Tag: Genesis 3:20

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14. Mary

The Virgin Mary is often referred to as the New Eve because of her role in the economy of salvation. We learn in Genesis that Adam called his wife Eve “because she was the mother of all who live”, since in Hebrew the name Eve resembles the word for “living”; if we apply the phonetic pair l-r, we will see that there is a connection between “living” and “Virgin”, which confirms the link between them.

I have the utmost veneration for Mary, the Mother of God. There is no one else through whom I would rather be saved. As part of God’s creation, she also responds to language in the most extraordinary way.

The rules that I have expounded in these short texts for unearthing spiritual meaning are very simple. We may rearrange the letters. We may change the vowels, which are water, by allowing them to flow (a-e, earth-three). We may replace the vowel i with its semi-vowel equivalent, y (think of try and tried). When we get to the flesh of language, the consonants, we must be familiar with the seven simple pairs, pairs of consonants such as f-v and l-r that are pronounced in the same part of the mouth (often one is voiced, the other is voiceless). We may replace the redundant letter c with either of the ways it is pronounced, k and s (think of a word like Pacific).We may take a step in the alphabet (d-e, God-ego; f-g, father-gather), turn a letter upside down (m-w, I am-way) or back to front (b-d, birth-third), or lengthen it (v-y, Eve-eye). And this is the way we will enter the spiritual edifice of the language we speak.

Look at Mary. Replace the y with i, and tell me what you can see.

Mary contains the name that God reveals to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3:14, I AM, in reverse, with the addition of the letter r. So it is clear that she has the divine in her.

And what if we double the r? We get marry. For her to give birth to the Son of God, was it not necessary for there to be a marriage of wills, as well as the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit that made the incarnation possible?

I AM-Mary-marry

She is the Mother of God. If we treat letters like reels in a slot machine and press the button, allowing the letters to spin according to their order in the alphabet, we will see that mother spells her son (m-n, s-t). The archetypal Mother, the Mother of us all, gave birth to her son in the flesh, Jesus Christ.

mother-her son

Jesus Christ was the Messiah, the long-awaited one, the one who would come to free us from bondage, except that he didn’t do this with physical weapons (remember the well and the bucket). The change he effects takes place within us, but it is no less visible for that. It’s just that if you’re expecting fireworks, flashing lights and earth tremors, you might not get them. Or you will, but not in the way you expect, and over a longer period.

Messiah. Can the word tell us anything? Does the word Messiah not contain I AM and she? Is this not confirmation of Mary’s role in the incarnation?

Messiah = I AM + she

We refer to her as “maid” and “lady”, two words that clearly contain the progression of the Greek alphabet, AIO (AIW).

But she is best known as the Virgin Mary.

Do you remember what Jesus said to the Samaritan woman in John, chapter 4, about asking him and receiving “living water” – not visible water that can only be retrieved by means of a physical bucket, but water that will flow “out of the believer’s heart” (Jn 7:38), becoming “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life”? This “living water” is not one that satisfies our physical needs momentarily, it restores us to ourselves, reminding us that we are eternal beings in physical bodies. If we believe – and when did anyone achieve anything without believing in what they were doing? – we will inherit eternal life. The word we have been in this earthly life, the sum of our acts and intentions, will be spoken.

Living water. Virgin Mary (l-r). The two words are connected, and this is because the Virgin Mary is the second Eve. Being a virgin and giving birth is what sets her apart from God’s other creatures; virgin harks back to the name of Eve in Genesis 3:20, “because she was the mother of all who live”, resembling as it does the Hebrew word for living.

Language, it seems, is also Marian.

Jonathan Dunne

Heart of Language 14/15

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11. Believe

Belief activates the spiritual senses and enables us to see. St Paul talks in his Letter to the Romans about justification by faith. Grace is freely given, we cannot earn it. All that Jesus requires of us is that we believe in him.

What we do not see, we have to believe. And paradoxically, it is the act of believing that then enables us to see, when our spiritual understanding is unlocked and our spiritual senses are awakened. Believe in order to see. What the Pharisees (Pharisee = far I see, or so they think!) wanted was to see in order to believe. In Matthew 16:4, when asked to show them a sign from heaven, Jesus gave them short shrift: “An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah” (see how closely the word sign is connected to sin, addition of g).

