The Saga of Atonement

[Long ago I read the Kalevala, the mythological epic of Finland and found its special meter (trochic tetrameter) to be one of the most compelling things about it. I wanted to write poetry of some kind for Christmas, and basically this is what happened. The rhythm is very suited for long poems, and I may very well gradually expand it in the future to tell the entire story of salvation. Either way, I hope you are blessed by my feeble attempts at wordsmithery. Merry Christmas!]

Long in silent darkness dwelling

Long the shadows on them lay

Those that name the Name of Israel

Waited for a coming day

Legions Roman hold their cities 

Legions Demon hold their souls

Priests of rules the rules abandon

Stealing tithes but washing bowls

Now a spark in shadow shining

Now a light begins to burn

Virgin she yet bears a firstborn

In their fields the shepherds learn

Angels sing in choirs angelic

Angels fallen shout in fear

Know they well the Son of David

Clothed in flesh now He is here

*

Eastern men of wisdom find Him

Eastern skies reveal a star

Furious a false king seeks Him

Safely fled to Nile afar

Nazareth receives Him homeward

Nazareth what good from there

By the lakeside woodcraft learning

Feels He all our mortal care

Now the fire begins a-blazing

Now Redeemer deems it time

Calling to Him sons of Israel

Breaking rules without a crime

From the desert flees the tempter

From the desert cries a voice

Kingdom coming heaven calling

Rich and poor must make a choice

*

Teachers of the law oppose Him

Teachers taught to listen well

Crowds are sated storms are silenced

Yeast and salt and fires of hell

Turns He fishers into preachers

Turns He to Jerusalem

Waving palms but palming silver

One betrays the rest of them

Now the flames grow somber softly

Now the sorrow swiftly nears 

Chases cheaters from His temple

Truth He rains on arid ears

Cup and bread and night is falling

Cup of wrath and torches glow

Whips that cut the Son of Heaven

Peter cut by rooster's crow

*

Borne by boards He bears our sorrow

Borne aloft for Adam's fall

Crying out the work is finished

Gives His life our all in all

Death in mortal fear beholds Him

Death a stranger in His land

From the grave a King is rising

Scars in foot and side and hand

Now a mighty conflagration 
Now His love the world ignites
Sends us forth to speak His gospel
Seven lamps and seven lights.

Dwelling now in heaven's glory
Dwelling places He prepares
Now we wait for His returning
God Almighty None Compares

Christmas with Pontius Pilate

We don't know what Pilate looked like, but the expression Greg Hicks
(from the old film The Robe) is making here seems very appropriate.

A middle-aged Roman prefect stumbles confusedly through an unfamiliar town square.

This is certainly not Jerusalem, he muses, observing the strange garb of the local inhabitants. A careful-thinking man, he does not panic, but tries to retrace his steps that evening. There had been the gift of fine wine from Antipas, perhaps enjoyed a little too willingly in the wake of yet another censorious message from Rome, a lapse of his customary self-discipline. Then on the way home, a swerve into that unfamiliar-looking alley to avoid that idiot rider who couldn't manage his own horse. There was a sort of flash, and disoriented feeling (had he hit his head?), and suddenly he stepped out of what he had assumed was the same cobble-stoned alleyway, only to find he was not in Jerusalem at all.

Nor anywhere in Judea, seemingly. The people here had strange features, and were of every ethnicity, like the diverse masses that poured into Jerusalem for Passover, yet there were faces strange to even his own fairly experienced eye. Some looked more or less Roman, some like the Germanic warriors Tiberius had brought back to parade at his Triumph, some like Egyptian or other African auxiliaries, and others more exotic still.

They were dressed in strange but festive garb, suitable for the cold weather, colder than Jerusalem had been, he now realized. He drew his cloak more closely around him as a frigid blast drove flurries of snow into his face, aquiline features narrowing in disapproval. He did not shiver, a habit cultivated to avoid appearing weak in front of his soldiers, but he knew he would need to find warmer clothing like theirs soon. That left the question of where he was, however, and how he'd get home.

His attention was quickly drawn by music, such music as he had never heard before. The rhythm and instruments were strange to his ears, but he could understand the lyrics well enough: Gloria in Excelcis Deo. "Glory to God in the Highest." But only part of the song was in Latin, the rest was garbled in some kind of barbarian, mumbling tongue full of consonant clusters, though here and there he heard loanwords borrowed from Latin and perhaps Greek. The tongue of some outlying province, then, which knew of the glory of Rome but perhaps did not yet bow to its authority. He should be careful; his obviously Roman garb and bearing might not earn him any good feeling in this place. And "deo" was a bit strange, "god" rather than "gods." Perhaps these people, like the Judeans, worshiped a singular deity. He'd never taken the time to learn the details of Judean religion, that was Antipas' forte, not his. The Judeans didn't like him, and he didn't care for them at all; they were difficult to manage, fussing with religious minutia at one minute, and attempting bloody insurrections the next, then crying to Rome if he so much as slaughtered a handful of them to teach them a good lesson. The Judean position had been a welcome promotion at the time, but he'd soon grown weary of the post, and Rome had not been pleased with his severe interpretation of proper governance. Perhaps they were all going soft back in The City Aeternal, losing the old patrician sternness just like they'd lost the war in Germania, though such rebellious thoughts were dangerous even in the secret palace of his own mind.

