Latest / truthunedited / Fall Asleep to the Testament of Solomon_ The Demons Who Built the Temple

Transcript

Fall Asleep to the Testament of Solomon_ The Demons Who Built the Temple · truthunedited

0:00
Speaker 1: Maybe to night. You are carrying something that has no
0:03
Speaker 1: clear name, not grief exactly, not fear exactly, something quieter
0:09
Speaker 1: than both of those, and in some ways harder to address,
0:12
Speaker 1: because it does not announce itself clearly enough to be
0:14
Speaker 1: argued with or resolved or set down in any deliberate way.
0:19
Speaker 1: Just a wait, A thinness in the ordinary world, a
0:23
Speaker 1: sense that something is pressing through from the other side
0:26
Speaker 1: of what is visible, and you cannot quite see it.
0:29
Speaker 1: If that is where you are to night, stay here.
0:32
Speaker 1: There is an ancient book attributed to the wisest king
0:35
Speaker 1: who ever lived. It is not in your Bible, It
0:39
Speaker 1: was not read in the church you grew up in.
0:42
Speaker 1: Most people have never heard its name. But for two
0:45
Speaker 1: thousand years it has been copied and studied and passed
0:48
Speaker 1: quietly from hand to hand by scholars and mystics and
0:52
Speaker 1: ordinary people who stumbled across it and found they could
0:55
Speaker 1: not look away. It is called the Testament of Solomon.
0:59
Speaker 1: According to this ancient text, Solomon did not only write
1:03
Speaker 1: proverbs and psalms. He did something stranger and more dangerous
1:07
Speaker 1: and more illuminating than any of that. He descended, with
1:11
Speaker 1: an authority given to him from heaven, into the hidden
1:14
Speaker 1: architecture of the world. He asked questions that no one
1:18
Speaker 1: had asked before, he wrote down the answers, and then
1:22
Speaker 1: he built something that has never been equalled. Tonight, we
1:26
Speaker 1: are going to follow him into those nights, into the interrogations,
1:30
Speaker 1: into the oldest questions, into the place where the visible
1:34
Speaker 1: world ends and something older begins. Your breathing is already slowing.
1:39
Speaker 1: The ancient text is open. The first question has not
1:43
Speaker 1: yet been asked. Let us begin together Chapter one, The
1:50
Speaker 1: Ring and the Architect. Seven years is a long time
1:54
Speaker 1: to build anything, long enough that the people who began
1:57
Speaker 1: the work have callouses now where they did not have
2:00
Speaker 1: them before, long enough that the youngest workers have grown
2:04
Speaker 1: into the job, that their movements have acquired the particular
2:07
Speaker 1: economy of people who have done the same things enough
2:10
Speaker 1: times to stop thinking about how they are doing them.
2:13
Speaker 1: Long enough that the building site has become its own
2:16
Speaker 1: kind of world, with its own sounds, its own silences,
2:22
Speaker 1: the particular darkness that falls across the site in the
2:25
Speaker 1: hour before first light, when the work has not yet begun,
2:28
Speaker 1: and everything is still, and the stones already laid hold
2:31
Speaker 1: the cold of the night in them like a memory
2:34
Speaker 1: that was the world Solomon moved through. In the seventh
2:37
Speaker 1: year of his reign, the temple was almost finished. You
2:41
Speaker 1: have to understand what that sentence meant to the people
2:44
Speaker 1: living inside it, not architecturally, not as a building project.
2:51
Speaker 1: To understand it correctly, you need to sit with what
2:53
Speaker 1: the temple meant to the people who had been watching
2:56
Speaker 1: it rise above the skyline of Jerusalem, stone by stone
3:00
Speaker 1: across seven years of ordinary days. David had wanted to
3:04
Speaker 1: build it himself. He spent the final years of his
3:08
Speaker 1: reign gathering materials cedar from Lebanon, brought down from the
3:12
Speaker 1: mountains by Phoenician laborers, stone cut from the quarries beneath Jerusalem,
3:17
Speaker 1: each block shaped with such precision that no chisel would
3:21
Speaker 1: be needed at the building site. Bronze and gold and
3:24
Speaker 1: silver in quantities that staggered the imagination, stored in vaults
3:28
Speaker 1: beneath the palace. He drew the plans. He chose the location,
3:34
Speaker 1: a threshing floor purchased from a man named Arauna for
3:37
Speaker 1: fifty pieces of silver. He did everything that could be
3:41
Speaker 1: done to prepare, and then God told him he would
3:44
Speaker 1: not be the one to build it. Because David was
3:47
Speaker 1: a man of war, and the House of God would
3:50
Speaker 1: be built by a man of peace. That man was Solomon.
3:54
Speaker 1: He had been different from his brothers even as a boy.
3:57
Speaker 1: While they trained with swords and rode horses through the
4:00
Speaker 1: hills of Judea, Solomon sat in the shade of the
4:03
Speaker 1: olive trees, listening to the priests read the law. He
4:07
Speaker 1: watched the stars at night and wondered about the order
4:10
Speaker 1: of creation. He asked questions that made the elders pause
4:14
Speaker 1: and look at one another with quiet amazement. And when
4:17
Speaker 1: David grew old, his breath shallow and his hand trembling,
4:21
Speaker 1: he called Solomon to his bedside and said, you will
4:24
Speaker 1: build the temple, my son. You will finish what I
4:28
Speaker 1: could not. So when Solomon walked the building site in
4:32
Speaker 1: the seventh year and listened to the sound of craftsmen
4:35
Speaker 1: doing the final work, the precise and careful work that
4:39
Speaker 1: a nearly finished project requires, he was not merely completing
4:43
Speaker 1: a construction project. He was fulfilling the single most important
4:47
Speaker 1: promise that had ever been made to his family. He
4:50
Speaker 1: was doing the one thing his father had wanted and
4:53
Speaker 1: never been permitted to do. And then a boy came
4:56
Speaker 1: to him weeping. He was one of the younger workers
4:59
Speaker 1: on the site, quick and willing, the kind of boy
5:03
Speaker 1: who arrives early and stays late, and takes on the
5:05
Speaker 1: small necessary tasks without being asked. Solomon had noticed him before,
5:11
Speaker 1: in the quiet way that people who paid genuine attention
5:14
Speaker 1: noticed the people around them without necessarily remembering the noticing.
5:19
Speaker 1: Now the boy stood before the king, with his face
5:22
Speaker 1: pale and his eyes red, and he told Solomon what
5:25
Speaker 1: had been happening. Every evening, as the sun went down
5:29
Speaker 1: and the workers went home, something came to him. He
5:32
Speaker 1: could not describe it clearly, a presence, a wait, something
5:38
Speaker 1: that pressed in on him in the dark and left
5:40
Speaker 1: him by morning diminished, drained, as if the night had
5:44
Speaker 1: drawn something out of him that the day could not replace.
5:47
Speaker 1: He held out his hand on his right thumb. Barely
5:51
Speaker 1: visible were two small marks, not the marks of an injury,
5:55
Speaker 1: the marks of something more patient than injury, the marks
5:59
Speaker 1: of something that had been returning, something was feeding on him.
6:04
Speaker 1: Solomon listened without interrupting. He did not tell the boy
6:08
Speaker 1: he had been working too hard, or that his imagination
6:11
Speaker 1: was running ahead of his reason, because Solomon understood in
6:15
Speaker 1: a way that his gift of wisdom made possible that
6:17
Speaker 1: the world contains more than what is immediately visible to
6:21
Speaker 1: ordinary attention. He went to his chamber and he prayed.
6:24
Speaker 1: The ancient text does not record what Solomon said in
6:27
Speaker 1: that prayer. What it records is what arrived in response
6:31
Speaker 1: to it. According to the Testament, while Solomon was praying,
6:35
Speaker 1: the archangel Michael appeared. The name Michael in Hebrew is
6:39
Speaker 1: not a name in the ordinary sense. It is a
6:42
Speaker 1: question compressed into the shape of a name, Micheil, Who
6:47
Speaker 1: is like God? Not a statement, a challenge, a declaration
6:52
Speaker 1: carrying within it the answer it demands. No one is
6:56
Speaker 1: like God, no power and no authority, and no name
7:00
Speaker 1: in any register of heaven or earth or beneath the
7:03
Speaker 1: earth can occupy the place that belongs to God alone.
7:07
Speaker 1: Michael is the one who carries that declaration into every
7:10
Speaker 1: confrontation where it needs to be heard. According to the
7:14
Speaker 1: ancient text, Michael placed in Solomon's hand a small ring.
7:18
Speaker 1: Engraved on it was a seal, a five pointed star
7:22
Speaker 1: formed by a single unbroken line that folded back on
7:25
Speaker 1: itself until it enclosed a perfect interior space. Later traditions
7:30
Speaker 1: would call this the seal of Solomon. The five points
7:33
Speaker 1: represented something in the ancient understanding that went beyond decoration.
7:38
Speaker 1: The four directions and the center, the place where the
7:42
Speaker 1: divine axis meets the human one, a line with no
7:46
Speaker 1: beginning and no end, inclosing, a space that the line
7:49
Speaker 1: itself defined. The text says Michael told Solomon what the
7:54
Speaker 1: ring could do with this seal. He could summon any
7:57
Speaker 1: demonic force. He could comp hell them to speak truthfully
8:01
Speaker 1: about themselves. He could put them to work, He could
8:05
Speaker 1: bind them. And then came the instruction that sets the
8:08
Speaker 1: entire story in motion. Use it to build the temple.
8:13
Speaker 1: Sit with what that instruction contained, not just the ring,
8:17
Speaker 1: the instruction itself. God was not telling Solomon to drive
8:21
Speaker 1: the opposition away so that the construction could proceed undisturbed.
8:26
Speaker 1: He was telling him to use the source of the
8:28
Speaker 1: obstruction as the solution to the obstruction. Take the thing
8:32
Speaker 1: that is disrupting the work, make it serve the work.
8:36
Speaker 1: Solomon stood in his chamber holding a ring no larger
8:39
Speaker 1: than his thumb. Outside the window, the half finished temple
8:43
Speaker 1: rose against the night sky, its stones pale in the moonlight,
8:47
Speaker 1: massive and patient, waiting for the work that would make
8:50
Speaker 1: them a house. He felt the weight of the ring
8:54
Speaker 1: and the weight of what it meant. There is a
8:57
Speaker 1: man named Daniel. He is forty three years old. He
9:01
Speaker 1: lives outside Austin, Texas, and to night he is sitting
9:04
Speaker 1: at his kitchen table at eleven o'clock with a legal
9:07
Speaker 1: pad in front of him and a pen he picked
9:10
Speaker 1: up twenty minutes ago and has not yet used. He
9:13
Speaker 1: runs a small company, not large, but real. It employs
9:18
Speaker 1: people and pays its debts and makes something useful. He
9:22
Speaker 1: has been trying for two hours to write down the
9:24
Speaker 1: name of the thing that keeps slowing the work down,
9:27
Speaker 1: the thing that is not quite a problem he can solve,
9:30
Speaker 1: and not quite a person he can address, and not
9:32
Speaker 1: quite a circumstance he can change, just a resistance consistent
9:39
Speaker 1: without a clear face. He stares at the blank page.
9:42
Speaker 1: He picks up the pen. He is about to learn
9:45
Speaker 1: the same thing Solomon was about to learn. That the
9:49
Speaker 1: first move is not the solving. The first move is
9:52
Speaker 1: the looking. The boy was brought to the chamber. Solomon
9:56
Speaker 1: pressed the seal against the boy's chest and spoke the
9:59
Speaker 1: words the ai angel had given him, and, according to
10:02
Speaker 1: the ancient text, into that room from wherever such things
10:05
Speaker 1: come from, when they are called by an authority, they
10:08
Speaker 1: cannot refuse. The demon came his name, the text says,
10:12
Speaker 1: was orneous. The word arrives without explanation, the way names
10:17
Speaker 1: in very old documents arrive simply present, carrying their weight,
10:22
Speaker 1: without offering their etymology in plain sight. What matters for
10:26
Speaker 1: our purposes is not the etymology, but what Solomon did
10:30
Speaker 1: when the presence was in front of him. He did
10:32
Speaker 1: not reach immediately for the power the ring had given him.
10:36
Speaker 1: He did not attempt destruction or expulsion, or any of
10:39
Speaker 1: the moves that power makes when it has not yet
10:42
Speaker 1: learned the discipline of attention. He looked not the way
10:46
Speaker 1: you look at something you have already decided you understand,
10:49
Speaker 1: the way you look at something you are genuinely trying
10:52
Speaker 1: to see for the first time, without the interference of assumption,
10:56
Speaker 1: without the short cut of deciding what something is before
10:59
Speaker 1: you have allowed to show you what it actually is.
11:02
Speaker 1: And then he asked a question. This is the thing
11:05
Speaker 1: that makes the Testament of Solomon unlike every other ancient
11:08
Speaker 1: text about the confrontation between human authority and adversarial forces.
11:14
Speaker 1: Solomon did not simply exercise power. He exercised attention first,
11:20
Speaker 1: and then he asked the ring was in his hand.
11:23
Speaker 1: The first question was forming Daniel in Austin finally sets
11:27
Speaker 1: pen to paper, not because he knows what to write,
11:31
Speaker 1: because he has decided that looking directly at the resistance
11:35
Speaker 1: is the only honest starting place. The chamber was quiet,
11:39
Speaker 1: the night was long, and the most important conversation in
11:43
Speaker 1: the ancient world was about to begin. Chapter two Orneus,
11:50
Speaker 1: The first question and what it opens. Picture the boy
11:55
Speaker 1: sleeping tonight. He is somewhere in the lower city of Jerusalem,
11:59
Speaker 1: in whatever bed belongs to him, and for the first
12:02
Speaker 1: time in months, there is nothing pressing in from the
12:05
Speaker 1: edges of the dark. His breathing is even, his hands
12:09
Speaker 1: are still. The marks on his thumb are still there,
12:12
Speaker 1: faint against the skin, but the thing that made them
12:16
Speaker 1: is not. Something has changed in the architecture of his nights.
12:21
Speaker 1: He does not yet know why. He only knows that
12:24
Speaker 1: the weight that arrived every evening with the failing of
12:26
Speaker 1: the light did not arrive to night, and his body,
12:30
Speaker 1: without being instructed, has let itself down into the rest
12:33
Speaker 1: it has been needing for a very long time. He
12:36
Speaker 1: will sleep until morning everything that follows in the Testament
12:40
Speaker 1: of Solomon, all the interrogations and bindings and compelled confessions
12:44
Speaker 1: across the weeks and months of the temple's construction, is
12:48
Speaker 1: finally about this. The ordinary life that the ordinary person
12:52
Speaker 1: needs to be able to live, the sleep that gets disrupted,
12:56
Speaker 1: the energy that drains away without the person understands why,
13:01
Speaker 1: the work that slows, and the question of what exactly
13:05
Speaker 1: is doing the disrupting and how it does what it does.
13:09
Speaker 1: Solomon understood this. He was not conducting his interrogations for
13:13
Speaker 1: the sake of scholarship, though what he produced became one
13:17
Speaker 1: of the most extraordinary pieces of scholarship the ancient world preserved.
13:21
Speaker 1: He was conducting them because the work was being disrupted,
13:25
Speaker 1: and the workers were being harmed, and the building that
13:27
Speaker 1: God had commissioned was not getting finished. He asked Orneus
13:31
Speaker 1: the first question, what is your name? In the tradition
13:36
Speaker 1: behind the Testament, this question is not small. The ancient
13:39
Speaker 1: Hebrew word for name is shem Its route carries the
13:43
Speaker 1: sound of breath, the sound a thing makes simply by existing.