Belief activates our spiritual senses and enables us to see beyond the mere appearance of things. This is why, I think, the word believe so obviously contains be and live. We become fully alive when our vision is not limited to seeing what will satisfy our physical needs.

This is the reason for the break-down in communication during the wonderful encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in John, chapter 4. When Jesus says if she knew who she was talking to, she would ask him and he would give her “living water”, the woman is perplexed. She doesn’t realize that Jesus is talking about spiritual sustenance – not physical sustenance, which always requires us to come back for more (something the system knows and relies on for its continued existence).

He doesn’t even have a bucket (again, this reliance on external objects, objects we can pick up and use), how is he going to give her this living water? Jesus replies, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them [what he means is those who put their trust in him] will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

These are extremely important verses. “A spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Now, that is surely something worth having. We know that when we drink water from the well, we will be thirsty again, and so we are tied to it, to something external. But what Jesus is talking about appears to be something that comes from within us: “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” It is something whose provenance we cannot perceive.

I think he is talking about belief. The bucket that will enable us to receive this living water is belief. It is all that Jesus requires of us – that we believe in him (even though we do not see him with our physical senses). He wants us to see/hear the message that he is transmitting and to plant the seed of that message in the earth of our heart (the soil of our soul). We are to become like the seed of an apple, which falls into the ground and sleeps for a while before bursting forth anew as a shoot that, in time and with proper care, will grow into a tree, as language tells us.

And so it is that three chapters later – in John, chapter 7 – Jesus decides to attend the Festival of Booths in Jerusalem. The message – about doing the will of God, about doing good and healing people, even if it is on the Sabbath – doesn’t seem to be getting across. When he says that he won’t be with them for long (because he is going to be crucified!!!), they understand he is planning a visit to Greece. It comes to the last day of the festival, and Jesus is feeling pretty frustrated. He cries out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water’” (Jn 7:37-8).

There it is again – that phrase “living water”. It means that when we believe in him, our life will take on new meaning, we will no longer be limited by the parameters of time, we will be working on a different timescale, or actually on no timescale at all. We will be diving into the white spaces between and behind the words on a page and finding new meaning. We will be entering the words themselves, admiring their structure, as if a word was a church and we could enter it, light a candle, look up into the dome, and even walk around the church three times on Easter Eve, before the light of the resurrection has dawned. We will begin to bear spiritual fruit, not just physical fruit we can eat, touch and confirm, but the fruit of obedience, which is not to put ourselves first in a world of competing egos, but to seek the common good, which might even involve some kind of personal sacrifice, but is incomparably richer and leads to true wealth (the wheat in the Parable of the Tares, which has ears and can hear). This “living water” can only come out of a believer’s heart, of a heart that is open, of a heart that is alive and beating, not one that is closed and withered, that only thinks about itself.

Jesus quotes scripture: “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” Except that the word in Greek is not “heart”, it is “belly” (κοιλία). In Genesis 3:20, we learn that Adam named his wife Eve “because she was the mother of all who live”. This is explained by a footnote in the NRSV Bible: “In Heb Eve resembles the word for living.”

So, the verse Jesus quotes could be reduced to belly (“Out of the believer’s heart”) and Eve (“shall flow rivers of living water”). And what do belly and Eve give us? Believe.

Jesus’ message – that all we need to do is believe to become fully alive, to be and live – is contained in the words he speaks. Language is pure theology, a vade mecum for the human who seeks a higher meaning. We just have to have the eyes to see it.

Jonathan Dunne

Heart of Language 11/15

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8. Om

The Fall – carnal knowledge – enabled us to have our own children, but it also brought about spiritual blindness, which is represented by the ego in English (I, a closed eye when rotated by ninety degrees). We must make the progression to O, an open eye, if we are to see the people and things around us.

In between the vowels a and i in the alphabet is the vowel e. The name of Adam’s partner in Genesis is Eve, “because she was the mother of all who live” (Gen 3:20).

