Dreaming with Mr. Raven

Adam—hearing God’s call to divine fellowship—dreamed of green and flowering cities, tempting even angels with the visions. They, leaning in, enticed Adam, in turn, to dream more and more lavishly. Before his eyes had fluttered open, his visions had long outstripped his childish wisdom and grown lost in fantasies of life apart from God. Only partially awake, Adam’s world first stirred in pain. It grew in twilight amid broken brotherhoods, crushed by death and darkness.

Early along this thorny road to God, first Adam beheld Eve and rejoiced that they would not be alone, though, he spurned her soon as a temptress, and went to dwell with Lilith. When Lilith left Adam to wield fierce powers as Queen of Death, Adam return to Eve and her children brought them promises of life. But bitter labor and broken fellowships soon took Adam back beneath the earth to dream fitfully again.

Watching his tortured dreams from the sweet-scented Cave of Machpelah, Adam first saw Mary. Gazing as she spun her yarn for the temple veil, Adam thought vividly of what it would be to wake fully and behold himself saying yes to God. He felt again God’s hands giving form to clay—his own soul shaped again with the knitting of the child that Mary carried.

God visited this night of Adam’s world as Jesus Christ and walked the dusty roads with Adam’s sons and daughters. Remembering lost evenings of quiet fellowship in a first fruited garden—a place governed by lights and filled with the voice of God—almost, Adam came forth from his cave to stand with God again.

Yes, watching Mary follow her son through death within his bitter dreams, Adam’s ears and eyes longed to fully wake and walk with God himself. Then a bold cry thundered up from the depths of the earth, filling buried Eden and echoing through the cave of the patriarchs. John, called out to the dead and sleeping, “Behold, the new Joshua and the son of David, putting death to flight. He approaches. Stir yourselves and behold.”

I dream now with Mr. Raven—George MacDonald’s Adam librarian—gathering little worms across the grassy fields of paradise where a thousand, thousand sleeping souls surround us, buried but ready to learn of light and air, to hear the echoes of Mary’s yes to God, the yes that even Adam and Lilith, finally, would imitate.

Five-ish Angelic Falls and Three Human Falls

Two Orthodox priests, Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick and Fr. Stephen De Young, have been podcasting together recently and shared about these five-ish angelic falls. They have also referenced three human falls which Fr. Stephen has blogged about previously here as well. These lists include some notes and clarifications later shared by Fr. Andrew in an outline group connected to the podcast group.

These five-ish angelic falls are wrapped up with the three human falls listed below but are articulated here from the angelic perspective:

1. Succession myth / serpent (=devil) cast into Hades. Attempt to overthrow the Most High from His throne in heaven that parallels various pagan myths of younger gods destroying the former gods. This is represented in all pagan myths as a success, but it is a failure in Genesis.
   1. Initial fall in the heart or mind of a divine council member. This is not recounted in Genesis directly. Subsequent readings of Genesis tend to fill in the gap and place this succession myth before creation (as in Milton’s Paradis Lost). However, casting it before the creation of the world creates a basic logical problem. You can’t dethrone the Most High God in reality, but you can try to dethrone him in the hearts and minds of his creatures. This requires there to be other creatures. Therefore, the serpent (a member of the divine council) is depicted as having “overthrown God” within his own heart at beholding the creation of humans and then to have invited humans to do the same. This succession myth gets told in Isaiah 14. The dethroning happens in the minds of the fallen angels, which is how this is described by St. Gregory the Great.
   2. Casting out of the devil into the Underworld for tempting mankind: the serpent, a divine council member, overthrows God in the hearts of humanity by tempting them with a shortcut to maturity and is sent by God to preside over the land of dust (i.e. of death or Sheol). This is the first angelic fall directly depicted in Genesis (a failure in contrast to the triumph of pagan succession myths). [Fr. Andrew notes that “fall” from this point on is not a moral fall or betrayal. In that sense, these angels are already fallen before these events happen. Fall here focuses on “being cast down.”]
2. Apkallu / Watchers / Nephilim-generation (the Watchers (the fathers) falling by generating nephilim). Angels tempt humans with technology for which they are not ready and then involve themselves in human procreation to produce a line of demigods (1/3 fallen angel) who start human royal dynasties. Paralleled in pagan myths such as the Sumeran Kings List and the story of the Apkallu or the story of the Seven Sages.
3. Nephilim / Unclean Spirits / Mastema+crew (the nephilim (the sons) falling by being defeated by the Flood when most are cast into the Abyss). Many of these demigods are finished off by Joshua and David. Their spirits trouble the earth as unclean spirits.
4. Accepting worship post-Babel. Fallen angels receive the worship offered to them at the Tower of Babel (gate of the gods) and become the 70 gods of the original divine council placed over the traditional 70 nations.
5. Satan (=devil?) falling like lightning. When Christ says, “I saw Satan fall like lightning” after his 70 disciples return from their commissions to declare the kingdom of God. This is also connected with Rev. 12:9. Some claim that Christ’s earthly ministry changed something for Satan. Are these two different figures who both fall, or is this one figure, one person, who falls two different times in two different ways? St. Andrew of Caesarea thinks it’s one figure who falls in two different ways.

