Douglas-Klotz’s interpretations of Matthew 6:9 [usually translated “Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.”] are unitive. He also seems to have string theory of particle physics in mind. I suppose that to verify correctness of interpretation independently I would have to learn Aramaic. The same kind of problem occurs when reading the many disparate translations of the Tao Te Ching in English. Whatever we would have taken away from the teachings of Jesus had we been present as native speakers of Aramaic when he gave those talks, we have the text in the Koine that the authors used. The Jesus they presented was [obviously?] their version of Jesus. And can we be certain that the “dualism” that people read in the original Greek manuscripts and subsequent translations of the New Testament are being read from it not rather being read into it? These questions will be in mind as I read translations now.
Easter according to William Blake. Resurrection is neither miracle nor mystery
Mark Vernon
Just what the death and resurrection of Jesus means, just what happened, has been debated from the earliest times which is why I think in the gospels there are very different accounts of what was seen, what was experienced. Some seem like resuscitated bodies, others seem like a different kind of body that Jesus had, and so could pass through walls or be not recognized, and then recognized. Clearly, it’s not simply about taking a picture, as if with a mobile phone, and recording what happened as a fact. And in fact, when the resurrection is presented as literal the disciples find it terrifying or bemusing. The literal clearly veils what this might mean, and so I think it’s pushing for a transformation. Easter is nothing if it’s not participating in the death and resurrection. Seeing the world in a completely different light. And this is why William Blake is quite clear that the death and resurrection of Jesus, Easter, is neither about a miracle nor is it a mystery.
The second thought there, that it’s not a mystery, is perhaps even more interesting than the first. But first of all, it’s not a miracle because that makes the resurrection a dead fact. I recently heard the Archbishop of Canterbury talking about the resurrection and saying that if the body of Jesus was found, then he would have to cease being a Christian. I thought how tragic that is. This is reducing Christianity to a kind of science, makes it very fragile, as if you can’t know anything about resurrection life. First you have to prove that somehow it happened once 2000 years ago and then grip on, hold on to it. But if it’s not a miracle, a one-off in history, that subsequent Christians are somehow supposed to cling on to for dear life, it’s not a mystery either Blake thinks.
And by mystery he means in the more straightforward sense of mystery that which seems obscure, opaque, difficult to believe. You have to hold on to the resurrection as mystery in a parallel way to the resurrection as miracle, just hoping against hope that somehow it makes sense. Not understanding, but just gripping onto its presumed promise. Miracle and mystery both lead to the same need to possess it, to try to prove what happened. I think in a way it’s why the crusaders wanted to seize the empty tomb, the presumed site of the empty tomb, from the Muslims, and today why, in Jerusalem, there are squabbles about who owns the site. It’s actually the opposite of knowing divine life. It completely secularizes and makes worldly the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection, rather than it being seen as a pivotal moment, into the kingdom of God that’s within you. That’s here but often overlooked.
You see the effects of these two models of easter, particularly in the confusion amongst preachers and theologians today about the nature of the resurrection of the body, because it makes it a sort of conjuring trick with bones. As if somehow, in some way, that which we call flesh now is going to have to be brought back from the soil, or back from the air if we’re cremated. It makes a mockery of the resurrection, to my way of thinking. It’s also quite clearly, I think, against Paul, the earliest writer on Easter, who’s clear that what he calls the ensouled body, the animated body, the instinctive body, that we do know most immediately now, how that’s going to give way to what he calls a spiritual body. But that can also be felt within us now, as we’ll come back to.
So, what did William Blake have to say about all this? How can he illuminate a better sense of Easter for today? Well first of all, he nails what’s mistaken. For example, he talks about how the church has nailed Jesus on the tree of mystery, and this is the rational scientific heuristics, as he would put it, account of the resurrection. Calling it a miracle, calling it a mystery, with the problem that it just lacks vision, and he writes:
“The Ashes of Mystery began to animate they calld it Deism
And Natural Religion as of old so now anew began
Babylon again in Infancy Calld Natural Religion.”
(111: 22-24, E 386)
This is the effort to try and understand the resurrection through scientific means, or as a strange intervention by God that’s just got to be held onto by blind faith, rather than revealing the divine reality now. Natural religion is belief in an objective account of Christianity, rather than one that’s subjective and first most intimately known. And that’s fallen. It makes the vision just strange and mysterious because it doesn’t know the eternal in human form. It doesn’t know that God is all in all. It prevents the world being seen in a grain of sand or heaven in a wildflower. It also turns the resurrection into a kind of power play, particularly for priests.
