Sometimes, when I take my dog for a walk, he lingers behind, locating scents that only he can smell, and I wander ahead. He likes to come running after me and, like a good rugby player, to make a feint and dodge me just as he reaches me. It is a joy to see his ears flapping in the wind. But there are times when I turn around that he has disappeared, and I call to him. Has he followed some female? A golden retriever, perhaps? I stand, wondering whether I should retrace my steps, go looking for him. And then I realize, as I face forwards, that he is only five feet away, not behind me anymore, but by my side, discovering a new scent. I don’t know what the locals must make of me, this strange Englishman calling out to a dog that is right beside him. When I look back at the landscape behind me, it is as if he is invisible. He is unseen.
This is how we are to perform acts of charity, according to today’s reading from Matthew. When we give to the needy, when we pray, when we fast, we are to do it in secret and our Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward us. We are not to seek the praise of those around us. We are to do it for our Father, who is unseen.
Lent is a strange journey from glory to glory. Let us not forget the previous Sunday’s reading was about Jesus’ transfiguration on Mount Tabor, when he appeared alongside Moses and Elijah, the Old Testament law and prophets, and shone dazzlingly white. But as we are reminded, this is not a moment you can hold onto. Peter was mistaken, Luke tells us (Lk 9:33), when he suggested building shelters for the three of them. They had to go on from there – Jesus to the Cross, but ultimately to the Resurrection and Emmaus, where he accompanies us on the road; Peter to Rome; James and John to their places, not the least of which was for John to write his Gospel. If they had stayed behind to witness to one event, to try to grasp water, none of this would have happened.
We also are on this journey. Joel tells us that “the day of the Lord is coming”, but it is not a day full of wonder, as we might expect, it is “a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness”. We are to “rend our heart”. As the Psalmist says in Psalm 51, “a broken and contrite heart, you, God, will not despise”.
We express our repentance. We are sorry that things are not how they should be. People suffer, are ill, are exploited. Others lord it over them. The journey as expressed in Psalm 51, a very important psalm which is part of Orthodox Morning Prayer (except that there it is numbered Psalm 50), goes from being “sinful at birth” to purity of heart.
Celtic Christianity would have a problem with the phrase “sinful at birth”. In their view, we are intrinsically good, just as the creation around us is good, and what we have to do is rediscover the sacredness within. But the journey is the same. To “be reconciled to God”.
I like to think of it in terms of language. The I, the ego, is a straight line, a kind of barrier. This word, I, sounds the same as the organ of sight, eye, and if we rotate the line by ninety degrees, indeed it looks like a closed eye.
So, we breathe air into the line and make a circle, the letter O. We open it out. “O” can be an expression of realization – “Oh!”. We become aware of God’s presence in our lives. It can also be an exclamation of repentance – “Oh!”
This realization, and repentance, is what opens our spiritual eyes and enables us to reach spiritual maturity. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” This is the doctrine of theosis, deification. St Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in his work “On the Incarnation” that “God became man so that man might become God”. He wrote this in 318, as a young deacon, before going on to help draft the first version of the Creed at Nicaea in 325. He also came up with the first listing of canonical New Testament books.
God became man so that we might become gods – gods by grace, not by nature – so that we might inherit eternal life, enter the land of paradox where truth resides. We are “genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything”.
It is this recognition – realization, repentance, return, it doesn’t matter – that enables us to fix our eyes, open now, on heaven. And this, for me, is the most important line in today’s readings, the line that we can take with us through Lent: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” We have rediscovered God, come to a realization, but there is a change in us. We do not return to the Garden of Eden, we do not try to hold onto the moment of the Transfiguration, to store it in a shelter or on film. We return to a state of innocence – a lack of willingness to do harm – but this time with knowledge. We must pass through the stage of physical knowledge in order to reach spiritual maturity, not only because it enables us to have children and so to be co-participants in the creation of man, but also because it teaches us what it is to hurt and not to want to inflict hurt on others.