13:48
Speaker 1: A name in this tradition is not a label attached
13:51
Speaker 1: from the outside, the way we label containers and files
13:54
Speaker 1: and folders. A name is closer to the truth of
13:57
Speaker 1: what something is at its deepest level. When Adam named
14:01
Speaker 1: the animals in the Garden of Eden, according to the
14:03
Speaker 1: Book of Genesis, he was not making arbitrary selections. He
14:08
Speaker 1: was perceiving the nature of each creature and calling it
14:11
Speaker 1: by what it actually was. When Solomon asked for the name,
14:15
Speaker 1: he was asking what are you at the level where
14:18
Speaker 1: all description ends and only essence remains. According to the Testament,
14:24
Speaker 1: Orneus answered, he lived. The text says, in the sign
14:28
Speaker 1: of Aquarius, he appeared to people in three forms, as
14:32
Speaker 1: a winged creature, as a lion, and as a figure
14:36
Speaker 1: that looked at first encounter like an ordinary person you
14:40
Speaker 1: might pass on any street without alarm. He came specifically
14:44
Speaker 1: to those born under certain signs, and worked his harm
14:47
Speaker 1: with a method the text describes with a precision that
14:50
Speaker 1: feels almost clinical. He attached himself to the vital energy
14:54
Speaker 1: of the people he visited. He drew it out slowly,
14:58
Speaker 1: not all at once, not dramatically, the way a slow
15:02
Speaker 1: leak draws water from a vessel, consistently and invisibly, until
15:07
Speaker 1: the vessel that was once full is nearly empty. And
15:10
Speaker 1: the person carrying it cannot understand why everything has become
15:14
Speaker 1: so difficult. Solomon listened to all of this without interrupting.
15:18
Speaker 1: Then he asked the second question, what defeats you? Every
15:24
Speaker 1: demonic force in the Testament, when compelled by the seal
15:27
Speaker 1: to answer, truthfully names the thing that has power over it.
15:31
Speaker 1: This pattern, consistent across the full range of the interrogations,
15:35
Speaker 1: is perhaps the most theologically striking feature of the entire
15:39
Speaker 1: ancient document. The forces the text describes, for all their
15:43
Speaker 1: various capacities to harm and disrupt, are not depicted as unlimited.
15:48
Speaker 1: They are depicted as bounded, as operating within a structure
15:52
Speaker 1: they did not design and cannot alter, as subject to
15:55
Speaker 1: constraints that exist above and outside their own will. This
15:59
Speaker 1: was a meaningful thing to write down. It remains a
16:03
Speaker 1: meaningful thing to read for anyone living in a world
16:06
Speaker 1: that sometimes feels organized entirely against them. The claim that
16:10
Speaker 1: the forces of disruption are finite, that they are bounded
16:14
Speaker 1: by an authority they cannot override, is not a minor observation.
16:19
Speaker 1: It is oxygen. According to the ancient text, Orneus named
16:23
Speaker 1: the archangel Uriel as the one who had power over
16:26
Speaker 1: him Uriel, the name in Hebrew means fire of God
16:31
Speaker 1: or light of God. Among the archangels named in ancient
16:36
Speaker 1: Jewish tradition, Uriel is the one most consistently associated with illumination.
16:41
Speaker 1: Not the dramatic light of revelation or the terrible brightness
16:45
Speaker 1: of judgment, the every day light, the light that makes
16:49
Speaker 1: it possible to see the shape of what you are
16:51
Speaker 1: actually looking at without turning away from it. The light
16:55
Speaker 1: that shows you the difference between the form of a
16:57
Speaker 1: thing and the shadow it casts on the word all
17:00
Speaker 1: behind it, According to the text or Nias, could not
17:04
Speaker 1: endure being seen clearly. Sit with this quietly for a moment,
17:09
Speaker 1: because it is not an observation that belongs only to
17:12
Speaker 1: ancient demonology. There is a reason that the things which
17:15
Speaker 1: trouble us most tend to lose a significant portion of
17:19
Speaker 1: their power at the precise moment we name them accurately.
17:23
Speaker 1: Not because the naming destroys them, because the naming removes
17:27
Speaker 1: the advantage of invisibility, which is the primary instrument of
17:30
Speaker 1: anything that operates through concealment and slow, patient attrition. A
17:35
Speaker 1: fear with a name is not the same fear as
17:38
Speaker 1: one without a name. A pattern recognized is not the
17:41
Speaker 1: same pattern as one running below the threshold of awareness.
17:45
Speaker 1: There is a woman named Claire. She is thirty eight
17:48
Speaker 1: years old and she is a therapist in Cincinnati, Ohio.
17:51
Speaker 1: To night, she is finishing her session notes at her desk,
17:55
Speaker 1: and she is thinking about something her supervisor said to
17:58
Speaker 1: her twelve years ago during her first year of training.
18:02
Speaker 1: They were discussing a patient who could not stop the
18:04
Speaker 1: spiral of catastrophic thinking that arrived every evening around nine
18:07
Speaker 1: o'clock like an appointment that could not be canceled. Her
18:11
Speaker 1: supervisor said, the first thing we need to do is
18:15
Speaker 1: give it a name, not a clinical category, not a
18:20
Speaker 1: diagnosis from a manual, a name, something specific enough to
18:25
Speaker 1: this particular person, this particular pattern, this particular way the
18:29
Speaker 1: spiral announced itself and progressed and eventually released its grip,
18:34
Speaker 1: something that when the patient said it, they would be saying,
18:37
Speaker 1: I see you. You are not the whole of my experience.
18:42
Speaker 1: You are a specific thing, and I know what you are.
18:45
Speaker 1: That patient came back the following week and said, I
18:48
Speaker 1: called it the current, like an undertow that starts pulling
18:51
Speaker 1: at me around nine. Claire wrote that down the current Orneas,
18:57
Speaker 1: the ancient text would say by another neame. The naming
19:01
Speaker 1: did not resolve everything. Claire is careful about this with
19:05
Speaker 1: every person she works with. She does not promise that
19:08
Speaker 1: naming alone is the cure. But naming is the beginning
19:11
Speaker 1: of the only movement that actually matters, the movement from
19:15
Speaker 1: being acted upon by something invisible to standing in a
19:19
Speaker 1: relationship with something that has been made visible enough to address.
19:23
Speaker 1: Solomon had learned what defeated Orneas. He asked the third question,
19:28
Speaker 1: and it is this third question that separates the Testament
19:31
Speaker 1: from every other ancient text on this subject. He asked,
19:35
Speaker 1: what can you do? Not what have you done? Not?
19:39
Speaker 1: What damage have you caused? What can you do? What
19:43
Speaker 1: is the nature of the capacity inside this force that
19:46
Speaker 1: has been pointed in the wrong direction. This is the
19:49
Speaker 1: question of an architect, not a soldier. A soldier asks
19:54
Speaker 1: what the enemy is capable of in order to defend
19:56
Speaker 1: against it. An architect asks what the enemy is capable
20:00
Speaker 1: of in order to consider whether that capacity might be
20:03
Speaker 1: redirected towards something entirely different. According to the Testament, Orneus
20:09
Speaker 1: revealed that the force he had been using to drain
20:12
Speaker 1: the boy could when directed by the authority of the
20:15
Speaker 1: seal be turned outward. He could cut stone. He could
20:20
Speaker 1: work with a precision that human tools of the period
20:23
Speaker 1: could not match, cutting through the limestone of the Judean
20:26
Speaker 1: Hills in a fraction of the time, a team of
20:29
Speaker 1: skilled workers would need the thing that had been emptying.
20:32
Speaker 1: A child could turned in a different direction, build the
20:35
Speaker 1: house of God. Solomon commanded it. The ancient text records
20:40
Speaker 1: this with the matter of fact brevity that characterizes its
20:44
Speaker 1: best moments. It does not pause to celebrate, It simply says,
20:49
Speaker 1: and the demon cut the stones, and the work continued.
20:53
Speaker 1: The work continued. The boy slept, and in Austin, Texas,
20:58
Speaker 1: Daniel finally wrote the second line on his legal pad.
21:01
Speaker 1: Underneath the first line, which named the resistance, he wrote,
21:06
Speaker 1: what is it actually capable of? If I stop fighting
21:09
Speaker 1: it and start asking different questions? He did not know
21:13
Speaker 1: yet what the answer was, but he had asked the
21:16
Speaker 1: question that makes finding the answer possible. The work continued.
21:21
Speaker 1: That is what honest attention to the source of disruption produces.
21:25
Speaker 1: In the ancient text, and in the kitchen at eleven
21:28
Speaker 1: o'clock at night, and in whatever room you are in
21:31
Speaker 1: right now, not the end of the difficulty, the continuation
21:35
Speaker 1: of the work. Chapter three builds a Bull The Lord
21:41
Speaker 1: who Fell from the Highest Place. Start with the air
21:45
Speaker 1: on the building site at dawn, limestone dust still settling
21:49
Speaker 1: from the previous day, cedar wood from Lebanon, releasing its
21:53
Speaker 1: oil slowly in the first warmth of the morning. The
21:56
Speaker 1: particular mineral smell of freshly cut stone that has never
22:00
Speaker 1: been exposed to open air before, a smell that has
22:04
Speaker 1: no name because it only exists in the first moments
22:07
Speaker 1: after the cut, and then the stone joins the air,
22:10
Speaker 1: and the smell becomes the air, and there is no
22:12
Speaker 1: longer any distinction between them. This was the air Solomon
22:16
Speaker 1: breathed in the days after Orneus was bound. The work
22:19
Speaker 1: was going faster, the precision of the cuts had improved.
22:24
Speaker 1: The other workers on the site did not know why.
22:27
Speaker 1: They only knew that something had shifted in the quality
22:29
Speaker 1: of the work, and that the evenings felt different, now, lighter,
22:34
Speaker 1: less pressured, as if something that had been pressing on
22:38
Speaker 1: the edges of the days had been removed. Solomon knew
22:41
Speaker 1: what had changed. He also knew that what had been
22:45
Speaker 1: removed was not the whole of what needed addressing during
22:48
Speaker 1: the interrogation of Orneas, something had been named a center
22:53
Speaker 1: of gravity, a place from which the disruption of building
22:56
Speaker 1: sites and the draining of workers, and the opposition of
23:00
Speaker 1: every worthy project in the world was organized and directed.
23:04
Speaker 1: A hierarchy that Orneas occupied only a lower position. In
23:09
Speaker 1: Solomon pressed the ring to his palm. He commanded Oneas
23:12
Speaker 1: to bring him the ruler of all the demons. The
23:15
Speaker 1: ancient text does not record what passed between the summoning
23:18
Speaker 1: and the arrival. It only records what the text says
23:22
Speaker 1: came through the door of the chamber. When the summons
23:25
Speaker 1: was answered, the name was Beelzeboul. That name deserves the
23:30
Speaker 1: careful attention that words with long histories always deserve. The
23:34
Speaker 1: form we encounter in the Testament and in the Gospels
23:37
Speaker 1: of the New Testament is Beelzeboul. But there is an
23:40
Speaker 1: older form. It appears in the Second Book of Kings,
23:44
Speaker 1: in the story of the Israelite king Ahaziah, who sent
23:47
Speaker 1: messengers to inquire of the God of Ekron, a Philistine city.
23:52
Speaker 1: That older form is ba' al Zevuv, usually translated into
23:56
Speaker 1: English as Lord of the Flies. This translation has shaped
24:00
Speaker 1: Western culture in ways too numerous to count, but according
24:04
Speaker 1: to a significant body of scholarly argument, the form bal
24:08
Speaker 1: Zevouve may itself have been a deliberate distortion, a mocking
24:13
Speaker 1: revision of an older and more exalted original. The original
24:16
Speaker 1: title in this reading was bal Zevoul, not lord of
24:21
Speaker 1: the flies, lord of the high Place, lord of the
24:25
Speaker 1: exalted dwelling. The difference between Zavouve and Zavoul is a
24:30
Speaker 1: single vowel, one sound. The kind of alteration A scribe
24:35
Speaker 1: who wanted to take a name claiming exultation and render
24:39
Speaker 1: it contemptible could introduce in a single stroke, what had
24:43
Speaker 1: been Lord of the high place became lord of the flies.
24:46
Speaker 1: Whatever you were, whatever height you once occupied, look at
24:51
Speaker 1: what you have become. This is not a small observation.
24:55
Speaker 1: It is the entire story compressed into the distance between
24:58
Speaker 1: two vowels. Because when Solomon looked at Beelzebul standing in
25:03
Speaker 1: his chamber, the ancient text is presenting a figure that
25:06
Speaker 1: had not always been what it now was. In this tradition,
25:10
Speaker 1: this is a figure that had fallen, that had begun
25:13
Speaker 1: in a place of genuine elevation, and arrived through a
25:17
Speaker 1: sequence of choices that different ancient traditions describe with varying
25:21
Speaker 1: degrees of specificity, at a state of existence defined by
25:25
Speaker 1: the corruption of everything it had once been. The chamber
25:29
Speaker 1: felt different when Beelzebul entered it, not louder, the opposite,
25:34
Speaker 1: a silence that pressed against the ears the way deep
25:37
Speaker 1: water presses against the body. Solomon had stood before great
25:41
Speaker 1: men and difficult situations, and had not felt small. He
25:44
Speaker 1: felt small now, not from fear, from the recognition of scale.
25:50
Speaker 1: Whatever this was, it was older than anything he had
25:52
Speaker 1: yet faced, older than the building site, older than the
25:57
Speaker 1: quarries beneath Jerusalem, older the the mountains from which the
26:01
Speaker 1: cedar had been cut. Solomon held the ring, and he
26:05
Speaker 1: asked the first question, what is your name? According to
26:10
Speaker 1: the Testament, beelsibl answered without evasion. He said, I am Beelsboul,
26:16
Speaker 1: the ruler of all the demons, the one the text
26:19
Speaker 1: presents as having been in one ancient tradition, the highest
26:23
Speaker 1: of the angelic host. The word was past tense, hanging
26:29
Speaker 1: in the answer, like a stone held above still water
26:32
Speaker 1: about to fall. Already falling. Solomon asked the second question,
26:38
Speaker 1: how did you fall? The answer the text preserves here
26:42
Speaker 1: is one of the most carefully constructed passages in the
26:45
Speaker 1: entire Testament. It draws from the same deep current of
26:48
Speaker 1: ancient understanding about what went wrong at the very beginning
26:52
Speaker 1: of things that also runs through the passages in Isaiah
26:55
Speaker 1: and Ezekiel that later tradition most often associates with the adversarial.
27:00
Speaker 1: For according to the Testament, Beelzeboul had been the foremost
27:05
Speaker 1: created before all others, and given the position closest to
27:08
Speaker 1: the throne of God, and then the text says he refused.
