In every moment find a long consideration
not of other moments but of who you have not
known:  a parade of hearts before the stand
of human love, for the one who never came
or came but did not speak in time. Words
are what we toss aside, store in books.
But finding words of who you have not fully
been and saying them with fire on the plain
or on a rocket out of daylight's
inconsideration:  Saying this is all
identity allows. The rest can be
accepted. Then the light will make
you one with who you are.
- Jack DuVall

(photo by Stuck in Customs, on Flickr)

"...the bright and morning star."

The strangest book in the New Testament of the Christian Bible is the Book of Revelation, written by an apostle named John after he was banished to the island of Patmos, about 70 years after the death and reported resurrection of Jesus. It contains a vision of the future and the "final judgment", in colorful, even phantasmagorical terms quite unlike the narrative gospels or the admonitory letters of Paul. While Jesus is a character in this book, he is only quoted once -- at the very end, in words completely unlike the preceding prose.

These words come abruptly at the end of a dialogue between John and an angel, and are simple and declarative. Suddenly, Jesus speaks for himself. But as with many sayings of Jesus, this one focuses on a topic that he raised again and again in the gospels, his identity:  "I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star." Many theologians have taken this literally, to mean that Jesus was saying that, as God, he preceded the Jewish king David, and as incarnated, he came from David's bloodline.


The "bright and morning star" has been interpreted usually to be a reference to Venus, which rises before the sun in the morning, heralding the day -- supposedly suggesting the metaphor of Jesus as the herald of a new dispensation in human events. But why would John, much less Jesus, after such a cinematic if allegorical glimpse of the future in Revelation, frame the last statement of the "Son of God" in such a prosaic and obvious way? What follows is a different interpretation, which is not theological -- but historical, or rather at the intersection of history and faith.

First, some background. In the gospels, Jesus is quoted as having said about himself, "Before Abraham was, I am." Who is the "I" that he meant? Today Catholics and many Protestants believe that the "I" is God, of which Jesus was the incarnation, so to them this was a statement meant to identify himself as God. But Jesus frequently referred to himself as the "Son of Man" and never directly as the "Son of God". Indeed, Jesus continually told his followers to "go and do likewise," as if his healings and miracles were not earthly stunts of a divine being but actions that others could also learn how to do, if they understood what Jesus taught.  That seems consistent with the references in the New Testament to Jesus as the "Spirit of Truth." Paul  identified that as the "Comforter" that Jesus said he would leave with the world after he left -- a spiritual presence, not a once and future physical visitor.

If Jesus was not an incarnation of God, was he the "root" of David in the sense that the spirit of Truth -- which he clearly embodied in his words and actions -- has always been present in human experience, to arouse and propel forward anyone who acts on the opportunity to express his or her sense of ultimate truth, as David did and many of the old Jewish prophets did, and as the human Jesus did later?  And what about Jesus being "the offspring of David"?  Why would Jesus (or John) have merely repeated his geneaology in this final statement by Jesus in recorded history?  It's an oddly factual remark, coming from the pen of John the Revelator, who is otherwise describing streets of gold and ferocious beasts, to try to capture the wonder of his revelation.  

I think something else was intended -- that Jesus, in the Revelator's words, meant this:  His mission, his presence here, was not some deus ex machina intervention in human affairs, like an animated pop-up ad on humanity's web site, miraculously reordering the direction of history.  It was a natural development of the good in human life that had slowly gathered force until that time. Hadn't Jesus always said that he was "the son of Man"? Hadn't there been, against all material odds, a never-dying undercurrent of hope and love in human minds and hearts, before Jesus?  Couldn't that have had a part in preparing for a fuller blaze of Truth in human experience? 

I have been reading about and considering the identity of Jesus for more than 40 years. What appears to me is that in his time here, he made real in our midst what had been normative in the thought of many people who felt that life was not a series of endless repetitive material cycles but that there could be better ends in view for ourselves or at least new points of departure. In that sense, Jesus was the "offspring" of the best in human endeavor -- the fruit of the faith and love arising naturally from all men and women of goodwill who had been central to the human story up to that tiime, and are still today. Moreover, this spirit of Truth comes, whether or not from a creator God, from all those who are "the image and reflection" of a God whose existence many of us posit and affirm, and whose action Jesus said was grounded in love.  As St. Augustine expressed it, "He loves each of us, as if there were only one of us."  In this perspective, each of us is qualified to play a role in how this Truth is manifested, and a role in how it is applied.  We are not refugees being saved, or patients being operated on, or abductees being taken up in flying saucers or heavenly raptures.  We are the agents now of this Truth that can show itself, in our minds and daily lives and in the history of what is to come, as we make actual our full potential. 