In his picture “24 elders cast their crowns before the throne” Blake shows how the gospel depicted in the four creatures that symbolize Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John becoming coloured like a deathly pallor and the lamb who’s been sacrificed almost disappears in this image. You have to look quite hard to see the lamb before the throne and of course on the throne is Blake’s image of heurism the deistic God with the ominous seven seals threatening humanity. Not welcoming humanity into divine life.
When the vegetable body, as Blake puts it, is all that’s known, the spiritual body can’t be seen and so Christianity becomes just another version of worldly secular life. It leads to what he calls deceitful religion, saying that what Christianity does is bridge the gulf between God and humanity, rather than showing that there is no gulf. It leads to a fear of death, and it also leads to what he calls religion “hid in war.” When Christianity in particular blesses conflict between human beings, as we’re seeing now in the Russian war in Ukraine, and as Blake knew in his own time, when he lived in another European war, the Napoleonic wars, it makes Christianity as bad or even terrifying news, rather than seeing God. It says that your future is precarious, shaped by suffering, threatened by hell, and so as he writes in Vala The Four Zoas:
The church sings:
“O thou poor human form O thou poor child of woe
Why dost thou wander away from Tirzah why me compell to bind thee
If thou dost go away from me I shall consume upon the rocks
These fibres of thine eyes that used to wander in distant heavens
Away from me I have bound down with a hot iron
These nostrils that Expanded with delight in morning skies
I have bent downward with lead molten in my roaring furnaces
My soul is seven furnaces incessant roars the bellows
Upon my terribly flaming heart the molten metal runs
In channels thro my fiery limbs O love O pity O pain
O the pangs the bitter pangs of love forsaken”
This is a lack of vision and the mention there of Tirzah will remind us of the poem from the Songs of Innocence and of Experience called To Terzah, where Jesus sees through this threatening suffering bad news and says precisely the opposite,
“The death of Jesus set me free:
Then what have I to do with thee?”
So, he offers a vision a sense of compassion and forgiveness and conveys the presence of eternity, that enables a different way of engaging with easter. Not as an intervention, but as an unveiling of reality. Not as a mystery, but as a vision. Blake is quite clear that he’s a visionary. He sees and he aims to help us to see, to know, to participate in divine life. That being the true Jesus, the divine human in which eternal life includes the reality of death, though now known as a giving, as a kindness, as a letting go of what’s deluded. Not as an ending that is otherwise somehow put off or transcended.
This in one way is known in nature. Nature as the return to life, which is why easter and spring are associated. Blake can see Eve awakening and the eternal garden, Eden, blooming again. In Vala, The Four Zoas, Enion or eros, passion, that up-thrust of life, calls out “fear not” because she personified desire. Enion can see the bridegroom coming, she can see that the grave is where the Lamb of God rends the veil of mystery. We’re like seeds, she says, looking for flower and fruit, the product of our life and we can know hope in the universe, and we can experience the gift of life.
Blake writes, “A voice came in the night a midnight cry upon the mountains
Awake the bridegroom cometh I awoke to sleep no more
But an Eternal Consummation is dark Enion
The watry Grave …
The Lamb of God has rent the Veil of Mystery soon to return
In Clouds & Fires around the rock & the Mysterious tree
As the seed waits Eagerly watching for its flower & fruit …
The Eternal Man is seen is heard is felt
And all his Sorrows till he reassumes his ancient bliss”
It’s a change of consciousness for we humans much as it’s a reaching for life amongst other creatures and beings. It’s a cleansing of our perception, this awakening, and you see it particularly portrayed by Blake in his reflections on the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus.
