ugliness of the natural world, to go with it's beauty. It is easy to be sentimental about nature when you don't live immersed in it. I DO live immersed in it.

Getting back to the topic of the first paragraph, it becomes hard to be enthusiastic about engaging in entertainments and diversions which I know are part and parcel of a world that injures me. Injures my heart. It's mere existence wounds me. I used to play a lot of computer games, less so now, but I went back and revisited the game Counter-Strike 2. And I had fun, but I also understood that it is a game where, if you play well, you are basically mimicking blowing people's heads off proficiently. Not happy times, if you really think about it. But how do I have any hobby, any interest, that isn't at core worldly? I am not sure I can. And I hate the world that wounds my heart.

In a related way, something that I think modern Christianity is missing that ancient Christianity had is asceticism. The practice of denying your own desires. Ancient hermits lived in the woods living off weeds and preaching to the squirrels. OSHA might have an issue with such a workplace today, I think. But what a way of life that denies desires IS, is true to the Gospel. Take up your cross, deny yourself. Beat the human hunger within you until it submits to godly authority. But even though I am myself living what many would consider the life of an ascetic hermit, my mind constantly seeks diversion. It hungers for information. It seeks out news of the world and current events which are almost inevitably dark and often makes me sad. It desires to be entertained. This is in many ways I think my last greatest temptation. Many sins and vices are in my past, but that one still lays in front of me. And yet it pleases me less and less.

I get to the point where I derive no pleasure from any of my former interests, really. It has all lost it's flavor. I stay active, but mostly doing chores. I do like to watch videos about history, but history is pretty dark too. At least it is darkness that is in the past.

Perhaps in the end I will be left with my only activity that isn't worldly, which is prayer.

Call the Lord's Holy Day "Honored"

 

Sabbath Mosaic in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem
by zeevveez

I had been kind of drifting on the topic of the Saturday Sabbath. Beyond really obvious things like don't work and don't engage in commerce, I was and am unsure how to keep it, for one. Turn off my refrigerator, like some Orthodox Jews do? Plus, a billion Christians keep the Sabbath, to the extent that they keep it at all, on Sundays.

Am I right and a billion Christians wrong?

Yes, that's exactly how it is. Or rather, to put things in their proper order, the Bible is right and a billion Christians wrong. This should not be a shocker at this point. 

There are some mysteries of one's communion with the Almighty that are not for discussing. Let me say that I was informed that I was not keeping the Sabbath in a worthy manner. Indeed, while I was wondering about the relevance of the Sabbath in the modern day, and while I was also wondering if a billion Christians are wrong about the Sabbath, I also did feel this myself. A shortcoming in the midst of some confusion does not stop being a shortcoming. There are some things I know I need to do that I have not been careful about doing. 

The Sabbath is on Saturday. It's been on Saturday for like 3000+ years. Nothing Jesus said indicated that the Sabbath has ceased to be a thing, and certainly not that it changed days. The jist of what Jesus said about the Sabbath is that it needs to be approached with a spiritually enlightened mind, not that it has disappeared. Certainly not that it has changed days.

I have also begun to understand what worlds of potential come into existence with obedience. With submission to the Lord. I feel like I see horizons I did not see before, and I have begun to taste of what it is like there. Things have started to "collate" in ways they didn't before, things arriving in life when or before I need them. It's hard to describe without being specific, which I can't be. It's between you and the Lord, you don't talk about it.

For someone who is probably regarded as a religious person if not a zealot, I actually haven't been praying that much. I had been praying the same prayer at meals, that's about it. I pray if there is trouble in my life.

Well that's pretty piss-poor, isn't it? Not suitable. As of the last couple days, prayer is on my daily schedule, like feeding the chickens. This was from today's Bible reading:

"If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath
from pursuing your affairs on my holy day

If you call the Sabbath "delight"

the Lord's holy day "honored"

and if you honor it and go not your ways

nor look to your affairs, nor strike bargains

Then you can seek the favor of the Lord

I will set you astride the heights of the Earth

and let you enjoy the heritage of your father Jacob-

for the mouth of the Lord has spoken."

