Thinking of you

Wordle up!

This could be fun! Have you checked out Wordle? Any body of text, either copypasta-ed or via URL (if it has an Atom or RSS feed) be it articles, blog posts, sermons, propaganda, love letters - anything textual - it creates a condensed "word cloud" out of it. Kind of a visual representation of a document's word count.

I wordled my blog and got this:



Pretty cool!

Now you show me yours!

Holidays

Well, it's that time of year again. Thanksgiving's over and now Advent begins once more. From the top. Adagio con brio. What may turn up this year I wonder? Depends on the key, I suppose.

To help set the tone I return once more to my two favorite poems for the season; Mary's Song, by Lucy Shaw, and this one which seems especially poignant this year:


Christmas Fills the Empty Chair
by Connie J. Hessevick


Christmas reminds me of Grandma

winters of lefse, krumkake, fattimand...

My father’s memories

handed down through my imagination

bring me the Grandma I never met

to share Göd Jul



I sit at the table

in a house fresh with baking

you offer me coffee or lingonberry wine

homemade lefse unrolled from checkered towels

Butter?

Sugar?



Five boys fill your home

the eldest son tall, pink and hearty

labors at the wood pile

the steady sounds of axe to wood

our music for the evening



My young father on the quilt

turns the pages of a book

you are stern with him

he’ll not damage the pictures of the Old Land

slim heritage of a young bride bound for America

Norsk woman’s pride stares squarely at the Proctor son

a son who smiles his blue grey eyes

gingerly turns another page

and knows it is a holiday



Two round faced boys burst in from the cold

snow deep in every fold of their bundling

you help them inside out

seat them chattering by the stove

give hot milk and chocolate shavings

as they begin their "What if..." game

"Just what if snow came down as milk and chocolate?"



I share your thoughts on things the boys don’t hear

of the youngest son

in the Proctor earth now

of the empty chair

Just what if their father would knock on the door

Just what if he had not worked on the railroad

Just what if he had not tried to unionize

if he had not been black balled

would he be here now?

Or would he have gone for other reasons

as he had gone from Norway

we can share this story of men

who have reason to go

and not enough reason to return

We turn to warm milk and hard tack

and ease the slow burning in our bellies



The evening stills

And the thin son lights the candles on the tree

Makes shadows of his father around the room

All of the family

Gathered together

For a Christmas Eve



Just as you join me

fill my empty chair

bringing the family together again

I sprinkle the fattimand with powdered sugar

and offer you coffee

Milk?

Sugar?


Reprinted with permission from "Gentle Spirit" magazine.

Are You Experienced? Have you Ever Been Experienced?

Whatever happened to Jimi, anyway. Oh. Wait. Nevermind.

Reading a couple cool books (yeah I'm back to reading books these days - it's alright) and since my memory isn't what it used to be (they say it's the second thing to go... I forgot what the first was - heh-heh!) I thought I'd write out the more salient passages in here for focus and future reference.

These quotes are from Spiritual Direction & the Encounter With God: A Theological Inquiry, written by William A. Barry, S.J., published by Paulist Press:

Modern philosophy has been grappling with the question of how we can be sure of our knowledge of reality. In his Critique of Pure Reason Emmanuel Kant set the problem by showing rather convincingly that we can only know the phenomenal world, the world of our experience, but have no way of knowing by reason whether this phenomenal world corresponds to the real world. John Macmurray, the Scottish philosopher who died in 1976, came to the conclusion that modern philosophy had started down a blind alley when it accepted Dscartes' dictum, "I think, therefore I am" as the foundation stone for the knowledge of reality and thus of any system of philosophy. With such a starting point Kant's critique is virtually unassailable... starting down this blind alley leads to a dead end.

If my primary knowledge is of myself as thinker then I have no immediate knowledge of aything outside myself. I have to argue to the existence of the outside world, and any argument one uses, Kant has shown, is problematic. If the very existence of a world outside myself is problematic, the existence of God is even more problematic. Agnosticism and atheism are close at hand.

Quoting Macmurray: The reason is that the adoption of the "I think" as the center of reference and starting-point of his philosophy makes it formally impossible to do justice to religious experience. For thought is inherently private; and any philosophy which takes its stand on the primacy of thought, which defines the Self as the Thinker, is committed formally to an extreme logical individualism. It is necessarily egocentric.