Lent is a journey of endurance – troubles and hardships, yes, but also truthful speech and sincere love. We are poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything. Deep inside us is a flame that, like the disciples of St Brigid or the inhabitants of the Hebrides, we must keep burning through the long winter’s night in the expectation that it will blaze up in the morning.
The concept of the Trinity has flummoxed theologians for centuries. We might liken it to the birth of a child (a third person), or the branching out of a tree (a tree needs branches and leaves to bear fruit). In terms of language, we might identify three persons in the number one when written with capital letters: ONE.
And what is it we must believe? We must believe in God the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It’s as simple as that. The rest will take care of itself.
The Christian concept of the Trinity – three persons, one God – has perplexed even theologians over the centuries, but we might think of our own birth to understand it (two people come together in order to create a third, which is why birth and third are connected, pair of letters that look alike b-d). We might also think of the shoot that branches out – the tree that becomes three – in order to grow and bear fruit.
But as language has taught us about the creation of the world, about the importance of belief, about our final destination and the Last Judgement (when an angel will enter the field to glean the wheat), so I think we can turn to language for an understanding of the Trinity.
Three in one. This doesn’t help us. Let us try writing one with capital letters: ONE. Now we can begin to see.
The word ONE comprises three numbers: 0, 2 (on its side) and 3 (back to front). The one number that ONE does not contain is itself: 1.
This is because in chemistry the subscript 1 is not written down. So if we take the first letter, O, to represent God (it has no beginning or end) and decide to write the three persons of the Trinity as chemical formulae, then God the Father would O(1), God the Son would be O2 and God the Holy Spirit would be O3. Three in ONE, literally.
For God the Father, we can read the formula O1 as no one, the end of the progression from the name of God in Exodus, AM, and from the purpose of Adam in the Book of Genesis to name the creatures, so that they mean something, to which he says amen. When we apply the progression of the Greek alphabet, AIO, to these words, from AM we get I’m and om, which with the phonetic pair m-n and addition of final e gives no one, God the Father. We are back to the beginning. From amen-mean-name, we get mine and nemo, the Latin word for “no one”, and omen. Again, we find ourselves back at God the Father, O1, the first person of the Holy Trinity.
Why would God the Father be “no one”? Because it’s the only way he can be everyone. We individual humans are someone – that is, as distinct from someone else, countable nouns, each with a line around them. The closest we can get to “no one” is the figure of the translator, that person who lives on the line, ferrying cultures across, enabling communication and understanding, and enriching people’s lives with what is other. The translator is “no man” – he lives inside the line, in no man’s land. He almost doesn’t exist – he is largely ignored, his name is sometimes omitted, he barely has enough to live on, and yet he believes in the value of the work he is doing… and so he continues beyond the bounds of what should be possible. He starts to push the boundaries of possibility, to test them, to see whether in fact they are real, whether the illusion will kill him or he will live to fight another day.
The translator, in human parlance, is no man. He doesn’t exist. He finds himself in the firing line between two opposite sides (sides that only exist because of the line), without a gun. He raises his arms in a semblance of crucifixion and implores an end to this madness of viewing people and things as external to ourselves. He doesn’t win, he loses, but he speaks the truth.
This is the closest we can come to the divine – “no one” – in this life. There are two indicators of truth: one is coincidence (things that happen together), the other is paradox (an apparent contradiction that turns out to be true). Language is full of paradox. God, who is in fact all that is, is no one. He is nowhere to be seen (which means he can be everywhere), but nowhere is also now here.
God the Son is O2, the chemical formula for oxygen – we breathe him, just as we speak him (because he is the Word) and see by him (because he is the Son/sun). And God the Holy Spirit is O3, the chemical formula for ozone, the layer that protects us from the sun’s rays (which we might understand as the Son’s wrath, existence in a precarious balance).