~Isaiah 58:13-14

And reading this, I had a sense of recognition. This is the will of God. The will of God for me (and every believer.)

I still don't know the particulars of Sabbath observance really. I mean, we all work every second of our lives in some sense, pumping blood through our veins if nothing else. But there are definitely areas where I KNOW I have done wrong and fallen short, and those areas must be corrected. 

The Sabbath is Saturday
Don't work at a job
Do not do commerce
Pray on the Sabbath
Revere His Day, keep it holy

These parts I know, and so it is sinful if I do not do these things I know to do. I probably also need to research how Jews celebrate the Sabbath, not that I feel I should be 100% guided by whatever they say, but obviously they have been doing it for a long time.

But more than anything, I am beginning to understand the incalculable consequences of obedience to God. We cannot understand what those bounties are, either in this world or the next. 

The Mother of Nightmares

 

Illustration of the Devil on Codex Gigas, early thirteenth century.

People may look at my life as a rural hermit and say, "Aren't you really a coward? You have fled from the spiritual battlefield. You're running away."

And I say, you have no comprehension of what spiritual evil is, if you don't think that running is not sometimes a valid response. 

We are speaking of the mother-father of all nightmares. The only true real-life horror story. Ontological horror that would make H. P. Lovecraft soil his britches.

I unfortunately do have some comprehension of what spiritual evil is, and I hate it and I also fear and flee from it. That is a healthy reaction, to fear evil, and also moreso to fear the Lord's displeasure and separation from the Lord if you fall into it. Since the Lord is the source of all good, all light, all truth, to be separated from Him is horror even if the demons leave you be. Which of course they won't. 

Now, sometimes you are forced to fight. You don't have a choice. And when you are forced to fight, you can't let fear dominate you. You've got to do the smack-dab in the face of that devil. To use an obscure wrestling reference, you've gotta do the Swanton Bomb on it. But if you are hanging around devil-town when you could leave, you probably should leave. 

“Come out from them
    and be separate,
says the Lord.

Touch no unclean thing,
    and I will receive you.”

~2 Corinthians 6:17

So yeah, you fight when you have to. You do a fighting retreat to get to a better place when you need to. The Israelites were called out to be a holy people, and holiness implies separation. You don't go tracking in the mud and the blood into the house of the Lord. 

It is right and proper and wholesome to fear and hate evil, and more so to fear God. This does not mean you are paralyzed with this fear: after all, the Almighty is your advocate if you are His. I cannot believe how uncomprehending and unknowing people can be that they do not understand this evil and the price of having truck with it. You are having a dalliance with the same forces that invented torture and killing people to steal their organs and abortion and somebody's daughter dead in the street with a heroin needle in their arm and... ugh, things I probably don't want to imagine and don't want to speak on further. The word "ontological" means concerning being itself, and this is ontological horror in total. All other horror traces back to this, the mother-father of all lies.

So no, I don't think I am a coward (more so than other men.) I think I see things truthfully, and that can be a horrifying thing. But however afraid I am of evil, the Devil is more afraid of God.

Submit yourselves, then, to God.

Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

~James 4:7

Love the Lord your God

 To love the Lord your God is probably the highest and most important commandment. Why?

I remember back in the days when I was an unbeliever, I questioned why God would command us to love Him and worship Him. If a mere human commanded this, we would say he was a very egocentric person. And there have been times in history when mere humans have commanded this, to their damnation.

There are a very few Commandments that are not purely intended for our own good, mostly dating back to the times when the Tabernacle or Temple existed. God is holy and majestic, and if He is going to live among humans in a special place, that special place has to have rules to respect His holiness. He's God, of course we have to respect His spaces. The original sin in Eden was not respecting God's things. Those holy spaces don't exist anymore in the previous material physical sense, though they do exist in the persons of His adopted children.

Otherwise, the Commandment to love God, like the rest, is intended for our good. There are of course very deep discussions possible on why God made humans to begin with, discussions for another time, but God does not need humans or their love in the sense that we need things. You can say God wants them, not needs them, which is probably an oversimplification too, but lets not get bogged down.