In the political realm Macmurray argues that the dead end is totalitarian government.

As an alternative to the Cartesian starting-point Macmurray proposes that philosophy begin with what is primary in our experience; we are not primarily thinkers, we are doers, but knowing doers, that is, agents. Thus philosophy begins with "I do" rather than "I think". Action includes knowledge: "To do, and to know that I do, are two aspects of one and the same experience. This knowledge is absolute and necessary. It is not, however, knowledge of an object but what we may call "knowledge in action," ie., the unreflective primary knowledge of any experience of action. When I act, I know that I am acting and what I intend. Action is the actualizing of a possibility, the determining of a future. The possibility of action implies free will. "To deny free-will is to deny the possibility of action... that I am free is an immediate implication of the 'I do'; and to deny freedom is to assert that no one ever does anything, that no one is capable even of thinking or observing." I am not free with regard to the past. But the future, precisely as future, is not yet determined; it is something determined by action. Thus the condition of possibility for action is my freedom.

When I act, I know that I exist and I also know that what is Not-I (the Other) exists. In action I encounter you.

The primary sense is not sight, but touch. At all times I am in touch with the Other since I am supported by the forces of gravity, the ground upon which I stand or the chair upon which I sit. Touch is the primary sense by which I encounter the other.

In order to act we must regard the world as a unity of action because our action requires the cooperation of the world of which we are a part. If we could not rely on the world outside us we could not act in it.

Our own actions [are] our own contributions to the one inclusive action which is the history of the world.

If we understand the world as one action of God, we mean that God has a unitary intention for the whole creation and that his one action includes and is constituted by all the actions of every created agent and all the events that will ever occur in the history of the universe. The one action of God (the Universal Agent) includes the free actions of all us human beings. Because we really are agents, the future of God's action is not determined, since only the past is determined. So in some mysterious way God's action depends on us.

No created being is excluded from the one action which is the world. The Kingdom of God preached by Jesus can be understood as God's one action. We can understand the Kingdom of God as God's intention for the universe, or rather as God's one action which is the universe.

God is present because the world is God's action.

Any human experience can have a religious dimension, can be an encounter with God...

There is no human experience that is not an encounter. Human beings are part and parcel of the reality of this universe. Even the most "subjective" experience, for example, an hallucination, happens to a person who is encountering the air, the ground, the forces of gravity, etc., of the universe, and these "objective" elements impinge on and condition the experience...

God is not only transcendent but also immanent in his created universe ...the world as one action informed by one intention...

Any action of ours occurs within a universe which is one action of God. Hence at every moment every human being encounters the creator whose action the universe is. Whether we know it or not, God is ingredient in every human experience... Experience is at the least a dyadic affair and it is even possible that it is irreducibly triadic in character...

Quoting John E. Smith: 'Revelation in the religious sense does involve something out of the ordinary, but it is unlikely that the manifestation of God would be intelligible to us at all if it happened only at times when human capacities for experience and understanding are totally suspended. It is more likely that revelation would require, not the suspension of human capabilities but rather their participation in an intensified form... Whatever is totally different from all we can experience and apprehend must be something that we neither experience nor apprehend and, far from calling this God, we should call it nothing at all...'

Smith again: 'There is no experience of God that is not at the same time experience of something else.' By this he means that every experience of God is mediated. We might say that every experience of God is sacramental... there is no experience of anything that is not at the same time an encounter with God. We may not and cannot always be aware that we are encountering God; not every experience has a religious dimension for us. But every human experience can have a religious dimension because God is always present and active in the universe which is God's one action.

Any human experience, hence any medium, can disclose God. It may tax our ingenuity to discern the presence of God in some experiences, but the difficulty should not blind us to the truth... The kataphatic tradition of prayer advocates the use of contemplation of nature and imaginative reading and contemplation of scripture... The apophatic tradition of imageless prayer cannot avoid some mediation if the experience of the Mystery we call God... the difference in the two traditions lies in the desire of the apophatic tradition to bypass the other dimensions to get to the heart of the Mystery, and that of the kataphatic to try to discern the religious dimension within the other dimensions.

Precisely because God is the perfect community, God had no need to create anything else. God creates the universe for no other motive than God's own gratuitous and unfathomable love. It is as if the three Persons said to one another: "Our community is so good; why don't we create a universe where we can invite others to share our community."