Three human falls:

1. Fall of Adam. A trespass but no mention of sin in Genesis (seeking a childish shortcut to maturity despite God’s warning). This trespass of Adam brings death. It is the first fall and the last enemy to be defeated by Christ.
2. Fall of Cain. Considered by several patristic writers to be the first to sin with his murder of his brother.
3. Fall of humanity at the tower of Babel. Coming under the dominion of the angelic powers overseeing the nations.

Rendering by Natalia Lvova of a traditional icon (Archangel Michael, the Commander of the Heavenly Forces).

saddened was the Tree of Life

Detail from Tree of Life. Artist: Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Coley (1833-1898). Found in the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum.

Greatly saddened was the Tree of Life
when it beheld Adam stolen away from it;
it sank down into the virgin ground and was hidden
—to burst forth and reappear on Golgotha;
humanity, like birds that are chased,
took refuge in it
so that it might return them to their proper home.
The chaser was chased away, while the doves
that had been chased
now hop with joy in Paradise.

St. Ephrem the Syrian (Hymn on Virginity XVI, 10)

St. Ephrem (306-373) wrote some 400 hymns, many of them still used today. This ancient hymn by St. Ephrem is one of many on this theme, which is closely associated with the Nativity. One much-loved hymn sings of how the “Tree of Life blossoms forth from the virgin in the cave.” (I’ve shared that here on a previous Christmas.) Without claiming any direct connections, this theme certainly continues into other Christian traditions.

One example is “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree.” This old English Christmas carol was most likely written by Rev. Richard Hutchins, a Calvinist Baptist clergyman then in Long Buckby, Northhamptonshire. The first known publication, beginning “The Tree of Life My Soul Hath Seen,” was in London’s Spiritual Magazine in August, 1761. This credits “R.H.” as the submitter and presumed author. Another early printing, which cannot be dated and could be earlier, is an English broadsheet. This broadsheet uses the term “Methodists,” which certainly places it after about 1730. (Preceding details from Wikipedia.) Here are those lyrics.

The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit and always green;
The trees of nature fruitless be,
Compared with Christ the Apple Tree.

His beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know but ne’er can tell
The glory which I now can see,
In Jesus Christ the Appletree.

For happiness I long have sought,
And pleasure dearly I have bought;
I missed of all but now I see
‘Tis found in Christ the Appletree.

I’m weary with my former toil –
Here I will sit and rest awhile,
Under the shadow I will be,
Of Jesus Christ the Appletree.

With great delight I’ll make my stay,
There’s none shall fright my soul away;
Among the sons of men I see
There’s none like Christ the Appletree.

I’ll sit and eat this fruit divine,
It cheers my heart like spirit’al wine;
And now this fruit is sweet to me,
That grows on Christ the Appletree.

This fruit doth make my soul to thrive,
It keeps my dying faith alive;
Which makes my soul in haste to be
With Jesus Christ the Appletree.

the fall of rational creation and the conquest of the cosmos by death is something that appears to us nowhere within the course of nature or history

The moral apostasy of rational beings from the proper love of God is somehow the reason for the reign of death and suffering in the cosmos, that human beings—constituting what Maximus the Confessor called the priestly “methorios” (the boundary or frontier) between the physical and the spiritual realms—severed the bond between God’s eternity and cosmic time when they fell. Thus we may say, as fantastic as it seems—and as fantastic as it truly is when reduced to fundamentalist literalism regarding the myth of Eden—that all suffering, sadness, and death, however deeply woven into the fabric of earthly existence, is the consequence of the depravities of rational creatures, not of God’s intentions. Not that we can locate the time, the place, or the conditions of that event. That ours is a fallen world is not a truth demonstrable to those who do not believe; Christians can see it only within the story of Christ, in the light cast back from his saving action in history upon the whole of time. The fall of rational creation and the conquest of the cosmos by death is something that appears to us nowhere within the course of nature or history; it comes from before and beyond both. We cannot search it out within the closed totality of the damaged world because it belongs to another frame of time, another kind of time, one more real than the time of death—perhaps the divine or angelic aeon beyond the corruptible sub-sidereal world of chronos, or perhaps the Drcamtime or the supcrcclcstial realm of the pure forms or the Origcnist heaven of the primordial intelligences, or what have you. In any event, this (or something roughly like it) is the story that orthodox Christianity tells, and it can tell no other.