27:14
Speaker 1: The specific content of the refusal is not defined with
27:17
Speaker 1: the precision that later systematic theology would demand. Ancient traditions
27:22
Speaker 1: point in different directions. Some say he refused to bow
27:26
Speaker 1: before Adam, the creature made from earth. Some say the
27:30
Speaker 1: refusal was more abstract, a rejection of the subordination that
27:34
Speaker 1: even the highest position in heaven requires the conviction that
27:38
Speaker 1: the closest place to God was a place of independence
27:42
Speaker 1: rather than a place of service. Whatever the content, the
27:45
Speaker 1: text describes the consequence in terms that are not primarily
27:49
Speaker 1: legal or punitive. They are experiential. What Beelzebul described in
27:56
Speaker 1: the Chamber of Solomon was what removal from the high
27:59
Speaker 1: place felt like. From the inside, not the dramatic image
28:03
Speaker 1: of a falling star that later poets would give to
28:05
Speaker 1: the Western imagination, something more psychologically precise, a being organized
28:12
Speaker 1: entirely around a position, a relationship, a proximity to something
28:16
Speaker 1: of infinite value, Finding that position gone, finding the relationship severed,
28:22
Speaker 1: Finding that what had structured every dimension of existence had
28:25
Speaker 1: been withdrawn, and that what remained was the same intelligence,
28:30
Speaker 1: the same capacity, the same energy, now untethered from the
28:35
Speaker 1: thing that had given it direction, now pointed at the
28:38
Speaker 1: nearest available substitute, which was destruction. Solomon asked what Beelzebul
28:44
Speaker 1: did in the world. The answer, according to the text,
28:47
Speaker 1: was long and specific, and it does not begin where
28:51
Speaker 1: most people expect such an answer to begin. It does
28:54
Speaker 1: not open with wars or catastrophes or dramatic external destruction.
28:59
Speaker 1: It begins quietly. I cause men not to believe, before
29:04
Speaker 1: the tyrant kings, before the violence, before any of the
29:08
Speaker 1: visible consequences. The primary work, according to the ancient text,
29:13
Speaker 1: is internal, the slow erosion of the capacity for trust,
29:18
Speaker 1: the patient diminishment of the part of a person that
29:21
Speaker 1: is capable of turning towards something larger than itself, and
29:24
Speaker 1: resting there This is the deepest work in the understanding
29:28
Speaker 1: behind this ancient text, not the dramatic interventions, the quiet
29:33
Speaker 1: and persistent pressure on the most fundamental orientation a person
29:37
Speaker 1: can have, and it works by the same method orn
29:41
Speaker 1: As worked, not by force by attrition, by the slow
29:46
Speaker 1: replacement of the wholeness of trust, with the fragmented experience
29:49
Speaker 1: of a person who has stopped believing that the story
29:52
Speaker 1: they are living in is going somewhere worth going. Solomon
29:56
Speaker 1: asked what defeated Beelzebul. The ancient text records his answer,
30:01
Speaker 1: and here the text says something that later Christian readers
30:05
Speaker 1: reading this passage alongside the Gospels may recognize as pointing
30:09
Speaker 1: towards something the ancient author may not have fully understood.
30:13
Speaker 1: According to the Testament, Beelzebul said, the Holy and most
30:18
Speaker 1: High God defeats me, and after him the one who
30:21
Speaker 1: will suffer many things at the hands of men, the
30:24
Speaker 1: one who will suffer many things at the hands of men.
30:28
Speaker 1: The text offers no explanation for this, It simply records
30:32
Speaker 1: the words and moves on. But for any one reading
30:35
Speaker 1: this text in the light of what came a thousand
30:37
Speaker 1: years after Solomon, those words carry a weight that the
30:41
Speaker 1: ancient text itself does not pause to name. The thing
30:45
Speaker 1: that defeats the ruler of all the demons in the
30:47
Speaker 1: text's own account, is not superior force or superior wisdom.
30:52
Speaker 1: It is a specific kind of human presence, a person
30:55
Speaker 1: who stays present in the middle of being handed over
30:58
Speaker 1: to the actions of others, who does not remove himself,
31:02
Speaker 1: who endures what staying present entails. We will return to
31:06
Speaker 1: this in the final chapter. For now, let the words
31:10
Speaker 1: settle where they settled in Solomon's chamber, into the record
31:13
Speaker 1: he was keeping. Solomon commanded Beelzebul to direct the other
31:18
Speaker 1: bound forces in the service of the temple's construction. The
31:22
Speaker 1: organizational capacity that had once coordinated opposition to the building
31:26
Speaker 1: of everything worth building was now turned to the sequencing
31:29
Speaker 1: and logistics of this specific building. The Lord of the
31:33
Speaker 1: High Place became a foreman on a construction site in Jerusalem.
31:37
Speaker 1: The ancient text does not comment on this. It trusts
31:40
Speaker 1: the reader to sit with it. The rebellion that had
31:43
Speaker 1: begun in the Highest Place ended, at least for the
31:47
Speaker 1: duration of seven years, in the supervision of manual labor.
31:51
Speaker 1: The limestone dust was still in the air at dawn
31:54
Speaker 1: the cedar still released its oil in the morning heat,
31:58
Speaker 1: and the building rose another course of stone. Chapter four,
32:04
Speaker 1: The thirty six Decans an ancient map of what cannot
32:08
Speaker 1: be seen. Before we enter this chapter, something needs to
32:12
Speaker 1: be said clearly and held throughout it. What follows is
32:16
Speaker 1: the ancient world's way of understanding a mystery that the
32:19
Speaker 1: modern world approaches from a completely different direction. The framework
32:23
Speaker 1: of the thirty six Decans, the idea that invisible forces
32:27
Speaker 1: correspond to regions of the human body, belongs to the
32:30
Speaker 1: cosmological worldview of the ancient Near East, a worldview shared
32:34
Speaker 1: across Egyptian, Babylonian, and later Jewish traditions. It is not
32:39
Speaker 1: a medical explanation. It does not replace or contradict what
32:44
Speaker 1: modern medicine understands about why bodies fail and how they heal.
32:48
Speaker 1: It is a window into how people two thousand years
32:50
Speaker 1: ago were trying to make sense of something that, still,
32:54
Speaker 1: in its deepest dimensions, resists complete explanation. Hold that distinction
33:00
Speaker 1: as you listen. Now. There is a section of the
33:03
Speaker 1: Testament of Solomon that most modern readers pass over quickly.
33:08
Speaker 1: It arrives after the dramatic confrontations with Orneas and Beelzebul
33:13
Speaker 1: after the compressed intensity of those encounters, and it does
33:16
Speaker 1: not have the same kind of narrative tension. No name,
33:20
Speaker 1: archangels arriving with rings, no confession of cosmic rebellion, no
33:26
Speaker 1: single figure of the scale that makes a reader lean forward.
33:30
Speaker 1: What it has instead rewards slower and more patient attention.
33:34
Speaker 1: It has a map. Solomon, in the days that followed
33:37
Speaker 1: the binding of Beelzebul, continued his interrogations. He called forward,
33:42
Speaker 1: one by one, and in small groups, a category of
33:45
Speaker 1: forces that the ancient text calls the decans. The word
33:49
Speaker 1: decan carries into the Testament from a tradition ancient even
33:53
Speaker 1: by Solomon's standards. In the astronomical understanding of the Egyptian
33:57
Speaker 1: and Babylonian worlds, the night sky was divided into thirty
34:02
Speaker 1: six sections. Each section corresponded to a ten degree arc
34:06
Speaker 1: of the zodiacal circle. Each decon rose on the eastern
34:09
Speaker 1: horizon at a specific time of year, and each one
34:13
Speaker 1: had been associated through centuries of careful observation by people
34:18
Speaker 1: who took the movements of the sky with absolute seriousness,
34:22
Speaker 1: with specific qualities and specific effects on the world below.
34:26
Speaker 1: According to the ancient text, each of the thirty six
34:30
Speaker 1: decans had a corresponding force, and each of those forces,
34:34
Speaker 1: the text says, operated not in the broad territory of
34:37
Speaker 1: war and tyranny and mass destruction that Beelzebul described, but
34:41
Speaker 1: in something far more intimate. Each one operated in the
34:44
Speaker 1: human body. Solomon called them forward, one after another. They
34:50
Speaker 1: came according to the testament, and he asked each the
34:53
Speaker 1: same questions he had asked the others. What is your name?
34:57
Speaker 1: What do you do? What defeats you? What they told him,
35:02
Speaker 1: recorded in the ancient text with the careful specificity of
35:05
Speaker 1: some one trying to preserve something important, was an account
35:09
Speaker 1: of the ways that invisible forces, in the understanding of
35:12
Speaker 1: this ancient tradition, work not in the world of nations
35:16
Speaker 1: and armies, but in the private interior of a single
35:19
Speaker 1: human life. The first group said, according to the text,
35:23
Speaker 1: we cause confusion and error in human thinking. We create
35:27
Speaker 1: the fog between a person and their ability to see
35:30
Speaker 1: things clearly. Another group, we work in the chest. We
35:34
Speaker 1: bring the tightness that makes breathing feel like labor. Another
35:39
Speaker 1: we disrupt the rhythm of the heart. We make it
35:42
Speaker 1: race when there is nothing to run from. We make
35:44
Speaker 1: it slow when clarity is needed. We introduce an irregularity
35:48
Speaker 1: into the most fundamental rhythm the body knows another. We
35:53
Speaker 1: work at the point between the eyes where thought and
35:56
Speaker 1: feeling meet. We press there with something that is not
35:59
Speaker 1: quite pain and not quite pressure, but something in between
36:03
Speaker 1: that has no good name in any language. On and
36:06
Speaker 1: on thirty six groups, thirty six territories, the ancient text
36:12
Speaker 1: mapping what it could not see with the tools it
36:14
Speaker 1: had available. Now Here is where the careful distinction from
36:18
Speaker 1: the beginning of this chapter matters most. It would be
36:21
Speaker 1: easy to read this section and categorize it quickly pre
36:25
Speaker 1: scientific explanation for phenomena that modern medicine now understands more accurately,
36:31
Speaker 1: the kind of framework that was necessary before germ theory
36:34
Speaker 1: and cellular biology gave us better accounts of why bodies fail.
36:39
Speaker 1: This categorization is not wrong on its own terms, but
36:43
Speaker 1: it misses what the author of the Testament was actually doing.
36:46
Speaker 1: And what the author was doing was not primarily about mechanism.
36:51
Speaker 1: It was about relationship. The underlying claim of the Decan
36:55
Speaker 1: section in the cosmological worldview behind it is that the
36:58
Speaker 1: human body is not a self contained system operating independently
37:02
Speaker 1: of the larger order of things. In the ancient understanding,
37:06
Speaker 1: the body is permeable. It is in conversation with forces
37:11
Speaker 1: and rhythms and patterns that are larger than the individual
37:14
Speaker 1: and do not originate inside the individual. What happens at
37:18
Speaker 1: the scale of the cosmos finds its way, in this
37:21
Speaker 1: framework into the experience of the single body lying in
37:25
Speaker 1: a single bed at a particular hour of a particular night.
37:30
Speaker 1: This is not a claim that modern medicine makes. It
37:33
Speaker 1: is an ancient claim, and it belongs to the ancient
37:36
Speaker 1: text as a feature of how that text understood the world.
37:40
Speaker 1: What is worth attending to and what does not require
37:43
Speaker 1: accepting the ancient cosmological framework to appreciate is the pattern
37:47
Speaker 1: in the answers these forces give when Solomon asks what
37:51
Speaker 1: defeats them? Some name specific angels. Raphael appears frequently in
37:56
Speaker 1: this section of the text. Raphael, whose no name in
38:00
Speaker 1: Hebrew means God heals, is the archangel most consistently associated
38:05
Speaker 1: in ancient Jewish tradition with healing and the restoration of
38:09
Speaker 1: what illness has damaged. The angel of the Book of Tobit,
38:12
Speaker 1: who accompanies a young man on a journey and provides
38:15
Speaker 1: at the journey's end, the means of restoring his father's sight,
38:20
Speaker 1: the one whose specific domain is the intersection of the
38:23
Speaker 1: divine and the physical, the one who stands where the
38:27
Speaker 1: spiritual and the bodily meet. But several of the Deccans
38:30
Speaker 1: name something that is not an angel and not a
38:33
Speaker 1: ritual action. They name a posture, the interior posture of
38:37
Speaker 1: the person in the body that the force is afflicting.
38:40
Speaker 1: Whether the fundamental attention is turned inward toward the anxious
38:44
Speaker 1: monitoring of every symptom, every fluctuation, every sign that something
38:48
Speaker 1: might be worsening, or whether it is turned outward and
38:51
Speaker 1: upward toward the reality that is larger than the individual
38:56
Speaker 1: and holds the individual within something more durable than the
39:00
Speaker 1: individual's own management of their situation. There is a woman
39:04
Speaker 1: named Sarah. She is forty seven years old. To night,
39:09
Speaker 1: she is forty minutes into the quiet stretch of a
39:11
Speaker 1: twelve hour shift in the intensive care unit of a
39:14
Speaker 1: hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The corridor smells of antiseptic and
39:19
Speaker 1: the particular warm electronic smell of monitors that have been
39:23
Speaker 1: running for a long time. The overhead lights are dim
39:26
Speaker 1: to the night setting, casting everything in a pale blue
39:29
Speaker 1: that makes the hallway feel like it exists slightly outside
39:33
Speaker 1: ordinary time. Her sneakers make a soft sound on the
39:36
Speaker 1: linoleum as she moves past each room. She stops at
39:40
Speaker 1: the window between rooms eleven and twelve. Two patients. She
39:45
Speaker 1: has been thinking about them for three weeks, same age,
39:49
Speaker 1: same diagnosis, same treatment protocol. She has the charts memorized.
39:55
Speaker 1: At this point. The numbers for both of them have
39:57
Speaker 1: moved in the same direction at roughly the set rate.
40:01
Speaker 1: But one of them is going home on Thursday. The
40:04
Speaker 1: other one she is not sure about, and the difference
40:07
Speaker 1: after nineteen years of doing this work is not in
40:10
Speaker 1: anything she can put in a chart. She is not
40:13
Speaker 1: thinking about the Testament of Solomon. She has never heard
40:17
Speaker 1: of the Testament of Solomon. But she is standing in
40:19
Speaker 1: the blue lit corridor at two in the morning, in
40:22
Speaker 1: exactly the territory that the ancient text is trying to describe,
40:26
Speaker 1: the place where the measurable and the unmeasurable meet, where
40:29
Speaker 1: the charts tell part of the story and something else,
40:32
Speaker 1: something she has spent nineteen years learning to notice without
40:35
Speaker 1: being able to name, tells the rest. The ancient map
40:39
Speaker 1: was drawn by people who did not have her charts.
40:42
Speaker 1: They were trying, with the tools they had and the
40:44
Speaker 1: frame work they inherited, to describe the same territory she
40:48
Speaker 1: is standing in tonight. They got the mechanism wrong in
40:51
Speaker 1: ways that modern medicine has corrected, but they were mapping
40:55
Speaker 1: the right territory. Solomon recorded all of itame, every domain,
41:02
Speaker 1: everything that defeated each force. He wrote it down with
41:06
Speaker 1: the systematic thoroughness of someone who understood that knowledge is
41:09
Speaker 1: only as useful as its transmission, that the wisdom accumulated
41:13
Speaker 1: in one generation becomes the foundation of the next, only
41:18
Speaker 1: if someone takes the trouble to preserve it accurately. He
41:22
Speaker 1: was building two structures simultaneously, the Temple of Stone above
41:26
Speaker 1: the hillside of Jerusalem, and this a document, a record
41:32
Speaker 1: of the hidden architecture of the world, preserved against the
41:35
Speaker 1: erosion that time brings to everything it touches. The Stone
41:39
Speaker 1: Temple was destroyed in the year seventy of the Common era.