Why then is it for our good that we should love God?

Humans are both material and spiritual beings. And your spiritual being can either be aligned with heaven or hell, those are the only two choices. You can say, "I don't want either, I do whatever I want," which is actually hell alignment. The devil wants to do whatever he wants, too. That is rebellion. And if you are rebelling against truth and love and goodness, what are you rebelling TO? Falsity and hate and evil. You are a spiritual being, and in spiritual matters there are only two alignments: obedience and devotion, or rebellion and individualism.

I become more and more convinced that the nature of heaven - if the Lord will mercifully forgive the oversimplification of one flawed human, - that the nature of heaven is unity in love. What did Jesus say? He is in the Father, and we are in him. We become the adopted children of heaven through him. And what does a good parent do? Love his children. What does a good child do? Love his parents. We are united to God in love through Jesus. Jesus says he is in us and we are in him.

See, the default mode of existence for humans in a fallen world is that we are each isolated islands onto ourselves. We can never truly see into another person, nor can they ever truly see into us. They can never truly be in us or we in them, no matter how much you love them. Hence all the selfishness of this world, because the self is all we know in our fallen state. This was my realization when I first started on the path to being a believer: the realization that I was not only an island alone, but also a lost island and all my skill and intellect was not going to result in that lost island being found. I was never going to be saved on my own strength or merits. He who would save his life will lose it.

These solipsistic rules are not the rules of heaven. When Jesus said "All I have is yours, and all you have is mine," he was not talking about his sandals or his hat. We belong to God, and God's kingdom is also our kingdom, if we are God's.

Loving God is drawing near to heaven in practice. It is the act of drawing near to heaven.

Since the nature of heaven is unity in love, God interacts with humans through relationship. The old "works versus grace" disputes (which, that's a confused and deluded debate anyway) have to be resolved in one sense in favor of grace. Merely being good in a human way doesn't get you any closer to heaven by itself. Connection to God does. You don't actually even know how to be good, truly, without that connection. So the humblest wretch who throws himself on God's mercy in absolute sincerity and devotion is way ahead of someone who, while a more worthy person in the eyes of the world, does not.

Why should God be good to you, whatever you have done good or bad? There is only one answer: God is good to you because you are His child.

If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
~Matthew 7:11

A good child loves his Father, as his Father loves His child. Heaven is unity in love. We are united to the Father through Jesus, and Jesus is in Him, and we are in Jesus.

Heaven is united in love.

The Heart of the Law

 I found this in a text document on my computer desktop, dated to April of 2024. I thought I would share it here.

***********************************************************

HEART OF THE LAW

It is said that the heart of the Law is to love G-d with all your heart, soul and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.

I have always interpreted that latter one in almost Lockean terms: do not regard your own rights and needs as more privileged than those of other people. That it is not so much that you LOVE your neighbor but that you respect the humanity and rights of your neighbor. It's not that I love the vast majority of humanity; I find the vast majority of humanity to be disappointing and disgusting. But that I don't get to treat myself as more privileged, important and with greater rights than others.

And many of the critics of believers point this out, that we love humanity in the abstract and in terms of individual rights but not so much where the messy rubber of human need meets the road. Where the rubber meets the road we often say "state your business quickly and then get off my lawn, stranger."

And if I try to be honest, I think that while I respect the rights of my neighbor and reject categorically the idea of privileged egoism, that my needs and rights are more important than others; I don't think I love my neighbor. There are scarcely any emotions involved in my regard for my neighbor, and what emotions are involved are usually negative.

And then I ask myself: does my love of G-d act like that? Do I just love G-d because I love truth, honesty, justice and equity? No. I do love truth honesty justice and equity, but I also love G-d Himself. And emotion, insight and reason blend together in that as a whole cloth, without distinctions. He's not just the archetype of goodness. He's my FATHER.

So I ask myself again: do I really NOT love Man? I think I do not love the aspects of him that present themselves the most readily to me: his greed, his selfishness, his callousness, his lies, his slurs and crimes against the value of life, and his hunger for power and domination. In short I do not at all love the demonic in him, and those are the aspects that present themselves the most apparently to me.