In this universe we encounter the Triune God who continually calls us into community.

At the heart of the universe is the creative desire of God to draw us into the universal community whose motive is love and whose intention is community.
[end quotes]

Wait... one more. This one's going on the fridge:

All knowledge is for the sake of action.
And all action is for the sake of friendship.
And all action, for the sake of friendship, is service.

more later...

Best Recipe for Stone Soup I've heard in years

After the Bailout
by Andrei Codrescu link:listen

All Things Considered, October 9, 2008 ·

I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy.

This request focused my thoughts, or the lack of 'em, to such a fine point, I gave my 14-inch Echo an edge it never had. Good enough for cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. I love not paying the oil company a nickel. Except for the half-gallon of gas and the chain oil, but I'm fixin' to make the thing run on plum brandy. I've got a plum tree.

Ah, where were we? The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. Also, red dirt and plum trees. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright.

Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV. Except for me. I was sharpening my chain saw.

So I go back to it, and I see a line of refugees coming up the road to move in with me. Oh my God, it's the '70s again. All my deadbeat friends — dead and alive — are being chased out of their homes and heaven for not owing any money. They are debt-free in a world that can't exist without interest rates. The dead are especially egregious in this regard; you can't squeeze even an extra penny out of them.

Oh, no, now that they are getting closer, I don't even think it's people from the '70s: It's people ... from the future!

It's worse than I thought: These are people independent from foreign oil, carrying solar-powered chain saws, full of American ingenuity. After the bailout, they owned their own homes, they didn't pay into a corporate energy grid, and they didn't worry about food because they grew it on the roof. They didn't drive, because they didn't have any jobs to drive to, and every garage in America was the site of an invention that was so darn beneficial nobody needed anything from the store.

Without worries about money, without a job, and with extra space in the garage to grow food and invent, these people forgot about the stock market, stopped borrowing money, even forgot how to shop — in short they stopped being American. These un-Americans got their exercise raking the compost instead of circling the mall; they home-schooled their children and were never again embarrassed that their kids knew more than they did. Heck, they were in heaven, the place where the pursuit of happiness leads to when you stop pursuing it.

Such self-sufficiency made the economy grind to a halt, so the government had to do something again: They called in the Army to chase everyone out of their self-contained greenhouses.

And now they are coming up the road to my place because I'm a poet, and I live in a compound defended by polygamist haikus.

"What did you do wrong?" I asked the first of the refugees to get over the palisades.

"Nothing," he said. "We just got out of debt and stopped watching TV! So the urge to buy things on credit disappeared. So they sent in the troops. First thing they did was to put a 40-inch plasma TV in every room and fixed it just so we couldn't turn it off. Just like in Orwell, only with much sharper images. They are calling this the Second Bailout, or the Bail Back In."

"At least the Second Amendment is safe," I said. "Nobody took away your guns, and the Founding Fathers didn't say anything about TV."

And with that, my chief haiku welcomed them thus:

make yourselves at home

you won't be bailed in or out again

you're safe in Second Life

---

Never heard of Stone Soup? It's the best!

Observe and learn..

a keeper to pass along to you

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

Credo

Ellul rocks:

BELIEF AND FAITH

Out of the single verb "to believe" come noun forms for two radically antithetical actions: belief and faith. However, when I wish to use a verb form to give expression to my faith, I still have to use "to believe," unless I happen to use an even worse formula, "to have faith."

Belief provides answers to people's questions while faith never does. People believe so as to find assurance, a solution, an answer to their questions to fashion for themselves a system of beliefs. Faith (biblical faith) is completely different. The purpose of revelation is not to supply us with explanations, but to get us to listen to questions.

Faith is, as Barth so often reminds us, in the first instance, hearing. Belief talks and talks, it wallows in words, it interpolates the gods, it takes the initiative. Faith takes an entirely opposite stance: it waits, remains on guard, picks up signs, knows what to make of the most delicate parables; it listens patiently to the silence until that silence is filled up with what it takes to be the indisputable word of God.