41:43
Speaker 1: The Roman armies came and reduced what Solomon had built
41:46
Speaker 1: to rubble and one remaining wall. The text survived, not
41:52
Speaker 1: without damage across its long transmission, not without the additions
41:56
Speaker 1: and corruptions that every ancient document accumulates across century of copying,
42:01
Speaker 1: but substantially recognizably, with enough of what Solomon's record contained
42:07
Speaker 1: still present that a person in a quiet room two
42:10
Speaker 1: thousand years later can read it and encounter the same
42:13
Speaker 1: ancient question, what is happening in you? That is not
42:17
Speaker 1: visible on any chart. Sarah finishes her check of room eleven,
42:22
Speaker 1: she moves to Room twelve. She stands in the doorway
42:26
Speaker 1: for a moment, watching the rise and fall of breathing
42:29
Speaker 1: in the blue light. She does not have the answer,
42:32
Speaker 1: but she is asking the right question. And the one
42:35
Speaker 1: whose name means God heals is not limited by what
42:39
Speaker 1: can be charted. He knows the territory on both sides
42:42
Speaker 1: of the number. Sleep comes slowly, sometimes to those who
42:46
Speaker 1: spend their nights watching over others, but it comes, and
42:51
Speaker 1: Raphael walks the blue lit corridor two, in the small hours,
42:55
Speaker 1: in the antiseptic air, in the space between what the
42:58
Speaker 1: monitor says and what the morning will bring. He is there.
43:02
Speaker 1: He has always been there. Chapter five, Ephippus and the Queen,
43:10
Speaker 1: the wind that carried what the building needed. There is
43:14
Speaker 1: a kind of mourning that only belongs to work that
43:17
Speaker 1: is almost done. Not the morning of the beginning, with
43:21
Speaker 1: its mixture of possibility and vertigo. Not the middle mornings
43:25
Speaker 1: of a long project, carrying the weight of people who
43:27
Speaker 1: have been working hard for a long time and cannot
43:30
Speaker 1: yet see the end. This is the other kind of mourning,
43:34
Speaker 1: the one when someone on the site stops in the
43:36
Speaker 1: middle of crossing from one area to another and looks
43:39
Speaker 1: up and sees for the first time the shape of
43:42
Speaker 1: the finished thing inside what is actually in front of them,
43:46
Speaker 1: not the plan, the thing itself. Almost the temple was
43:51
Speaker 1: that close. Now. Solomon had bound Orneus and Beelzebul. He
43:56
Speaker 1: had mapped the thirty six territories. The building was rise
44:00
Speaker 1: with a consistency and precision that the craftsman on the
44:03
Speaker 1: site had stopped trying to explain and had simply accepted
44:07
Speaker 1: as the condition of this particular project, on this particular hillside,
44:11
Speaker 1: in this particular seventh year. And then the wind came.
44:16
Speaker 1: It arrived, without seasonal logic, from a direction that did
44:20
Speaker 1: not match the time of year, moving with an intention
44:23
Speaker 1: that ordinary wind does not carry, and it left behind
44:27
Speaker 1: it at the base of one of the nearly finished walls.
44:30
Speaker 1: A disruption in the laid stone work that would cost
44:33
Speaker 1: several days of careful repair. Solomon recognized it before he
44:37
Speaker 1: could name it. He pressed the ring to his palm,
44:40
Speaker 1: he spoke the words. According to the ancient text, what
44:44
Speaker 1: entered the chamber this time was a force who called
44:46
Speaker 1: himself Ephippus. The name does not appear in most referenced
44:50
Speaker 1: texts on ancient demonology. Ephippus is not famous the way
44:55
Speaker 1: Beelzebul is famous. He is not referenced in the iconography
44:59
Speaker 1: of the tradition or in the popular imagination. He exists
45:03
Speaker 1: almost entirely within the pages of the Testament of Solomon,
45:07
Speaker 1: which means that what we know about him is exactly
45:09
Speaker 1: and only what Solomon's record preserves, and what Solomon's record
45:14
Speaker 1: preserves about him. Opens with a claim that changed the
45:17
Speaker 1: shape of the interrogation entirely. According to the text, Efippus
45:22
Speaker 1: identified himself as a wind demon, not in the localized
45:26
Speaker 1: sense of a spirit attached to a particular valley or
45:29
Speaker 1: a particular season, something with broader range, something that moved
45:34
Speaker 1: across the full span of the atmosphere, with a freedom
45:37
Speaker 1: that most forces do not possess. He could travel. The
45:41
Speaker 1: text says, from one end of the earth to the
45:43
Speaker 1: other in a single day. He could raise storms at
45:47
Speaker 1: sea that would overturn ships, he could move mountains, And then,
45:52
Speaker 1: according to the ancient text, he said something that made
45:55
Speaker 1: Solomon pause before asking the next question. He said, I
46:00
Speaker 1: am the one who brought the Queen of the South
46:02
Speaker 1: to your father's son, the Queen of the South. Solomon
46:07
Speaker 1: had grown up with this story. It was part of
46:10
Speaker 1: the inheritance of his family and his kingdom, and his
46:13
Speaker 1: own sense of what his reign was meant to be.
46:16
Speaker 1: It appears in the tenth chapter of the First Book
46:19
Speaker 1: of Kings, with the compressed and luminous brevity that the
46:22
Speaker 1: best passages of the historical books achieve when they are
46:26
Speaker 1: describing something the author knew mattered beyond what words could
46:30
Speaker 1: fully hold. She had heard of Solomon. The report had
46:34
Speaker 1: traveled through the trade networks of the ancient world, through
46:38
Speaker 1: the hands of merchants and the careful assessments of diplomats,
46:42
Speaker 1: who noted in their records of regional powers that something
46:46
Speaker 1: unusual was happening in Jerusalem. A king unlike other kings,
46:51
Speaker 1: a wisdom unlike other wisdoms. She came to test him.
46:55
Speaker 1: She arrived with a great caravan, camels, spy, gold and
47:01
Speaker 1: precious stones in quantities the text says, had not been
47:04
Speaker 1: seen before in the city. She brought with her the
47:07
Speaker 1: full weight of her own intelligence, her own capability, her
47:11
Speaker 1: own practiced art of asking the questions that reveal the
47:14
Speaker 1: quality of the person being asked. And she asked Solomon
47:18
Speaker 1: everything that was in her heart. The text says, he
47:21
Speaker 1: answered all her questions, that nothing was hidden from him
47:25
Speaker 1: that he could not explain to her. When she had
47:28
Speaker 1: seen everything, the building and the table, and the servants
47:31
Speaker 1: and the offerings, the text says, there was no more
47:34
Speaker 1: breath in her No more breath, Not the breath of
47:38
Speaker 1: a person who found exactly what they expected, the breath
47:42
Speaker 1: of a person who found something that exceeded every category
47:45
Speaker 1: they had brought to the encounter. The particular quality of
47:48
Speaker 1: standing before something that is more than the report of it,
47:52
Speaker 1: that makes the report feel in retrospect like the outline
47:55
Speaker 1: of a painting, rather than the painting itself. She said,
47:59
Speaker 1: the half was not told me. I prepared, I traveled
48:03
Speaker 1: months to get here. I asked every question I knew
48:06
Speaker 1: how to ask, and the half was not told me.
48:10
Speaker 1: This sentence has stayed in the record for three thousand years,
48:13
Speaker 1: because it names an experience that is not limited to
48:16
Speaker 1: the Queen of Sheba and is not limited to encounters
48:19
Speaker 1: with ancient kings. It is the experience of any one
48:23
Speaker 1: who has ever arrived at something they thought they had
48:25
Speaker 1: adequately prepared for and discovered that preparation and encounter are
48:30
Speaker 1: not the same thing. That the real thing is always
48:33
Speaker 1: more than the description of the real thing. That the map,
48:37
Speaker 1: however accurate, is not the territory. The territory is always larger,
48:42
Speaker 1: the half is always more than was told. Now Here
48:46
Speaker 1: is where the two stories meet. Where what if Phippus
48:49
Speaker 1: told Solomon in the chamber intersects with the story Solomon
48:52
Speaker 1: had known since childhood. According to the ancient text, if
48:56
Speaker 1: Phippus said he had brought the Queen of the South
48:59
Speaker 1: to Solomon, not accompanied her, not been present on the journey,
49:04
Speaker 1: brought her think about what the text is suggesting the
49:08
Speaker 1: event that Solomon had grown up hearing about as one
49:11
Speaker 1: of the defining moments of his father's reign, one of
49:14
Speaker 1: the most visible confirmations that the wisdom given to his
49:18
Speaker 1: family was real and recognizable even to those outside the tradition.
49:22
Speaker 1: Had according to this ancient account, an invisible dimension that
49:26
Speaker 1: the visible account did not contain. The queen had come
49:30
Speaker 1: because she heard and because she chose. Both of those
49:34
Speaker 1: things remained true within the framework of the Testament. The
49:37
Speaker 1: ancient text is not suggesting her agency was an illusion,
49:41
Speaker 1: that she was moved without knowledge or will. She made
49:45
Speaker 1: a real decision, She undertook a real journey, She asked
49:49
Speaker 1: real questions and received real answers that produced a real
49:53
Speaker 1: transformation in her understanding. The Testament is not collapsing the
49:57
Speaker 1: visible story into the invisible one. It is saying both
50:01
Speaker 1: were real simultaneously, that the scene and the unseen were
50:05
Speaker 1: running alongside each other, That the movement of a great
50:09
Speaker 1: queen across a continent to encounter a great king was
50:12
Speaker 1: a human decision, and, in the understanding of this ancient text,
50:16
Speaker 1: something more than a human decision. At the same time.
50:20
Speaker 1: This is the claim the Testament makes repeatedly in different
50:23
Speaker 1: forms across its chapters. The visible history of the world
50:27
Speaker 1: is always running alongside an invisible one. The two are
50:31
Speaker 1: not in competition. They are the same story told at
50:34
Speaker 1: two different scales. Solomon asked Ephippus what defeated him? According
50:40
Speaker 1: to the ancient text, the archangel who had power over
50:43
Speaker 1: him bore a name, carrying in its route the idea
50:46
Speaker 1: of seeing clearly, not the seeing of eyes, only the
50:50
Speaker 1: seeing of a kind of awareness that perceives the full
50:53
Speaker 1: structure of what is present, the visible lair and the
50:56
Speaker 1: invisible one simultaneously. The defeat of the w whin demon
51:00
Speaker 1: is the clarity that sees through the disruption to the
51:03
Speaker 1: force moving through it, that asks not only what is
51:07
Speaker 1: happening on the surface, but what is being carried through
51:09
Speaker 1: what is happening? And then Solomon gave Epheppus a task,
51:14
Speaker 1: and the ancient text records it with a specificity that
51:18
Speaker 1: suggests the author understood its significance. The temple needed its
51:22
Speaker 1: corner stone, not any stone, the stone that would be
51:26
Speaker 1: set at the corner where two walls met and bore
51:29
Speaker 1: the weight of both, the stone that determined the alignment
51:33
Speaker 1: of everything built after it. The cornerstone, in the tradition
51:36
Speaker 1: of the ancient Near East, was not merely an engineering element.
51:41
Speaker 1: It was a theological statement. The moment of its setting
51:44
Speaker 1: was the moment a building declared what it was and
51:47
Speaker 1: what it was for everything that followed was a line
51:50
Speaker 1: to it. Or it was not a building. The corner
51:53
Speaker 1: stone for the temple was enormous, larger than any stone
51:57
Speaker 1: the human workers had yet moved heavy in a way
52:00
Speaker 1: that made ordinary transport impossible across the difficult ground between
52:04
Speaker 1: the quarry and the hillside of Jerusalem. Solomon commanded a
52:08
Speaker 1: phippus to carry it. The wind demon, who had disrupted
52:12
Speaker 1: the building site, gathered himself for a single act that
52:16
Speaker 1: was the exact inversion of everything he had been doing.
52:19
Speaker 1: He carried the cornerstone from the quarry to Jerusalem, and
52:23
Speaker 1: Solomon set it in place in the hundred and eighteenth Psalm,
52:27
Speaker 1: a psalm the worshiping community of Israel used in its
52:31
Speaker 1: great festivals for generations. There is a verse that Jesus
52:34
Speaker 1: quoted in the final week of his life standing in
52:37
Speaker 1: the Temple, that this corner stone had helped build. The
52:41
Speaker 1: stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This
52:45
Speaker 1: is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.
52:48
Speaker 1: He quoted it as a claim about himself. The people
52:52
Speaker 1: he was speaking to understood what he was claiming. The
52:55
Speaker 1: stone rejected by those who were supposed to know which
52:58
Speaker 1: stones mattered, turn set in place become the thing that
53:03
Speaker 1: everything else must be aligned to. The wind demon carrying
53:08
Speaker 1: the corner stone, the rejected stone becoming the alignment of
53:12
Speaker 1: the building, the same movement, the same ancient understanding that
53:17
Speaker 1: the force working against the building is sometimes the only
53:20
Speaker 1: mechanism capable of delivering what the building requires. But you
53:24
Speaker 1: can only see that after the corner stone is set.
53:28
Speaker 1: In the middle of the disruption. It looks like loss.
53:31
Speaker 1: Only when you stand back far enough to see the
53:33
Speaker 1: corner do you understand what the wind was carrying. There
53:37
Speaker 1: is a woman named Caroline. She is fifty two years old,
53:41
Speaker 1: and she lives in Portland, Oregon. To night, she is
53:44
Speaker 1: lying in the dark and thinking about something that happened
53:47
Speaker 1: nine years ago that she still does not have a
53:49
Speaker 1: clean way to hold. Nine years ago, she lost the
53:52
Speaker 1: position she had spent fifteen years building toward. It happened
53:56
Speaker 1: quickly and without the warning she felt she deserved. She
54:00
Speaker 1: spent the following two years in the particular disorientation of
54:03
Speaker 1: a person whose sense of themselves was built into a
54:07
Speaker 1: structure that no longer exists. She knows this now. She
54:11
Speaker 1: could not have said it then. What she knows now.
54:14
Speaker 1: Nine years on the other side of it is that
54:16
Speaker 1: the work she does now is more aligned with what
54:19
Speaker 1: she is actually built for than anything she did in
54:22
Speaker 1: the fifteen years before the loss. She is not saying
54:25
Speaker 1: the loss was secretly good. She is careful about that.
54:29
Speaker 1: She would not choose it again. The pain was real,
54:33
Speaker 1: and some of what it cost her has not fully
54:35
Speaker 1: come back. But she is saying something more honest than
54:38
Speaker 1: a simple redemption story. She is saying that the wind
54:42
Speaker 1: that knocked the structure down was also the wind that
54:45
Speaker 1: carried her to where she needed to be. And she
54:48
Speaker 1: cannot make that sentence simple or clean or comfortable. She
54:51
Speaker 1: has stopped trying to. She holds both things at the
54:55
Speaker 1: same time. Now, the disruption was real, the damage was real,
55:00
Speaker 1: and the cornerstone she is standing on to Night was
55:03
Speaker 1: carried here by the same force that took the previous
55:05
Speaker 1: structure down. She does not have a theology for that.
55:09
Speaker 1: She only has the experience of it, and the experience
55:13
Speaker 1: for to Night is enough. The Night over Jerusalem is still.
55:18
Speaker 1: The cornerstone is in place, The walls rising from it
55:22
Speaker 1: are aligned to something that the wind demon carried without
55:25
Speaker 1: understanding what he was carrying. The half was not told.