But let us remember that the letter in the alphabet that represents breath, wind (a word, by the way, comprised of the numbers 0, 1, 2 and 3: WIND), is h, so we can choose to represent the Holy Spirit (pneuma in Greek) as H. Combine H and the chemical formula for oxygen, O2, in reverse (common in word connections) – that is, combine God the Son and God the Holy Spirit – and you have H20, the chemical formula for water. We breathe him, we speak him, we see by him, and we drink him in water.
God is three in ONE. The last symbol, O3, can refer to God the Holy Spirit – the third person of the Trinity – or to the Trinity itself: 3 in One (the mantra om).
We have seen how three Os together spell GOD (just as three egos, three Is, spell ill). And we will find these three Os again in the word WOOD, with a lopsided 3 at the beginning. WOOD, of course, is the ultimate symbol of Christianity: the Cross, which is nothing more than a deleted I.
Language is clearly Trinitarian. It is also Christological.
A text about law, and the proximity of this word to the name of God in Exodus 3:14, I AM.
The word law in reverse reads wall. This is because the law acts as a wall around private property; divine law acts as a wall to protect us from our enemies.
Consonants, the flesh of language, are divided into pairs. One such pair is l-r. If we apply this pair to law, we get war (again, in reverse). Law is a way of avoiding war, if at all possible. Sometimes, however, it doesn’t work and someone crosses the line between us with hostile intent.
But the most beautiful – and the most important – word connection with law is I AM (capital I and lower-case l look alike; w is m upside down). This is the name of God in Exodus 3:14, the name God reveals to Moses at the burning bush. The law is very important in the Old Testament (the law and the prophets, profits). God’s law is about truth, it reflects who he is. I think behind the human laws that we make stands God’s law, reflected in his name I AM. That is, everything is contained in him; we may think we possess things, but we only possess them as gifts from the Creator.
And this connection law-I AM is found in the New Testament, which is about Christ become man and the message he brings. He became man so that we could become gods by grace (not by nature), a process known as theosis. He shows us the way. This word is also in law if we remember that the semi-vowel y corresponds to i.
I AM-law-way is the message contained in the Bible. We can see that all three words contain the progression of the Greek alphabet: from A (the first letter, creation) to I (the Fall, the ego in English) to O (omega, written w in Greek).
If we delete the ego – that is, submit our will to God’s – we get a cross (†), which is also a plus-sign (+). This is the meaning of Christ’s injunction to lose our life in order to find it, a seeming paradox.
One way of writing this plus is ’n’ (as in rock ’n’ roll). If we take the progression of the Greek alphabet, AIW, and substitute the deleted ego, ’n’, we get ANW, which gives us man. This is the purpose of human life – to make this progression away from the ego and become fully man, a word that is linked to law. We achieve it by observing his commandments to love him and to love our neighbour.
This is the inner meaning of language, the one we do not see. We think of language as an external tool that we hold in our hands, but it is like nature, it has its own meaning.
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.
In this thirteenth video on “Theological English”, Jonathan Dunne looks at paradox as an indicator of truth, as the path towards truth. Sometimes the most obvious statements can be misleading, while what on the surface appears to be contradictory, illogical, can turn out to contain the truth. Christianity is a religion of paradox – the Trinity is “three in one”, we must “lose our life in order to find it”, Christ dies and rises again… All of these are examples of seeming paradox. In this video, we look at Christ’s statement that “many who are first will be last, and the last first” (Matthew 19:30) and how the cycle of physical/spiritual thirst, referred to in the meeting between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in Sychar (John 4), can be broken.
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.
In the first two parts of this short course in English, we have seen how word connections – connections that reveal the hidden meaning inside the words we use every day – can be made by keeping the letters in the same order, by rearranging the letters, by replacing the vowels i and u with the corresponding semi-vowels j/y and w, by using the fact that the letter c can be pronounced either k or s, by making changes to the vowels according to where they are pronounced in the mouth (for example, a-e, e-i) and by making changes to the consonants, again according to where they are pronounced in the mouth (the seven phonetic pairs – especially d-t and l-r – and b-v-w).