…It may seem a fabulous claim that we exist in the long grim aftermath of a primaeval catastrophe—that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is a phantom of true time, that we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, and that the universe languishes in bondage to the “powers” and “principalities” of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the kingdom of God—but it is not a claim that Christians are free to surrender. There is a kind of “provisional” cosmic dualism within the New Testament that simply cannot be evaded: not an ultimate dualism, of course, between two equal principles, but certainly a conflict between, on the one hand, a sphere of created autonomy that strives against God and, on the other, the saving love of God in time.

The explicit claim of Christian scripture is that God’s will can be resisted by a real and (by his grace) autonomous force of defiance, and that his purposes can be hidden from us by the history of cosmic corruption, and that the final realization of the good he intends in all things has the form—not simply as a dramatic fiction, for our edification or his glory, nor simply as a pedagogical device on his part, but in truth—of a divine victory.

From “The Devil’s March” by David Bentley Hart.

There is a lot in this echoing Chesterton who writes that we are “the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world” (more here) and that “the end of the world was long ago, / And all we dwell to-day / As children of some second birth, / Like a strange people left on earth / After a judgment day” (citation here).

by the tune of the rustling of Thy leaves

On the last Sunday before Orthodox Great Lent, the church remembers the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. This hymn is sung at the vespers on Saturday evening that starts this liturgical day. In this hymn, Adam asks Eden itself to pray to God for Adam (by the music of Eden’s rustling leaves) that the gates might be opened and that the Adam might once again be able to enjoy the tree of life.

O most-honored paradise, comeliness transcendent in splendor, the dwelling-place perfected by God, unending joy and enjoyment, the glory of the righteous, the joy of the Prophets, and the dwelling-place of the saints, beseech the Creator of all, by the tune of the rustling of Thy leaves, to open for me the gates which I closed by sin, and that I be worthy to partake of the tree of life and joy, which I enjoyed in Thee of old.

My Accidental Day with Super Power

I have taken down the original draft of this story as it has been posted in a revised version as “A Misunderstanding with my Guardian Angel over the Meaning of Super-Power” by Macrina Magazine.

Note on the background of my writing of this story: In preparation for our Thanksgiving get-together this year, my mother-in-law asked all of the extended family members (of a capable age) to write a short story describing one day with a superpower of their choice. I did not entirely follow the directions, but this is what came to me.

For now, I’m leaving a few passages here from other places that helped me to respond with this story.

Emily Dickinson poem 1544:

Who has not found the Heaven — below —

Will fail of it above —

For Angels rent the House next ours,

Wherever we remove —

…Perhaps the best I cn say is that I felt as if I was united to all of these middle lines of Hopkin’s great poem:

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

…Although I was wore shoes and was in downtown York, PA rather than a pastoral setting such as this, the world still reached out to me in this same way. Just as the protagonist does within this passage, I stepped out into the early morning half-light:

A wondrous change had passed upon the world—or was it not rather that a change more marvellous had taken place in us? Without light enough in the sky or the air to reveal anything, every heather-bush, every small shrub, every blade of grass was perfectly visible—either by light that went out from it, as fire from the bush Moses saw in the desert, or by light that went out of our eyes. Nothing cast a shadow; all things interchanged a little light. Every growing thing showed me, by its shape and colour, its indwelling idea—the informing thought, that is, which was its being, and sent it out. My bare feet seemed to love every plant they trod upon. The world and my being, its life and mine, were one. The microcosm and macrocosm were at length atoned, at length in harmony! I lived in everything; everything entered and lived in me. To be aware of a thing, was to know its life at once and mine, to know whence we came, and where we were at home—was to know that we are all what we are, because Another is what he is! Sense after sense, hitherto asleep, awoke in me—sense after sense indescribable, because no correspondent words, no likenesses or imaginations exist, wherewithal to describe them. Full indeed—yet ever expanding, ever making room to receive—was the conscious being where things kept entering by so many open doors! When a little breeze brushing a bush of heather set its purple bells a ringing, I was myself in the joy of the bells, myself in the joy of the breeze to which responded their sweet TIN-TINNING, myself in the joy of the sense, and of the soul that received all the joys together. To everything glad I lent the hall of my being wherein to revel. I was a peaceful ocean upon which the ground-swell of a living joy was continually lifting new waves; yet was the joy ever the same joy, the eternal joy, with tens of thousands of changing forms. Life was a cosmic holiday.