55:29
Speaker 1: It never is until you are standing inside the thing
55:32
Speaker 1: that the wind was building all along. Rest Now you
55:37
Speaker 1: are further along than the disruption made it seem. And
55:41
Speaker 1: the cornerstone, once set, holds everything that rises from it.
55:45
Speaker 1: Sleep Chapter six, Asmodeus, the oldest Wound and the healer
55:53
Speaker 1: who walks beside you. There is a kind of silence
55:57
Speaker 1: that falls between two people who love each each other
56:00
Speaker 1: and have stopped being able to reach each other. Not
56:03
Speaker 1: the comfortable silence of people who have been together long
56:06
Speaker 1: enough that words are not always necessary. The other kind,
56:11
Speaker 1: the silence that has weight in it, that fills the
56:14
Speaker 1: space between them, not with ease, but with everything that
56:16
Speaker 1: has been said inadequately, and everything that has not been
56:20
Speaker 1: said at all, and everything that both of them sense
56:23
Speaker 1: without being able to find the language for it. You
56:26
Speaker 1: know this silence not from reading about it, from having
56:30
Speaker 1: been inside it at a kitchen table, in a car
56:34
Speaker 1: on a long drive that no one is talking through,
56:37
Speaker 1: in a bed in the dark, where two people are
56:40
Speaker 1: lying close enough to touch and are not touching, and
56:43
Speaker 1: both of them are awake, and neither of them says so.
56:46
Speaker 1: Solomon knew it too, in a different way, across a
56:50
Speaker 1: different kind of life, but the silence he recognized when
56:53
Speaker 1: Asmodius entered the chamber was the same silence. Not the
56:58
Speaker 1: opposition of the others, not the resistance of forces working
57:02
Speaker 1: against the building from outside. It something that felt, even
57:05
Speaker 1: across the chamber like the inside of things. Solomon asked
57:10
Speaker 1: the first question. According to the ancient text, the answer
57:14
Speaker 1: came with a directness that carried even under compulsion, something
57:18
Speaker 1: almost like pride, not the evasion of the lesser forces,
57:23
Speaker 1: not the negotiation of something uncertain about its own nature.
57:27
Speaker 1: I am Asmodeus. The name arrives in the Testament from
57:31
Speaker 1: multiple directions simultaneously, which is itself significant. In the Book
57:36
Speaker 1: of Tobit, a text preserved in the Catholic and Orthodox
57:39
Speaker 1: Biblical canons and part of the broader scriptural world of
57:43
Speaker 1: ancient Judaism, as Medeus appears as the force attached to
57:47
Speaker 1: a woman named Sarah, in the possessive and destructive sense
57:51
Speaker 1: of something that has fastened on to what it cannot
57:53
Speaker 1: actually have, and is destroying what it cannot have rather
57:57
Speaker 1: than releasing it. Sarah had been married seven times. Each husband,
58:03
Speaker 1: the text says, died on the wedding night, seven men
58:08
Speaker 1: seven deaths before the marriage could become what marriage is
58:12
Speaker 1: meant to become. The resolution in Tobit comes through a
58:16
Speaker 1: young man named Tobias, accompanied on his journey by the
58:19
Speaker 1: archangel Raphael, who gives him specific instructions. The liver and
58:24
Speaker 1: heart of a fish burned as incense in the wedding chamber.
58:29
Speaker 1: The smell drives as Moodius away. Rafael pursues him to
58:33
Speaker 1: Egypt and binds him there fish fire, an angel who
58:38
Speaker 1: knows the road. Solomon, looking at Asmodius in his chamber,
58:43
Speaker 1: was looking at the same force the book of Tobit
58:45
Speaker 1: had described, the one that used the most unguarded and
58:49
Speaker 1: intimate moment of a human life as the occasion for
58:52
Speaker 1: its worst work. He asked the second question, what do
58:56
Speaker 1: you do? And here the ancient text does something worth
58:59
Speaker 1: reading slowly because the answer is not what most people
59:03
Speaker 1: expect from a force associated with love. According to the Testament,
59:08
Speaker 1: as Medeus did not say I destroy love. He said,
59:12
Speaker 1: I plot against the newly wedded. I divide them. I
59:17
Speaker 1: bring madness against them through their passions. I waste the
59:21
Speaker 1: beauty of virgins and estrange hearts. PLOT divide madness through passion.
59:28
Speaker 1: Waste is strange not one of these words describes the
59:33
Speaker 1: absence of love. Every one of them describes the corruption
59:36
Speaker 1: of something that begins as genuine connection and is turned
59:41
Speaker 1: slowly and without the people inside it, always recognizing what
59:45
Speaker 1: is happening into something that consumes rather than nourishes, that
59:50
Speaker 1: isolates rather than joins, that takes the energy of genuine
59:54
Speaker 1: feeling and bends it until it faces inward, until love
59:58
Speaker 1: becomes possession, until care becomes controlled, until the desire to
1:00:04
Speaker 1: be close to someone becomes the demand that the some
1:00:08
Speaker 1: one never change or need anything that cannot be provided.
1:00:12
Speaker 1: This is the distinction the ancient author was drawing with precision.
1:00:16
Speaker 1: The most destructive work, as Modius does in the frame
1:00:20
Speaker 1: work of this ancient text, is not to destroy love
1:00:23
Speaker 1: from the outside. He enters love from within it. He
1:00:27
Speaker 1: uses the real feeling, the genuine attachment, the actual desire
1:00:31
Speaker 1: for connection that exists in the person, and he redirects
1:00:35
Speaker 1: it until it faces the wrong direction, until what was
1:00:39
Speaker 1: given freely has become what is owed, until what was
1:00:43
Speaker 1: offered has become what is demanded. There is a word
1:00:47
Speaker 1: in the ancient Greek of the text, sometimes translated as
1:00:50
Speaker 1: is strange. Its root means to set apart from the
1:00:54
Speaker 1: proper relationship, not the relationship ending, the relationship continuing in
1:01:00
Speaker 1: a form that no longer resembles what it was made
1:01:02
Speaker 1: to be, the form without the substance, the proximity, without
1:01:07
Speaker 1: the presence two people in the same house, further apart
1:01:11
Speaker 1: than geography. Asmodius does not need people to stop loving
1:01:15
Speaker 1: each other. He only needs them to love each other incorrectly.
1:01:20
Speaker 1: In the thirteenth chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians,
1:01:24
Speaker 1: Paul wrote, the passage read at more weddings than any
1:01:27
Speaker 1: other text in the history of the Christian tradition. Most
1:01:31
Speaker 1: people know the beginning of it passion kinned, not envious
1:01:36
Speaker 1: or boastful, but the phrase that matters most in the
1:01:39
Speaker 1: light of what Asmodius confesses to Solomon appears near the middle.
1:01:44
Speaker 1: Love does not insist on its own way. Read that,
1:01:47
Speaker 1: in the light of what Asmodius has just described, the
1:01:51
Speaker 1: corruption of love is precisely the insistence on its own way,
1:01:55
Speaker 1: the hardening of the boundary between my needs and your needs,
1:01:58
Speaker 1: until the relationship becomes a negotiation between two defended positions
1:02:03
Speaker 1: rather than a shared life. The replacement of genuine interest
1:02:08
Speaker 1: in the other person with the management of the other
1:02:10
Speaker 1: person as a source of what the self requires. This
1:02:14
Speaker 1: is not a dramatic transformation. It does not happen in
1:02:18
Speaker 1: a single event or a single choice. It is the
1:02:21
Speaker 1: slow work of a force that operates through the materials
1:02:24
Speaker 1: of love itself, patiently, invisibly, one small bending at a time.
1:02:31
Speaker 1: Solomon asked the third question, what defeats you? According to
1:02:36
Speaker 1: the ancient text, Asmadeus gave two answers. The first was Raphael,
1:02:42
Speaker 1: the same archangel who appeared in the Book of Tobit,
1:02:45
Speaker 1: the one whose name means God heals, the one whose
1:02:49
Speaker 1: specific domain is the restoration of what has been damaged,
1:02:53
Speaker 1: the healer of bodies, the restorer of sight, the one
1:02:58
Speaker 1: who accompanies the traveler on the road and provides at
1:03:01
Speaker 1: the journey's end the means of repair. Raphael does not
1:03:05
Speaker 1: heal from a distance. This is what the Book of
1:03:08
Speaker 1: Tobit makes clear in its account of the journey. He
1:03:11
Speaker 1: walks beside. He travels the road with the person. He
1:03:16
Speaker 1: carries the knowledge of what is needed, and provides it
1:03:19
Speaker 1: at the moment the traveler is ready to receive it.
1:03:22
Speaker 1: The defeat of Asmodaeus is not accomplished by the person alone.
1:03:27
Speaker 1: It is accomplished in the company of the one who accompanies.
1:03:31
Speaker 1: The second answer was more specific, the liver and heart
1:03:34
Speaker 1: of a fish burned in the place where the harm
1:03:37
Speaker 1: is being done. This detail is strange to modern ears,
1:03:41
Speaker 1: but it carries a significance in the ancient tradition that
1:03:44
Speaker 1: goes beyond its literal content. The tradition behind the Testament
1:03:48
Speaker 1: believed that God, in creating the world, had built into
1:03:52
Speaker 1: the created order the means of addressing every harm the
1:03:56
Speaker 1: world contained, that the physical materials of creation were not
1:04:00
Speaker 1: separate from the spiritual struggle, but continuous with it. Underneath
1:04:05
Speaker 1: the ancient specificity of fish and fire, the tradition is
1:04:08
Speaker 1: pointing at something that both modern medicine and modern psychology
1:04:12
Speaker 1: have arrived at from different directions. The healing of love
1:04:16
Speaker 1: is not abstract. It happens in specific bodies, in specific rooms,
1:04:22
Speaker 1: through specific conversations and specific moments of choosing to turn
1:04:26
Speaker 1: toward rather than away. The repair is physical as well
1:04:30
Speaker 1: as relational. It requires the actual presence of the people involved.
1:04:35
Speaker 1: It cannot be accomplished entirely in the interior of one
1:04:38
Speaker 1: person's mind, managed from the inside, worked out in private.
1:04:43
Speaker 1: Raphael Hels what has been brought into the open, He
1:04:47
Speaker 1: does not heal what has been managed back into a
1:04:49
Speaker 1: comfortable appearance of health. Solomon gave as Modius a task,
1:04:54
Speaker 1: and the task, according to the ancient text, was not
1:04:57
Speaker 1: building above the ground, It was go owing beneath it.
1:05:01
Speaker 1: As Medeus was commanded to dig into the earth under
1:05:04
Speaker 1: the temple site and make the foundation sound by removing
1:05:08
Speaker 1: what should not be there, the preparation that makes the
1:05:11
Speaker 1: visible building possible without the visible building ever showing the
1:05:15
Speaker 1: evidence of it. The demon of corrupted love was put
1:05:19
Speaker 1: to work on the foundation. What is built on a
1:05:22
Speaker 1: damaged foundation will eventually tell the truth about what is
1:05:25
Speaker 1: underneath it. The structure may rise for a long time,
1:05:29
Speaker 1: it may look from the outside complete and sound and
1:05:33
Speaker 1: capable of bearing whatever is placed on it. But something
1:05:37
Speaker 1: in the relationship between the foundation and what sits on
1:05:40
Speaker 1: it is not what it appears to be, And eventually
1:05:43
Speaker 1: the building says so what Asmodius dug out made the
1:05:47
Speaker 1: temple sound. What is uncovered in the honest examination of
1:05:51
Speaker 1: what lies beneath a relationship makes the relationship possible in
1:05:55
Speaker 1: a form that is not merely proximity dressed as presents
1:06:00
Speaker 1: there is a woman named Margaret. She is forty nine
1:06:03
Speaker 1: years old. Tonight, she is sitting in her car in
1:06:06
Speaker 1: the parking lot of a grocery store in Portland, Oregon.
1:06:09
Speaker 1: She arrived twenty seven minutes ago. The list is on
1:06:13
Speaker 1: her phone. The lit store is twenty yards away. She
1:06:17
Speaker 1: has not moved. She had a conversation three hours ago
1:06:21
Speaker 1: with the person she has been married to for twenty
1:06:23
Speaker 1: one years. Not a final conversation, not a dramatic one,
1:06:28
Speaker 1: one of the conversations that have been accumulating over the
1:06:31
Speaker 1: past three years, each one beginning with something ordinary, a
1:06:35
Speaker 1: question about dinner, a comment about the week, a silence
1:06:39
Speaker 1: that started as a pause and became something else, each
1:06:43
Speaker 1: one ending with both of them in their separate corners
1:06:46
Speaker 1: of the house, not angry exactly, not finished exactly, unable
1:06:52
Speaker 1: to find the way back to the room where they
1:06:54
Speaker 1: used to be without effort. She is not thinking about Asmodius.
1:06:58
Speaker 1: She has never read the ten Estimate of Solomon. But
1:07:01
Speaker 1: she is sitting in a parking lot at nine thirty
1:07:04
Speaker 1: in the evening, in the particular stillness of a person
1:07:07
Speaker 1: who has finally stopped moving long enough to let the
1:07:10
Speaker 1: right question catch up with her. Not the external accounting,
1:07:15
Speaker 1: not the list of events and failures and things said
1:07:17
Speaker 1: and unsaid. The deeper question, the one that asks not
1:07:21
Speaker 1: what went wrong in the history of the marriage, but
1:07:24
Speaker 1: what she has been doing with her own need inside it,
1:07:27
Speaker 1: the ways that the genuine love she carries for this
1:07:30
Speaker 1: person has become without her noticing when it happened, organized
1:07:34
Speaker 1: primarily around what she needs from him rather than what
1:07:37
Speaker 1: she is offering to him. This is not a comfortable question.
1:07:42
Speaker 1: It is the kind of question that Asmodeus, when operating,
1:07:45
Speaker 1: effectively prevents people from asking, because the question leads somewhere,
1:07:51
Speaker 1: and where it leads is underground, into the foundation, into
1:07:56
Speaker 1: the examination of what is underneath the visible structure. Twenty
1:08:00
Speaker 1: seven minutes in the parking lot. In a moment, she
1:08:03
Speaker 1: is going to start the engine. She is going to
1:08:06
Speaker 1: go into the store and get the things on the
1:08:08
Speaker 1: list and drive home. She does not know what happens
1:08:11
Speaker 1: after that, but she has been sitting with the right
1:08:14
Speaker 1: question for twenty seven minutes, and sitting with the right
1:08:18
Speaker 1: question in the understanding behind this ancient text is not
1:08:22
Speaker 1: a small thing. It is the beginning of the road
1:08:25
Speaker 1: that Raphael walks beside you. He is already there in
1:08:29
Speaker 1: the parking lot, in the car, in the lit store,
1:08:33
Speaker 1: and the drive home, and the door that opens into
1:08:35
Speaker 1: a house where someone else is also awake, and also
1:08:38
Speaker 1: carrying something they have not yet found the words for
1:08:42
Speaker 1: He is there. The foundation is the last thing visible
1:08:46
Speaker 1: and the first thing that matters. Whatever needs to be
1:08:49
Speaker 1: dug out, whatever needs to be cleared from underneath the structure,
1:08:52
Speaker 1: before the structure can bear the weight it was meant
1:08:55
Speaker 1: to bear. The healer who accompanies knows what it is.