What he could not understand was where the music was coming from. To produce such a song would require a choir of reasonably well-trained singers, along with a small band of musicians. But his ears could clearly distinguish the direction of the music, and it seemed to be coming from the air. Perhaps it was a party on an upper floor? Some of the buildings here, he now realized, were taller than any he'd seen before. Gods knew what far-flung royal capital had he been transported to, no doubt in a deep wine-dream he'd regret in the morning, even if his slaves had gotten him safely home to bed.

He walked further down the street, avoiding the pedestrians who mostly ignored him, though several gawked as if they'd never seen a Roman before. He rounded the corner, seeking shelter from the wind, and drew in his breath at the sight that greeted him. A great conifer tree, like those of the forests of northern Germania, completely covered in dazzling lights. How they were contrived he did not know, but one of these would be the talk of Rome if it could be arranged. He drew closer, seeking to understand how it was lit and appointed.

At the base of the tree, he now saw, were some badly-done statues, enacting a scene of some kind, probably religious in nature. There was a baby in a tiny bed of straw, surrounded by improbably diverse livestock, with sheep jostling with cows and what was either a horse or a donkey for space. There was a man and a woman on each side of the baby, probably its parents, and then some other strange characters, with shepherd's crooks but dressed unlike any shepherds he'd ever been forced to take notice of. On the other side were three unusual figures, dressed in exaggerated finery and accompanied by an undersized camel, the kind with two humps from the northeastern provinces that were massive and intimidating in real life, around which the horses of his all-too-few cavalry units were irritatingly skittish.

The whole scene had an air of spiritual significance, both in its placement under the shining tree and with the careful placement of certain characters, as if it were the re-enactment of an important religious ceremony or myth. These mystery religions and their public rituals had become common in Rome and throughout the Empire, though the significance of this one escaped him and didn't particularly concern him. As he was turning his attention back to the tree, to his great surprise a woman tapped him on the shoulder. He glared in startled outrage at her for daring such a familiar gesture, and he a prefect of Rome, before remembering that this was a dream and he'd best play along in hopes of waking up as soon as possible. His wife often had vivid dreams, and claimed they sometimes came true later. Perhaps this was something significant as well. He forced himself to relax his features and looked sternly but inquiringly at her. The woman, who did not at all resemble his wife, with pale skin and hair redder than he had ever seen before, looked momentarily taken aback at his reflexive scowl, but now drew herself up and began prattling at him in her barbarian language with the occasional familiar-sounding word, seemingly both pleased and impatient. He understood nothing from her speech, but she began poking and prodding him toward the scene he had just been contemplating, and to his irritation he understood that she wanted him to stand off to one side and not move.

He did so, feeling very imposed upon by this strange dream, and in response she drew out a small, flat, black object and held it up in front of her, bending forward slightly and appearing to look through it at the scene, though it was solid as far as he could tell. He wondered if she was the designer of the display, and the black object was used for worship in her obscure cultus. It was aimed at him too, he thought, which meant he was being honored as well. Though he didn't hold with barbarian superstition, he decided to play the part, and drew himself up proudly. She made more pleased sounds at this and kept tapping the object in her hand, before straightening up and, to his utter astonishment, raising her thumb in the pollice verso gesture which condemned a defeated gladiator to death. With her beaming countenance completely at odds with the lethal sign, it occurred to him that this might mean something different so far from proper civilization as he clearly was, though it was hard to contemplate. This must be a distant province indeed.

She withdrew after being hailed by some other women, and Pilate took the opportunity to study the scene more carefully before withdrawing. He had assumed the figures were carved from stone and then painted in this rather lurid fashion, but now he saw they were fashioned from some light but tough material, so light that having barely brushed against it he knocked one of the rich kingly figures into its impossibly tiny camel, both falling over. No matter, a slave would take care of that. On the back, he now noticed, were affixed labels, in mostly-legible Latin script. He peered at each of them, and found some names were more or less familiar. "Ioseph" was seemingly their local corruption of the Latin name "Iosephus," for example, though the I was drawn with a foot, like "J". Idly curious, an unnatural mood for him, he came to the child, and lifted it to see what the label on its back might say. Having done so, he dropped the small figure in surprise and passed his hand over his eyes in disbelief. "Jesus Christ." Surely it couldn't be...?

