Our Lady of the Dunes

I became acquainted with Mary of Egypt through Kathleen Norris's book The Cloister Walk. She is a a saint better known in the Orthodox world. According to her Vita, Mary was a girl who came to the city of Alexandria from the country found out she had an outrageous taste for sex. She loved to have so with so many men and in so many ways that, though she was a prostitute, she would take no pay. She preferred to to make her living by begging and weaving flax. After seventeen years of this, she decided to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and sold her sexual favors to the pilgrims on the ship in order to pay for her passage. Once in Jerusalem, she attempted to enter the Holy Sepulcher, but was barred by a force of holiness that repelled her sinfulness. She had to repent before and image of the Blessed Virgin before she was allowed in, and when entered the church a voice told her that if she crossed the Jordan she would find glorious rest. This she did, becoming an ascetic for the rest of her life.

This is a ridiculous story.

No whore, no matter how much she loved pleasure, would turn down her living to beg on the streets. This is a portrait of a woman of unregulated and almost demonic desires. If we were taking it seriously, we could say she was someone who, coming to a strange city, had suffered from sexual abuse and dealt with it by becoming a nymphomaniac. We could even say she was delivered from this cycle of sexual slavery by meeting good Christian souls who counseled her into a life of holiness and ended her demonic drive for sex. But we are not taking this story seriously, This is a common fantasy of hagiographies told by men who fear sex as much as they long for it. Such stories wind their way not only into Christianity, but Buddhism as well, To read Mary's story as I just did is to give it too much credit.

Holy men love stories about holy sluts. The idea of a holy whore who repents and becomes a celibate feeds the warped sexual imagination. The idea that the holy woman must have, at one point, been an outrageous slut, stimulates the undersexed Christian with the oversexed mind.  In the Western Church, Christian men had already settled on the picture of the penitent slut as Mary Magdalene, but in the equally sex addicted and sexphobic patriarchy of the Orthodox world, Mary Magdalene's status was nearly as inviolate as the Virgin Mary's. They needed their own holy slut, enter Mary of Egypt.

Was there a Mary of Egypt always revered in the Holy Land? Possibly. Was she an outrageous slut who whored her way through a boat full of pilgrims to get the Holy Land? Doubtful. Was she separate from Mary Magdalene, or is it possible that she was Mary Magdalene, and her reputation was sullied in the East as it was in the West? This is speculation, but it is possible, for Mary Magdalene was seen as a hermitess, and certainly had monasteries built in her honor, and they were indeed in Syria and in Egypt.  

A saint, like a hero or like a god has this great fortune, she does not have to be historically real to be real. It is enough that her archetypal existence correspond to something in the deeper reality which we reach not through history and science, but through visions and dreams. No matter what we say of Magdalene, she always has a link to the sexual and the sensuous, and while this is bad to Christianity, it is not bad in and of itself. She certainly captures the Asherah image of the Mother and the Lover more than the Virgin Mary ever could and so she may be more essential. Mary of Egypt seems to be, if not Magdalene, then part of her. Her story, looked at away from Christian eyes is interesting. A prostitute who does not take pay, but delights in sex and offers it freely is a sacred prostitute, and so we see Mary as sacred whore coming to the Holy Sepulcher, that is the Axis Mundi, the Omphalos and the Spiral Castle, and her she switches from being whore to celibate hermitess, the very other side of what she was. She enters as whore and crosses out of this place into the desert as Virgin.

Christianity stops the revolution of the spiral. There is no cycle. Things go in one direction. Assumedly, though,  if she entered the Spiral Castle again and were spun out the other way, she would be Whore again.  If she continued the cross, she would find herself in many permutations. Mary becomes the Two in One and the One in many, and this is brilliant because, of course, she is Mary of Egypt, and the oldest word for Egypt is Kem and the Arabs honestly called that land Al Chemy, so she is Mary of Alchemy, the Lady of the Great Work and the Chemical Marriage.  Oh, Mary, Our Lady of the Sands, grant us clarity of heart and hand, whole hearted devotion for the Beloved, and the power of true prayer and dedication to the Great Work. Amen.