Now I knew that life and truth were one; that life mere and pure is in itself bliss; that where being is not bliss, it is not life, but life-in-death. Every inspiration of the dark wind that blew where it listed, went out a sigh of thanksgiving. At last I was! I lived, and nothing could touch my life!

As I said, imagine all this but within the context that Paul describes in Romans 8:19-22:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

…We were close to concluding our conversation when the young man shared a few lines that he particularly loved from “The Ballad of the White Horse” by G. K. Chesterton:

For the end of the world was long ago,

As children of some second birth,

And all we dwell to-day

Like a strange people left on earth

As children of some second birth,

After a judgment day.

This recalled a line from a book that I had recently read, and I picked the book up, wishing that I could somehow point out the passage to him through the phone. Taking up George MacDonald’s Lilith, I put my fingers on the lines: “Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. …None but God hates evil and understands it.”

…As I tried to explain what the world was like through the senses of my glorified body, one passage that I shared was from “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages” by C.S. Lewis. This was first delivered as a lecture in 1956 and then published posthumously in the 1966 collection of essays called Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature:

We find (not now by analogy but in strictest fact) that in every sphere there is a rational creature called an Intelligence which is compelled to move, and therefore to keep his sphere moving, by his incessant desire for God. …The motions of the universe are to be conceived not as those of a machine or even an army, but rather as a dance, a festival, a symphony, a ritual, a carnival, or all these in one. They are the unimpeded movement of the most perfect impulse towards the most perfect object.

Greek Fathers on Human Sexuality and Eden (a Few Brief Comments)

Someone on a closed group posted a question about why several Greek church fathers would have taught that Eve was a virgin until after she left Eden. Someone else pointed out that, in this case, Adam would have also been a virgin before leaving the garden, and it was noted that Irenaus mentions Adam’s virginity as also significant. There was some continued speculation about why Eve’s virginity gets more comment. Most comments, however, focused on the theology involved—such as teachings about the fall of humanity. In any case, one comment that I made was appreciated, and I wanted to record it for possible later use (along with a few other comments from the same thread).

Point of humor that I appreciated from an earlier comment:

…Much of this is above my pay grade.

My comment:

This thread is helpful, and I’ve learned a few things above my pay grade too. For what it’s worth, I’d take it as given that preoccupation with Eve’s virginity would be connected to bigger problems in relation to sexuality within our history together as humans. That’s likely true and well worth considering, but it does not make the teaching wrong of course.

For my part, I take some comfort in the pervasive idea (among the fathers) of Adam and Eve as pre-adult and innocent in the time leading up to their first sin. It actually puts the fall into its place as a very sad but also relatively simple thing that happened to us all. It’s not the epic crime scene or the premeditated rebellion that’s its sometimes made out to be. Our sins have grown far more “mature” since that first and collective fall. Also, there is some sense in which all of humanity has suffered in a kind of “arrested development” since the fall: Jesus Christ and his saints are the only “adults” among us. Anyway, I’m not sure that the idea of Adam and Eve being virgins when they fell is so much about sex as it is about many other things. When it comes to sex, the church’s teaching that I love most is the gentle and modest icon of the Conception of the Theotokos which shows the joyful and tender context in which sex can exist inside of the marriage sacrament.

Another later comment:

Panyotis Nellas’ book Deification in Christ talks about pre-fall procreation and post-fall. The “garments of skin” were not “animal skin clothing” (as I was always taught in my Protestant traditions), but our actual “fleshly existence”. Prior to the fall we had different “bodies” and our communion with each other was on a different (spiritual) level. After the fall, we are now clothed in a “fleshly existence” and subject to physical necessities and have a different kind of relationship to each other and creation. So in that sense, pre-fall procreation could be defined as “virginal” and post-fall as “fleshly” and subject to fallen “passions”.

Yet another later response:

There are things written about what procreation would have been like before the fall. The idea of Eve being a virgin has more to do with sin being primordial to humanity. All human beings after creation are conceived in sin, which is about the condition of Man, not the imputation of sinfulness to sexual intercourse.

How can the end of the world start in a place like this?

From Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

The authors would like to join the demon Crowley in dedicating this book to the memory of G.K. CHESTERTON. A man who knew what was going on.

