ESSAY #13: Ancient Hebrew Rainbow-Kings
Approaching Canaan (II)
We often refer to the environmental crisis, but the real crisis lies not in the environment, but in the human heart. The fundamental problem is to be found not outside but inside ourselves, not in the ecosystem, but in the way we think.
– His All-Holiness Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch
Note » This week, thanks to an attentive, insightful, empathetic soul in the comment section of
‘s substack, I was finally ushered into the world of independent scholar Margaret Barker’s temple theology. Oh man!—where has she been all my life? So I’ve been devouring her essays, and what books of hers I can find, like exactly the luminescent honey-cakes they exactly are, and this essay and whatever else comes of it, if good and faithful, is thanks to her. (The epigraph from HAH above is quoted in her book: Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment).
I. CHILDREN OF THE EARTH
And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people
Was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight,
And in the center grew one mighty flowering tree
To shelter all the children of one mother and one father.
And I saw that it was holy.
– Black Elk
The image at the top of the essay is not of an ancient Hebrew, of course, but of an American Indian. In this essay, I want to recognize a kindred spirit between the two peoples, both radiant and noble, as nothing more than a poetic dreamer whose dreams are shaped by the dreams of the Hebrews, but who also lives in America, and who longs to be truly at home in America, at rest.
It may be that what ends up happening here is nothing more than some light-skinned guy hijacking the cultures of two different brown peoples at once, smashing them together in a totally hamfisted way, then picking up the pieces, merely to justify his own myopic, fountain-of-chaos existence—but that won't be my intent.
I've been struck by a sentence in Ohiyesa's The Soul of the Indian ever since
was struck by it in his essay Lives of the Wild Saints:I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and that the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same.
Struck. Awestruck, moonstruck. Agog. If there's a hard diamond core to whatever this prismatic inner fire is that drives me—some unlettered and undisciplined wandering nobody—to say whatever it is I need to say, Ohiyesa says it in his one sentence: True Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable; the spirit of true Christianity and indigenous American religion are fundamentally the same.
I recognize that as deeply true.
I also recognize that, for this to be deeply true, the spirit of true Christianity is, and must be, Hebraic: Of the Earth, for the Earth.
No floating away.