Solemnity of Magdalene Mother of the New Creation: Sixth and Final Sunday in Extraordinary Time

Around the Feast of Mary Magdalene, I could not help but return to the author of a series of dull books I had perused twenty years ago and put down, Margaret Starbird, and it turns out this is not a made up name. Her books hypothesize, though one wonders who you can get multiple books from this, that Jesus's mission was to restore the Sacred Feminine and Mary Magdalene was his wife, and that the two of them performed the hieros gamos (sacred marriage). At the time of the Crucifixion Roman soldiers were busy trying to kill the family of Jesus and so Joseph of Arimathea found Mary Magdalene and smuggled her away where she had Jesus's baby. The baby, a daughter, was the Sacred Bloodline of Israel, the Holy Grail. 

Now, there is so much ridiculous about this premise, starting with the fact that Starbird borrowed it in large part from a highly fictional work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. As legend it is lacking and as history it is ludicrous. It is also mythologically lacking because it is theologically lacking, meaning, the story has no real implication on Christianity.

And yet, there does seem to be some wonderful truth to it. For twenty centuries we have been presented with the rather incongruous couple of Jesus and his mother, and the image of the Bride, the Church has been symbolized by his mother as well, but this isn't quite right. It isn't appropriate. So many of the images and titles which have been heaped on the Virgin, change our approach to theology and humanism and great deal, if they make their way to Mary Magdalene, the woman who seems to be very much the partner of Jesus and the first to see him rise. She even carries in her iconography an egg, which is seen to be a symbol of resurrection, but of course, eggs mean birth. In many stories the world is hatched from an egg. Helen of Troy and her siblings hatched from eggs and the egg is not simply birth, but divine birth, or if it is resurrection, is the resurrection of everything.

Now, there is no story that tells us Jesus and Mary were husband and wife, and in fact Margaret Starbird's idea of hieros gamos is so wrong because husbands and wives did not perform it, if it was performed at all. The idea of Mary as the Radha to Jesus's Krishna, Mary as Divine Lover, carries great steam. The new creation is not about sex or marriage. It is spiritual and its spirituality can be celebrated through sex or marriage. Nuns are called the brides of Christ, those set aside for Christ alone are called his brides and it seems very much as if Magdalene is the first of these, even in legend she becomes a hermit and a healer. If we see Magdalene not as the wife of Jesus, but the spiritual bride who met him mentally and psychically, we can see her as the Mother of the New Creation.  

This means making a mental shift in the idea of Our Lady. The Catholic churches have see Mary Jesus's mother as Our Lady and some people more on hope than scholarship imagine that this title originally belong to Mary Magdalene. I don't know that this is true, but we can apply it to her. The more I look at icons of Mary of Nazareth, the more I see how many can belong to Magdalene, or even should. There is of course, that strange icon of Mary that seems principally the domain of the Virgin Mother, and that is the Madonna and Child. But at a closer inspection, even this is not necessarily the image of the Virgin.

Isn't it strange, that the Lord who taught and suffered and died and is considered the King of Glory is endlessly represented, even in the company of other saints, as a baby in his mother's arm's? Isn't it strange that even Saint Anthony carries a Baby Jesus?  What if the baby is not Jesus? What is the baby is the New Creation, the Church? In the very confusing Book of Revelation, a Woman Clothed in the Sun is chased by a Dragon and gives birth to a Child. In Catholicism we are roughly told the Woman  is the Virgin Mary giving birth to the Church or Jesus. Some say the Woman is the Church, but what is she giving birth to? The Apocalypse of John though is a vision, not a forecast, and we might not want to spend so much time trying to solve it, but certainly Mary Magdalene, chased from the mainstream vision of Christianity and hiding out in desolate places could be giving birth to her Child, which is the New Creation, the Secret Church, Us. What if Mary did have a baby by Jesus? What if that baby is us, is the new creation we can barely see, the Secret Church? What if it is our task to become Magdalene, to not go off on our own, or to be ever subject to a divine will, but to meld our will and our love with that Will and that Love and bring for this Child ourselves. What if Mary is the Mother of Alchemy? 