Faith isolates; belief (Christian or otherwise) brings together. We find ourselves joined with others in the same institutional current, all of us oriented toward the same object of belief, sharing the same ideas, following the same rituals, enrolled in the same organization, be it social or religious, speaking the same language. Belief is quite useful for the smooth functioning of society. Belief is the key to the consensus we look for, the one long proclaimed essential of communal life. Faith works in exactly the opposite way. Faith individualizes; it is always an exclusively personal matter. Faith is the personal relationship with a God who reveals Himself as a person.

This God singularizes people, sets them apart, and confers on each an identity comparable to none other. The person who listens to His word is the only one to hear it; he or she is separated from the others, becomes unique, simply because the tie that binds that individual to God is unique, unlike any other, incommunicable, a unique relationship with a unique, absolutely incomparable God. God particularizes, singularizes the person to whom He says, "I call you by your name" (Isa. 45:4). Faith separates people and makes each of them unique. In the Bible "holy" means separated". To be holy is to be separated from everyone else, to be made unique for the sake of a task that can be accomplished by no one else, which one receives through faith.

Faith presupposes doubt while belief excludes it. The opposite of doubt isn't faith, but belief. The "knights" of belief comply unfailingly with the law and the commandments. They are unbending in their convictions, intolerant of any deviation. In the articulation of belief they press rigor and absolutism to their limits. They unceasingly refine the expression of their belief and seek to give it explicit intellectual formulation in a system as coherent and complete as possible. They insist on total orthodoxy. Ways of thinking and acting are rigidly codified. This leads to a very high level of efficiency; the believer is a person who gets the job done, but all this activity is hollow at the core. Believers have so little internal reality of their own that they can live and express that reality only by and in a conventional established unit. They are the people of gatherings. Believers find encouragement and certitude in the presence of others -­ the certitude that those others really believe -­ and so community life fills up the existential void.

Multiplying the number of liturgies, commitments, and activities gives believers complete satisfaction -­ in the midst of them they have no need of questioning the truth or reality of their belief; activity keeps them busy. But in this situation you can imagine how intolerable the diversity of beliefs becomes. There must be neither doubt nor uncertainty, for that would be radically destructive. So diversity cannot be tolerated. Diversity is always a source of further questions, of self-criticism, and thus of possible doubt, so belief is rapidly transformed into passwords, rites, and orthodoxy.

Faith is summarized in the words, "I believe; help my unbelief" (Mark 9:24). Faith constrains me above all to measure how much I don't live by faith; how seldom faith fills up my life. Faith puts to the test every element of my life and society; it spares nothing. It leads me ineluctably to question all my certitudes, all my moralities, beliefs, and policies. It forbids me to attach ultimate significance to any expression of human activity. It detaches and delivers me from money and the family, from my job and my knowledge. It is the surest road to realizing that "the only thing I know is that I don't know anything." Faith leaves nothing intact. The only thing faith can bring me to recognize is my impotence, my incapacity, my inadequacy, my incompleteness, and consequently my incredulity (naturally faith is the most unerring and lethal weapon against all beliefs).

Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor's edge. Though it knows that God is the Father, it never minimizes His power. "Who then is this, that even wind and the sea obey Him?" (Mark 4:41). That is faith's question. For belief things are simple: God is almighty. We normalize God. We get comfortable with God's power. It is faith alone that can appreciate the immensity of God, and His true nature.

The doubt that constitutes an integral part of faith concerns myself, not God's revelation or His love or the presence of Jesus Christ. It is doubt about the effectiveness, even the legitimacy, of what I do and the forces I obey in my church and in society. Furthermore, faith puts itself to the test. If I discern the stirrings of faith within me, the first rule is not to deceive myself, not to abandon myself to belief indiscriminately. I have to subject my beliefs to rigorous criticism. I have to listen to all denials and attacks on them, so that I can know how solid the object of my faith is. Faith will not stand for half-truths and half-certainties. It obliges me to face the fact that I am nothing, and in so doing I receive the gift of everything.

Belief relates to things, to realities, to behaviors that are raised to the status of an ultimate value that it worthy dying for. Belief transforms next-to-last human realities into ultimate, absolute, foundational realities. It turns everything that belongs to the order of the Promise, of God Word, of the Kingdom into epiphenomena, into sweet pious words, ways of making life easier, and a process of self-justification. Faith runs totally counter to this. To begin with, faith acknowledges the Ultimate in all its irrefragable truth, and so it depreciates and attaches little importance to whatever offers itself as a substitute for that Ultimate. It is not a matter of looking to some external ultimate reality; the Kingdom of heaven is (at present) in you or among you. As of now it is you who constitute it. Faith is the demand that we must incarnate the Kingdom of God now in this world and this age.

