Chapter One: On Being Everything

 Beginning at the End

I

nstead of beginning at the beginning, let’s begin at the end. Let’s begin with the concept of death. There are primal fears associated with the end that cloud our judgment and need dealing with: these are the fear of pain, the fear of the unknown, and the fear of non-existence.

There are nuances to these. At its noblest our fear may be a selfless fear for loved ones who need our protection and might be lost without us. But essentially most of us are, in some degree at least, afraid of death.

Fear invariably clouds our judgement. It clouds our assessment of the God who, if he exists, presumably holds it within his power to deliver us from fear.

Is not such deliverance central to Christianity and indeed to all the monotheistic religions? One of the most often repeated instructions in the bible, short presumably for emphasis, is the direct instruction, given to everyone by almost every prophet from Isaiah to Jesus to: “Fear Not”,[1] as in Luke 12:32 Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Yet how can a loving God permit the horror of war, or allow millions to die in the Holocaust, or permit earthquake, tsunami, fire and flood, or snatch away a child’s life from sickness or disease when it is but scarce begun? Why do some inherit disability and disadvantage and others inherit undeserved wealth and comfort? Why is life unfair?

Makes you a little angry with God, perhaps with some justification? God has a great deal to answer for. Certainly we are grateful for the gift of life, to drink in the beautiful air, to laugh at the dawn and welcome each new day; but the associated brutality cannot just be brushed aside. We must all face and deal with sickness, sin, disease and most certainly death. We cannot escape.

There is an old Arab tale of an appointment in Samarra with Azrael, the Angel of death. This version of the story was retold by W Somerset Maugham in 1933.[2] The speaker is Death:

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, ‘Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.  I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.’  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. 

Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, ‘Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?’ 

‘That was not a threatening gesture,’ I said, ‘it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’

Concerns over the injustice of it all are voiced particularly loudly by agnostics who, for understandable reasons, are angered by unquestioning adherence to the concept of a supreme being who could be so cruel. They have a point. Why should most of the peoples of the world pay lip service to such a brutal creator?

There are some members of the Jewish community who believe death to be the end and obliteration the summation of all things, but who still pray to and expect aid from this brutal Old Testament God, this God of the living whom is cruelly capricious. Maybe you too are hardwired thus, to want a Master, however cruel he may be, rather than to face life’s brickbats with none to complain to.

However, the sixty-four thousand dollar question remains. How can God be so cruel?

The true believer has the comfort that the “First will be last”.[3] This goes something along the lines of: It will all come out in the wash. There is an afterlife in which those that suffer most in this life win Brownie points to hold against their misdeeds and will be likely to do OK, whereas those that have it good now get marked down in the next world. There’s an old story. It goes:

A rich man arrived at the Golden Gates of Heaven and a poor man was following hard on his heels. Saint Peter opened the gate to allow the rich man in before closing it again just as the poor man was approaching. The poor man knocked on the door but there was no answer. Instead, all he could hear were celebrations inside the City walls. Trumpets were playing, crowds were singing, there were fireworks and fun and there was music; all of this he could hear, and he was left outside. Eventually, about an hour later when the fuss had died down, Saint Peter came back to the gate and let him in. But there was no fuss, no fanfare.

The poor man turned to Saint Peter and said, “It’s the same up here as it was down there. The rich get all the luck.”

Saint Peter looked at the poor man and smiled. “You must forgive us my friend,” he said. “You see poor men like yourself come here every day, but a rich man . . . a rich man . . . . . once in a thousand years.”

But what then of the seeming injustice of the here and now? It is all so unfair. What of the child taken in sickness before he has a chance to grow? What of those exploited through no fault of their own? Can it be right, as happens in many instances, that the evil prosper at the expense of the good? No, it is not right.