The Solemnity of Saint Mary Magdalene Our Lady of the Secret Church

So, I am still thinking about Elizabeth Shrader's article, and her thesis on alteration of the texts of the Gospel of John, especially in the case of the story of Mary and Martha and the raising of Lazarus. As many people have suspected and fantasized, the early orthodox hierarchy of the Churches cut out or limited the influence of Mary Magdalene which means we have an entirely different orthodox Christianity than we might have. Did those first Christians know that the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Jesus would fill the vacuum left by Mary being cut up into several Marys and hidden away? Was it something that they decided they could live with? But it does create something a little strange, especially when we get to the Middle Ages and we enter the cult of the Virgin at the same time we have the cult of courtly love.

Our Christianity, and to an extent, out fantastic view of things crystallized in the Middle Ages. I would even go so far as to say we have three ways of looking at things: the legendary and fantastic way: Arthur with his lovely Queen Guinevere, lady of Camelot. Then the actual terrestrial way, some king on his throne, let's say Henry the Second,and his wife, Queen Eleanor. And then the heavenly way, the court of heaven C.S. Lewis loved so much, wrote about and in some ways modeled Narnia on. There is a hiccup here, for Jesus is king, but he is an infant king, and his lady is.... his mother.

The absence of Mary Magdalene and or her exile means the absence of a complete picture of a heavenly Queen with a beloved. It means a sharp difference in the quality of devotion. There is no Radha to Jesus's Krishna. It means a different look at sex. We may say Mary Magdalene was a devoted disciple of Jesus and nothing more. We may say she was Jesus's lover, but even the most modern minds have a difficulty with her being both. Our views of sex and of holiness prize distance so much that we cannot imagine a divine disciple going to bed with her Master. We cannot imagine Jesus teaching his most personal things while lying in bed with Mary, or John for that matter. And it is not that this is the way things went down. Who knows how things went down? But it is that this vision was taken from us. In losing Mary Magdalene, in letting her be turned into a reformed harlot of a friend of Jesus who is prominently named but disappears from the face of the formal church, we lose a Queen of Heaven and a lady of the church who has nothing to do with virginity.

It is hard to say what we lost when we lost Magdalene. How many sights called Our Lady might have been hers? What would a church have been like that reverenced her as much it reverenced Mary of Nazareth, or reverenced her more? How would we think of ourselves and our relationship to Christ if the chiefest relationship to Christ was not of a penitent Peter who had betrayed him, but of a lover who had never abandoned him, not even at the Cross? What if in place of the shame that characterizes most Christian interactions with the divine, what if rather than Paul, the reformed and sexually repressed sinner (and killer) being the model of Christianity, we had the Magdalene? We don't exactly know what we lost in losing her, how can we, but around her we see, much like Saint John the Baptist, the signs of some powerful reverence lost to the mainstream church which must be recaptured, and this is why it is Saint Magdalene who is lady of the invisible church which lies in secret, and Mistress of all lost things.

Fifth Sunday in Extraordinary Time, Black Land Sunday

Witches, mystics, magicians and other occultists are always using the term, alchemical, or saying that what we practice is alchemy. We speak of the alchemy of our magic, and we even speak of the Alchemical Wedding. Serious students of the Craft are quick to state that what we do is part of the Western Occult Tradition, and the world Alchemy always figures into it. If we are practicing Wiccan rituals, Garnerian or Alexandrian, then the position of salt is alchemical, and the phrase in the circle blessing, "Blessed art thou salt, without which we would not be," is alchemical.

This is personal to me because I was having, as a Masonic initiate, a bit of a crisis, namely that I fundamentally was coming to disagree with Freemasonry in all of its forms, but that I had been attracted to it for its underlying deep teachings, its teachings which were, yes, alchemical.The tightness I was feeling, the not alrightness in calling myself a Mason and my studies Masonic was relieved when it was revealed to me in the silence before the altar, that what I was doing and pursuing was Alchemy, not Masonry, and that the native soil of my search was not a Masonic hall in England or America, but much further back in the fertile land of Egypt or, as the Arabs called it, Al Chem, the translation of what the Egyptians actually called Egypt, Kem, the Black Land.