We are now going to look at changes made to letters according to their position in the alphabet and according to their appearance. In the fourth and last part, we will look at the addition of letters. The important thing to remember is that we must continue to apply the rules we have learned – word connections often involve several changes, not just one, so we may have to change a vowel and take a step in the alphabet, or change a consonant and a letter according to its appearance. The most important changes are those made to the consonants – the seven phonetic pairs and b-v-w. Then come the changes made to letters according to the alphabet and their appearance. Vowels flow, they change easily (in some languages they are not even written down). We may need to double a letter. And we may understand i-j/y, u-w and c-k/s to be interchangeable.
Before we start looking at the alphabet and appearance, here are the words we are going to connect. I have put the changes you need to make in brackets, so have a go at making the word connections. You will need to shuffle the letters and to apply some of the rules we have already studied. There are ten words according to the alphabet:
BIRTH (b-c) COG (c-d) WORLD (d-e)
LEFT (f-g-h) WICKED (k-l) LOSE (l-m, r-s) MUTUAL (l-n)
GRAIN (n-p-s) ERROR (r-s) SHARE (s-t)
and ten words according to appearance (which are written lowercase to make it easier to see the resemblance between the letters):
birth (b-d) cross (c-e) free (f-t)
faith hide mouth (h-n) I’m sane (i-l)
alone (l-t) north (n-u) devil (v-y)
The English alphabet has twenty-six letters. We have already looked at the letters that make up the alphabet. When we change letters according to their position in the alphabet, we take a step forwards or backwards, we turn the dial. It is as if the letters were on reels in a slot machine and they spin. We rotate them, sometimes one notch, sometimes more than one. We saw the examples of GOD and EGO (d-e), FATHER and GATHER (f-g), OTHER and THEOS (r-s). They are like the dates that appear in the little window of a watch. We may make several changes at once: JERUSALEM-JESUS AMEN (l-m, m-n, r-s). We may go in alternate directions, one letter forwards, the other back: MOTHER-HER SON (m-n, s-t). But it is clear to me that the letters in the alphabet are ordered in this way for a reason.
So if we apply the alphabetical pair b-c, we will find that BIRTH gives CHILD (also the phonetic pairs d-t, l-r). And this is true. Birth does give a child. I think of birth as an equation: 1 + 1 = 1. Two bodies come together to make one body. Three people in one. It’s quite a good analogy for the Holy Trinity, for how three can be one. If we apply the phonetic pair b-v-w and add final e, we will see that BIRTH is connected to THRIVE and WRITHE. It is also connected to BRIDE and TRIBE. The first three letters in reverse spell RIB, which is how the first woman was born. And RIB gives RIP (phonetic pair b-p) – the ability to give birth leads to our physical death, but it also gives us the opportunity to have children and to form the body of the Church.
If we apply the alphabetical pair c-d, we find that COG gives GOD. We are cogs in a machine designed by the Creator. Each one of us has his or her particular function. When we work together, everything goes smoothly. When we fight or think only of our own needs, the machine starts to malfunction. What is most remarkable for me, however, is how the Son of God, through whom the world was created – who was outside the world, therefore, as well as in it – deigned to become a cog in that machine so that we could find the way to salvation. God became a cog. He entered his own machine in order to fix it.
WORLD is connected to LOWER. This world is lower than heaven. According to the celestial hierarchy, there are another nine levels above us, rising to God and ending with the seraphim and the cherubim. So it is appropriate that WORLD is LOWER. This reminds me of another two word connections: HEATHEN-NETHER and HEAVEN-NEVER (you have to read the words in reverse). If we are pagan and do not believe in God, but only in the things of this world, we remain here below. Heaven is a kind of Never Never Land, outside time. There is a paradox here – the place it seems we are never going to reach lasts for ever.