The picture of the Magdalen at the sepulchre is one of Blake’s images of the moment of resurrection, and it’s very fascinating that he painted it with Mary in the sepulchre looking back at the resurrected Jesus behind her. The usual way to portray this moment is to paint Mary in the garden reaching out to Jesus with Jesus saying “noli me tangere” – “do not touch me,” but instead Blake paints Mary in a moment of uncertainty still, but it’s a moment of bewilderment that’s also a moment of transformation, hence Jesus’s hands are open beckoning. They’re not preventing as they are in the traditional portrayals of the “do not touch me” moment. He’s outside the tomb she is inside, but inside the tomb it’s full of light from the angels from the very atmosphere as well as from Jesus, so this is not a single source, but is a visionary radiance that Mary is experiencing in the tomb. The presence of different consciousness and when Jesus asks her “why are you weeping?” she becomes conscious of her sorrow and is able to turn to Jesus, so that the energy of her sorrow is transformed into the energy of awakening.
I think that Blake chooses not to portray the “do not touch me” moment, because he wants to stress that Mary doesn’t confuse Jesus with a resuscitated corpse, as if it’s a strange mystery or a miraculous moment. Precisely the opposite. She is turning from the sepulchre, which is the church’s version of this religion of death. Jesus is fulfilling in fact what he promised earlier in John’s Gospel
“I will leave you not comfortless, I will come to you yet in a little while. The world sees me no more, yet you see me because I live. You also shall live, and, on that day, you shall know that I am in the father, and you in me, and I in you. He that loves me shall be loved of my father, and I will love him, and I will manifest myself to him.”
This is to say that, whilst Jesus leads, Mary is in the same transitional state as Jesus. She’s participating in this moment, in the resurrection. She’s been changed from glory to glory, and you see a similar recognition, visionary experience of the encounter with Jesus, in another image that probably shows Mary Magdalene again.
In Blake’s mind the women woman caught in adultery she is in a transitional moment too she stands upright with her breasts showing but strikingly not ashamed in her face although she’s also bound with her hands tied behind her back. The figures who brought her to Jesus and tried to condemn her have already walked away, they’ve felt the condemnation in Jesus’s words, the one without sin cast the first stone, and so this is the moment in which Mary, the woman caught in adultery, is freed from earthly condemnation and awaiting what that might mean.
It’s shown so strikingly because Jesus also doesn’t condemn her but in Blake’s image actually bows to her in a way, when she might be the one bowing to him. He is recognizing the human form divine in her, and that recognition awakens the realization within her. So Blake can show how that which is condemned in shame is now released in light, as he puts it in the Everlasting Gospel, another poem that reflects in part on the encounter with Mary Magdalene,
That they may call a shame and sin
Love’s temple that God dwelleth in,
And hide in secret hidden shrine
The naked Human Form Divine,
The resurrection is when that is hidden no more. When it can’t be called sin anymore, but known as “love’s temple that god dwelleth in.”
Another really interesting feature about Blake’s image of the woman caught in adultery is that Jesus is writing in in the dust, as the biblical account recalls, but writing in the dust after the condemners have turned away, rather than while they’re still present, as if he’s musing. And I think that Blake puts it this way around because he writes for us. Jesus’s pause before he writes in the dust, which is the moment caught in Blake’s picture, is for our imaginations to write or not in the dust. We’re invited into the moment of transition too. What is going to be written? Asks us to consider in ourselves what realization is awakening for us. Maybe there’ll be nothing written, because there are no written codes anymore to condemn, which the woman Mary sees and so realizes not just that she has the human form divine too but is free with that recognition and so the phrase “go sin no more,” it’s not, as it’s often interpreted, go and obey the rules that you’ve broken in the past, it’s precisely the opposite. It’s an explosion of imaginative possibility. Forget that whole business about sin. Step into the new life that’s released now, because she can start to see a new way to live, a new place to go. The eternal life that she has had highlighted within her in this encounter.
