I just finished the good ol’ book—that best of all books: the Holy Bible—for the first time I might add. Now for a lesser man this might be a thing of shame since it is a book I not only claimed to have completely followed most of my life, but maybe even to have completely read most of my life. But I am no lesser man. No indeed! I am a great man of indignity who wears his shame on his sleeve and excuses himself faster than Adam. I am a great, laborious reader; travailing much against laziness; with a mind inclined to fantasize; complaining much against dim lighting. So, though I am late, though I am unfaithful and wretched, I celebrate! I remark the unremarkable! Full of shame, I am yet shameless before my author. The last to join the millennia-long parade of the lamb, I dart ahead of it, cartwheeling through the city. Look down on me from your tower of contempt if you will, I will not see. For I am proud of my God and His ancient work that works still.

And this is what I should tell you!
As I came over the last hill of Paul’s epistles I gazed upon a golden city. Between lay an epilogue of sorts; a gentle slope. At the bottom, pinned against the high gate, just before The End, the cosmic battle raged and stars fell from the sky. And I saw something I had never seen before, both in the gentle slope and the uproarious finale. The last biblical writers referred to it over and over, calling Jesus by an attribute I had never before heard nor considered. At first it was like a sound in a forest of a creature or running water. It was immeasurable, disorienting, inconsistent. There, then gone. Then suddenly I saw it, right in front of me; standing as an hart; unworried, unworldly, unnaturally confident of his home; looking at me as a foreigner in his forest. A thing tall, crashing, and eternal as a waterfall. This thing! This crazy thing! was his patience.
Maybe I am wrong. Even now it seems I may have dreamed it. But I think not. Why it should surprise me if the writer of Hebrews, or James, Peter, Jude or John should say something along the lines of, “Look! There it is! Did you see it?! The Patience of Jesus!” I can not say. Yet it did.
Maybe it is because the gospels spring out of nowhere. Maybe it is their shortness. Maybe it is because Jesus springs out of nowhere and departs shortly. Maybe his surprise and brevity—things no more a sign of impatience than over-predictability and overgrowth—felt impatient. Maybe, and most likely, I was impatient. Whatever the case, I had heard Jesus called many wonderful things. I had heard him expressed in intimate relation to his acts: everyday acts, but of his particular and divine type. I had heard of his strength, his love, his peace, his truth, his way, his life, his zeal, his kindness. But I had never heard of his patience. Taking the last books as a whole, I could only conclude those disciples who saw him first-hand apparently counted Jesus’ patience as one of the wonders of the world. They write as if there was anything that could stop a runaway train or kill the dragon that blots the stars, it was Jesus’s patience. They seem to huddle together and whisper to us as if we are sitting at the last dinner table and point at their friend who never put his own heart one beat before his Father’s. John tells of it at the beginning as it must have been told to him by Jesus: Alone in the wilderness; when in great hunger; when in great need; He would not be tempted. He would not tempt. He would would wait. At each turn would he answer his enemy thus: “No, Tempter, I’ll wait for my Father.”
The disciples who first saw the Holy Family; who walked and dined with them; who roomed in the houseless home of “I and My Father are One;” tell us to the end, from Capernaum to the cross, of a son who knows his Father; knows he gives what is needed the moment it is needed— and not a moment before.
“And, behold, angels came and ministered unto him.”

As I climbed the spiraling stairs to the city on the hill, I turned and looked back at the battle at the gate. I looked back at the distant slope and the hart and the waterfall; I looked back at John and Jude and Peter and James and Hebrews; and I saw them bathed in gold. There below me, and far and wide around me, was the enduring solidness and joy of patience.
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[An Exploration of the problem of using the complex tool of Science for the interpretation of reality.  And the harsh truth that the more complex the tool, the less real the user's interpretation of his reality: the less useful it is for understanding it.  (Partly because the creator, therefore interpreter, is less and less involved and therefore less and less needed and therefore less and less there).  And though it is a good practical tool (since it is the only one we have) for making and hence understanding things, science is not a good interpretive tool for making or understanding reality.]  

Reality is what is; which means it is being.  
And the only proper interpretation of being is through the doing of it.
Which has the precondition of listening to it.
The only proper attitude to being is listening to it, then doing it.

Hence, the proper tool to interpret reality is not, thank heavens, the scientific method, it is the ear. As well, the mind, oddly enough, is not the proper, or even in the material sense, the actual interpretative instrument for consciousness; or being; or as Christ calls it: Life. It is the heart. Which sees and hears without trying. The mind complicates, quite literally, the interpretation; looking upon reality as an observer does a distant and possibly dangerous experiment. 
Rather, the proper interpretive  structure of reality is being itself. Which is reflective in its nature; that is to say, passive.  In our nature, therefore in our poetry, the sheep is the passive ideal.  Thus as a sheep, as the ancient Hebrews insisted, a man’s being is the reflective ideal of his reality; of his Shepherd and pastureland.  
Or, just as his mirror is the proper interpretive instrument of a man’s hair, so his being is the proper interpretive instrument of a man’s life—which, correctly stated is his God.  Each man may hold within his meager frame as deep and wide a reflection of life as he wishes to face.  However, the mirror of man is not before him to behold, rather the mirror is himself holding within him his God: he, the very image of infinity; he, the very being that stands before him; gazing into him; reflecting upon itself. And this passivity, as opposed to the endless toil of the mind, requires no effort, no experience, no experimentation, analysis or mathematics. As in zero. It is a thing that just is. The only action needed is custodial; is cleanliness; that is to say: sanity; a keeping of the mirror clean of anything that clutters.