That land is black for several reasons, the most obvious first, that Egypt, one of the most ancient and long lasting cohesive societies gained its life from the River Nile constantly keeping its canyon banks black with fertile soil. The outer land which eventually was part of Egypt was the Red Land, but the Black Land was Egypt's heart. But Egyptians, like all ancient people, thought on multiple levels, and the fertile black farming land was the base of all things, needing always to be kept fertile and powerful by Khnum, the ram headed shaper of men and giver of creativity. The knowledge and power, the spiritual practice of Egypt, what we call magic, was taken all over the surrounding word, first by trade, probably with the Minoans and Mycenaeans, later by the classical Greeks and still later by the Arabs and Persians. It would have gone south long before that into Nubia and Ethiopia, but when it traveled into Europe is was called Alchemy, the Art of the Black Land or, quite simply, The Black Art.

I returned to the beach, but it wasn't quite right. The trip went smoothly, but missed something. I was disappointed to see, as I was planning to leave, that the great red image of Khnum which overlooked these waters, had been removed. Litter was on the beach and it was becoming too crowded to quickly. By the end of the week, the mayor of Michigan City closed the beach park down. The removal of the horned lord of creation, the source who brings constant fertility to the Black Land, could be clearly felt. 

This Sunday, and this week, and really, all times afterward, it is time to remember the Black Land. And when I say this I mean it is time to return to our own foundation, not be afraid to go to the bedrock of our knowledge systems and of our hearts. We all have a black land, a baseland, that is ancient and true, that is kept fertile by the God of Creation, and that must be fostered and tendered at all times.   

Fourth Week in Extraordinary Time, Week of the Initiation. Anniversary Sunday

I haven't written in here for a while. That's actually okay. I post less in the summer anyway, and then, this is a page that is meant to reflect the growth of my practice and sometimes it's more important to sit back and learn, to be quiet and observe and let things form. This is the fifth week of Extraordinary Time. This Sunday was the Sunday that marked eighteen years in the Craft. I've been examining where I've come from and where I want to go, what's important and what needs to be put away, and of late I've been looking at the degree system and initiation. On YouTube, Ayla, from Australia, a Wiccan, spoke of her life as a first degree witch and all the work that went into each degree, the spiritual and psychic things that were opened in each and how each took a year and a day. She spoke of her progression so far, as a member of the outer court. She did Outer Court twice, and spent three years in it, and then after this she was Crafted and only after these two stages was she brought into her First Degree. On the other hand, Nick of Dorset Wild Life Coven, which is Old Craft, speaks of only one initiation.70's He talked about being initiated as an Alexandrian in the early seventies, and having gone through their degrees. He talked about how, in his time, in contrast to the year and a day waiting period between each degree, and he and most witches who lived in the 60s and 70s went through this in a matter of months. But what Nick said was that, in the end, only one initiation is necessary, that between you and your gods and no witch can truly initiate you but you. Both of these witches told very different stories about initiation and yet both acknowledged the validity of other peoples' path and the subjectivity of their own.

I am reminded that people who get very furious about knowing the truth and what they are doing being the truth are those who, unfortunately have never experienced truth. Not only Christians or upholders of traditional religion, but even pagans and witches, are told a thing and told it is true and get very upset if someone disagrees because they do not have the strength of actual experience. Not being able to say, this is true for me. I have experienced it for myself, and I don't know what you will experience, most people are shaken by disagreements. They need other people to believe in their world, precisely because it has not yet become their world.