We have seen other examples of paradox in Christianity. Opposites are connected. For example, LEFT and RIGHT (take two steps in the alphabet, f-g-h, change the vowel and apply the phonetic pair l-r). Everything is contained in God. Things that seem disconnected are not so far apart.
Remember the connections DIFFER-DEVIL and FATHER-GATHER? It is the devil who would make us differ, who would lead us into STRIFE (the contest to be FIRST). This is why GOD is GOOD and the DEVIL is EVIL (their etymological roots are different, but the words are practically the same). DEVIL is also connected to WICKED by the phonetic pair v-w and the alphabetical pair k-l (the c in wicked is just reinforcing the k).
And here’s another paradox. LOSE gives MORE (alphabetical pairs l-m, r-s). Christ enjoins us to lose our life for his sake, and we have seen how by denying the self and forming a cross – † (the I with a line drawn through it) – we also make a plus-sign. This is how we lose our life in order to find it.
MUTUAL gives AUTUMN. I find this a beautiful connection, but I cannot say quite why. There is something borrowed in autumn, something we must give back, a change taking place between the warmth of summer and the cold of winter. In autumn, the weather can be lovely, a kind of bonus summer – we call it an Indian summer. I have climbed to the Rila Lakes in Bulgaria with my wife and son in November! Autumn is like an extension that God offers us for free. It is also the season for harvesting, when we gather crops and fruit.
Crops are stored in the form of grain. We use GRAIN to make bread. We use the GRAPE to make wine (I have taken two steps in the alphabet, n-p, and changed the vowel, e-i). Bread and wine are the elements of the Eucharist, which are translated into the body and blood of Christ. How are they translated? By the descent of the Holy Spirit, by GRACE (another two steps in the alphabet, p-s; c corresponds to s). GRAIN-GRAPE-GRACE, the ‘materials’ we need to celebrate the Eucharist.
ERROR is connected to EROS (r-s). There is no doubt that eros can be used in error when it seeks to take pleasure at the cost of the other. This is one of the devil’s main strategies – to convince us that EXCESS in SEX, or alcohol, or drugs, is an affirmation of the self, an assertion of freedom, an act of independence, when all it is doing is destroying the self we are purporting to raise on a pedestal by linking it to the passions, by enslaving it, in short. Eros is when two people come together, openly, knowingly, in full possession of their faculties, and commit to each other. It is a private affair, in which God is present.
In SHARE we find HEART (s-t). We open ourselves to the other, share with them what we have. This is why both these words have HEAR in common. We hear the voice of the other, and not just our own selfish demands.
Let us turn now to word connections made by changing letters according to their appearance. For these connections, it is better to write the letters lowercase so their resemblance becomes more obvious. Letters can be turned upside down: f-t, m-w, n-u. Back to front: b-d. They can be continued: c-e, h-n, i-l, n-r, v-y. They can be crossed out: l-t. We have seen the examples ‘breath’ and ‘thread’ (b-d, breath is the thread that links birth and death), ‘hope’ and ‘open’ (h-n, hope keeps us open), ‘venom’ and ‘money’ (v-y, money acts as a poison).
We now find that ‘birth’ gives rise to a ‘third’ person (b-d). We have seen this is the case in the equation 1 + 1 = 1.
The word ‘cross’ can be likened to ‘eros’. This is not eros in error. This is the true meaning of eros, in which we are fully open, fully vulnerable before the other. Is there any way of being more open in a human body than on the cross, with your hands and feet nailed in place? Is this not what God asks of us, to become increasingly vulnerable, which paradoxically constitutes an ascent to heaven (Never Never Land). The answers (the certainties) seem to evaporate. They leave only one. That God is love. It is that LOVE that will make us WHOLE.