One never moves from belief to faith, whereas faith often deteriorates into belief. You can't get to faith by way of any old religion, or belief, or some vague spiritual exaltation, or aesthetic emotions. It is not "better" from a Christian viewpoint to "believe" than not to believe, to "have religion" than not to have it. There is no road from belief to faith. You can't transform a conviction of the value of rites into the act of standing alone in the presence of God.

The reverse is true: every belief is an obstacle to faith. Beliefs get in the way because they satisfy the need for religion, because they lead to spiritual choices that are substitutes for faith; they prevent us from discovering, listening to, and accepting the faith revealed in Jesus Christ.

Kierkegaard argues that it is more difficult for people brought up on all the lore of Christmas, for those who have had all their little religious needs met by the church, to receive the shock of revelation, to discover the Unique One, and to enter into the dark night of the soul, than it is for those who have done nothing but search continuously without ever coming upon a satisfying answer.

Belonging to Christendom and to one of its churches is the main obstacle to becoming a Christian. There is no path leading from a little bit of religion (of whatever kind) to a little more and finally to faith. Faith shatters all religion and everything spiritual. On the other hand, the passage from faith to belief is always possible and always a threat. It is the downhill slide to which the church and the Christian life are always subject. Faith is constantly degenerating into multiple beliefs. No phrase expresses this imperceptible change better than "to have faith."

When we take possession of faith and claim to be the proprietor of faith, we naturally think we can dispose of it as we wish. The only thing we are really entitled to say is that "Faith has me." The rest is mere belief.

Faith is neither belief nor credulity, neither a reasonable acquisition or an intellectual achievement; it is rather the conjunction of an ultimate decision and a revelation, and bids me bring about the incarnation of the ultimate reality today, the Kingdom of God present among us. I am summoned by a Word that is eternal, here and now, universal, personal. I accept this summons. I am willing to act responsible; I enter upon an illogical adventure, knowing neither its origin nor its end. Such is faith.

Apologetics tries to prove that Christianity is true, that it is superior to other religions (which of course leaves us arguing on the religious level), and that it answers all human questions. We can show that Christianity makes a reasonable case, but these debates among intellectuals are utterly sterile: nobody ever succeeds in persuading anyone else. No apologetics have ever brought any unbelievers to faith, even when they could see that they had been beaten by their adversary's rhetoric. There is no intellectual road to the attitude (and more than the attitude ­ the life) of faith. The logical, intellectualist approach winds up in a ditch. The intellect does not call forth or show the way to faith.

Belief is a refuge and flight from reality. It is seized upon as protection, as a guarantee or insurance policy. Faith is taking risks, leaving behind safety and security, scorning guarantees, stepping out of the boat onto the Sea of Galilee. If we live by faith there is no need to plead with Him to save us from danger. It is enough to know that since He is there, even if the danger should prove mortal, whatever God's love wishes is being done and will be done in us, no matter what.

Why believe? (Using "believe" for participating in faith.) We have no answer for it. Believe for what? With an eye to what? To achieve what? To get what? We believe for nothing. There is no objective reason for faith; you have to live it. Faith has no origin or objective. The moment it admits of any objective, it ceases to be faith. If you believe in God in order to be protected, shielded, healed, or saved, then it's not faith, which is gratuitous. This will prove shocking, especially to Protestants, who have talked so much about salvation through faith, about faith as the condition of salvation, that they end up saying you believe so that you'll be saved. But we have to keep coming back to grace and its gratuitousness. If God loves and saves humankind without asking any price, the counterpart to this is that God intends to be believed and loved without self-interest or purpose, simply for nothing. It is scandalous, and yet so easy to understand when you think of love. The moment that a man and a woman love one another for something, whether it be for money or prestige or beauty or job, it is no longer love. Love is without cause and selfish interests; love is without reason.