When I first came to the Craft, the Internet wasn't what it is, and neither was my knowledge of it. So things were not open to me the way they are open now. I didn't know anything. When Ayla and this Nick talk of their journey I need to see how mine aligns. I don't need my path to be the same as theirs. There is no uniform witch path, but I want to know how theirs informs mine. I didn't know words like Outer Court and Crafted or even much understand the concept of degrees when I first took a bath with salts and candles and chose a different way. What I know is I had reached a point where the world and the knowledge I was handed were not enough, and I knew there were other paths to walk. I knew the word for that walking was witch. I remember the excitement of going to old shops in town looking for incense, for my first robe, purchasing candles, not really knowing what I was doing, but that I had to do it. I took the weekend after the Fourth of July to Emancipate myself and dedicate to a path I knew little about. I stumbled a great deal. There were many, many, many many dead ends. I found myself with strange people in stranger places and often nothing seemed to be happening at all. There were no covens to go to, so I went to churches till I couldn't deal with them anymore. I had a complicated dance with religion in general until I finally decided I needed to pursue it alone, and away from any formal communities, which is why I am solitary. I can't say that was my Outer Court, but it was my long Crafting. It was years before I ever went through a process like degrees, and there is a reason for that. In a coven someone can say this person is ready, but the only person to police a solitary is the solitary, and I had to make very sure I was ready and worthy of studying and initiating through degrees. There have been so many fools who call themselves witches because they went to a spiral dance at a Unitarian church, picked up a Llewellyn Press book at Barnes and Nobles, or bought some black clothes and a deck or Tarot cards. I did not wish to fool myself.

The card this week that symbolizes the Sunday of Dedication is the Magician. I rarely draw it but drew it this week. He stands as Master of all four elements and I once believed that this was the end game for me, for witches. Now I am coming to understand the Magician is not us, but the Teacher, the God, the Master of Magics that some called Odin, or Enki or Hermes. He is Pan, the Bucca, the Witch's Devil or even Christ. The Magician presides in the midst of all ritual and all of our seeking, and in Alchemy he is the Holy Child. The Magician is the personification of the Four Elements. He is the Magic. The Magician is in fact, the Magical Path. It is not my job to master everything to perfection, but to walk this Way.

I need the path of several degrees, frankly, because I need to always be dying and rising. I need to be starting over again. A lot. Once does not work for me. This Monday, after the Initiation Anniversary I went to Lake Michigan where the water was milky blue and the heat and fire of the sun beat on me while air blue on me. My feet sang into the sand and pebbles as I went under the waters. A wave took me and I tumbled around in a circle inside of it. I need to be reborn. A lot.

The need for Initiation does not go away. It is in every path, and like the Fool, we never know what we're doing. It's a grace if we make it out alive, and receiving a degree isn't quite the same as being initiated. Nick or the Dorset Coven speaks of initiation saying it may entail be being buried in the earth, or walking through fire. That is is usually done in the nude because its hard to be born in a suit or a billowy robe. He says the experience is and should be "uncomfortable". This is a revelation because I have been having a most uncomfortable time and though I was doing something wrong. For some reason I equated rebirth wirth refreshment, even fun, even self assurance. The English witch reminds me that rebirth is putting down, it is death. It is resurrection. And that's always a little messy.

Pulling Yourself Together, the Fractured Psyche as Legacy of Monotheism

Fractured Self by JJRoberson

So much ot the language of prayer is a strange repentance for not being able to measure up to what we believe we should be. This is as true outside of conventional churches as in them. The world before monotheism saw a hosts of deities more or less in some form of unity, but also sometimes striving one against another, but the Israelite insistence on One God, not the Oneness of God, not the Eastern idea of Atman, but one personality controlling things changed the story of God and the story of the human psyche. The Sumerians could talk about deities hostile to humanity causing a flood because they were annoyed by humans, and one god, Enki, friendly to humans, saving them by instructions to build an ark. The Israelite account became one God, as crabby as the last set, but willing to save one family, and--we were told--justified in his crabbiness. And what crabbiness it was! Cities burned by falling sulfur, families swallowed into the ground, random plagues. When one God became the only god in town he had to take on all aspects of the Divine. What's more, even though he was required to do this, he was incapable of it. Yahweh could be a war god, but he was not going to be a god of sexual pleasure. In the book of Isaiah, he would brag about causing evil, but in the end this was too much, so a Devil was made. In the new view, the world was more divided than it ever would be and some things were simply no longer sacred. They were even flat out evil.