His mind immediately flashed back to that horrible day. Iesus Nazarenus, the one they called Christus. The crowds had been all stirred up at his arrival for their annual celebration, one of several yearly that required the slaughtering of vast numbers of animals, then a few days later turned on him savagely and demanded his crucifixion. But this man was not just a fallen local celebrity. He was... different. The thought was uncomfortable, even years later.

His wife had behaved unusually that day they executed the man. She'd had another one of those dreams, but claimed it was about this Iesus, this Nazarene also called the Galilean, and that Pilate should have nothing to do with him. He'd interrogated the man himself, and to his surprise found that instead of a desperate criminal begging for the clemency of Rome, it was he himself who felt defensive. The one they now called Christus seemed to be walking a fine line between not giving him any legitimate, legal grounds for condemnation, yet also not asking for pardon, throwing the burden of the decision entirely on Pilate. He almost seemed to be inviting Pilate to make a self-sacrificing choice, an altruistic decision altogether at odds with Pilate's own studied pragmatism and enlightened self-interest. That was impossible, yet something deep inside him stirred when the man spoke.

The man hadn't said much, but his few words were efficiently profound, in a way any educated Roman could appreciate. Clearly the man understood philosophy. Pilate had nothing but contempt for those faux-hellenized sophists who called themselves professional philosophers, but this man wasn't like that. He knew some things about the nature of authority, too. Somehow, inexplicably, Pilate had felt proud that the man had said more to him than to Herod. Antipater hadn't gotten a word out of him, though he'd handled the whole impossible situation with more humor than Pilate had anticipated. Things had been better between them after that, for all Antipas' short-comings. But old Antipas was never very deep, nor interested in virtue; this Christus seemed to realize Pilate was a man who lived by a code, and was trying to subvert that code with a higher one. How strange that the natural response of "who do you think you are" seemed impossible to apply to him, even beaten bloody and dressed in tragic finery. The title of King seemed natural to him, yet he'd not boasted of it or even claimed it for himself, simply accepted it but explained it was a different sort of kingdom.

His death felt like a tragic waste. Pilate considered himself a cynic, not a man given to sentimentality, but Iesus Nazarenus had radiated dignity and peace, and a man like that who understood philosophy finding an early death at the hands of a reactionary mob had happened too many times in history already. Pilate hadn't wanted to be the enabler, and was angered by the chief priests' open leveraging of his uneasy standing with Rome. They knew how to stir up the crowds, knew how to get what they wanted, and in the end they'd gotten it from him, and an innocent man had died due to some religious dispute.

In the end he had washed his hands of the matter, of course. In fact he'd found it difficult to stop compulsively washing his hands, sometimes, for a long time after that. His wife said he still did it in his sleep. But when he thought of how the man looked, how he'd not attempted to convince Pilate to spare him, he felt vexed. The man had put him in an unfair position. It's like he wanted to die. Pilate had put a rather significant number of people to death in his day--too many, Rome kept complaining--but somehow this one was like a little burning, itching spark in his sense of moral rectitude that refused to be quenched by either persuasive logic or stone-faced stoicism. Glancing down at the infant-figure's painted face, he scowled deeply. So the Christus had his own cultus here too?

Recently he'd heard rumors of this sort of thing, private meetings and public gatherings of the ones mocked as "christianoi," little christers. It was deeply unsettling somehow. The Galilean had risen from the grave--metaphorically, he hastened to add to himself--though the christianoi all seemed to believe he'd done so in reality as well. Thinking back to the man's eyes, his own soldiers' report of the events that afternoon when everything grew dark... Pilate shuddered at the cold wind. Something was rising in the world, a strange premonition told him, that would shake even the measureless might of Rome to its foundation.

He'd had some of the soldiers who were there put to death, just to be sure. The Judean leaders had given them money, told them to spread rumors that the corpus christi had been stolen. That order had been harder to give than usual, more people dying in connection with the same strange incident, but the fact remained that the soldiers had totally failed in their duty to protect the grave site, and could not even offer a decent reason why. If they'd been able to produce one, perhaps this whole matter would have resolved itself peacefully. As it was, their ridiculous stories about an earthquake and shining figures--the true account, they insisted, not the one they'd been paid to spread--just made it worse. But the real unforgivable crime had been accepting the money. First the religious leaders openly manipulated him in public, and got away with it. Now they'd tried to manipulate the situation in private, bribed his own men, and even convinced them they could shield them from Pilate's anger. He wasn't about to let that kind of corruption spread through the garrison; those soldiers who had believed the lying priests had paid dearly for their naivety, and the lesson had been well taken by the others.