Also regarding GKC, in the story, we have this at one point within Crowley’s stream of consciousness thinking:

Who had written that? Chesterton, wasn’t it? The only poet in the twentieth century to even come close to the Truth.

One of the book’s most developed themes is the joy of life found in children and the loss of particular places where children can enjoy the world.

She gave him a helpless look. “It’s hard to describe it,” she said. “Something or someone loves this place. Loves every inch of it so powerfully that it shields and protects it. A deep-down, huge, fierce love. How can anything bad start here? How can the end of the world start in a place like this? This is the kind of town you’d want to raise your kids in. It’s a kids’ paradise.” She smiled weakly. “You should see the local kids. They’re unreal! Right out of the ‘Boy’s Own Paper!’ All scabby knees and ‘brilliant!’ and bulls-eyes—”

…The sun continued to shine. The thrush continued to sing. Dog gave up on his master, and began to stalk a butterfly in the grass by the garden hedge. This was a serious, solid, impassible hedge, of thick and well-trimmed privet, and Adam knew it of old. Beyond it stretched open fields, and wonderful muddy ditches, and unripe fruit, and irate but slow-of-foot owners of fruit trees, and circuses, and streams to dam, and walls and trees just made for climbing.

There’s also a wide variety of wit and humor that ranges all over the map of human experience. For example, this bit about “movements” (to use a Wendell Berry term) versus community:

And he’d given up on ecology when the ecology magazine he’d been subscribing to had shown its readers a plan of a self-sufficient garden, and had drawn the ecological goat tethered within three feet of the ecological beehive. Newt had spent a lot of time at his grandmother’s house in the country and thought he knew something about the habits of both goats and bees, and concluded therefore that the magazine was run by a bunch of bib-overalled maniacs. Besides, it used the word “community” too often; Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word “community” were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.

Where are these other things?

From J.R.R. Tolkien’s story “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” (unpublished within his lifetime, see more here):

“But do you know that the Eldar say of Men that they look at no thing for itself; that if they study it, it is to discover something else; that if they love it, it is only (so it seems) because it reminds them of some other clearer thing? Yet with what is this comparison? Where are these other things?”

“We are both Elves and Men, in Arda and of Arda; and such knowledge as Men have is derived from Arda (or so it would appear). Whence then comes this memory that ye have with you, even before ye begin to learn?”

***

“Ever more you amaze my thought, Andreth,” said Finrod. “For if your claim is true, then lo! a fëa [meaning something close to “soul”] which is here but a traveller is wedded indissolubly to a hröa [meaning something close to “body”] of Arda; to divide them is a grievous hurt, and yet each must fulfil its right nature without tyranny of the other. Then this must surely follow: the fëa when it departs must take with it the hröa. And what can this mean unless it be that the fëa shall have the power to uplift the hröa, as its eternal spouse and companion, into an endurance everlasting beyond Eä, and beyond Time? Thus would Arda, or part thereof, be healed not only of the taint of Melkor, but released even from the limits that were set for it in the ‘Vision of Eru’ of which the Valar speak.”

“Therefore, I say that if this can be believed, then mighty indeed under Eru were Men made in their beginning; and dreadful beyond all other calamities was the change in their state.”

***

“They say,” answered Andreth: “they say that the One will himself enter into Arda, and heal Men and all the Marring from the beginning to the end. This they say also, or they feign, is a rumor that has come down through years uncounted, even from the days of our undoing.”

“Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” (likely completed in 1959 but not printed until 1993 within Morgoth’s Ring, the tenth volume of Christopher Tolkien’s 12-volume series The History of Middle-earth)

the human vocation to make the hundred thousand billion galaxies with a hundred billion stars into paradise

This is from “Darwin and Christianity – Part 8: The Genesis Account (part 2)” recorded as a podcast on “Speaking the Truth in Love” for Ancient Faith Ministries by Fr. Tom Hopko. Here he is talking about the first chapters of Genesis and describing how God made the Garden of Eden:

So there’s a real question here whether the entire creation was paradise from the beginning. In this narrative, it doesn’t seem so. It seems that paradise is only where man is, and it’s only where man is in communion with God, where man is adoring God, obeying God, keeping God’s commandments, and his job is to make all of creation into paradise. I’m even tempted to say nowadays maybe it’s the human vocation to make the hundred thousand billion galaxies with a hundred billion stars into paradise and to do so in the power of the risen Lord and the Holy Spirit in the age to come. That might be it. Who knows? But in the beginning you just have this little garden of Eden, this little paradise spot.