So what about "the bright and morning star"?  Was Jesus, who tended to understate his role, now saying that he was some sort of cosmic celebrity? By the time John wrote Revelation, it was already evident that Jesus was having an impact on history. His stardom for many hardly had to be emphasized. Was he saying that he was heralding a new era? His disciples had already said that. But what would this phrase have meant, if it had surprised or even stunned John?  Just this, I think:  The morning star doesn't only come before the sun rises.  It appears at the very beginning of an entire day.  At the beginning.  Not at the end -- not at an "end time", but at the dawn.  In the true scale of what will be achieved in the human story, of what will be illuminated, we have only just begun. It has been only 7,000 years since the invention of writing, only 500 years since the advent of mass literacy, and only 300 years since the first modern scientists began to chart the universe systematically. Jesus -- and the other great spiritual originators of monotheistic thought -- came near the outset of all that remains in human history. There is an effectively endless time ahead for the ideas, the work and the goodness of who we are inherently to be expressed.  For millennia, when it appeared, the morning star helped sailors navigate for only a half hour or so, before it was overtaken by so much light that it wasn't needed for that.  But that interval is enough.  If all history were a single day, there would be another 47 periods of that length yet to come -- the functional equivalent, for children (which we are) of eternity. 

The spirit of the truth that it is our role to discover and apply is itself opening the door in human consciousness to vastly more light than anyone can yet imagine.  

(photo by ajwazzer, on Flickr)

Conflict with Lies

Those who bring truth into an important debate are always met by the custodians of the existing lies, and that means there will be conflict. That's what Jesus meant when he said, "I come with a sword," a metaphor that let his followers know that what was to come would not be some pleasant stroll into a world of instantaneous peace -- but a world of struggle, through what became two millennia of fitful, passionate, often badly pursued but nevertheless dogged work (undertaken by monks, theologians, musicians, scientists, lay people, healers, philosophers, teachers, and many others) on behalf of something that only now is becoming gradually recognized for what it is, a new paradigm of truth about the human condition, which has still not been fully understood. It is the same truth that Aldous Huxley wrote about in "The Perennial Philosophy": the understanding that power is not corporeal. "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly," Jesus also said, with no metaphors for that announcement. This is not about religion, it's about ontology. Violence is done to bodies, by bodies, on behalf of lies. Nonviolence is done by minds, for minds, on behalf of truth, and the saving and empowerment of life is always its purpose.

A Poem by Philip Levine

Soloing

My mother tells me she dreamed
of John Coltrane, a young Trane
playing his music with such joy
and contained energy and rage
she could not hold back her tears.
And sitting awake now, her hands
crossed in her lap, the tears start
in her blind eyes. The TV set
behind her is gray, expressionless.
It is late, the neighbors quiet,
even the city -- Los Angeles -- quiet.
I have driven for hours down 99,
over the Grapevine into heaven
to be here. I place my left hand
on her shoulder, and she smiles.
What a world, a mother and her son
finding solace in California
just where we were told it would
be, among the palm trees and all-
night super markets pushing
orange back-lighted oranges at 2 A.M.
"He was alone," she says, and does
not say, just as I am, "soloing."
What a world, a great man half
her age comes to my mother
in sleep to give her the gift
of song, which -- shaking the tears
away -- she passes on to me, for now
I can hear the music of the world
in the silence and that word:
soloing. What a world -- when I
arrived the great bowl of mountains
was hidden in a cloud of exhaust,
the sea spread out like a carpet
of oil, the roses I had brought
from Fresno browned on the seat
beside me, and I could have
turned back and lost the music.

- in What Work Is, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

A Poem by William Bronk

Beethoven: The Late Sonatas

You have to understand it isn't what
he says but what was being said to him.
He even hardly had to write it down.
He listened in his deafness. In ours, we hear
him listening. We overhear.
The purpose for the pianist playing now
is how to let us think he isn't playing,
to just be quiet and listen along with us.

- from Living Instead, North Point Press, 1991.