Pilate smiled grimly at the recollection of the priests' displeasure when he'd ordered the sign for the crucifix. "King of the Judeans" seemed an appropriate title, given that was nearly the only accusation they could muster against him. "Quod scripsi, scripsi" he had replied, "What I have written, I have written." One of his better comebacks, and it silenced them for the time being, though the troubles had only begun at that point and he'd lost good soldiers by the end of it. Though it was hard to say if it had really ended, now.

Discipline had improved since then, at least, though rumor had it that even a few of his soldiers now prayed to the Christus. "A fine god for a soldier," he murmured out loud, sarcastically. "A betrayed King who couldn't save himself." The infant figure stared up at him calmly, a mute refutation. A sphinx-like smile played about its lips, one that hadn't been there when the man himself had stood before Pilate, wounded and sorrowful. Yet also calm, and without the least trace of desperation. Almost as if he'd known... almost as if those reports that he'd been spotted a few days later, outside the city...

Pilate turned on a heel and strode away from the scene. The mighty tree, bejeweled and shining like the desert sky on a clear night, now seemed like a monument to Pilate's lapse in judgment. Its joyful aspect mocked him, as if the man who'd died in defeat had won, and Pilate had lost. He gritted his teeth. It wasn't fair. He'd saved himself, preserved public order. Duty to self came before any kind of altruistic nonsense, and duty to Rome above all. Sometimes innocent men died, that was how things were. People died and Rome endured, crawling forward like a mighty siege engine on the backs of slaves and corpses of men down the Viae Romanae from almighty Rome itself to distant barbaric lands like this one he now found himself trapped in. 

But better one innocent man die than the whole nation perish, was it not so? Roman Law even benevolently took pains to try to lessen the killing of innocent people, and Pilate felt on that day he'd really done more than was strictly necessary to defend the Nazarene, who didn't seem inclined to defend himself despite having not broken any real laws. He'd practically put his already unstable career in jeopardy over the situation, surely no more could be expected than that. One man's life didn't count for much, not in Jerusalem. If he'd expected more from Pilate, he'd only gotten his own death as a reward. Yet none of this soothed that little burning spark in his conscience, if anything it grew a little hotter now, turning his mood sour.

The tree was at one end of the town square, and as he stalked away from it he nearly jumped as a large bell rang out, a brief, repetitive cadence. It was some kind of signal, clearly enough, but did not seem like an alarm. Looking in the direction of the sound, he was surprised again to see a building marked with a large crucifix. Surely these barbarians did not do their crucifixions indoors? Even as a man accustomed to scenes of violence, he would not have relished being trapped inside a room with the gruesome spectacle and the accompanying sounds and smells. Drawn toward the white-painted structure despite himself, he ventured closer, and decided that could not be the case, as the building's white façade was entirely clean (blood always stood out on white, and slaves never managed to find and wash or paint over every single crimson splatter). It also had too small an entrance to drag a crucifix in, or let the sanguinary-minded crowds in to watch.

Peering inside, he found a mostly-empty room, lined with benches. Almost like a synagogis, where the more devout Judeans insisting on congregating every sabbath, except decorated strangely, and predominantly made of wood instead of more durable stone. He noted with unstoic pleasure that warm air was issuing from within, and wondered if in this cold clime they had architects skilled enough to run hot water pipes through the floor. Taking a few steps inside, he froze again. At the front, prominently displayed on the wall, was a crucifix. But this one had a man on it, and he had a sinking feeling that he knew who it was supposed to be. His eyes weren't what they used to be, but from this near distance he could see a sort of rendition of the thorn-crown one of the garrison's more cruelly inventive soldiers had placed on the Nazarene's head, in unsubtle mockery of his claimed kingship. It was not a good likeness of the man himself, granted, but only a good sculptor could bring that out, and the intent was unmistakable: it was a depiction of the Christus being crucified. Pilate could even see the little sign over his head, the one he himself had ordered.
I.N.R.I.
A shudder ran through him.

He stormed back outside into the cold, his mind raging in confusion. It was just one man. One man among so many that had been nailed to the wooden posts and died in agony. Gods, what was he supposed to have done? The crowd was about to riot. Couldn't the man see that? Why hadn't Herod figured out something? Why was it left up to him? Why did they insist on choosing the other Iesus, the one they called Barabbas, instead? Why did everyone else seem to think he had any other option? Why did none of the other decisions he'd made keep haunting him like this one?

Pontius Pilate rubbed his face with his hands, groaning for a moment, then mastered himself. He knew exactly why they'd chosen Barabbas. The Galilean had said it himself. His kingdom was not of this world. Rome, Judea, the political machinations of the Empire were not his concern. But they were Barabbas' concern. He'd led a riot over it, drawn blood. He'd done what the Judeans all wished they could do, all those who hated Rome and would have revolted in a heartbeat if the right leader presented himself. That's--he paused, a thought suddenly striking him. That's why they'd welcomed the Christus to Jerusalem like a hero and then turned on him so savagely. They thought he was coming to finish what Barabbas had started. Failing that, they had no use for him.