Yahweh could never really be the God of all. When that attempt was made the world was bound to be filled with devils and shadows and why in the world does that matter except that, as our minds turned from the world of pantheism to the world or monotheism the same thing happened to us. I had to stop myself and still stop myself from driving out my demons rather than soothing them. I still live, mentally, that Christian life, impatient that I cannot be as wise or courageous, or visionary as I want to be, or that while one part of me walks the path in certainty, another part is fearful in doubting. There are many parts of me. I do have a childlike spirit, but there is also an overzealous guard attending the child because he hasn't always succeeded in guarding him. And there is the Divine Spirit, God and Goddess and Lover as well. There is a sage in me as well as a lustful creature that takes pleasure whenever offered.  The fun parts of me I love. The frightened or mean ones I would drive out ruthlessly. But true integration means naming and accepting those rough fellows. In another time I would have even called those recalcitrant parts unholy or demonic. It is believed that much of what has been regarded as demon possession was the failure of a person to except certain parts of themselves until they grew into unholy and tormenting others within the psyche. But we often want, self included, is an integration that is defined by ridding ourselves of these difficult personas, and that may not be a reality.

Polytheism, the freedom to see many Gods where, for seventeen centuries there had been only one game in town, ought to be accompanied by a freedom to live with the many selves inside of us. The teaching that some gods are devils trickles down to us  believing some parts of us are devilish and not be borne as well. When Asherah is no longer divine, neither is lust and our desire is made shameful. As we step closer to embracing the gods we have forgotten or demonized, let us embrace with equal love the parts of us to which we have done the same.

Third Sunday in Extraordinary Time, Sunday of the Journey. Fool Sunday

I have been cheated before. I think I see through situations well, but this seeing came at a great cost. Aside from the many times that I gave too much of my time to the wrong people, there was a time some years ago when I trusted too much and too easily and lost a great deal of money to thieves. So, despite all the signs of doing business with a legitimate company, to this day there is part of me that is afraid it is not legitimate, is somehow a set up stealing all that I have. Against the measured common sense I use to direct myself, there is this almost constantly nervous sentinel inside of me that, having slept through its watch, is afraid of missing something again.

I want to be the holy Fool, the trusting only half human prince who steps off the edge of the world with his wallet of wealth strapped to his back, who is journeying in joy accompanied by the dog who symbolizes the soul and guardian of otherworldly things, the faithful companion. I want to be this Fool who is wholly trusting, heedless and ready to go off into whatever adventure, but overwhelmingly there is this nagging guard posted in my ear that worries and worries about the very practical until its worries are, in fact, no longer very practical at all.

I grew up in a house of worry. My mother was endlessly worried and dramatically afraid. It didn't stop her from making poor choices, and it didn't make our lives any better. There was an endless cycle of poor decision making, bad planning, and then nail biting anxiety. It reminds me of a talk a spiritual teacher gave about how difficult the spiritual life was, saying, "We don't have models. Our mothers and fathers were like this, everyone around us is like this. It is hard to get better."  And it is hard. Depending upon what path one came from and whatever angle, one might say, "I want peace. I want power. I want to experience love. I want to love God. I want forgiveness. I want holiness" but often it seems like what we want is to simply escape the madness of the world, to stop being crazy.

So it is comforting that the Buddha's last words are "Strive on" that even in the blissful joy of the Hare Krishnas' chanting, we are reminding that spiritual life is "work".  Closer to most of our homes are the constant injunctions of Jesus, such as: "We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God..." (Acts 14.22) The hard work we go through is appropriate and normal. The fact that we are not yet as loving or courageous or faithful or peaceful as we wish we were, that it is a constant work, is not only fine, but expected.