​Again, strangely, the proper tool for understanding is not knowledge. 
Maybe to do right by knowledge and for clarity, I should say intellectual or factual or scientific knowledge; which is the knowing of many things, maybe even a mountain of things so high it looks like almost everything; which, there is little doubt, is the only sense in which almost everyone uses it. Knowledge, in this sense, is not reflective, it is opaque. It does not give light.  It does not glitter nor glimmer as a mirror—alive because what it holds is life.  This knowledge, rather, is stone.  No matter how great a stone, no matter how high and sheer its face, it is still dead. What is written on this dead thing, though it may be a never ending attempt to engrave on it a living word, is instead an epitaph: “Here lies a bunch of things.  But I forgot why.”
It is no wonder the modern man’s intellectual dream of artificial intelligence is called artificial; for it is only an extension of his modern superstition that intelligence is intelligent: Dead before the chisel is ever used. 
This knowledge shatters the glass it was meant simply to adorn, to frame, and to support. 



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​Isaiah was a poet, that is to say, a prophet. He was sorrowful and heart-broken,  as was his God.  They both were jilted lovers.  And their almighty wrath and woe sprang from the most inhuman of failures of that most divine of tests: the betrayal of love. 
Jonathan Edwards was no poet and therefore no prophet.  He was no dreamer and therefore could never truly be popular. Instead, he was a knower. He had the certainty of the literalist, that is to say, the certainty of being wrong. His wrath came not from betrayal by mankind, for that would first require a romance with it. Edward’s wrath came from complete and utter love of himself. Edwards was no resurrection man; no believer in his brothers and sisters.  How could he if his own Father did not believe in them?  He and the God he claimed to hear, were merely angry and disappointed in humanity.  And both almost seemed to have a sort of glee in the punishment of man, along with an expectancy, maybe even a hope of this grand mistake’s failure. Jonathan Edward’s God was a respecter of persons who punished for punishment’s sake alone.  In a truly hair-raising display of cosmic extortion, Jonathan Edward’s God would dangle His children like insects over a fire; watching as they squirmed, only too happy to drop them if they would not capitulate. 


But there was no glee in Isaiah’s God. Though the hand of his God may have been stretched out still, yet His eyes remained burning with tears.
For unlike the Edwardsian God, Isaiah’s God dreamed. 
And those God-sized dreams became Isaiah’s: of children coming home; of a poisoned root blossoming again; of a bride waiting only for her groom’s voice. Wrath and love, woe and joy.  Isaiah mingled these in the God of redemption. 
Jonathan Edwards never did.  No mingler, this one. No, he was as monolithic as he was monomaniacal. To me, if anyone were to ever truly awaken in Jonathan Edward’s world, he would awaken to a moonscape; not arise to a world shining ‘neath the glory of the Sun.

It was explained to me at great length recently that the thing not to miss about the Sermon on the Mount is how filled it is with doctrinal fulfillment. If I was to completely understand it, according to my colleague, I was first to understand it is already completed. I was to be ultimately grateful Jesus’ ultimate message was there was nothing I could do! My face was to shine at the blissful thought there was nothing at all—not one thing!— I could do to be perfect, to be good, to be righteous, to be lovely to God, to be loved by God, to be lovely to others, to be saved, to be clean, to be healed, to be alive, to be free of Sin, to be set free from even the slightest inclination to sin. Nothing!
I was to read the sermon as if when Jesus said he came to fulfill the law, he had said instead, “Tetelestai!” or as if when he said, “Take up your cross,” he had already taken everyone of them up to Golgotha and left them there. I was to note how, just as he was beginning to open it, he closed the prophetic Book of Grace with substitutionary atonement and imputed righteousness. I was to watch gladly as he shut the Book of Life and sealed it with seven seals. In summary, the thing I was to be most careful not to forget was the moment the Lord sat down on the Mount and opened his mouth to speak, he had nothing left to say. It was apparent I was not to take too much notice of what came after for fear of finding Jesus in an embarrassing situation; of catching the Good Teacher playing with lilies and filling the mountainside with platitudes, impossibilities, and impracticalities.
Now, it is always at this point in any lengthy, theological claim such as this that I begin to smile. For, as is often the case, the explanation is in direct opposition to what Jesus actually said. The poor fellow doing the enthusiastic explaining staked his claim so deeply he plunged it into the antipodes; finding himself the owner of a far eastern land with that same philosophy of nothingness where no one is like unto a man who built his house on a rock because he built a Pagoda. With the highest of aims, this good-hearted man so far overshot what the Sermon on the Mount said, that he shot himself. He, like many before and many after, fell into the great danger of talking far too much about what Jesus said, rather than simply listening to what he said. Because when Jesus himself talks about what he said, which he certainly did on the Mount, he has the great Lordly, and therefore practical, sense to say the only thing to really remember about his sermon is how filled it is with things, not for a man to put into his philosophy or his PowerPoint, but to put into his practice. It was expressly for the man, not who would buy his heavenly home on credit, but who would build his house on a rock. Just before he finished, Jesus, my great fulfiller, the once and forever architect of my home, begged me to notice, not how he filled his mountainous sermon with theologies already done, but how he filled it with things to do.

…is to give up what ye want.

Man, generally the comfortably religious man, tends to think obeying God’s word means something like reading God’s word and then agreeing that it is really, really, really true. But that has nothing to do with obeying  God’s word for the possibly unexpected reason that is not what obeying anyone’s word means.  That is just like thinking a child who never obeys his parents even though he ever agrees their words are true is somehow still an obedient and good child.  But he isn’t.  He is simply a liar.  
What the parents need from the child is what our Father needs from us:  not to agree, but to obey—to be good—to be true.
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"The hardest thing for anyone to let go is what he doesn’t have."
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​ --Adam