Yet the standard Christian response remains that there is no injustice. If you believe in the God Jesus spoke of, then there is perfect balance, perfect harmony — not perhaps in this mortal life but in life as a whole, in eternity. The suffering some find in this life is nothing when measured on the eternal scale. Death itself is meaningless. All is just. God will see to it. As of now, we must accept our situation as best we can, and bring ourselves to say, with St. Paul: "For I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content".[4]

Are you happy now?

Probably not.

In any case that does not mean that man should do nothing, resigned to let God put the balance right in the after-life. Jesus demands that all Mankind's thought and energy be directed now to subverting all and everything that counteracts God's Plan, subverting the devil with positive thought and positive action now.

The word now is important, too often we fall into the trap of thinking of life in terms of yesterday and tomorrow.

But we still haven’t really addressed the problem. So let’s lay out the alternatives. If there is no God then obliteration is indeed the end and we have to accept the fact that nature is red in tooth and claw with no comforting qualifiers and get on with it.

And were that so, it would still not all be bad news. Were there no God, life would still be exciting and challenging right up to the last gasp and we had best drink it in to the full. Indeed, the old gladiator’s watchword, “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die,”[5] would seem the very best maxim possible. We should live life to the full and relish every moment:

A young girl was walking in the jungle one day and she saw a hungry lion that turned towards her and roared, baring its teeth in the most hideous snarl. The lion was clearly about to attack. She fled, desperate to escape, and in her eagerness to get away stumbled out of the jungle straight to a cliff edge with the lion in hot pursuit.  Beneath the cliff was a terrible rocky chasm of immense depth that augured inescapable death, for the rocks far below the sheer cliff would dash anyone who went over to pieces.  The lion backed the girl towards the cliff and she stumbled and losing her footing, went over. As she began to fall she clutched at a shrub growing from the rock which offered some sort of hold, and indeed, for a moment, it seemed to hold fast; then it started to give, its roots coming away from the rock with the weight of her, slight though she was. Above her there was the lion, growling in frustration, below her the terrible chasm with the hideous rocks. And on the bush, the shrub that was, even now, giving way, she noticed a ripe, plump berry, just the one. And the little girl plucked the berry, and ate it.

Well you get the point. There are many other ways to say it. Make hay while the sun shines. Carpe Diem[6] or ‘seize the day’. Better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all[7]. Whatever, the drift is much the same. You don’t have to believe in a future to enjoy the best of today.

But let’s work with the premise that God exists, because that must be a possibility. If so what of those alternatives? They are:

1.       That God and is utterly capricious in as much as he (or ‘she’ if you prefer, presumably the greatest conceivable being has no gender) pays little or no attention to our affairs and goes his own way.

2.       That God deliberately challenges us to develop our level of understanding, our wisdom. The youngest of Job’s comforters, Elihu, says as much when he talks of all the misery of the world in Winter and then says of God, “He causes it to come, Whether for correction, Or for His land, Or for mercy.”[8]

3.       That the God who is the Great Unknown[9] exists within but does not transcend time and space and though he does care enough to intervene in our lives in answer to prayer, or perhaps just by capricious whim. He can do nothing to stem the tide of death and that everyone will cease to exist, ultimately even God (at the end of time).

4.       That there is a transcendent God and he does care but that he doesn’t save everyone, just those chosen few whom have behaved as he requires and the rest are either sent to some eternal hell or perhaps, more mercifully, just obliterated for their sins.

5.       That there is a God who does not believe in death and that, in some degree, in some shape or form, we all live forever (and there are of course many variations on this theme – such as the concept of reincarnation).  

But clearly there is a God (in my view).

Prove it? Well what matters is the experience of God. Most believers have their own seminal moment. For me it was when I was farming and had no money to buy sheep and was finished – so one night I prayed up a storm, went to a casino, placed everything I had on number seven, and came away with enough money to stock the farm with sheep on just one roll of the wheel.

No you point out – that’s trite. What about all the other times you prayed for things that didn’t work out? You are going to base your faith in God on one turn of the roulette wheel? And you have a cogent point.