The truth is that this Fool I wish I was is not a good thing, or even a human thing. He is, after all, a little mindless. It is not that he is faithful, he is thoughtless. He is not trusting in the goodness of the universe, he is just assuming that nothing will happen. He is not waiting to be caught in his fall. He doesn't even know there will be a fall. I was thinking this morning about a time in my life I often had much resentment over and realized it was the making of me. I became sadder and more thoughtful. The person I was before had no story, no cause, no real memories or sense of self. He was happy, but thoughtless and that is the Zero Card image, the Fool. The constant worrier is also the Fool, worrying despite all evidence there is no need, clinging to a past that cannot be retrieved. The Holiness of the Fool is in integrating these silly creatures, in the transformation or alchemy that takes one from the Zero space to 1, 2, 3 and the whole road of the Tarot, and this, in the end, is a work or waiting, and a work of grace.

Reversing the Blasphemy

Saint Boniface, the "Apostle to the Germans" whether they wanted him or not, cutting down the sacred tree of Thor. It is unlikely people were standing around watching him doing it. We know that he was eventually killed by the Frisians. 

Hezekiah did what the LORD said was right, just as David his ancestor had done. Hezekiah destroyed the high places. He broke the memorial stones and cut down the Asherah poles. At that time the Israelites burned incense to the bronze snake made by Moses. This bronze snake was called “Nehushtan.” Hezekiah broke this bronze snake into pieces. Hezekiah trusted in the LORD, the God of Israel. There was no one like Hezekiah among all the kings of Judah before him or after him. He was very faithful to the LORD and did not stop following him. He obeyed the commands that the and did not stop following him. He obeyed the commands that the LORD had given to Moses. The LORD was with Hezekiah, so he was successful in everything he did...

2 Kings 18:3-27 ERV

In the ancient world, while one might destroy the city of an enemy people, destroying their holy sites was nearly unthinkable. Even if a temple was burned, it was done after the sacred things were removed from it. In the eight century BC the people of Judah set a precedent we have never recovered from and filled examples of righteous destruction of holy places in their books. Destruction of holy places in the name of God becomes the mark of holiness in the Bible from Jacob destroying his wives' images, to Moses destroying the Golden Calf and making the Hebrews drink its dust mixed with water. Such rage comes home to roost. In reality the Babylonians burnt down the temple of Jerusalem and this destruction was repeated five hundred years later, and that temple was never allowed to rise again. 

The Ruins of the Temple of Allat, Palmyra Syria

The poison of sacred destruction, the belief that only you could be right and other ways of worship must be punished, bloomed in Christianity and Islam, the religions which succeeded Judaism and had the numbers and power to do what Jewish prophets only dreamed of. The great temples of Bel and Allat in Palmyra were destroyed by Christians when, after years of being persecuted, they became the chief and persecuting religion. The very image of Allat had her face smashed in. Allat was also worshiped in Mecca, but three hundred years later, the first Muslims would destroy her holy places there too.  While Christians were busy defacing each others churches and fighting over if images were holy or not and which Christian was right or wrong, Muslims would make it to India. Being people of the Book they could not attack churches or synagogues, but because Hindus did not belong to that pack, the Muslims felt free to loot, pillage and burn the temples of India, and they did.

This sick circle would spiral to the 1500s where Europeans would loot the world, revile the native religions of the people they found and deface their holy places all while Protestants and England burnt Catholic churches, urinated in baptismals before smashing them and destroyed holy images of saints and the Virgin Mary herself.

The madness still goes on. In the same Syria where Christians began the destruction of Allat and Bel's temples fifteen centuries ago, ISIS completed the job and then blew up several ancient Christian monasteries that were unifying places of community for Christians as well as Muslims who lived  around them. Meanwhile, a President is building a wall and putting up pipelines through land sacred to the indigenous people of the United States, and in Brazil, which could use all the prayer it can get, right wing Catholics are talking about destroying the sacred places of others. This Friday let's come together and work to begin reversing the blasphemy. Remember the holy places destroyed. Work for their revival and remember those in danger.

The Monastery of Mar Elian before its destruction in 2015. Mar Elian, a Christian saint, was revered as a sheikh by Muslims and Christian even allowed them to drape green satin, the sign of a Muslim holy man, over his tomb. This was the site of community festivals where people of all religions would gather to celebrate each other and God for centuries.