We want to be free and, in order to achieve this, we travel in all directions, we seek forms of entertainment, things that will occupy our attention, distract us from the futility of death, we search for ways to give our life meaning, to justify our existence. We think that ‘free’ means asserting our own will. This forms the basis of our modern society – the ability to do what we like (within reason). But freedom is not to do what we like, to go wherever we want. Freedom is to remain in one place. To go through the pain. To endure. And what better example of ‘free’ than a ‘tree’, which is rooted to the spot? We may pollute it, surround it with concrete, cut it down, but still it continues to give fruit, shade, warmth, oxygen! You may say that it has no choice, but I think that is exactly the point. It is our choice that kills us. Freedom is submission to God. Freedom is to bow our heads in worship. To reach down to the ground, so that God will lift us. This is why language – and life – are so paradoxical. The answers are not where we would find them. They are somewhere else (and not generally in our brains).
But ‘faith’ can grow ‘faint’ (h-n). Sometimes the journey seems long, unending, without purpose. This is where we must dig in and stay in one place. STAY provides YEAST (addition of e). STRAY doesn’t. Even the DEVOUT can DOUBT (b-v, addition of e). But when the wind blows and life seems most pointless, when we are at our most vulnerable (and the devil chooses that precise moment to attack us), we must stand firm. Like the tree.
Then we will find God. In the eye of the storm. The word ‘hide’ gives ‘find’ (h-n, alphabetical pair e-f). What is hidden comes to light. If we persevere. Word connections are often confirmed by other word connections. So it is with ‘hide’-‘find’. Compare SEEK and SEE (addition of k). Or SEARCH and REACH (addition of s). We find an answer, but it may not be immediate.
The ‘mouth’ is a ‘wound’ (two physical pairs, h-n and m-w, phonetic pair d-t). The mouth is like a wound in our body, a kind of gash. It can also wound others. As Christ says, ‘It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles’ (Mt 15:11). Note the connection between DEVIL and DEFILE (phonetic pair f-v).
Here is one of my favourite connections. The world thinks it is sane. It puts other people who don’t agree with its point of view in hospital. But ‘mental’ spells ‘I’m sane’ if we apply the alphabetical pair s-t and the physical pair i-l. There is a corresponding connection: ‘normal’ reads ‘I am wrong’ in reverse (physical pair i-l, addition of g and w). What is considered normal – making money at the expense of the other – may not be right. The one who is marginalized because of his opinions may actually be saner than we are. As a translator who lives on the margins, I begin to think that holding fast to your beliefs inevitably leads you to the margins; it is compromising on your beliefs that takes you to the centre, to a place by the fire. Christ was the most marginalized figure of them all (Mt 8:20, Mk 6:4).
But alone we can do nothing (Jn 15:5). We need the Cross to make sense of our existence. Cross out the I in ‘alone’ and you get ‘atone’, which is what Christ did: lead us back to the Father, the source of life.
We have seen how opposites are connected: LEFT and RIGHT. Let us take another two directions: ‘north’ and ‘south’ (n-u, alphabetical pair r-s). They also are connected. God is everywhere; there is nowhere he is not. This is why his name, Alpha and Omega, is left over in the other two points of the compass: EAST and WEST. These two words share the letters est. What is left over is AW (the Greek letter omega is written w).
But the ‘devil’ would have us stray. Abandon our post. Succumb to the difficulties. Seek amusement, satisfaction, elsewhere. The devil does not want us to withstand the pressure. He wants us to fracture. He wants us to ‘yield’ (v-y).
We have now seen all the ways of changing letters:
– i-j/y, u-w, c-k/s;
– vowels (u-o-a-e-i);
– consonants (seven phonetic pairs, especially d-t and l-r, plus b-v-w);
– alphabet (d-e, f-g, r-s, s-t);
– appearance (b-d, h-n, i-l, m-w).
But not all words that are connected contain the same number of letters. We now come to the richest source of word connections – the addition of letters. We continue to apply the rules we have studied (phonetics, alphabet, appearance), but also add letters.