1.   The God doesn’t care option

What if God doesn’t care about us? In a sense the idea is irrelevant – since having a disinterested loser for God is no better than having no God?

There is of course a way to spin this that is more heartening.

My own father had to face a hard death despite my prayers. My wife suffers from multiple sclerosis and I can’t seem to pray her out of that. For every plus there seems to be a minus. On the plus side I have clawed my way out of debt many times by the grace of God in answer to prayer. And there have been some healings. These healings, when they have happened, have been amazing. There was a little child, Tomasina, who was dying with a hole in her heart and collapsed arteries, had indeed been sent home to die, and the women of the church sowing circle prayed her into life though they’d never met her.

I have seen many miracles. But there have also been the many times prayer has been unanswered.

Now the Christian would say, “No, every prayer is answered.” Really? Who are you kidding? Experience dictates otherwise.

One possible truth is God doesn’t think like you or me. We therefore have quite a job getting through to our Father-Mother in heaven.

OK now press the pause button a moment before we go on. This gender of God issue is going to hamper us at every turn. And ‘God’ is such a small pagan word for the concept of the greatest conceivable being. In the Old Testament book of Exodus[10], according to the Hebrew text, God tells Moses “I am who I am”[11] and says he should tell his people, “I AM has sent me to you”. In the Greek text of the original “I am who I am” is actually written “I am the One Being”[12]. Perhaps we should switch now whilst we still have the chance and start calling God “The One Being”. But that implies that we are all a part of God which may or may not be the truth. Alternatively God could go by the Alawite name for God, which seems more apt, and which is, “The Great Unknown”. And to stretch our minds a little – yours and mine – perhaps we should not use either the masculine or indefinite pronouns for The Great Unknown. Instead we could refer to our supreme being with the feminine pronoun, not because God is a woman, but because God is not a man and we need to knock that idea out of our thought and addressing God as female balances things out a little. Well we may for a while. Being politically correct all the time gets exhausting. So if I slip back into calling the Great Unknown “God”, or “Him”, you will have to forgive me.

So why does prayer sometimes go unanswered? Well clearly the Great Unknown has different priorities. For a start one can but presume that a caring god does not believe in death in quite the way we do. And how do you pray for the avoidance of death to an unbelieving supreme being? Just because you believe that death is the end does not necessarily mean She believes death is the end. Don’t make the mistake of shaping god into your own image. You might as well fashion a manikin of gold and worship that. The Great Unknown does not have our priorities. That does not mean She does not care.

Then we have the little issue of freedom of choice. I mean we should and must pray the great prayers like “Give us peace in Jerusalem”[13]. But the Great Unknown is not going to descend in a clap of thunder and knock heads together and impose peace on earth. First it’s not her style and second it would mess up our freedom to make our own mistakes. And she will never do that because to do so would disrupt the very purpose of the universe.

But presumably I have failed to convince you. You believe that the Great Unknown’s intervention in this life can as easily be described as the outcome of mere chance; that we might as well toss a dice as watch for answered prayer because outcomes would be just as predictable.

All right: Let’s just deal once more with that, “If there is a God” issue.

When I was a younger man I travelled in Sudan. I was writing articles and selling advertising for a supplement we were putting in a publication called ‘Voice’ that I was editing at the time. Our advertising agent was a man by the name of Mahmoud Hassaballah. Now dear Hassaballah was a wild man, in evidence of which I submit the fact that he, together with a gun toting accountant, and a Sudanese Army Colonel, had taken me drinking to a house in Omdurman where we dipped raw camel’s liver into pepper sauce, drank Black Label, watched an effete young boy who danced like an angel and sang like a girl, and were fed rice stuffed pigeons. It was only far later when they all disappeared and a sweet, sari-clad African girl materialised in their stead that I realised the place was a brothel.