So, if that’s prefiguring the resurrection during the life of Jesus, then in between comes the crucifixion and Blake presents the crucifixion as the pivotal moment in which this kind of transformation, this kind of awakening, this visionary experience happens. He presents the crucifixion always with light emanating from the body of Jesus, particularly the head and the outspread arms. The cross is often presented as a tree, with apples and life on it, and the figures that stand before the crucified Jesus often have their arms outspread too, when they recognize what’s going on, on the cross. It’s because they are human figures mirroring the divine figure before them, but also awakening the divine figure within them. In Jerusalem, the emanation of the giant Albion Los, the figure of imagination or divine vision, becomes Jesus. Imagination is transfigured, nature is awoken, nature is resurrection. This is about seeing something, not struggling to prove it. It’s about seeing what John in his gospel calls the moment of Jesus being glorified, as the moment when Jesus is on the cross. I think it’s also why, when Jesus looks down from the cross and says to Mary and John “behold thy mother, behold thy son,” this is not just a touching detail, although it is that, it’s also saying, behold, step into this new way of life, that’s right before you right now. As Blake puts it in one of his lovely summaries of how we might live in this resurrected life,
“It is right it should be so; Man was made for joy and woe; And when this we rightly know, Thro’ the world we safely go. Joy and woe are woven fine, A clothing for the soul divine. “
We experience joy, we experience woe in life, but when we rightly know of our experience, because we’re rooted in our true nature, our true self, which is the divine nature, the divine self, we can safely navigate a way through life, regardless of whether joy or woe comes to us, because we’re not identified with the experience, but know our true awareness, the true presence of god that’s within us. The kingdom of God that’s within. It’s such a different perception of life from secular living, worldly living. In another way, when the soldiers cast their lots for Jesus’s gown, the greediness of this world is shown even before the cross, that might present a different light. It’s the desire again to prove and to possess, and yet Blake paints it paling alongside the transcendent light of the cross, coming from the crucifixion. You can almost see the crucifixion in this moment as manifesting for us a kind of dream state, when our true nature is forgotten, that imagines death is somehow the enemy, imagines that a miracle is needed, or else just pausing before a mystery, and the crucifixion is dreamy, because when you see that you’re in a dream, that’s the moment you wake up. You start to see not with the eyes, as if the vegetable life was all that was real, but through the eyes to the eternal life, that is shining radiant and present in all of life.
Jesus then embraces the Magdalene as Blake describes in Jerusalem the emanation of the giant Albion, when Jerusalem the divine spirit within us is a one identified with Mary Magdalene in fact and she says “art thou alive and live us down forevermore, or are thou not but a delusive shadow?” A thought that liveth not, she’s tussling in this moment with her transformation, but it is a moment of her evolution, because she looks again and then says she can hear the truth of what Jesus is saying. When he says “I am the resurrection and the life” as Blake glosses that, Jesus says “I die and pass the limits of possibility.” That’s the invitation that the resurrection presents to us. That’s the heart of easter according to William Blake, and so this pattern starts to appear in other ways in Blake’s imagery.
For example, his image of David delivered out of many waters, with David in the waters beneath, bound down choruses of angels appearing, and then Jesus coming down from the sky with arms outstretched in cruciform form, displays the crucifix again as a moment of eternal vision. Because David in the waters has his arms outstretched, which he thought was, because he was bound, but now sees, as he sees his true life mirrored in the figure of the resurrected Jesus, has eternal life. It’s a play in Blake’s image on psalm 18 which was originally a psalm, in which king David sings of his military victory, because he was righteous and so had Yahweh on his side Blake’s saying, no, no, this isn’t really about some secular militaristic moment of triumph, it’s a recognition that the soul is indeed righteous, that the human form divine does indeed dwell within us, and so we’re with Christ already, when Easter is experienced in this visionary sense.
It leads to a glorious experience of the resurrection and the crucifixion, leading as much to apocalypse as anything else. Apocalypse in the true sense, the unveiling of the truth. Although again, apocalypse has all these negative connotations now, I think because the visionary sense of it is not probably understood. It leads instead to what Blake calls a horrible fear of the future, which is heuristics, this scientific approach to divine reality, the attempt to see say things through symbols, or to interpret the times, and then the prophecies become condemnations of what’s going on. Rules return and moral law is imposed by the church, by Christianity, and attempts to try and control the future to shape it through rules and threats. The fires of hell never far from this. What gets lost in all this dark apocalypse is the true unveiling as a vision of the truth, and for Blake it’s quite clear, it’s a universal salvation. All are saved, although even putting it by that is not quite right, rather all will come to know, as they are known. They’ll realize that creation is already full in the presence of God and what we’re experiencing is the realization of that eternal sense in time. And it’s not just about all human beings be saved, for Blake, it’s also about the whole of the created order, knowing its divine life, as he writes in another part of Vala The Four Zoas,
“The Sun has left his blackness & has found a fresher morning
And the mild moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night
And Man walks forth from midst of the fires the evil is all consumd
His eyes behold the Angelic spheres arising night & day
The stars consumd like a lamp blown out & in their stead behold
The Expanding Eyes of Man behold the depths of wondrous worlds
One Earth one sea beneath nor Erring Globes wander but Stars
Of fire rise up nightly from the Ocean & one Sun
Each morning like a New born Man issues with songs & Joy”
This is Blake showing how humanity has a pivotal place to play, because our consciousness of these things, presages the whole of creation becoming conscious of the divine light, and so the stars are blown out as mere physical objects, and instead become like the eyes of humanity. Wondrous worlds, the expanse of the cosmos, as seen, not as a dark nihilistic void, but as the expanse of the divine life, and so this changes as well the sense of the resurrection of the body.