Pilate shrugged cynically. So be it. A man in leadership had to read the crowds and understand the needs of the time, or he deserved whatever failure he reaped. If the Nazarene had chosen to be their leader on that day, it would have taken more than the garrison in Jerusalem to stop them. The man himself had even said something like that. He was willingly dying rather than lead his own people to revolt and ultimate destruction by Rome. Pilate grasped at the straw of justification. Really, he had made the right choice then. If he'd refused to allow the crucifixion to take place, maybe the crowds would have convinced the Nazarene. Maybe he'd have had a full-scale insurrection on his hands. Maybe.

Maybe not, he admitted, thinking of the man's words and face. Maybe the man hadn't failed. Maybe in dying he'd accomplished something greater than he'd ever been able to achieve if he'd clung to life. After all, even in this distant place, they somehow knew of what had happened, and considered him a god of some kind. But Pilate hoped his own name would be forgotten in connection with the whole affair. He wanted nothing more to do with it. He trudged back through the light dusting of snow, back towards the alley he'd emerged from. He wanted to wake up from this dream, and face whatever troubles the ever-troubled city of Jerusalem would greet him with in the morning.

As he approached the alley, he noticed a man was standing suspiciously off to one side of the entrance. He was handing out to passersby some kind of membranei, a little folded pamphlet. As Pilate approached, the man blinked at his clothing and appearance, but offered him one with a smile. He said something in their garbled tongue, just two or three words, like a greeting, but Pilate could swear "Christus" was in the second half of it. Maybe he was just losing his nerve now.

Looking down at the tiny codex, however, his hand spasmed as he saw on the cover was a man, dressed in a white robe. His hands were outstretched, and clearly bore the stigmata of crucifixion nails. Across the top was written that name he now dared not speak, that of the Christus. The face stared into his. The eyes were different, yet the same. "You again! You everywhere!" he hissed, dropping the thing as if it had burned him. He fled down the alley, and collided with a light metal container which made a loud crashing noise as he fell over it.

They tumbled to the ground together, and as he flailed around in unseemly panic, he realized he was wrestling with bed sheets. A copper platter lay on the floor where he'd knocked it off the small bedside table in his somnolent struggle. The window was unfastened, and the cold midnight air was blowing in. He went to it and looked out at the old city, a few lonely torches guttering in the night breeze, trying to calm his breathing. Just a dream. His eyes wandered across the dark rooftops, drawn in the direction of that place they called The Skull.

"Quod scripsi, scripsi," he muttered, going back to bed.

The Unseen World - Part 2: A Falsely-Seeded Imagination

This is the second of a multi-part series. Click here for the first entry.

“Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?' A man may do both,' said Aragorn. 'For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!” - J.R.R.Tolkien (from The Two Towers)

1. The Reality of the Unseen World

You live in a world which includes the supernatural. Watching a sunrise in the mountains, or dressing up for a wedding, or playing games on your cellphone while you wait to get a flu shot, there is an unseen component to your surroundings, another aspect to reality which eludes your observation. We have trouble visualizing this, precisely because it is unseen. Each of the scenarios above (sunrise, party, flu shot) can be clearly pictured in your mind, perhaps you even imagined them as you read that sentence. Take a moment and do it now if you haven't. The unseen world, by contrast, cannot be imagined with any realistic help to the mind's eye, as you (99% of you, at least) have no realistic points of reference for it, and your attempts to do so will probably only render it less credible by all being based on fictional/fanciful depictions.

Yet I chose those three scenarios above for a reason: all three are considered liminal occasions in many cultures. The term "liminal" comes from the Latin for "threshold," and refers to a sort of boundary phase, where you are passing from one place or state to another. You are probably more familiar with a related word, subliminal. Subliminal describes something which does not reach the threshold of sensory awareness, like the old idea of subliminal messaging, with images flashed onto the screen during a film too fast for you to notice, but perhaps unconsciously persuading you that you wanted to drink a coke or buy more popcorn. (Which seemingly doesn't work; the original claimed success of increased sales is a hoax, though still floating around the internet)

A great example of liminality in story-telling would be in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Prior to Lucy actually going into the wardrobe (a liminal object which is the threshold between Narnia and our world), there are a whole series of liminal moments. First the long trip into the countryside, leaving behind London and arriving at a mysterious old house. Then the adventure to explore the old house itself, and all the various rooms and series of passages that draw them deeper into the house, past various symbolic objects (suits of armor, harps, huge old books) that take us, with the children, away from the normal world outside and deep into some other kind of realm, the realm which, while still in our world, can have something like a magical wardrobe in it.

A door between worlds.

