Jesus has the power of the most high God, the one that in the beginning slew the monster of the sea and created order where there had been chaos. Although the god of the storm and demons have power over us, they are powerless against the most high God. Through Jesus, God was again restoring order where there was chaos. The world would be reborn.
We are not the people our ancestors were. Now we see distant flaming stars in an expanding void when we look toward the heavens. We have rolled up the sacred celestial tent, the most high God and his son have vanished, and we have forgotten what it was like to live beneath the tent.
In our unconscious memory the symbols cast a spell over us still. It is as if deep inside we live among the tombs cutting ourselves with stones waiting for the most high God to remake our lives and world. And time goes on and on and on.
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April 14, 2008 at 11:52 am
jakeb
Pretty interesting thoughts. The death of God, I suppose, is a reality (some would say burden) we carry in ourselves. I woke up in the night thinking about romanticism. What a weird wake up. But it made me think of why I’m still a haphazard man of (mostly warped) faith: I’m a romantic.
April 14, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Ken
Romanticism is meant for the night: William Blake: “Some are born to endless night… We are led to believe a lie when we see not through the eye that was born in a night to perish in a night, when the soul slept in beams of light.”
To wake up in the middle of the night is to come back too soon, before it is time.
Waking up in the night ruptures reality.
In the night, watchmen wait for the dawn.
May 8, 2008 at 3:52 am
Benedict
Good grief, gentleman, you’re managing to invoke Romanticism, Jung, Eliade, and Merton all in one brief post and discussion.
Indeed, we are not the people our ancestors were. More’s the pity. The tent analogy is interesting here as well, although I’m more inclined to think that many think of God in the manner of “the Architect” in the second Matrix film; inaccessible, on a floor in a high rise that has no elevator or no stair that reaches it, in the classic watchmaking god sense.
More’s the pity.
I’m not even so sure it is our unconscious that recognizes the spell of elidadean imagery. I think the spell is too near the surface to be located in the unconscious.
“Watchman, what of the night?
“The night, O My Lord, is a time of freedom. You have seen the morning and the night, and the night was better. In the night all things began, and in the night the end of all things has come before me.” — Thomas Merton, “The Firewatch, July 4, 1952″
May 8, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Ken
Merton must have read Blake. There was a time “when the soul slept in beams of light.”