The body comes to be known as a clothing of the divine form as we experience it now, as a kind of veil, a fallen vision of mental reality, though of course the funny thing about a veil, or the body, is that whilst it conceals, or also simultaneously reveals, something of the true form, you know like clothing both covers rendering opaque, but also promising beauty beneath the clothing. And this is Blake saying that even in fall and mistaken appropriations of easter life, the divine life still pushes through. You see it, in a way, in what happens with Jesus’s clothing on the cross, and how the soldiers greedily gamble for the clothing of the Christ thinking they might use it themselves, but then the clothing is abandoned in the tomb, as the radiant spiritual body appears. A true experience of the body reveals our souls, as Wittgenstein said, we don’t approach each other as mere bodies, but as souls communicating, say when making love, and inwardly we know our bodies not as objects, but as the sight of our most intimate subjectivity, the place where we can say I am, and so the body becomes the place where the divine I AM might be detected as well. Resurrection as vision, as unveiling, in this way is contagious, Blake says. He tries to spread it by giving us a golden thread to wind into a ball, by saying behold, and the point about this is that when you start to see this vision, a kind of virtuous spiral of beholding can take hold of us. The upward power and thrust of the resurrection, what we behold, shapes who we become, Blake observes.
Which has a negative moment, when the resurrection is seen in the miraculous or mysterious way, we can get trapped in the scramble to prove it somehow happened, or to peer through its darkness, but positively of course, when you behold the vision, it draws you more and more into it, putting on Christ becomes possible. Originally a theatrical metaphor, like putting on a character, and so immersing in Christ is to become united with Christ in the resurrection, and as Blake says so many times, it’s about a mental fight to awaken. It’s about realizing something from within, and then seeing it manifest, without. It’s a fight that doesn’t have enemies, because it’s not about contending for life, it’s about sharing life. It’s not about a victory, in which someone else gets defeated, even death, but instead is about forgiveness, when the arts that seemed deathly, are recognized as arts of life, and so Blake says to the Christians in Jerusalem the emanation of the giant Albion,
What is mortality but the things related to the body, which dies?
What is immortality but the things relating to the spirit, which lives eternally?
What is the joy of heaven but improvement in the things of the spirit?
What are the pains of hell but ignorance, bodily lust, idleness, and devastation of the things of the spirit?
This, he identified, as the risk of the way. Easter tends to be talked about it can lead to a devastation of the things of the spirit. It can lead to a mistaken notion of immortality, rather than an improvement in the things of the spirit, leading to the joy of heaven. And so, he concludes to the Christians on easter:
For hell is opened to heaven,
thine eyes beheld the dungeons burst and the prisoners set free
England awake, awake, awake!
Jerusalem, thy sister calls, why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death
and closer from thy ancient walls by hills and valleys
felt her feet gently upon their bosoms move
thy gates beheld sweet Zion’s ways
then was a time of joy and love and now the time returns again
o souls exalt and London’s towers receive the lamb of God
to dwell in England’s green and pleasant bowers
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYm_ZJlhoD0[/youtube]
I resonated with Douglas-Klotz because I read his book shortly after a series of talks with my friend, Raimund the Philologist, who I also invited to a meeting at my home with several young people from evangelical churches. Those talks were eye-opening, and I think they also imparted a bit of the fascination I had, although I doubt that it remained long.
Since then, reading Mark Vernon’s “A Secret History of Christianity” I came across this, talking about the development of the Greek language and thought, which wasn’t accepted at first, as we see in Socrates and other Philosophers who were condemned for heresy, he says that Greek also holds much to be unveiled:
I have a growing feeling that we are overlooking much of what was implied by the words spoken by people two thousand and more years ago, and that the theological “order” that was created in the church has covered over much that would make more sense to us if we knew it. This comes out every time someone with knowledge of the ancient languages, or a different approach, takes the trouble to explain things.