There is paradox in Christianity, and I begin to think that paradox is a sign of truth. Truth is paradoxical. The main tenet of the Christian faith is that Christ died and rose again. That is fairly paradoxical, and I believe it to be true. But I have always found his injunction to lose our life for his sake in order to find it rather paradoxical as well. How on earth can you lose your life and find it? It doesn’t make sense. And yet everything that Christ says or does makes sense in the long run, even if we don’t understand it at once. We saw that the way you lose your life is to deny the ego – that is, to draw a line through the I – which gives the sign of the cross: †. The cross, as I like to say, is a deleted I, an I with a line drawn through it. But it is also a plus-sign: +. So while we may seem to lose our life by denying our selfish impulses, we actually end up receiving a hundredfold in this world – our eyes are opened, our spiritual senses are honed – and eternal life. We lose our life for Christ’s sake and find it. What he offers us is true self-discovery, we become not a creature who is driven by his passions, who is in effect controlled by what he thought was the world’s pleasures, and through repentance we rediscover our true selves, we are freed of our addiction, our bodies and lives are infused with light, we are prepared to become gods – gods by grace, by adoption. This is what is meant by losing our life in order to find it.
We have seen how the ego in English, I, resembles the number 1 and how we teach our children to count up from the number 1, thereby putting the ego first. This is a mistake, we should teach them to count from 0, the eternal figure that represents God, because this will give them a base they can rely on, a rock on which they can build their lives rather than being swept along by whatever whim may take them. This is one of the ways of moving away from the ego – we make reference to a third point and create a triangle, which resembles the letter A; we draw a line through the ego, which makes a cross, but also a plus-sign; and we turn the ego into a number, 1, and count down to 0, the letter O. The three actions together give us A+O, or the name of God in the Book of Revelation, Alpha and Omega, and that name is present in the middle conjunction, ‘and’ or AND (A ’N’ O). That path is mapped out for us in the name of God. This is why Christ tells us that he is the way. He is literally the way, as the name Alpha and Omega indicates.
We make the progression from the A of Creation to the I of the Fall to the O of redemption: AIO.
We have seen how the Holy Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is three in ONE. The Father is no one (O1) – except that in chemistry the subscript 1 is not written down – the Son is oxygen (O2) and the Holy Spirit is ozone (O3): three in ONE. The only number ONE does not contain is itself: 1. It contains 0, 2 (the N on its side) and 3 (the E back to front). And just as we count down from 1 to 0 – from I to O – so we can take a step back in the alphabet and ‘count down’ from the EGO to GOD (alphabetical pair d-e). The two processes are parallel. We turn away from the selfish demands of the ego, we repent of our selfish (actually self-destructive) impulses and embrace the source of life.
What we haven’t seen so far is the ordinal: ‘first’. What can FIRST tell us? I wonder if you can see anything. I am struck by the correlation between FIRST and FIGHT. You might say they have nothing in common, but that is not quite true. The words share three letters – f, i and t – while the other two letters – r and s, g and h – are alphabetical pairs.
But that is not the clearest connection. If we remove the r, we see that FIRST contains FIST. In reverse, it spells STRIFE with the addition of final e (very common in word connections). So when we put ourselves first, we encounter strife, we get involved in fisticuffs, on an individual level and on the world stage.
This is why Christ teaches us not to put ourselves first. He tells us he came ‘not to be served but to serve’ (Mt 20:28). And in reference to the kingdom of heaven – and the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, which immediately precedes this passage – he explains that ‘many who are first will be last, and the last will be first’ (Mt 19:30).
Another paradox. How is it possible for the first to be last, and the last first? Again, surely that doesn’t make sense. Either you’re first or you’re not. I would like to explain how I believe these two words to be connected, and also how the cycle of conflict and suffering has to be broken in order for us to enter eternal life.