Why then am I so passionate about abortion? Sure it's still murder, and sure murder is wrong and I should be against it for that reason, but that does not explain my passion. Fewer babies of liberal parents means fewer bad people, right? And as long as I am not the one doing the murdering, why should I be passionate about it? 99% of those babies, if they were to live, are going to turn out like their godless liberal parents.

EASY LEGAL ABORTION MEANS FEWER LIBERALS. On that basis I should keep my nose out of it and let them murder their own, right?

But I LOVE them, those babies. I don't just love their moral right to exist, I love THEM.

They haven't done a thing good or evil yet. They haven't had that chance to make those decisions and face those trials. And here I think I am getting close to the core of the matter. I DO love Man - as G-d intended him. Man as the image of G-d. And the murdered unborn never get the chance to decide where on that divide they will stand: either on the side of seeking to live out the image of G-d or the image of the other guy. They never got the opportunity.

Not to mention that abortion destroys the standard of motherhood, an important part of that image of G-d in Man. Real mothers don't love their children one day and throw them in the dumpster the next, depending on how they feel. This is what liberals say, that you are only a mother if you choose to be. You only love that child if you choose to love them. Otherwise that child is just unloved tissue and you can freely throw it away (or sell its remains to medical science.)

No no HELL NO. If it's your child, you are a mother (or father.) You are going to be held to that godly standard of motherhood or fatherhood whether you like it or not: that you love and care for your child and seek his good. Why is "Honor thy father and thy mother" a COMMANDMENT, one of the TEN? Because it is an acknowledgement that according to G-d's standards they must love you, too. Even if you annoy the crap out of them, they are obligated to look after your good. This is a critical part of that "image of G-d in Man" thing, and one that the godless are most focused on destroying.

But even a fully grown human reprobate, an incorrigible sinner: are we not obligated to love whatever shadow of the image of G-d still remains in them? And incorrigible sinners sometimes DO repent, though I grant you it is all too rare. It does happen, it happened to me.

So in short, yes I do love my neighbor and not just abstractly. I love whatever part of the image of G-d is in him, just like I love those babies. It's hard to see that sometimes, with the demonic seeming to dominate most humans these days (or at least the loudest humans,) but it's still true.

Loving And Severe

 An important step to spiritual maturity is to see G-d as He is, not as we want Him to be. If you are just engaging in wishful thinking, just seeing what you want to see, that is not real religion. G-d does not exist to fulfill our wishes. We exist to fulfill His. He wants us to come more and more into His image, which is both loving and merciful and at the same time severe and unsentimental. G-d does not spare His children; who G-d loves he prunes and admonishes. Like a wild vine, He prunes off the unproductive branches in us and strengthens the productive ones.

Yes, G-d is loving, more so than we can imagine. Whatever your sins in the past, all you need to do is sincerely repent of them and see that you were wrong and resolve not to repeat them, and your sins will be forgiven. G-d wants to move past your previous shortcomings and embrace your future improvement and reconciliation with Him. G-d is so loving that He sent His own Son to this heck of a planet to die in order to save us. We low-lifes, you and me. In fact if you are His, everything He sends into your life whether it seems good or bad to you, is actually for your improvement. Some of those things are very unpleasant at the time.

And G-d is also severe. He is severe to his own to raise them up right, and he is severe to the unrighteous. One of my favorite passages in the Old Testament is also one of the hardest. In Leviticus 10 two of the sons of Aaron offer "strange fire" before G-d's altar. This might have been unauthorized incense or it might have been because they kindled their own fire rather than using fire from the altar. Whatever was the case, G-d consumed them both with fire. And then He says a very hard thing to Aaron:

"Do not cry."

Aaron was forbidden to weep. Man! He just lost two sons at once, burned to a crisp. But Aaron was no ordinary man. He was the High Priest of the Nation of Israel. He above all had to put G-d's interests first. And the sanctity of G-d's presence had just been violated. This was a very severe thing that nevertheless had to happen.