_
Well-worth the watch, plus… it will have you laughing, in places. 
Video, courtesy of KTS: odysee.com/emj-debate-720:4e772 … ?src=embed
Thanks for you contribution, and yes, we must also address such theories if we want to do the job properly.
One big problem I have with such theories is that the outcome is assumed to have been the intention that was developed hundreds of years before. The single-minded determination that would have been necessary for such a plot to be pursued over centuries hasn’t been found anywhere, and in fact the contributions from surrounding traditions are unmissable.
Another is the fact that the people criticising these traditions are mostly by far not so sophisticated as the traditions themselves are. I think I have shown that there is indeed a Jewish root, specifically in the Aramaic/Hebrew that was superseded by Greek, but the depth of the original language was always suggested by Paul and John, who supposedly knew both languages. The degree to which the ideas were developed may have been blurred by the church under Constantine, when developing mainline Christianity, but it always pops up in archaeological finds throughout the last few hundred years. Certainly, later the Church diversified beyond what Adam Green has assumed.
Besides which, Green is a materialist and literalist, who has absolutely no concept of mythology and allegorical writings, poetry and fable seem to confuse him, his reading of the “signs” of the Bible is primitive and paradigm changes that progress throughout Judaism and Christianity is completely left out of the picture. I’m not a friend of Dr E Michael Jones either, a traditionalist Catholic theologian who holds a litany of antisemitic and misogynistic views. So, in the end, I wasn’t laughing but rather wincing at these two people, who tended to remain by the conflict between Christianity and Judaism, rather than develop a conversation on the deeper sophistication of both traditions.
They met on a ground that I feel extremely uneasy with, because it is a blinkered view of humanity, leaving out the deep traditions of the rest of the world, especially of India and China, but also numerous others, as though the biblical tradition that concentrates on the middle east was a comprehensive account of the human development in the world.
At this point, Mark Vernon summarizes the main error that I believe separates the Protestant church from the New Testament mindset and refutes the statement that “… the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” (2 Corinthians 3:6)
By asserting “sola scriptura,” he (perhaps unwittingly) made the New Testament narratives a law that had to be obeyed, causing the rise of fundamentalist thinking that struggles between the spirit of love and the letter of the Word, regularly neglecting the former. Spiritual intimacy is equally suspect to Protestants today, though to varying degrees. Instead, it became important to see the historicity of the Bible in a new sense and to accept its reliability, which, however, disintegrated after thorough examination in the following centuries. Later, the Historical-Critical Method discovered the compositional character of the Bible, which in itself is not a problem unless one relies on its chronological credibility.
Of course, it is difficult to overlook the secular developments that began in parallel with the Reformation and gave us the scientific revolution that forms the basis of our modern society. However, this was also a clear turn toward materialism and machinery that led people to view everything as a series of “cogs and wheels” and to see the enchanted world of the past as archaic and in need of replacement. This was further emphasized in the course of historical criticism, and the later “revivals” were a Christian version of the later Islamic revolutions, designed to protect the fundamentalist views Luther had invoked.
Today, struggling to reclaim the sacred, we are disillusioned with the materialist version of the world, disenchanted and bereft of our mythological narratives, pitied for our ritual re-enactments of a transcendental journey, and ridiculed for our belief in the spiritual that underlies all reality. The awareness of a truth between the lines, the mystical perception of a presence in which we “live and move and have our being,” the magic of poetry and music - all these are moments of the “in-between,” where the Spirit remains elusive but leaves a trace where it touches us. This was also an experience of the early Christians and a motivation to accept oppression in the awareness that they are part of a kingdom that is not easily seen or experienced except through grace.
Mark Vernon points out that it was …
This shows me that the world of thought was already changing to encompass a “reciprocal participation,” the Barfield expression that Vernon quotes, describing the mindset of Jesus and his followers. It is this transformation by the “renewal of [our] mind,” [Romans 12:2) and a change of perspective, as against the immediacy of feeling caught up in a drama, like the way people thought up until then, that I feel we need to return. We have the benefit of all the developments of the modern world, but risk losing it all if we fail to regain a reciprocal participation with existence.