1:08:59
Speaker 1: He knows before you do, and he has already begun
1:09:02
Speaker 1: the walk toward it. Rest. Now, let the honest question
1:09:07
Speaker 1: do its quiet work in the places that the waking
1:09:09
Speaker 1: mind cannot reach on its own. Raphael is near. He
1:09:14
Speaker 1: has always been near. Chapter seven, The Seven and the Void,
1:09:22
Speaker 1: the Night that has no name. Not every chapter of
1:09:25
Speaker 1: a human life has a clear shape. Some of them do.
1:09:29
Speaker 1: The chapters with a beginning and a middle and an
1:09:32
Speaker 1: end that can be identified from inside, the experience as
1:09:36
Speaker 1: it is happening, the grief that has a cause, the
1:09:39
Speaker 1: struggle that has an opponent, the season that has a name.
1:09:43
Speaker 1: These chapters are hardest while you are in them, but
1:09:46
Speaker 1: they eventually produce on the other side, the particular clarity
1:09:51
Speaker 1: that comes from having gone through something you can point
1:09:53
Speaker 1: to and say that is what that was. But there
1:09:57
Speaker 1: is another kind of chapter, the kind and where the
1:10:00
Speaker 1: difficulty does not have a clear shape, where the weight
1:10:03
Speaker 1: pressing in on the ordinary day does not correspond to
1:10:06
Speaker 1: any single cause you can name, or any single loss
1:10:09
Speaker 1: you can grieve, or any single opponent you can address.
1:10:13
Speaker 1: Where everything in your life is, by any honest accounting, intact,
1:10:18
Speaker 1: and yet something is not right in a way you
1:10:20
Speaker 1: cannot locate. A thoog, a flatness, a sense that the
1:10:25
Speaker 1: thread connecting one moment to the next has become too
1:10:28
Speaker 1: thin to feel. You know this kind not from reading
1:10:33
Speaker 1: about it, from having been inside it. Solomon encountered it too,
1:10:38
Speaker 1: not in a form that matched his experience exactly. His
1:10:42
Speaker 1: was a king's version of it, with a king's particular
1:10:45
Speaker 1: texture of responsibility and isolation. But the quality of what
1:10:49
Speaker 1: arrived in the chamber when he pressed the ring to
1:10:51
Speaker 1: his palm was something he had not encountered before in
1:10:55
Speaker 1: any of the interrogations. Not one force seven. They arrived together.
1:11:01
Speaker 1: The ancient text says, moving together the way weather moves.
1:11:06
Speaker 1: Not a single thing with a single nature, but a condition,
1:11:10
Speaker 1: an atmosphere, a pressure system that had no single point
1:11:14
Speaker 1: of origin. Solomon asked the first question, what are your names?
1:11:20
Speaker 1: The answer the text preserves here is unlike every other
1:11:23
Speaker 1: answer in the Testament of Solomon, because these seven did
1:11:27
Speaker 1: not give names in the ordinary sense, not the kind
1:11:30
Speaker 1: of individual identification that Orneus and Beelzebul and Asmodeus had given.
1:11:36
Speaker 1: Names with etymology and history and a specificity you could
1:11:40
Speaker 1: hold and examine. According to the text and in the
1:11:44
Speaker 1: interpretation this ancient document invites, they said, we are the
1:11:48
Speaker 1: ones called by many names in many places, and by
1:11:52
Speaker 1: no settled name in others. We came from the place
1:11:55
Speaker 1: that was before the ordering of things, and we have
1:11:58
Speaker 1: never fully left it, the place before the ordering of things.
1:12:03
Speaker 1: The ancient Hebrew of the tradition behind this text has
1:12:06
Speaker 1: a phrase for what existed before God spoke the first
1:12:09
Speaker 1: word of creation. You find it in the second verse
1:12:12
Speaker 1: of Genesis, in the description of what was present before
1:12:15
Speaker 1: light was called into being dohu vavo who. This is
1:12:20
Speaker 1: one of the most difficult phrases in the entire Hebrew
1:12:22
Speaker 1: Bible to carry into another language, not because the individual
1:12:26
Speaker 1: words are obscure, but because they are pointing at something
1:12:29
Speaker 1: that resists the kind of precision that translation requires. Doh
1:12:33
Speaker 1: who formlessness, not the emptiness of a container that has
1:12:37
Speaker 1: been emptied, the condition of a space that has not
1:12:40
Speaker 1: yet been made into a container. Vavo who void. A
1:12:46
Speaker 1: depth without bottom, not because the bottom is far down,
1:12:49
Speaker 1: but because the concept of bottom requires a structure that
1:12:52
Speaker 1: has not yet been established. Before God spoke before light,
1:12:58
Speaker 1: before the ordering of anything into relationship with anything else,
1:13:02
Speaker 1: this was there, and the spirit of God, the text says,
1:13:07
Speaker 1: was hovering over the face of it, hovering. The Hebrew
1:13:11
Speaker 1: word is mehrakefhet. It appears only twice in the entire
1:13:15
Speaker 1: Hebrew Bible, here in Genesis and in Deuteronomy, where it
1:13:20
Speaker 1: describes an eagle hovering over its young, the brooding presence
1:13:24
Speaker 1: of something about to act but not yet acting, the
1:13:27
Speaker 1: stillness before the first movement, the attention of something that
1:13:31
Speaker 1: has not yet spoken, but is fully present to what
1:13:33
Speaker 1: it is about to speak. Into the seven told Solomon.
1:13:37
Speaker 1: According to the ancient text and in the understanding, this
1:13:40
Speaker 1: tradition invites that they were the children of that original
1:13:44
Speaker 1: state that they had persisted from before the ordering of things.
1:13:48
Speaker 1: Carrying within them the quality of the unordered, the unnamed,
1:13:52
Speaker 1: the condition that preceded the word that made light, and
1:13:56
Speaker 1: their work in the world was not the work of
1:13:58
Speaker 1: the others. Solomon asked the second question, what do you do?
1:14:04
Speaker 1: The text says, They answered together overlapping, not quite. In unison,
1:14:09
Speaker 1: we do not do one thing. We are not the
1:14:12
Speaker 1: force of the throat, or the force of the wind,
1:14:14
Speaker 1: or the force of estranged hearts. We are the dissolution
1:14:18
Speaker 1: of coherence, the state in which the person cannot find
1:14:22
Speaker 1: the thread that connects one moment to the next, one
1:14:25
Speaker 1: decision to its consequences, one feeling to its cause. We
1:14:30
Speaker 1: make the ordinary world feel strange. We make the familiar
1:14:33
Speaker 1: feel unreachable. We make the person wonder whether what they
1:14:37
Speaker 1: have always believed is true, not because they have found
1:14:41
Speaker 1: new evidence against it, but because the capacity to believe
1:14:44
Speaker 1: anything with stability has gone quiet. Solomon sat with this
1:14:49
Speaker 1: before continuing, because what the seven were describing was not
1:14:53
Speaker 1: something he could address with the tools he had used
1:14:56
Speaker 1: on the others. With Orneas, he had named the harm
1:14:59
Speaker 1: and redirected the With bale Zebul, he had identified the
1:15:03
Speaker 1: rebellion and commanded the service. With Asmadeus. He had pointed
1:15:07
Speaker 1: toward the honest question and the healer who accompanies. But
1:15:11
Speaker 1: the seven were describing something that resisted the move of naming,
1:15:15
Speaker 1: because their essential quality was the dissolution of exactly the
1:15:19
Speaker 1: kind of clarity that naming requires. You cannot name formlessness
1:15:24
Speaker 1: without giving it form, and giving it form changes what
1:15:28
Speaker 1: it is. This is the paradox at the center of
1:15:31
Speaker 1: this chapter. The ancient author understood it and did not
1:15:35
Speaker 1: try to resolve it cheaply. So Solomon asked the third question,
1:15:39
Speaker 1: what defeats you? The answer the text preserves here is
1:15:44
Speaker 1: the most unexpected answer in the entire Testament. Not an archangel,
1:15:49
Speaker 1: not a specific action, not a ritual object, or a
1:15:53
Speaker 1: sacred word, or any of the categories of defeat that
1:15:56
Speaker 1: the other forces had named. According to the ancient text,
1:16:00
Speaker 1: what defeats the seven is the continued practice of the ordinary.
1:16:04
Speaker 1: The one who does the next small thing, the one who,
1:16:08
Speaker 1: in the middle of the dissolution makes the bed, says
1:16:11
Speaker 1: the morning prayer even when it feels empty, eats the meal,
1:16:16
Speaker 1: keeps the appointment. Does not require the practice to feel
1:16:20
Speaker 1: meaningful in order to continue. The practice does not require
1:16:24
Speaker 1: the thread to be visible in order to keep following it.
1:16:28
Speaker 1: The one who trusts the structure when the structure has
1:16:30
Speaker 1: stopped feeling like a structure and has started feeling like
1:16:34
Speaker 1: a habit that no longer connects to anything real. That person,
1:16:38
Speaker 1: the seven said, is the one in whose presence we
1:16:40
Speaker 1: become small. Hold this quietly because what the ancient text
1:16:45
Speaker 1: is saying here is not what most people expect when
1:16:49
Speaker 1: they think about how to address the formless difficulty of
1:16:52
Speaker 1: the nights that do not announce themselves. It is not saying,
1:16:56
Speaker 1: understand the darkness, and it will lose its power. The
1:17:00
Speaker 1: Seven are more honest than that. They resist understanding in
1:17:04
Speaker 1: the way that Fogg resists cutting. What the text is
1:17:07
Speaker 1: saying is more practical and less satisfying, and also more true.
1:17:11
Speaker 1: Do the next small thing, not because the small thing
1:17:15
Speaker 1: will immediately restore the sense of meaning, not because the
1:17:19
Speaker 1: practice will feel worth while when you do it to night,
1:17:22
Speaker 1: but because the small thing done in the absence of
1:17:25
Speaker 1: felt meaning is the specific act that the seven cannot
1:17:28
Speaker 1: grow large in the presence of It. Is the act
1:17:31
Speaker 1: that says, without saying it in words, that you trust
1:17:35
Speaker 1: the structure even when the structure is not producing the
1:17:38
Speaker 1: feeling of trust, the made bed, the morning prayer said
1:17:42
Speaker 1: into apparent silence, the meal eaten, the message sent to
1:17:46
Speaker 1: the person you have been meaning to contact, the one
1:17:49
Speaker 1: step taken in the direction of what matters, without waiting
1:17:53
Speaker 1: for the motivation to arrive before the step. These things
1:17:56
Speaker 1: are not magic. They will not always dispel the weight
1:17:59
Speaker 1: in immediately, but they narrow the space in which the
1:18:02
Speaker 1: seven can work. Because the seven do not need defection.
1:18:07
Speaker 1: They do not need dramatic abandonment of faith or practice
1:18:10
Speaker 1: or the people you love. They only need suspension, the
1:18:14
Speaker 1: temporary setting aside of the practice, on the grounds that
1:18:17
Speaker 1: right now it is not producing the feeling it is
1:18:20
Speaker 1: supposed to produce, and therefore continuing it feels pointless. That
1:18:25
Speaker 1: suspension is enough for them. They live in that gap.
1:18:29
Speaker 1: Now Here is what Solomon did with the seven, and
1:18:32
Speaker 1: it matters that he did not do what he had
1:18:34
Speaker 1: done with the others. He did not redirect them, He
1:18:38
Speaker 1: could not give them a task in the service of
1:18:40
Speaker 1: the temple's building. You cannot redirect formlessness the way you
1:18:44
Speaker 1: redirect a specific force with a specific capacity. You cannot
1:18:48
Speaker 1: give a direction to the void and expect the void
1:18:51
Speaker 1: to hold it what Solomon did was more honest about
1:18:54
Speaker 1: the nature of what he was dealing with. He had
1:18:57
Speaker 1: a clay jar brought into the chamber of vessel of
1:19:00
Speaker 1: the kind used throughout the ancient world for storage and preservation,
1:19:04
Speaker 1: for keeping what needed to be kept across the years.
1:19:08
Speaker 1: He spoke the words of the seal over it and
1:19:10
Speaker 1: commanded the seven into the jar, and then he sealed it,
1:19:15
Speaker 1: not destroyed contained. This distinction is the most important thing
1:19:20
Speaker 1: in this chapter. Some things in human experience cannot be resolved.
1:19:25
Speaker 1: They cannot be defeated in the sense of being eliminated.
1:19:28
Speaker 1: The formlessness that preceded creation did not disappear when God
1:19:32
Speaker 1: spoke the first word. It was ordered, given shape, brought
1:19:36
Speaker 1: into relationship with the structure that the word established. But
1:19:40
Speaker 1: the capacity for the unordered to press back against the
1:19:43
Speaker 1: form is not something that Creation removed from the world.
1:19:48
Speaker 1: It is something that Creation addressed continuously. Every morning, when
1:19:53
Speaker 1: the light comes and the dark recedes, the same movement
1:19:56
Speaker 1: that occurred on the first morning occurs again, not as
1:20:00
Speaker 1: the memory of something that happened once, as the ongoing
1:20:03
Speaker 1: act of a God who is still speaking the word
1:20:05
Speaker 1: that calls the light. The Seven are in the jar sealed,
1:20:10
Speaker 1: not destroyed, but contained within a boundary they cannot cross
1:20:14
Speaker 1: as long as the seal holds. And who holds the
1:20:17
Speaker 1: seal the same authority that gave it to Solomon. You
1:20:22
Speaker 1: are not the one who has to hold the chaos
1:20:24
Speaker 1: at bay through the force of your own will and
1:20:27
Speaker 1: the sufficiency of your own daily practice. You are the
1:20:30
Speaker 1: one who does the next small thing in the presence
1:20:33
Speaker 1: of the one who sealed the jar before the first morning.
1:20:36
Speaker 1: The jar was sealed before the first morning. You are
1:20:40
Speaker 1: living on the inside of that ceiling to night, in
1:20:44
Speaker 1: this room, at this hour, with this particular quality of
1:20:48
Speaker 1: nameless weight pressing in from no clear direction. The seven
1:20:52
Speaker 1: are real. The formlessness is a genuine feature of a
1:20:56
Speaker 1: world that has not yet been fully renewed. You are
1:20:59
Speaker 1: not experiencing something that faithful people are immune to. But
1:21:04
Speaker 1: the jar is also real, and the seal on the
1:21:07
Speaker 1: jar is older than the weight you are carrying. Tonight,
1:21:10
Speaker 1: do the next small thing to night. That thing is
1:21:14
Speaker 1: already happening. Breathe in all the way, slowly, hold it
1:21:20
Speaker 1: for just a moment, breathe out. The structure is holding you,
1:21:25
Speaker 1: are not holding it. It is holding you. The seven
1:21:28
Speaker 1: are in the jar. The seal is intact, and the
1:21:32
Speaker 1: morning is already moving toward you from the other side
1:21:35
Speaker 1: of the dark, at the speed that mornings have always moved,
1:21:39
Speaker 1: which is the speed of the God who decided before
1:21:42
Speaker 1: the first word was spoken, that the void would not
1:21:44
Speaker 1: be the final condition of anything he made. It was
1:21:48
Speaker 1: not the end, then it is not the end. Now sleep,
1:21:52
Speaker 1: the next small thing can wait until morning. The jar
1:21:56
Speaker 1: was sealed before the first morning. You are living on
1:21:59
Speaker 1: the inside of that ceiling, and you are held. Chapter eight,
1:22:06
Speaker 1: The temple rises what seven years of ordinary days builds.