Next day we had to drive down to Wad Madani in the Gezira cotton growing area. That’s a long way out and a long way back. We were early going out and I slept much of the way given the party the night before. By the time we were coming home it was late afternoon. We were crossing an area of desert where the sand was black as coal, a strange place with its immense horizons and the sweltering heat. I said to Hassaballah, “How come you believe in God? I mean you of all people, given the fact that your life is the way it is with women and drink and such, how can you be even remotely religious?”

For answer Hassaballah swerved off the road into the desert, the wheels of the car kicking up a cloud of black dust. He pulled the car to a halt and climbed out motioning to me to do the same. “Watch,” he said.

And we waited and we watched as the great red-gold orb of the vast setting sun was consumed by the immense blackness of the desert, melting into the ground it touched, in breathtaking, heart rending magnificence.

“Now you too believe in God,” said Hassaballah. 

Still unconvinced? Ok well let’s say the jury is out. That even if I haven’t proved to your satisfaction that the Great Unknown actually exists, perhaps you will concede that She might possibly exist and that if She does exist she is no dispassionate unconcerned creator, She takes a hands on interest in what is going on. The idea that a God exists that doesn’t care simply does not ring true.

2.   The God cares and he tests us because he cares option

What if God cares and he tests us because he cares? Even Darwin might like this idea. God conspires to make the species stronger. If so we can all take solace in our suffering in the knowledge it is for the greater good.

Tell that to the dying child in Gaza. Perhaps behaviour of this kind is acceptable in your world on the basis that there is a difference between punishment and discipline. It is not acceptable in my universe. Not unless there is the consolation of salvation down the line. That of course would change everything. We had best hold onto that hope lest God become a schoolmaster with a stick but no carrot. And I would like to think better of him than that.

That said there is an underlying truth here. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger they say. Well perhaps that’s taking things a bit far, but certainly enduring tribulations can, and often does, help us grow. Life is, after all, a learning process.

3.   The God cares but hasn’t the power option

Alternatively, there is a concept of a limited God, but here we are scarcely talking about the Great Unknown. One could imagine a spiritual “Big Bang” or moment of spontaneous creation bringing with it a temporal God, a God existing within time and space; bringing such a god into being alongside the creation of the material universe. Such a God might die with the end of time and the spontaneous creation of a new heaven and a new earth. There is even scriptural authority for such an Alpha and Omega[14] concept of God. But then there’s scriptural authority for almost anything if you search hard enough. Such a God would not have true dominion over death. Were the Great Unknown thus limited it would be pointless trying to view Her other than as a mirror of ourselves. She would be made in our image as much as we in Hers. She could still be useful though.

The essential difficulty with such a concept is that such a person would not be the greatest conceivable being, indeed would be more a demigod than a god; a valuable concept for a fantasy novel but fairly irrelevant when it comes to any real eschatology.

In a sense this is important for what it is not. Here we are talking about a God who cannot offer us eternal life except in some amorphous, ‘meld with me’ form which might sustain a Buddhist monk or a Sufi mystic, and might conceivably even be the truth but for most of us who don’t exist on such a selfless plane, would be pretty indiscernibly different from mere oblivion.

No, instinctively, I can’t say I like the idea of a limited God. The concept jars. I recognise it as a possible truth but choose not to believe it – and life is all about choices after all.  

4.   The ‘choice between death and eternal life’ option

However, what if God’s approach is to give us a choice, a ‘choice between death and eternal life’? Now this is the scary one. This is the option given us that is alluded to by Christ, Mohamed and throughout the Judaeo-Christian tradition whereby the prophets not only talk of “hell” in parables and allegories but imply that eternal death awaits the sinner and some sort of Elysian Field existence awaits the righteous. The nature of this heaven aside for the moment, does the notion that the choice is between death and eternal life hold water?

The answer is an absolute but uncomfortable ‘Yes’.  Of course for this to work requires a terrifyingly omnipotent supreme being. With this option the Great Unknown is truly the greatest conceivable being with an omniscient mind that can sift the wheat from the chaff and dispense justice on an individual basis. We can but hope that She chooses to be merciful.