Now there are two coincidences, and coincidences are indicators of truth. The first is the correlation between Eve and eye (v-y is a pair of letters that look alike, one is an extension of the other). The second is the way the words eye and I sound exactly the same.

Eve is taking us in the direction of the Fall (I), but I don’t see this as a bad thing. Without carnal knowledge, without a fall into bed, we could not have children. We had to make this progression in order for the world – and then heaven – to be comprised of our own creations. The alternative was for God to create a clone army, to keep on removing ribs from Adam in order to make more humans. God knew perfectly well what would happen in Genesis, chapter 3. But it was necessary for us to co-partake in creation – after all, we are divine creatures, we bear God’s name (AM is in ADAM). And there is no doubt that children give great joy and make life worth living.

So, the Fall made it possible for us to marry and have children. But with carnal knowledge came spiritual blindness. And this is something we don’t realize. We think when our eyes are opened shortly after birth, we can see. But our physical sight is extremely limited. We see things as objects. We label them. We move them about. We trade in them. We build lines around them (walls, fences) to protect them from others. This is not sight.

And this is why the ego, I, if we rotate the word by ninety degrees, represents a closed eye: —. This explains the correlation between eye and I. The ego is a closed eye, because it is spiritually blind. And we are in this life (apart from to have children) to open our spiritual eyes and to form the letter O. O is eternity. O is an open tunnel. O is a cry of recognition. O is a sigh of repentance. It represents restoration, redemption. Do you see how all these words begin with the prefix re-? It is a return – we are restored to ourselves – but it is a return with knowledge.

We have seen how this progression from the A of creation to the I of the Fall and the O of redemption can be discerned in the question words what, why and who (how).

Let us take the name of God in Exodus, AM, and apply the same progression. AM gives I’m (self-importance). We no longer call on God, we rely on our own resources (only to discover, later on, that they are limited). When we reach the end of our tether, we make the further progression from I’m (the ego gets to be pretty boring with its repetitiveness) to om, a mantra in Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism. But I don’t mean that. For me, om represents the Holy Trinity: O3 (three in One).

And if we apply the phonetic pair m-n and add final e (which is extremely common in English), we find that om gives no one. Amen-mean-name do the same – they pass through mine (acquisitiveness) to nemo (Latin for “no one”) and omen.

No one – O1 – is God the Father, as we will see in a later chapter. So, again we call on him, just as we did by being human (the first word the human apparatus is capable of pronouncing, a combination of breath and the first vowel to emerge from the throat, the root of our word God). Or by moving away from the line and producing three symbols, A+O, that spell another name of God, Alpha and Omega.

This progression, AIO (sometimes written AIW), is inherent in language. We will see more examples.

Jonathan Dunne

Heart of Language 8/15

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Theological English (14): The Names of God

In this fifteenth video on “Theological English”, Jonathan Dunne looks at the importance of names. “Name” is “man” in reverse with a final “e”, and we read in Genesis chapter 2 that God brought the creatures to Adam so that he could “name” them – in effect, so that he could translate them and choose the right word. God didn’t ask Adam to make the creatures because he is not an author – he cannot create out of nothing. He, and the rest of humankind, are translators. So “name” is central to man’s role in this world. What can the names of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary tell us about their roles? And what meaning can we find in the names of people like Strauss and Grant Gustin, and countries like Ukraine?

To access all the videos in this course, use the drop-down menu “Theological English (Video Course)” above. The videos can be watched on Vimeo and YouTube.

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Theological English (13): Believe

In this fourteenth video on “Theological English”, Jonathan Dunne looks at the importance of the word “believe” in the Christian Gospel. The word “believe” crops up again and again in the Gospel – this is what God requires of us: to believe in him, to believe in his name, in order to receive – the power to become children of God, eternal life, salvation, healing. When we believe, all things become possible. The video focuses on John 7:38 and the verse from Scripture: “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” Once again, language is not only used to convey the message – it is the message.

To access all the videos in this course, use the drop-down menu “Theological English (Video Course)” above. The videos can be watched on Vimeo and YouTube.