1:22:11
Speaker 1: Go back to the building site for a moment, Not
1:22:15
Speaker 1: to the drama of the interrogations, Not to the chamber
1:22:19
Speaker 1: where the ring pressed against Solomon's palm, and the forces
1:22:22
Speaker 1: came and answered questions they had never been asked before.
1:22:26
Speaker 1: Go back to the site itself, to the part of
1:22:29
Speaker 1: the story that the text moves through quickly, because the
1:22:32
Speaker 1: text is not interested in the ordinary work. The ordinary
1:22:35
Speaker 1: work is what built the temple stone on stone day
1:22:39
Speaker 1: on day, the accumulated faithfulness of craftsmen who woke before
1:22:44
Speaker 1: dawn and climbed the hill and picked up their tools
1:22:46
Speaker 1: and worked until the light failed and went home and
1:22:49
Speaker 1: slept and woke again. Seven years of this, not seven
1:22:54
Speaker 1: years of dramatic confrontations and sealed jars and conversations with
1:22:59
Speaker 1: the ruler of all the demons. Those were part of it.
1:23:03
Speaker 1: But the larger part was what the text does not
1:23:05
Speaker 1: describe in detail. The larger part was the ordinary, and
1:23:10
Speaker 1: the ordinary, across seven years, had built something that was
1:23:13
Speaker 1: almost finished. Solomon walked the site differently in the final weeks,
1:23:18
Speaker 1: not with the purposeful stride of a man managing a project,
1:23:22
Speaker 1: with the slower movement of a man taking in something
1:23:25
Speaker 1: he has been too close to see clearly. He stopped
1:23:28
Speaker 1: at places he had walked past a hundred times. He
1:23:31
Speaker 1: ran his hand along the cedar paneling that lined the
1:23:34
Speaker 1: inner walls. He stood in the doorway of the Holy
1:23:37
Speaker 1: of Holies and let himself feel the silence of the
1:23:39
Speaker 1: room that would hold the ark. The room was empty,
1:23:43
Speaker 1: nothing had been placed in it yet, and it was
1:23:46
Speaker 1: already the holiest place he had ever stood, not because
1:23:50
Speaker 1: of what it would contain, because of what it was,
1:23:53
Speaker 1: a space prepared with seven years of intention, the accumulated
1:23:58
Speaker 1: faithfulness of every ordinary day added to every other ordinary day,
1:24:02
Speaker 1: until the ordinary days had built something that no single
1:24:05
Speaker 1: extraordinary day could have built. The holiness was in the faithfulness.
1:24:10
Speaker 1: Now Solomon did something the text records briefly, but that
1:24:13
Speaker 1: deserves more attention than a quick reading gives it. He
1:24:17
Speaker 1: went to find the evidence of each of the bound
1:24:19
Speaker 1: forces that had worked on the site, not to inspect
1:24:22
Speaker 1: the work in the way a foreman inspects a team,
1:24:25
Speaker 1: to look at what had been made by the things
1:24:28
Speaker 1: that had been opposing the making. He found the places
1:24:31
Speaker 1: where Orneas had cut stone. The cuts were precise, beyond
1:24:35
Speaker 1: what human tools of the period could produce, clean angles,
1:24:39
Speaker 1: perfect edges, the accuracy of a force operating outside the
1:24:44
Speaker 1: limitations of physical tools. Solomon stood at those stones and
1:24:49
Speaker 1: looked at them for a long time. The same force
1:24:52
Speaker 1: that had been draining the boy every night, the same nature,
1:24:56
Speaker 1: the same capacity. Turned found the sections overseen by Beelzebul.
1:25:03
Speaker 1: The sequencing of the work in those sections, the efficiency
1:25:06
Speaker 1: with which materials had moved from preparation to placement, were,
1:25:09
Speaker 1: by any honest assessment, the most carefully coordinated portions of
1:25:13
Speaker 1: the entire project. The organizational intelligence that had once structured
1:25:18
Speaker 1: the opposition to every worthy building was visible in the
1:25:22
Speaker 1: orderly progression of the stone. The Lord of the High
1:25:26
Speaker 1: Place had managed the details of the construction with a
1:25:29
Speaker 1: thoroughness the human overseers had not matched. He stood at
1:25:33
Speaker 1: the corner stone that Ephippus had carried. He was there
1:25:36
Speaker 1: for a long time. He had known from the moment
1:25:39
Speaker 1: Michael gave him the ring that God was doing something
1:25:42
Speaker 1: unusual in the instruction, to use the forces rather than
1:25:46
Speaker 1: simply drive them away. He had understood it intellectually and
1:25:50
Speaker 1: followed it faithfully year by year, interrogation by interrogation, binding
1:25:56
Speaker 1: by binding. But standing at the cornerstone, with the finished
1:25:59
Speaker 1: war rising from it at exactly the right alignment, he
1:26:03
Speaker 1: felt it for the first time in a way that
1:26:05
Speaker 1: went past understanding. The wind that had disrupted the building site,
1:26:11
Speaker 1: the wind that had seemed in the days when it
1:26:13
Speaker 1: was blowing against the work like the evidence that the
1:26:16
Speaker 1: project was under assort from forces that could not be managed.
1:26:20
Speaker 1: That wind had carried the stone that made every other
1:26:23
Speaker 1: alignment in the building possible. He could not have seen
1:26:26
Speaker 1: that while the wind was blowing. He could only see
1:26:29
Speaker 1: it now. This is the truth. The completed temple was
1:26:33
Speaker 1: embodying in the structure of its own making not as
1:26:36
Speaker 1: a proposition, as a building, as stone and cedar, and
1:26:41
Speaker 1: the specific record of which forces had carried which materials
1:26:44
Speaker 1: to which location. The forces that opposed the building had
1:26:48
Speaker 1: been the means by which the building was completed, not
1:26:51
Speaker 1: despite their opposition, through the redirection of it. Let this
1:26:55
Speaker 1: be said clearly, because it is easy to soften into
1:26:58
Speaker 1: something it is not. The forces in the ancient text
1:27:02
Speaker 1: of the Testament of Solomon were not good. What they
1:27:05
Speaker 1: had been doing before Solomon bound them was genuinely harmful.
1:27:09
Speaker 1: The damage was real, The drain on the boy was real.
1:27:13
Speaker 1: The estranged marriages were real, the hardened hearts were real.
1:27:17
Speaker 1: The wars beelsboul had incited were real. Solomon named the
1:27:21
Speaker 1: harm directly in every interrogation, without minimizing it, without reframing
1:27:27
Speaker 1: it as secretly fine. And then he said, now work
1:27:32
Speaker 1: not because the harm was acceptable, because the authority to
1:27:35
Speaker 1: redirect is real, because the same energy pointed in the
1:27:39
Speaker 1: wrong direction can be made to point in the right one,
1:27:42
Speaker 1: not by excusing the corruption, by changing what the corruption serves.
1:27:48
Speaker 1: The deeper claim underneath the building project is not that
1:27:50
Speaker 1: evil is good. It is that evil is not sovereign.
1:27:54
Speaker 1: It operates under a sovereignty it did not choose and
1:27:57
Speaker 1: cannot escape. And that sovereign, exercised with the authority of
1:28:02
Speaker 1: the one who gave Solomon the ring, can take what
1:28:05
Speaker 1: was destroying the building and make it build. There is
1:28:08
Speaker 1: a man named James. He is sixty years old. He
1:28:12
Speaker 1: lives in Memphis, Tennessee. And he is awake right now
1:28:15
Speaker 1: in a house that is quiet because everyone else in
1:28:18
Speaker 1: it is asleep. He is sitting at the kitchen table.
1:28:21
Speaker 1: His coffee went cold twenty minutes ago. He has been thinking.
1:28:26
Speaker 1: He spent the first eighteen years of his adult life
1:28:29
Speaker 1: in a pattern of behavior that damaged himself and everyone
1:28:33
Speaker 1: who tried to stay close to him. He does not
1:28:35
Speaker 1: call those years wasted. He has learned that the word
1:28:39
Speaker 1: wasted does not apply accurately to any portion of a
1:28:43
Speaker 1: human life when you look at it honestly. But he
1:28:46
Speaker 1: would say they were years pointed in the wrong direction.
1:28:49
Speaker 1: He has been sober for twenty two years. He works
1:28:53
Speaker 1: now with people who are in the place he was.
1:28:56
Speaker 1: He uses in that work a vocabulary for the interior
1:29:00
Speaker 1: experience of addiction and its aftermath that he could not
1:29:03
Speaker 1: have developed from outside the experience. He knows from the inside.
1:29:08
Speaker 1: What it feels like when the force that was destroying
1:29:10
Speaker 1: you begins through a process that is not your own
1:29:13
Speaker 1: management of yourself, to be redirected into something that does
1:29:17
Speaker 1: not destroy. He says when he tells his story, I
1:29:21
Speaker 1: am not the person I was, but the person I
1:29:24
Speaker 1: was is part of how I do what I do now,
1:29:27
Speaker 1: the same energy a different direction. He would recognize what
1:29:32
Speaker 1: Solomon was standing at in the corner stone. The same
1:29:35
Speaker 1: force turned. The temple was almost complete, the cedar walls
1:29:41
Speaker 1: were finished, the inner rooms were ready to receive what
1:29:44
Speaker 1: they had been prepared to hold. Solomon stood in the
1:29:48
Speaker 1: evening light on the hillside of Jerusalem and looked at
1:29:51
Speaker 1: what seven years of ordinary days had built. It was
1:29:54
Speaker 1: more than he had imagined at the beginning. This is
1:29:57
Speaker 1: always true of things built faithfully over t the relationship
1:30:01
Speaker 1: tended through the ordinary days, the character formed through the
1:30:05
Speaker 1: repeated small choices, the faith kept through the long nights
1:30:09
Speaker 1: when keeping it produced no feeling of keeping it. The
1:30:12
Speaker 1: finished thing is always more than the plan, always more
1:30:16
Speaker 1: than what the person building it could see from the beginning,
1:30:19
Speaker 1: not because the person underestimated themselves, because the work itself
1:30:24
Speaker 1: teaches the builder things the builder did not know at
1:30:27
Speaker 1: the start. The building was not his accomplishment. He understood
1:30:31
Speaker 1: this in the evening silence, with a clarity he had
1:30:34
Speaker 1: not had the capacity to understand seven years before. He
1:30:38
Speaker 1: had been the instrument, the one who held the ring
1:30:41
Speaker 1: and asked the questions and wrote down the answers, and
1:30:43
Speaker 1: gave the commands and kept the record. But the authority
1:30:47
Speaker 1: in the ring was not his. The capacity to redirect
1:30:51
Speaker 1: what was opposing the work was not his. The seven
1:30:54
Speaker 1: years of ordinary days that added up to a temple
1:30:57
Speaker 1: were not the product of his management. They were product
1:31:00
Speaker 1: of a faithfulness that preceded him and would outlast him.
1:31:04
Speaker 1: The temple cast a long shadow in the evening light,
1:31:07
Speaker 1: stretching east across the hillside toward the desert. Solomon watched
1:31:12
Speaker 1: the shadow and understood that it did not belong to him.
1:31:15
Speaker 1: It belonged to the house. Rest Now, whatever you have
1:31:19
Speaker 1: been building for longer than feels comfortable to admit building,
1:31:23
Speaker 1: and being disrupted, and continuing, and wondering on the harder
1:31:26
Speaker 1: days whether the finished thing will ever be visible enough
1:31:29
Speaker 1: to cast a shadow. It will. The ordinary days are
1:31:33
Speaker 1: adding up. The shadow belongs to the house, and the
1:31:38
Speaker 1: house is further along than the disruption made it look
1:31:41
Speaker 1: sleep well. Chapter nine, The Fall of Solomon the night
1:31:48
Speaker 1: wisdom could not prevent. Wisdom is not immunity. This is
1:31:54
Speaker 1: the hardest sentence in the Testament of Solomon. The ancient
1:31:58
Speaker 1: text does not say it directly. It demonstrates it through
1:32:02
Speaker 1: the account of a man who had received more wisdom
1:32:04
Speaker 1: than any other person alive, had used that wisdom to
1:32:08
Speaker 1: accomplish something no other person had accomplished, had been confirmed
1:32:12
Speaker 1: in that wisdom by the visible and undeniable manifestation of
1:32:16
Speaker 1: the divine presence filling the temple he built with seven
1:32:20
Speaker 1: years of faithful work and the compelled labor of every
1:32:23
Speaker 1: force that had opposed the building, and who, in the
1:32:26
Speaker 1: fullness of his long reign, lost the ring, not through
1:32:30
Speaker 1: a dramatic confrontation, not through the failure of power. Through
1:32:35
Speaker 1: the gradual and invisible bending of his heart, the temple
1:32:39
Speaker 1: had been completed, the dedication had taken place, the ark
1:32:44
Speaker 1: of the Covenant had been brought into the Holy of Holies,
1:32:47
Speaker 1: and the cloud of the presence of God had filled
1:32:50
Speaker 1: the building so completely that the priests could not stand
1:32:53
Speaker 1: to minister in it. Solomon had prayed the prayer that
1:32:56
Speaker 1: the Book of Kings preserves, that long and thy theologically
1:33:00
Speaker 1: honest prayer in which he acknowledged that the God who
1:33:03
Speaker 1: fills the highest heaven could not actually be contained in
1:33:06
Speaker 1: a building of stone and cedar and gold, and yet
1:33:10
Speaker 1: asked that same God to hear from this particular place
1:33:13
Speaker 1: the prayers of every person who would come to it.
1:33:16
Speaker 1: The cloud had descended, the fire had come down from heaven,
1:33:20
Speaker 1: the glory of the Lord had filled the temple. This
1:33:23
Speaker 1: was the greatest moment of Solomon's life, and the ordinary
1:33:27
Speaker 1: days came after it, the way ordinary days always come
1:33:31
Speaker 1: after the great moments, not as a continuation of the greatness,
1:33:35
Speaker 1: but as a return to the texture of actual living.
1:33:38
Speaker 1: Solomon wakes the morning after the dedication, and he is
1:33:42
Speaker 1: still the king, with all the ordinary responsibilities of being
1:33:45
Speaker 1: the king, the diplomatic relationships, the trade agreements, the judicial decisions,
1:33:52
Speaker 1: the marriages that were part of the political architecture of
1:33:55
Speaker 1: the ancient Near East, where alliances between nations were sealed
1:33:59
Speaker 1: in the giving and receiving of daughters within the ruling family.
1:34:03
Speaker 1: Solomon had many wives. The Book of Kings records this
1:34:07
Speaker 1: without apology, because the ancient world understood it without the
1:34:11
Speaker 1: categories the modern world brings to it. Political marriages were
1:34:15
Speaker 1: how alliances were sealed. The women who came with those
1:34:18
Speaker 1: alliances brought their own identities and their own traditions, and
1:34:22
Speaker 1: their own relationship to the gods their people had always worshiped.