There is one problem with this; it seems a bit unnatural and counterintuitive. That some should live whilst others die; that the Great Unknown is some sort of cosmic gardener picking over her plot and plucking up the tares and throwing them onto the bonfire whilst She replants the promising seedlings in Elysian soil.

It’s not that I am uncomfortable with the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient God, far from it. It is just that it seems a little petty for the Great Unknown to get Her hands dirty in quite this way. It just doesn’t resonate.

It is, however, the ideological position adopted by many but not all of mainstream Christianity’s senior clerics. On 27 March 2018, the Vatican was sent into a flurry of denial when Pope Francis was reliably quoted as, perhaps quite reasonably, telling a renowned Italian Atheist by the name of Eugenio Scalfari, a co-founder and former editor of La Repubblica, that, “Hell does not exist, the disappearance of sinful souls exists”. The Vatican really need not have got so distressed. The Pope was after all only echoing the words of Christ and the main thrust of biblical teaching[15].

5.   The ‘Nothing Dies’ option

And what if nothing dies? That surely would be the truly terrifying afterlife, an afterlife in which you can’t kill the Spirit[16]; essentially we all go on forever.

Always tough to prove there is an afterlife of any kind of course. There are the alleged first hand proofs. The “I saw Jesus” stories being one prime example that goes right back to the Garden of Gethsemane. But are they to be believed? Some of us, a minority perhaps, have our own episodes that give us pause.

I remember as a young man of twenty, spending a night in the arms of Jackie Malden, a doe-eyed neighbour who had stolen my heart. It was a December night and I was fast asleep when, in the middle of the night, I woke with a start to see my American Grandmother’s face in the corner of the room. “Gaga” we called her for reasons history does not relate. I switched on the bedside light to realise that I was looking at an exact spot where there was the lampshade of a standard lamp across the room. But the impression of having seen Gaga’s face was vividly seared on my brain. The following day I was phoned by my mother to be told that Gaga had been struck by a car and killed that very hour at which I had seen her image. Proof of some form of extra sensory perception undoubtedly; I am certain of that. But was that proof of an afterlife? Not per se. But for the moment, for the sake of argument in the context of exploring the implications of the “nothing ever dies” concept, we will go with the assumption that there is an afterlife.

How would this pan out in reality? Well not very easily really. Does the afterlife become a continuation of the struggle that this life has been? Some would appreciate that: Better than sitting round in a circle singing hymns of praise through eternity which, presumably, would be mind-numbingly dull. Perhaps you say, now we see through a glass darkly[17]. Really? Pious is pious whichever way you cut the cake.

But the real concern is not what happens to those that get the Brownie points and enter the Kingdom of Heaven. What of the others, doomed or cursed to live forever? Are they consigned to a living hell? Presumably. Well it’s the logical consequence. A hell of their own making no doubt but a hell none the less.

And if you truly can’t kill the spirit, what, over time, is the result? Presumably the damned fade away, melding slowly into the melting pot, the cosmic ocean (much like the Men of the White Mountains in the Lord of the Rings story who would have faded over time to nothingness had they not have been enlisted in the Army of the Dead). Not a great prospect for the selfish but, I would argue, the most likely of our alternative eternities.

And if I am right, you and I should tremble, not for ourselves because why worry about your own salvation? You’ll either make it or you won’t. But we should tremble for the myriad that clearly won’t make it. We should tremble for those doomed by the indestructibility of the soul.

Back to the Future

Of course the truth is that none of us “Knows” the truth. Not the Atheist. Not the Agnostic. And certainly not the Believer with all the multifaceted shapes and sizes[18] in which believers come. But we like to think we know. And none can gainsay us. The convinced atheist is as dependent on “Faith” in his or her position as is the convinced Hindu with a belief in reincarnation. My personal thinking on the nature of creation and its consequence is shaped by encounters with others[19]. But most particularly my attitude is shaped by the scriptures as well as my personal still small voice (that encounter with God that many of us have).

So what is the Truth?