FIRST is clearly connected to THIRST (physical pair f-t, addition of h). That which is first in this life – the young, the newborn – always has a strong thirst. A strong thirst for its mother’s milk, a strong thirst for discovery, a strong thirst to leave its mark. Youth and thirst are closely related, and if you don’t believe me, just go to a pub on a Friday night.
But there is something else that makes us thirst, and that is salt. If you eat salt, you become very thirsty. This should remind us of Christ telling his disciples that they are ‘the salt of the earth’ (Mt 5:13). They are what gives life its taste. But salt can be painful – in a wound, for example. It can also be curative – remember washing your mouth out with salt water in order to heal a sore? This is what we, Christ’s disciples, have to be in this world. We have to give taste, to resist falsehood, to heal wounds.
But salt is also used to preserve meat. It is used to make things last, to make them endure, and this is why SALT and LAST contain the same letters.
So we have gone from FIRST to THIRST to SALT to LAST. But having done this, having endured persecution in this world, having become the salt of the earth with all of life’s blessings, but also its problems, how do we avoid a return back to the beginning? This is very important. It is the same with the Garden of Eden. Our aim in life is not to return to the GARDEN OF EDEN, where we will simply be in DANGER OF NEED once again. We become like children in our innocence, purity and trust in order to prepare ourselves for the kingdom of heaven, but we do not become like children in our ignorance and adopt some kind of infantile stance, so that we are like helpless babies. Having acquired knowledge, having eaten of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the whole point, I think, is to use that knowledge to grow, to become better people, not to fall into the same traps again. We are in this world – this spiritual nursery – to learn.
So how do we prevent this return to the ferocious thirst of youth? How do we avoid getting sucked up into the fight involved in competition, a concept that is exalted in the West, but always struck me as fundamentally absurd. I never saw Christ compete. I saw him heal, help, resurrect, teach, give hope. I never saw him compete, put himself first. And yet competition is the ethos of the way we school our children and, as a result, it forms the ethos of our Western society, that is how civilized we have become, despite the fact the race to be first causes us to damage the environment we live in and sometimes to harm other people. Wealth implies poverty only if you put a price on things. Wealth can be made available to everybody if you do not put a price on things – as God does (he gives us the air we breathe), as the earth does (it gives us the food we eat).
I will tell you how you break this cycle of conflict and suffering. Having become the salt of the earth, having endured persecution, you take the word ‘last’ and you make a simple adjustment. Can you see it? You take out the a, the beginning of all things, the Creation, the Garden of Eden, the going back to the beginning, you leave that all behind, you give your whole life up for God. This reminds me of a time I was in London, at the end of my tether, and I knelt down in front of my desk and offered God my life. I didn’t want it for myself anymore. I never actually thought he would hear me, but he did.
You take out the a. And what happens when you remove the a from ‘last’? You get ‘lst’. But ‘lst’ is not ‘first’, and this means that the connection to ‘thirst’ is broken. This is the difference that Christ wished to teach the Samaritan woman at the well (Jn 4:4-26). If you drink of the water of the well (this world), you will be thirsty again. It doesn’t last. But if you drink of the living water that Christ offers, you will never be thirsty because you are no longer ‘first’, but ‘lst’.
Everything the world gives you will tire you in the end, and you will have to go back for more. This is what the capitalist model is built on – the need to go back for more. You will never be replenished, or only for a couple of hours. That kind of life, with pit stops at every turn, is not going to be a very good fit for eternity. You need something that is going to last a little longer, that is going to sustain you, and Christ offers precisely that: ‘a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’ (Jn 4:14).
The first – those who have put themselves first – will be last in the age to come, and the last – the poor in spirit, those who have been persecuted – will be lst. This is why the description of his disciples as ‘the salt of the earth’ directly follows on from the Beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel, because it is only through salt/last that the chain is broken and the kingdom of heaven becomes ours.
Stones Of Ithaca 