And you may find G-d removing people from your presence, if you are G-d's. If you are G-d's, you are His temple, His holy place. Profane people do not belong trammeling the courts of G-d. For myself, I became a hermit, among other reasons, to be separate from the profane human world and I find G-d removing the World's people from my life on a repeating basis. If you are His, He will do the same to you. This will be hard, and also necessary.

The benevolence and forgiveness of Jesus in the New Testament is mentioned frequently, sometimes at the expense of the many occasions of Jesus also being severe. In the Old Testament, adultery carries the death penalty. Yet Jesus saved the life of a woman who violated this Commandment and forgave her. Just as he will forgive you if you truly repent, no matter what you have done.

He also said this:

“Go in through the narrow gate, because the gate to hell is wide and the road that leads to it is easy, and there are many who travel it. But the gate to life is narrow and the way that leads to it is hard, and there are few people who find it."
~Matthew 7:13-14

This is a hard saying! He is saying the overwhelming majority of people won't be saved. Which means the odds are that most if not all of your friends and loved ones won't be either. Most of the world and most of its people are headed to the ash heap. Now, people follow a sinful way because they want to and they are free to make that choice. But it is a bit like some fish who lay millions of eggs so that only a few will survive to adulthood. Most people are like those million-minus-a-few who get gobbled up by other fish.

This is a profoundly unsentimental worldview. This is not intended to make us feel good, because it sure doesn't. It is intended to tell us the hard truth about being saved. We are supposed to feel chastened by this statement. Most will not make it. Will I? Better get serious.

This is also the same Jesus who went violent against the money-changers in the Temple. This is the same Jesus who told the Pharisees they will die in their sins. They're doomed. The same Jesus who said that anyone who leads one of his little ones (the context was children, but he means us) to sin would be better off drowning themselves.

G-d will not fit into our categories. He doesn't live to accommodate our wishes. He is more loving than we can know: indeed the nature of Heaven appears to be unity in love since the Father is in Jesus and Jesus is in us; we are united in love. He is also at the same time very unsentimental in a human sense, and severe. Our job is to come to know the only true G-d, not to try to squeeze Him into our wish-fulfillment knapsack.

The Incarnation is Weird, Man

 

Madonna and Child and Two Angels by Filippo Lippi

 

 Okay, so you are an expectant mother. And you have been told that the baby you are about to bear is the Savior of the World. How the heck are you supposed to behave? And according to gospels, she knew this full well before she ever gave birth.

What you hold in your arms is the pre-existent only Son of the Living G-d.

What. The. Heck.

It might be a bit like holding a case of nitroglycerin in your arms, except it is not going to blow you up but totally change the condition of everything. I guess that after you give birth, normal Mom stuff kicks in and you are cooing and burping him and changing nappies and you kind of get amnesia as to the fact that this is the pre-existent only Son of the Only Almighty G-d. I believe I have actually experienced similar amnesia before: times when I think G-d was saying, "I don't want you to realize what is happening yet: you will have to deal with it when it is time but not before, so I am putting a veil over your eyes for now." And certainly Mary was going to have some heavy stuff to deal with 30 years hence. She was going to need to pretend that everything was normal until Jesus was grown.

G-d was saying, "This is My Son. And now, because Mary gave birth to him, this is also a son of Humanity. Jesus often referred to himself as the Son of Man. Our son. And you are going to kill him, and through him I am going to save a remnant of humanity for Myself." Very much like Abraham and Isaac, except this time the humans followed through with the sacrifice. Both the Old and New Testaments often refer to the reconciliation between G-d and Man as a kind of marriage.

You have to assume that Mary's mind was to some degree sheltered from the full realization of who was in her arms. For a bit anyway, until Jesus was an adult, she was a normal mother and he was a normal child. Even though nothing of the sort was actually the case. I think that if Jesus as a toddler went around saying "I am your Lord: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life," that Mary would have eventually freaked right the hell out. But no. Lets make pretend, Momma. Let's pretend you are a normal mother and that I am a normal baby. They would have had to, almost.

Ya, the Incarnation is super weird, man.