While we must turn back from that pleasant analogy (I haven't read Narnia in too long, Christmas is the perfect time to start the series again... in order of writing, of course, as is the only proper way, beginning with LWW), hopefully it serves to illustrate the point. There is an invisible passage, a liminal boundary, and once you cross it, things are different on the other side.

Sunrises, weddings, and the administration of medicine are all occasions where an invisible boundary is being crossed; in the case of sunrise, night is turning to day, in the case of a wedding, a mysterious and sacred bond between a man and a woman is being pronounced, and for the case of medical care, in traditional or folk cultures the healing arts are very often considered to cross over the boundary of the purely natural world into the supernatural.

That is our focus for this post and more or less for this whole series of posts: Most people throughout history have always believed in this supernatural threshold which can be crossed in manifold situations. The Bible does not teach us that that other side of reality does not exist (it assumes it, rather), but that God above invaded this corrupted world by not only entering it but crossing the threshold of the supernatural and actually being born in the flesh as a historical person.

Jesus literally crosses the threshold, pun respectfully intended, by his own death on the cross. He is the Door. (Aslan is the Wardrobe!) He is the reverse siege tower from heaven down to earth that mercifully allows travel back up and out from the walls of our exile. Condemned by the visible authorities of His day in order to triumph over the invisible ones, He was the God no one has seen, seen by many witnesses; the perfect completion of love and suffering to reconcile the irreconcilable perpendiculars of immaculate justice and endless mercy.

Even centuries after He returned past the liminal threshold to prepare for our arrival and the final Divine invasion which will overthrow the kingdom of darkness forever, we see and remember Him in the sacrament of holy communion, and observe that the Christian faith has been a topic of conversation between the world's most powerful leaders, from Ancient Rome* to 2017 Russia**.

(*- An interesting letter exchange between Pliny the Younger and Emperor Trajan regarding what to do with Christians, who refused to worship Caesar's image) (**- An investigation of Putin's friendly but nuanced relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church). 

In the Christian faith there is a continual play of seen/unseen going on, then, a dance with an invisible partner, a tension of evidence and faith, impressively answered and distressingly unanswered prayers, which reflects the seen/unseen nature of all reality. So we will understand our faith better, and the Bible will seem more urgent and relevant to us as it should, when we recognize that the world we live in does include this supernatural aspect, whether we see much evidence of it in our daily life or not. You can in Taiwan, if you live here long term or spend much time in certain locales, and Aragorn's answer to Eomer in the opening quote can be a sort of answer to us as well. We do live in a scientific world, but that does not preclude the fact of there being more going on than merely that.

This is because scientific inquiry, an extremely valuable and useful tool when pursued correctly (such an effective one that it's being discarded as a means of antagonizing Christianity because in the end all the evidence is turning out to be on our side), does not describe the entirety of what lies below heaven, merely the material bits.

To be sure, one prevalent modern belief system, what we might call scientism, insists that anything that science cannot explain yet is merely something it will figure out later. This is what I call the science-of-the-gaps defense, the exact analogy of the argument mistakenly used by many Christians in the past and some still today, claiming that the inexplicable is evidence for God. But we do not find our evidence for God hiding in the inexplicable, but clearly seen from what has been made, because we haven't based our observations on the premise that there is no God.

In folk cultural worldviews, on the other hand, we have the opposite problem, where most areas of life are considered to be affected by the supernatural but traditions regarding this are rarely if ever examined critically. (Indeed, people don't even bother artificially reconciling mutually exclusive superstitions with each other).

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, Europe was the same way before Christianity and modernity combined forces to condemn the unseen world as spiritually opposed to God, and to disbelieve in it entirely, replacing it with a solely material universe to be measured, explained, and mastered by science. That stance became the default worldview of anyone growing up in the West, and various Western-influenced subcultures around the world, so that now even sincere Christians in Western countries may need a lot of faith to believe in things like angels or demons, or even the miracles of Jesus, because their worldview has no place for what the Bible describes in a relatively straightforward manner.

2. When Art is Unreliable

(Note: as I begin this section I am proud to say that I have multiple Christian friends who use their gifting in art to serve God, and I have been blessed, intrigued, and edified by many of their works. So when I speak of unreliable Christian or Bible-referencing art, I know there are exceptions. Lord willing, there will be many more exceptions in the years to come, and Christian art will rise to glorify its Creator, like "living hymns of stone and light," and not be primarily mass-produced to meet a large niche industry demand)

If you grew up in that kind of rationalist-influenced culture which still describes most of the postmodern West, the moment you try to envision life being lived in the context of a supernatural world unsupervised by science, immediately your imagination may begin to supply imagery of the supernatural from sources with which we have been inundated since childhood. That is often more harmful than helpful for Christians, since such imagery is nearly always misleading.

