For what do we know – truly – of Powers and Principalities?

Whom together form the firmament?

And people the spiralling staircase from beneath

Throughout the Heavens

Spanning all the brilliant bandwidth of creation

Between us and The Almighty

Such as which spans the distance between us and other mammals;

…Thither to the creeping invertebrate; and on the First Day, between seething amoeba split

At His touch, whose else?

Jacob weeps for how jealously we guard the ladder

And scapegoat its inhabitants

Is there a place at the table – under Christ – for these unworshipped, unfallen

Angelic Lords, godlike but not He; Of God but not Him:

The arbiters of creation

With power and responsibility granted, atomic in scale who

May rain burning sulphur; yet we – Like Lot, unhurried –

Watch on as Sodom burgeons!

In the Whore’s Womb we founded.

As with governors and Kings of the earthly realm

With fallen lens we do them no justice in myth

The Iliad, Odyssey: all inadequate

We would make of them sheep in wolves’ clothing, fiends

Likened to our own deceitful mob:

“If cattle could devise their gods, they would sketch a cow and a bull”

And thus is it any wonder: deigned to burn at the stake for ever and anon?

Thrown in with their fallen kin

And cast out through the executive erasure

Of Her, our Reformed Church

“Re-formed (adj.): dismembered and remade in the image of science”

Amenable to reason; to the Head

Hence, Father

Hence, right and wrong conduct above all else

Enlightenment Now comes with its own dogma,

And begets that which we grew up laughing at in Sunday School.

The bible rendered material facts waiting to be uncovered, like limpets hid beneath the waves

Of Plato’s cave – while meaning waxes overhead.

A set of propositions to affirm – like a jury under oath

While the “saved” run amok…

What preposterous, preponderant tosh!

That the Scriptures couldn’t be any more than the facts, most especially those tales of old

And the mythologizing – historical or not – of Yeshua’s story

That Galilee Druid

Criminal King

Laughing, whip toting reconciler of the irreconcilable

Virgin Birth, Manger-sarcophagus, Wise Men and Shepherd boys, Life through Death…

Ox and Ass he makes of us, Gentile Orphans thrust together with His Anointed

Beasts of Burden indeed…

Materialist baggage we carry too so that atheist and fundamentalist alike

Looking from Calvin (to Darwin) and back, grow cross-eyed, bashful

And see them united in their disdain for fairy tale fallacy.

Their sterile determination to render faith (science) a personal, legally binding contract with the one and only God (empirical truth) – Elohim be damned – for individual salvation (progress) for the painful proposition that humanity is but a wretched serfdom (subjective accident) for an objective and unfeeling God (universe).

And spy ye not by contrast – uncomfortable enough – common ground between that of the Church Fathers and their stoic forebears?

Mystical, symbolic and communal lens, passed down orally, theosis (or “Union with God”) over august salvation, natural law, a spiritual hierarchy of saints, ancestors and Powers with the ordering Logos at its head, made fully manifest in Christ, the God-man, our model of perfection and as Lewis ventures, present throughout worldviews different to one’s own:

Pininpricks of divine truth, beauty and goodness which manifest through indigenous traditions the world over, and appropriate relationship to mother earth and father sky; to brother sun and sister moon. That God-given affinity for nature (“the animals sensed in the saints a pre-Fall humanity”), for one’s fellow man and for telling right from wrong.

That the Church Fathers’ understanding of the cosmos bore closer resemblance to the philosophical heights of paganism than they did to the ravages of Calvin or Luther would be worth pause in and of itself!

But let the proclamation uttered the secular world over be recognized for the praise it merits: that the bible is a book of fairy tales

Is not its condemnation, but our very redemption;

A more global depository of nested, symbolic truths, you will not find.

Just as in the person of Jesus, where Myth meets History, Scripture for us becomes

Ontological map of reality for when the culture blows itself to bits,

As it is wont to:

Indulgent, multiplicitous Babylon,

When sons of god “from the skies” came into the daughters of men and bore them titans, the culture heroes of old who

The world over

Brought fire, technology, arts of war and seduction

Animal skins heaped upon us;

Promethean vices, for why else – as the Greeks insist – did the gods object?

At an infant species

Crawling into premature decline…

When flourished the chimeric breaking down of categories: gender, human-animal, transcendence of our very biology…

Value inversion of up and down, dark and day, order and chaos: the move toward the outer edge, which is to say

Apocalypse: unveiling. Revelation of what is good and true and beautiful…of what is God’s when we most risk losing it,

In the inevitable Flood on our horizons…

Preserving the natural order (male and female he made them) in no less than The “Ark” of the “covenant”, which is to say “the church”…the “Body of God”…humankind…

What are these stories except the rising and falling of civilizations lost to time?

What are they except an End Times Survival Kit:

Pentecost for the Zombie Apocalypse?

Could these and other signs weaved into the narrative,

Be anything more than a sober analysis of what merely transpired?

But what it means

To be saved; adopted and modelled a path back to the divine inheritance intended:

Called forevermore,

To beget and nurture gardens beyond our imagining, beyond our Solar System…

For the ploughshare lies idle in fields of our own design.

Will we earn what is ours through humble, loving submission

To God, Nature and each other

And through twist of cosmic fate

Be given run of the place?

Run our fingers through star strewn soils,

And cast about with the clay stuffs of galaxies,

In the playpen of the gods?

A fissile church

And space-going ark

Oh! The kids grow up so fast…