From tolerance, the human future...

A fascinating article based on experiments in social collaboration among animals may suggest new clues to the differences between human beings and their closest evolutionary cousins, which may help explain the basis of human intelligence -- and our common (and future) achievement: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/woods_hare09/woods_hare09_index.html

Roughly stated, researchers Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare note that humans have evolved the capacity to have a "theory of mind" which gives each of us the desire to know what others are thinking and the determination to find that out -- a capacity that no other species possesses, though some domesticated animals seem to have developed the reading of social cues on which this theory of mind may be based, even faster than physical evolution can explain.

But unlike animals, we don't have to rely on interpreting body language to collaborate with each other. We've developed language based directly on thought, expressed in words. Unlike our evolutionary cousins, we've also learned to set aside the aversion to cooperating with others who are outside our immediate family group and build collaborative networks (and cooperation is inconceivable without exchanging words). Stated another way, we've done things together on the basis of communicating with and tolerating those who are different from us. Thus it might be said that we've built civilization, not on zero-sum material competition, but on enlarging our sense of affinity for one another.

All this may give new meaning to the insight of the inventor of the scientific method, Sir Francis Bacon, who said in the 17th century that science would one day enable all people to escape from "animal time". From civilization has come science, and now science (and other disciplines of thought and work) may be helping us to understand ourselves and our underlying talents better, in order to help us drive our own further development. Carl Sagan predicted that the next stage in human evolution would be self-guided. And now we may know how: If we can leave our residual hatreds and antagonisms behind, there may be an extraordinary new evolutionary leap forward for humanity in the next centuries. And that may give new meaning to the famous statement of St. Paul: "Love is the fulfilling of the law."

What are we ignoring?

In his remarkable book, The Perennial Philosophy, first published in 1962, the late English novelist Aldous Huxley wrote:

"There is no reason to suppose that, between the thirteenth century and the twentieth, the human mind underwent any kind of evolutionary change...What happened was that men turned their attention from certain aspects of reality to other aspects. The result, among other things, was the development of the natural sciences. Our perceptions and our understanding are directed, in large measure, by our will. We are aware of, and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where there's a will there's always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great. Whatever we will to do, whether it be to come to the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, or to manufacture self-propelled flame-throwers -- that we are able to do, provided always that the willing be sufficiently intense, and sustained. It is clear that many of the things to which modern men have chosen to pay attention were ignored by their predecessors."

What are we ignoring now? Unless it can safely be said that we are not ignoring anything, then perhaps we cannot be certain that the default beliefs of the prevailing worldview -- for example, that life and consciousness are fundamentally material, or that violence is a form of power, or that money is a prerequisite for creativity -- are true. We understand a great deal about the operations of many external phenomena that are presented in daily experience. Science and other forms of empirical investigation have sharpened that understanding. Do we understand as much about who we are, or even how we think? Can we proceed from within a set of definitions of what exists, which rest on material premises, to understand certain faculties -- such as our capacity for free and unprompted imagination, or our intuition about distant people or imminent events -- which seem to require no passage of time or no material means of apprehension? What are we ignoring that might lead to new explanations of these and other commonly reported natural faculties?

The traits and operation of the external structure of the world in which we appear to move may not fully explain the agency we bring to changing it. In regard to the creations of thought, mechanism is not causation, let alone meaning. The idea of a painting cannot be derived from the canvas on which it appears, or even from the brush. The destination of the car you intend to drive to Philadelphia cannot be ascertained by examining its engine. For centuries, some of the finest writers have testified that when it came to their best material, they felt they were not creating the text so much as transcribing what they were hearing. "The book wrote itself," we are often told.

In the book of Exodus, when Moses saw God face to face on Mount Sinai, he asked God who he should say he had been talking with, when he returned to the people. "Tell them, I AM has sent you to them," was the answer -- That Which Exists. Adi Shankara, the 9th century Hindu philosopher, said that there is not even a class of substance to which the Brahman, or Divine Ground, belongs. "It is the One before whom words recoil." In an age of obsession with celebrities, in which the media coach us to believe that the desirable story and the reliable explanation live on the surface of a painted screen, the concept that there is a Cause that has no image, and that cannot be described with words, but which employs and loves us, seems increasingly strange and safely ignorable. How convenient it would be to live in a world in which what we get is only what we can see.