Much Christian imagery reveals no attempt at scriptural accuracy, relying more on Renaissance-era art or other influences than on what brief depictions we have in the Bible of the world beyond our ken. So whenever you see images of Satan lounging arrogantly on the throne of hell, or cute little chubby baby angels (putti), you can thank whomever it was that began misapplying the work of Milton or Raphael, since the Bible describes Satan as cast from heaven to earth and roaming around the planet, and heaven's angels as intimidating enough that their first words are typically "do not fear." And those are just the ambassador angels with roughly humanish form, not the four-fold keruvim (cherubim, but people confuse the putti with cherubs now, "keruvim" is more like the Hebrew pronunciation), or the mighty six winged seraphim, "the burning ones".

Not to get too far afield, by the way, but the Hebrew word saraph is transliterated (not translated, but given an English spelling) into Seraph/Seraphim in Isaiah 6 when it's talking about angels in the throne room of God, but refers to a "fiery" flying serpent in other Old Testament passages and period literature. (See the entries here) Translating Isaiah 6:2 consistently, then, you'd get "above Him were fiery serpents, each with six wings..." Since prophets describing their visions did the best they could using the knowledge and language they had, we can't say whether the angelic beings simply reminded Isaiah of whatever were the "fiery," snake-like creatures which God sent into the Israelite camp to punish them in the desert further out from Edom, or looked exactly like them, but it seems clear that neither the "shiny person, except with six cool wings," or the more esoteric "pretty much just six conjoined wings" images are what Isaiah was seeing and describing. (And if Satan is a fallen angel, and some angels look like fiery serpents/dragons, it makes sense that he shows up as a snake in the garden and a dragon in revelation. This suggests the possibility that Satan is a fallen seraph, though we will pause with that interesting thought and not stray from scripture into apocryphal speculation. For now we're sticking with this Hebrew note.) 

Not angels. Possibly deciding on where to eat lunch.

But angels are heavenly servants and depictions of heaven are in fact given to us in scripture, so our imagination has some authorized help in that case, even if people choose not to make use of it. How are we to envision ourselves, on the other hand, living on earth, but in the midst of the supernatural? I don't know if we can do it helpfully. The unseen world is precisely that, "unseen". The more you try to visualize it, the more your mind will conjure up Hollywood special effects or folk tale illustrations,
and that will seem fictional and unlike your daily experience of life, and you will doubt reality on the basis of a false characterization, or believe what is not reality, like those people who fall for every
"child goes to heaven" tale which somehow always manage to stray from anything like a scriptural depiction at some point.

As an example of the power of visual suggestion to compete with written information: I am a devoted fan of the Lord of the Rings series and all things Tolkien (as is obvious to anyone not new to my blog), and so I am quite glad that I read the books before I watched the Peter Jackson films. Because that means Frodo, and Sam, and Aragorn, and Gandalf, and all the others, as envisioned in my imagination, will always have the first spot, and the images of the actors who played them are only overlaid on top of this, influential though they be.

But for people who have only ever seen the films, or saw them first before later reading the books, their mental image of Frodo will be more or less synonymous with that of Elijah Wood and his interpretation of the character in the films. Because most people's imagination of a literary character is at least somewhat limited in detail, the image of an actor fills in all the details first, and their imagination, even supplied with details from a book that may slightly go against the film version, can't compete with all the powerful visual information of a modern film. (Feel free to comment if you are an exception to this, and watched the films first yet envision Frodo and/or other characters as looking different)

It would be nice to know exactly how Tolkien envisioned Frodo in his mind, if only for comparison purposes, but it's not a pressing issue because it's a fictional tale. It does not describe our world as it is, nor is it meant to, though it was surely intended to incline us toward those true and beautiful things in this world. But this same problem exists for believers in a more urgent sense. Our imaginations have been "pre-seeded" with the inaccurate Renaissance Art and Hollywood renditions of Biblical and/or spiritual realities, and that's what sticks in the mind, even when it clashes with scripture.

"Not my Frodo.." (but Wood did a good job, all considering)

So if you find things like heaven and hell and angels and demons a bit difficult to swallow, and believe in their factual existence only because scripture assumes and demands that you do, I want to argue that it's much more of a challenge because the depictions of these things you've seen previously are typically fanciful and frequently unscriptural. It's might not be that your faith is weak, it's that your imagination has been supplied with images that are not accurate depictions of spiritual realities, and there is a cognitive dissonance there that is in fact legitimate.

Again from Lewis:

"The fact that “devils” are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you." (C.S.Lewis, from The Screwtape Letters) 

Lewis was writing in the decades when England was in its modernist rebellion against the faith, something which reportedly began after the horrors of World War I began undermining people's faith in the Church's authority and handle on truth (worth a look in some future post to see if that's really the case or not) and continued in the decades after "winning" World War II at a very high cost, when England spun off influential pop icons on its way down into domestic cultural malaise.