So what is the Truth? Who knows but we can guess I guess, and I guess that there is a God, and that she is a gardener, and that the choice is between death and eternal life. But that God’s criteria for goodness may not quite gel with that of some in religious leadership. Because like a gardener, I think God chooses the plants with potential. Which means the plants with a capacity for increased loving. Not intelligence. Just loving. Loving is the criteria if you want to be left in the flowerbed and not weeded out.

It is not for nothing that Jesus Christ says, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”[20]

 

---

[1] Deuteronomy 3:22 Do not be afraid of them; the Lord your God himself will fight for you. Deuteronomy 31:6 Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Psalm 23:4 Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. Psalm 27:1 The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life — of whom shall I be afraid? Psalm 46:1-3 God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging. Psalm 56:3-4 When I am afraid, I put my trust in you. In God, whose word I praise — in God I trust and am not afraid. What can mere mortals do to me? Psalm 118:6 The Lord is with me; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me? Isaiah 41:10 So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. Isaiah 41:13 For I am the Lord your God who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you. Lamentations 3:57 You came near when I called you, and you said, “Do not fear.” Haggai 2:5 ‘This is what I covenanted with you when you came out of Egypt. And my Spirit remains among you. Do not fear.’ Luke 12:7 Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. John 14:27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. Hebrews 13:6 So we say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?”

[2] An ancient version is recorded in the Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 53a.

[3] Matthew 20. New International Version (NIV) The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard: “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agreed to pay them a denarius for the day and sent them into his vineyard. About nine in the morning he went out and saw others standing in the marketplace doing nothing. He told them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. He went out again about noon and about three in the afternoon and did the same thing. About five in the afternoon he went out and found still others standing around. He asked them, ‘Why have you been standing here all day long doing nothing?’ ‘Because no one has hired us,’ they answered. He said to them, ‘You also go and work in my vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, ‘Call the workers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last ones hired and going on to the first.’ The workers who were hired about five in the afternoon came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’ But he answered one of them, ‘I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.

[4]   “But I rejoiced in the Lord greatly, that now at last you have revived your concern for me; indeed, you were concerned before, but you lacked opportunity. Not that I speak from want, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need.…” Philippians 4:10-12 New American Standard version.

[5] Variations on this theme were common in the ancient world but the phrase as we use it is a conflation of two biblical sayings, Ecclesiastes 8:15, ‘Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry’, and Isaiah 22:13, ‘Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die.’

[6] “carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero” or “seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next”. From Horace’s Odes.

[7] I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. Alfred Lord Tennyson

[8] Job 37:13

[9] The Allawite name for God

[10] Exodus 3:14

[11] Hebrew transliteration: ’eh·yeh ’ă·šer eh·yeh

[12] Greek transliteration: Egō eimi ho eimi

[13] Psalm 122:6-7 New American Standard Bible Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: May they prosper who love you. May peace be within your walls, And prosperity within your palaces.

[14] “Who gave them as the dust to his sword, as driven stubble to his bow? . . .  Who has performed and done it, calling the generations from the beginning. ‘I the Lord am the first; and with the last I am He’.” Isaiah 41:3-4 New King James Version.

[15] “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 6.23, New International Version.

[16] You’ll perhaps remember the song, original words by Naomi Little Bear, additional lyrics by the women of Greenham Common: “You can't kill the Spirit, She is like a mountain, Old and strong, She goes on and on and on, She is like a mountain... (repeat)”

[17] ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ 1 Corinthians 13:12 King James Version.

[18] Of course most religions teach that it’s my way or the highway. St Paul famously told Christians, “Teach no other doctrine,” 1 Timothy 1:3 New King James Version. But I like the many shades of belief. It gives you a choice to find your truth.

[19] The writings of Tolstoy; those of Mullah Sadra, the great Islamic thinker; discussions with Allawite thinker, Dr Rifat al Assad; with my sometime parish priest, Father Larry Wright, and others.

[20] Mathew 18:2