Faith is constant interplay; it never stagnates or settles down. One cannot incarnate faith in some static, definitive fashion. Faith is the perennially new critical point. Faith therefore implies the continual presence of temptation and an ever clearer vision of reality; it implies criticism of Christian religion, of civilizing missions, of Christian moral codes imposed from the outside, of a Christian truth that excludes claims to it from any other area of human culture. Faith is the point of rupture (not with our fellow human beings) but with religions. Faith must proceed to criticize, to judge, and radically to reject all human religious claims. We have to be careful here; it is not people who are being judged or criticized here; it is their will to power and the expression of that in religion. But faith's critique of religion can be rooted only in its critique of itself.

Faith leads me to take part in everything, while at the same time it shows me everything in a light that is not that of reason, experience, or common sense. This is not a intellectual operation, but an existential attitude. Faith brings about the "new person" manifested in love and lucidity.

The faith of Christians in the church today has gone astray. Their obsession with the contents of faith (theologians quarreling over technical terms) instead of with the movement and life of faith is what has triggered our worldwide crisis. But the unchangeable remains unchangeable. The Ultimate One, the Unconditioned, the Wholly Other has not changed. Faith is our responsibility to see to it that the transcendent, the Unconditioned, the Totally Other Being, becomes an active reality here and now. Faith moves mountains only when it speaks to the omnipotent Creator, and when it also accepts its role of hearing the word of faith.

From: The Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World. San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers. 1983.

Trinity Sunday, 2008

let there be light

Holy Saturday, 2008

It was a dark and stormy night, when

the hand of the Father Almighty,
creator of heaven and earth
and all that is,
seen and unseen,
came upon a human being,
a son of man, born of a woman
(bone of their bones and flesh of their flesh).

And the LORD God brought this human being out
in the Spirit of the LORD
and settled him down in this valley,
smack dab in the midst of
this very low and very dark place;

and this place
was full of
bones.

And he led the man
through this valley
in the shadow
of death,
and he walked
around and amongst
all the bones.

And all he saw
wherever he went
and as far as he could see
was bones - so many bones
laying all around on the ground
all of them
disjointed, all
disconnected, all
scattered abroad - multitudes upon multitudes of
bones.

And they were very dry.
Just about gone
to dust...

And the LORD said
to him,
"Son of man, can these bones live?"

And he answered,
"O Lord GOD... only you know."

Then he said to him,
Prophesy over these bones - speak,
proclaim, say outloud to these old bones,

O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD spoken through this Prophet.

The Lord GOD, the Spirit, the Giver of Life
has this to say to all you old dry bones:

Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.

And I will lay sinews and tendons and connecting tissue upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin,

and I will put breath in you, and you shall live,

and you shall know - know in your bones - that I am the ONE.

So the Son of man prophesied as he was told.
And as he spoke the word aloud, there was a sound, and behold, a clamorous rattling,
and all the bones came together,
bone reconnected and rejoined to bone,
all the parts joined together with others, arranged
just so, and they all
fit - perfectly.

And look, behold, tendons and connective tissue
grew between them - muscles formed,
and skin covered them.

But there was no breath in them.

(What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of Spirit is spirit.)

Then the LORD God said to the prophet,
Prophesy to the breath;
prophesy, son of man, and send your voice into the wind, saying
Thus says the Lord GOD:
Come from the four winds, O breath, and
breathe on these dead that they may live.

So he prophesied as he was told.
And so the breath of God came into them, and
they lived, and stood on their feet, in full stature,
an exceedingly great company of hosts.

. . .

Then he said to him,
Son of man, the bones of my people cry out from the ground. They say,
'We are dried up!
We have no hope!
We are disconnected.
We are scattered and disjointed.
We are indeed cut off.'

Therefore prophesy, and lift up your voice for them, saying,
Thus says your GOD:
Behold, I will open the way and raise you from your graves, O my people.
And I will bring you out
to the place I promised and have prepared for you
from the foundation of the world -
my redeemed creation made new - the Beloved Community,
the Fellowship of Saints,
that Heavenly City, New Jerusalem,
our true long Home.

And you shall know, O my people, that I am the ONE-IN-ALL,
when I open your graves, and raise you out from the death - out of your darkest and lowest and loneliest most solitary places.

And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.
And I will place you in My most blessed company.
Then you shall know
Who I Really Am.

I have spoken and I will do it, declares your Father the Almighty.

Truly, truly, I say to you, The hour is coming and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they who hear shall live. And breathe. And have their being in God and God's people, to enjoy from henceforth and forever our most excellent and delightsome company.