Thus he writes of "devils" (we'd use the term demons now) as being comic figures, and you can perhaps imagine that being the case in an old British comedy, something played for laughs, leaping about in red pajamas, as he mentions. Nowadays, with interest in the supernatural having risen and remained high, and modernism in the rear-view mirror as we head into a new Western era of spiritual darkness (borrowing also from the Eastern spiritual darkness which was never much interrupted by Christendom), they're more of a gothic and sinister or horror/possession film topic. So not so much of a laughing matter, but the principle remains the same: If you ask people to believe in something they saw a version of interpreted in CGI (perhaps poorly), it's going to be easy for their skepticism to creep in, even though what the Bible talks about is not at all like the Hollywood portrayal in the vast majority of cases.

This is true for believers with regards to other matters of faith beyond angels and demons. I have, at times in my life, even caught myself struggling with doubts about the reality of heaven itself, only to realize that I wasn't doubting heaven at all. What I was struggling with was the idea of it being "like" some picture or illustration of it that I'd seen, which seemed nice but very far from an eternal abode with the Creator of all things.

No effort of imagination is sufficient to conceive of that, of course, and Paul references Isaiah 64 in 1 Corinthians 2 in passing as he says that “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” - it is something the Spirit reveals, yet what is revealed is wisdom of God and spiritual truths, not specifics about the accommodations of infinite life, which must necessarily be of a quality that we cannot imagine in our finite, time-bound consciousness. (One reason I don't worry if I can't entirely conceive of the biblical description either--my earth-bound conceptions could never come close)

3. Delete the Spam in your Spiritual Visual Cache

If the prophets were staggered, then, and struggled to use the most beautiful things they could think of on earth to describe the images God showed them of spiritual realities, then at least we can seed our imagination with what they wrote, and not blatantly unbiblical or confused, apocryphal images from pop culture.

So my first suggestion is to clear your spiritual imagination cache a little. Start erasing.

Erase Saint Peter with a quill pen at a little desk in front of baroque gold gates and boring white clouds. Erase a red-caped Satan with a Poseidon trident enthroned over what looks like an interesting Super Mario lava world. Erase the dark images used by Hollywood to depict the evil and demonic, and the often even darker ones used in Asian horror films. Erase the medieval inn Mary and Joseph did not get turned away from in Bethlehem (There were no Prancing Pony style medieval inns in those days, with an apologetic Barliman sticking his head out to inform them that all the rooms are full, even the Hobbit-styled ones. The story may be compelling, but a realistic and not anachronistic understanding of the story will certainly be more compelling). Erase the chubby little putti (or confine them to their rightful place as a feature of art history), and also erase the idea that we will float around like taskless angels with standard-issue harps. We will not be like angels; we are adopted sons and daughters of God--we will judge them.

Then, having erased all the erroneous and contradictory images you picked up along the way, go read scripture. You may notice an interesting contrast... In popular media, the powers of good in any supernatural sense are often portrayed as less compelling, "good because they're good, not because they're impressive," or get less screen time altogether, while the bad guys are cool and powerful and command everyone's attention.
However the Bible does the opposite: you will find fascinatingly detailed descriptions of angels, with eyes and wings and wheels, but little to nothing about what demons look like; detailed yet tough-to-envision descriptions of the celestial city, with its foundations of precious stones and gates that are not described as "pearly" but in fact as being like huge pearls, and beautifully staggering attempts to describe the throne room of God, but only a little about the lake of fire prepared as an eternal punishment for unrepentant rebels against God's authority, and precious little indeed about the "place of the dead," where the unsaved await the final judgment.

It seems that God wanted scripture filled with images of the most transcendent beauty imaginable, contrasted to the stark, sinful reality of the violent ancient world, with as little space given to the dark spiritual side of fallen earth as possible. (What superstitious/folk religions primarily concern themselves with, with frightening tales and intimidating idols.)

In Closing

In the aesthetic sense of scripture, Good is strong and beautiful and compelling, certainly not boring, and Evil is a corrupted parody of or absence of it. Demons are described not as "dark angels" but as "unclean spirits," and they cause disease, self-harm, and disfigurement. The place of the dead (those not in Christ) is described not as Dante's macabre but interesting Inferno, nor as a sort of burning lava world, but as a dark, watery pit, away from light and life.

So don't let your spiritual imagination be populated by unreliable at best (and often outright deceptive, as we'll bring up in the next part of the series) images and conceptions, false lighthouses that guide your ship of faith nearer to the rocks of cognitive dissonance. If the Bible is silent on something, don't fill in the space with human imagination and call that what the Bible asks you to believe. And if the Bible describes unseen realities, let its own words speak louder than the media we are bombarded with in modern life.

If that takes a lot of mental effort... well, most worthwhile things do.