1:34:26
Speaker 1: And Solomon, who had built a temple for God and
1:34:29
Speaker 1: prayed the prayer of dedication and stood in the cloud,
1:34:32
Speaker 1: also loved these women. With whatever complexity and whatever limitation
1:34:37
Speaker 1: human love always carries, he loved them, and they had
1:34:41
Speaker 1: gods of their own, not immediately, not in the first
1:34:45
Speaker 1: year of any given marriage, but over the long accumulation
1:34:49
Speaker 1: of years. The Book of Kings says, the women turned
1:34:52
Speaker 1: Solomon's heart. The Hebrew word for this turning is nata,
1:34:57
Speaker 1: to bend, to incline to He turn away from the
1:35:00
Speaker 1: straight direction, gradually degree by degree, over a period long
1:35:06
Speaker 1: enough that no single degree felt like a significant departure
1:35:10
Speaker 1: from the previous one. This is the specific anatomy of
1:35:13
Speaker 1: Solomon's fall, not a sudden defection, a gradual inclination, the
1:35:20
Speaker 1: slow movement of the heart away from the wholeness that
1:35:22
Speaker 1: had made the ring work in his hand. He maintained
1:35:26
Speaker 1: the temple, He continued the official worship, He kept the
1:35:30
Speaker 1: external forms of the Covenant, while the internal orientation, the
1:35:34
Speaker 1: direction of the heart, beneath all the visible faithfulness, continued
1:35:37
Speaker 1: its slow drift toward division. A little here, a little there,
1:35:43
Speaker 1: an altar on a hill outside Jerusalem for the God
1:35:46
Speaker 1: of one wife, a shrine in a valley for the
1:35:49
Speaker 1: God of another. Not because he believed in those gods
1:35:52
Speaker 1: the way he believed in the God of Israel, because
1:35:56
Speaker 1: the people he loved believed in them. And it is
1:35:59
Speaker 1: very difficult, across the long accumulation of years to maintain
1:36:03
Speaker 1: a clear distinction between what you love and what the
1:36:06
Speaker 1: people you love love. The wholeness eroded not in a
1:36:12
Speaker 1: single night, over years, and on the night that the
1:36:16
Speaker 1: woman he loved asked him to bow before her God,
1:36:19
Speaker 1: there was not enough wholeness left to say no unbou
1:36:23
Speaker 1: from the man who had faced Beelzebul without flinching, from
1:36:27
Speaker 1: the man who had pressed the ring to his palm
1:36:30
Speaker 1: and compelled the ruler of all the demons to stand
1:36:33
Speaker 1: in his chamber and answer questions. From the man who
1:36:36
Speaker 1: had stood in the cloud of the presence of God
1:36:38
Speaker 1: and spoken the prayer of dedication of the holiest building
1:36:42
Speaker 1: in the history of the world, an bau, and Solomon bowed.
1:36:47
Speaker 1: According to the ancient text, the spirit of God departed
1:36:50
Speaker 1: from him and the ring left his hand, not in
1:36:54
Speaker 1: a dramatic external event, not in the kind of visible
1:36:58
Speaker 1: judgment that makes a clear before and after, quietly the
1:37:02
Speaker 1: way the fullness of something drains when the small accumulations
1:37:06
Speaker 1: of many small choices have finally reached the point where
1:37:10
Speaker 1: what remains is not enough to hold what the fullness required.
1:37:13
Speaker 1: He was still the king. He was still the wisest
1:37:16
Speaker 1: man alive in the ordinary sense. The accumulated knowledge, the interrogations,
1:37:22
Speaker 1: the record he had kept. None of that disappeared. But
1:37:25
Speaker 1: the direct endorsement, the delegated authority, the specific quality of
1:37:30
Speaker 1: relationship between Solomon and the God who had given him
1:37:33
Speaker 1: the ring. That relationship was now in a form he
1:37:36
Speaker 1: could not access the way he had accessed it before.
1:37:39
Speaker 1: He had bowed to something else, and in the bowing
1:37:42
Speaker 1: something had transferred. Now Here is where the honest reading
1:37:46
Speaker 1: of this moment requires looking at something the punitive reading misses.
1:37:51
Speaker 1: Solomon's beau was not the beginning of a change. It
1:37:54
Speaker 1: was the visible expression of a change that had been
1:37:57
Speaker 1: happening slowly for years. The moment of the bow was
1:38:01
Speaker 1: not the cause of the loss. It was the point
1:38:04
Speaker 1: at which the gradual natter of the heart had accumulated
1:38:07
Speaker 1: enough that the wholeness the ring required was no longer present.
1:38:12
Speaker 1: The Book of Kings says this precisely. It says Solomon's
1:38:15
Speaker 1: heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God,
1:38:18
Speaker 1: as the heart of David his father had been. Not
1:38:21
Speaker 1: wholly true, not entirely false, not completely turned away, not
1:38:27
Speaker 1: given to something else, in any dramatic, final sense, not
1:38:31
Speaker 1: wholly true. The failure of Solomon is not the failure
1:38:35
Speaker 1: of a man who abandoned his faith in a single,
1:38:37
Speaker 1: dramatic act of defection. It is the failure of a
1:38:40
Speaker 1: man whose heart became divided gradually through the accumulation of
1:38:44
Speaker 1: attachments and loves that each seemed individually small enough to accommodate,
1:38:50
Speaker 1: until the accumulation was large enough that the wholeness was gone.
1:38:55
Speaker 1: He still loved God, he built the temple, he prayed
1:38:59
Speaker 1: the prayer, he stood in the presence. But he also
1:39:03
Speaker 1: loved the women. He also maintained the altars on the
1:39:06
Speaker 1: hills and across the long years, the distinction between the
1:39:10
Speaker 1: wholeness that God required and the divided life he was
1:39:13
Speaker 1: actually living became a distance he could no longer feel
1:39:16
Speaker 1: the edges of. In the Book of Ecclesiastes, the text
1:39:20
Speaker 1: that tradition also attributes to Solomon, there is a word
1:39:23
Speaker 1: that captures what the rest of his reign felt like
1:39:25
Speaker 1: from the inside, heavel, usually translated as vanity, but the
1:39:31
Speaker 1: Hebrew word is more physical than vanity suggests. Heaven is breath,
1:39:37
Speaker 1: the small visible cloud that forms in front of your
1:39:39
Speaker 1: face on a cold morning when you exhale, present for
1:39:43
Speaker 1: a moment, real in that moment, and then gone joined
1:39:48
Speaker 1: to the air, indistinguishable from the air. Vanity of vanities.
1:39:53
Speaker 1: The preacher says, all is hevel. This is not despair.
1:39:58
Speaker 1: It is the honest observation a man who has had
1:40:01
Speaker 1: everything and discovered that everything held in the hands of
1:40:04
Speaker 1: a divided heart does not hold the weight that everything
1:40:07
Speaker 1: is supposed to hold. The temple is stone, The temple
1:40:11
Speaker 1: will stand for centuries, but the temple is also in
1:40:15
Speaker 1: the end hevel. The Babylonians would prove this, and then
1:40:20
Speaker 1: the Romans would prove it again. What is not hevel.
1:40:25
Speaker 1: The preacher, in the final words of Ecclesiastes gives the answer,
1:40:30
Speaker 1: the whole book has been approaching. Fear God and keep
1:40:33
Speaker 1: his commandments. For this is the whole duty of man.
1:40:38
Speaker 1: Not the temple, not the ring, not the wisdom that
1:40:42
Speaker 1: could interrogate the ruler of all the demons, not the
1:40:45
Speaker 1: seven years of building, or the cloud of the presence,
1:40:48
Speaker 1: or the seven hundred wives. The whole duty, the thing
1:40:52
Speaker 1: that is not heaven, the orientation that cannot be taken
1:40:56
Speaker 1: away when the ring leaves the hand, the wholly dedicated
1:41:00
Speaker 1: heart pointed in the right direction, doing the next small thing,
1:41:04
Speaker 1: one morning at a time, one small choice at a time,
1:41:08
Speaker 1: one refusal on the night when the bow is requested
1:41:12
Speaker 1: to bend the heart even one degree further from the wholeness.
1:41:16
Speaker 1: This is what Solomon learned at the cost of everything
1:41:19
Speaker 1: that had made his reign magnificent, and it is the
1:41:22
Speaker 1: thing that the Testament of Solomon, read all the way
1:41:24
Speaker 1: to its difficult and unsentimental ending, is finally teaching that
1:41:29
Speaker 1: the ring is a gift, that gifts are given to
1:41:32
Speaker 1: the wholly dedicated heart, and that the wholeness of the
1:41:36
Speaker 1: dedication is not maintained through extraordinary acts of spiritual heroism.
1:41:41
Speaker 1: It is maintained through the ordinary, daily, unglamorous orientation of
1:41:45
Speaker 1: the heart in the right direction. That night, according to
1:41:49
Speaker 1: the account the ancient text preserves, Solomon returned to the temple.
1:41:53
Speaker 1: He knelt on the stone floor of the outer court,
1:41:56
Speaker 1: alone in the dark, and he remained there for a
1:41:59
Speaker 1: long time, not praying words exactly, not the formal prayers
1:42:04
Speaker 1: of the dedication, something older and less composed than that,
1:42:08
Speaker 1: the sound a person makes when they have finally stopped
1:42:11
Speaker 1: managing the distance between where they are and where they
1:42:13
Speaker 1: should be. He had been the wisest man alive. He
1:42:17
Speaker 1: had held the ring, he had interrogated the prince of
1:42:20
Speaker 1: all demons, and made the Lord of the High Place
1:42:23
Speaker 1: carry stones. And now he knelt on the cold stone
1:42:27
Speaker 1: of the temple he had built, and understood, with the
1:42:29
Speaker 1: full weight of what he had lost pressing down on him,
1:42:32
Speaker 1: that the ring was not the thing that mattered. The
1:42:35
Speaker 1: wholeness was the thing that mattered. And the wholeness was
1:42:39
Speaker 1: available again, not through a second ring, not through any
1:42:43
Speaker 1: new demonstration of authority or power. Through the oldest and
1:42:47
Speaker 1: most ordinary movement a human being can make the turning
1:42:51
Speaker 1: of the heart back toward the one who had been
1:42:53
Speaker 1: waiting for it to turn. The temple stood on the
1:42:56
Speaker 1: hill side of Jerusalem. The cloud still filled it. The
1:43:00
Speaker 1: God who had filled it did not leave because the
1:43:02
Speaker 1: man who built it turned away. The presence remained in
1:43:07
Speaker 1: the house, in the Holy Room, in the space prepared
1:43:11
Speaker 1: by seven years of ordinary faithfulness, waiting for the heart
1:43:15
Speaker 1: to find its way back Heavel, and underneath the heaven
1:43:19
Speaker 1: the one thing that is not heavel, the God who
1:43:22
Speaker 1: was there before the first morning, who is here now
1:43:26
Speaker 1: in this room, in this quiet waiting with a patience
1:43:31
Speaker 1: older than the first morning. Chapter ten, The ring returns
1:43:39
Speaker 1: not to Solomon, to the one Solomon could only see
1:43:42
Speaker 1: from a distance. There is a question underneath all the
1:43:46
Speaker 1: other questions in this ancient story, a question the Testament
1:43:50
Speaker 1: of Solomon never asks directly, but that every chapter has
1:43:53
Speaker 1: been circling the way a river moves toward the sea
1:43:56
Speaker 1: without having seen the sea, the way every pointing finger
1:44:00
Speaker 1: exists in relationship to the thing it is pointing at,
1:44:03
Speaker 1: which is always larger than the finger. The question is this,
1:44:07
Speaker 1: If the ring was given to Solomon and Solomon lost it,
1:44:10
Speaker 1: where did it go? Not in the immediate sense the
1:44:15
Speaker 1: ancient text has its own account of the mechanics of
1:44:17
Speaker 1: its removal. That account is there for those who wish
1:44:21
Speaker 1: to follow it. But in the larger sense, the sense,
1:44:24
Speaker 1: the whole arc of the story demands, what is the ring?
1:44:28
Speaker 1: For if the wisest and most specifically equipped human being
1:44:31
Speaker 1: whoever held it could not hold it all the way
1:44:34
Speaker 1: to the end. The Testament of Solomon, read as a
1:44:38
Speaker 1: complete document and held alongside the fuller tradition of which
1:44:42
Speaker 1: it is a part, is not finally a story about Solomon.
1:44:46
Speaker 1: It is a story about a gap, the gap between
1:44:49
Speaker 1: what the ring made possible in Solomon's hands and what
1:44:52
Speaker 1: the ring was ultimately meant to accomplish. The gap between
1:44:56
Speaker 1: the temple that Solomon built and the presence that the
1:44:59
Speaker 1: temple was built to, the gap between the wisest man
1:45:02
Speaker 1: who ever lived and the one that even Beelzebul under
1:45:05
Speaker 1: the compulsion of the seal pointed toward. When Solomon asked
1:45:09
Speaker 1: what defeated him, the one who will suffer many things
1:45:12
Speaker 1: at the hands of men. Let us return to that
1:45:14
Speaker 1: moment one final time. Beals Boul, the Lord of the
1:45:18
Speaker 1: High Place, who became the Lord of the flies standing
1:45:22
Speaker 1: in the chamber of Solomon under the compulsion of the ring.
1:45:25
Speaker 1: Solomon had asked what defeats him, and Beelzebul, according to
1:45:29
Speaker 1: the ancient text, did not name a ring, or a
1:45:32
Speaker 1: king or a system of wisdom. He named a person,
1:45:36
Speaker 1: a person who would suffer. Now Here is where the
1:45:39
Speaker 1: text reaches its fullest resonance, and it is important to
1:45:43
Speaker 1: say clearly what kind of claim is being made. The
1:45:47
Speaker 1: ancient text does not explain these words, it records them
1:45:50
Speaker 1: and moves on. But for readers in the Christian tradition
1:45:54
Speaker 1: reading this ancient and non canonical text alongside the Gospels,
1:45:59
Speaker 1: those words have all is carried a weight that points
1:46:01
Speaker 1: beyond Solomon's chamber towards something the ancient author may not
1:46:05
Speaker 1: have fully understood. Not as a direct prophecy, not as
1:46:10
Speaker 1: a text the New Testament was written to fulfill, but
1:46:13
Speaker 1: as the kind of ancient longing and ancient intuition that,
1:46:17
Speaker 1: when held in the light of what came later, begins
1:46:19
Speaker 1: to look less like coincidence and more like preparation. What
1:46:23
Speaker 1: defeats the ruler of all the demons in the text's
1:46:26
Speaker 1: own account is not superior force or superior wisdom. It
1:46:31
Speaker 1: is a specific kind of human presence. A person who
1:46:34
Speaker 1: stays in the middle of being handed over to the
1:46:37
Speaker 1: actions of others, who does not remove himself, who endures
1:46:41
Speaker 1: what staying present in that situation entails, and who, in
1:46:45
Speaker 1: enduring it does something to the structure of the adversarial
1:46:49
Speaker 1: order that no ring and no accumulated wisdom could accomplish.
1:46:53
Speaker 1: He undoes it from the inside. In the twelfth chapter
1:46:56
Speaker 1: of Matthew, Jesus was accused by the religious authorities of
1:47:00
Speaker 1: driving out demons by the power of Beelzebul. He answered them,
1:47:05
Speaker 1: And then in the same week, standing in the temple
1:47:08
Speaker 1: that Solomon had built, he quoted the hundred and eighteenth Psalm.
1:47:12
Speaker 1: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
1:47:16
Speaker 1: This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in
1:47:19
Speaker 1: our eyes. He quoted it as a claim about himself,
1:47:23
Speaker 1: not a historical observation, a declaration of presents. The cornerstone
1:47:28
Speaker 1: that the building was always meant to be aligned to,
1:47:31
Speaker 1: was not an object or a concept, or a ring
1:47:33
Speaker 1: or a system of authority. It was a person. It
1:47:37
Speaker 1: was there. It was standing in the temple that the
1:47:40
Speaker 1: corner stone had helped build, speaking the words of the Psalm,
1:47:43
Speaker 1: that the building was constructed to embody. And as Paul
1:47:47
Speaker 1: writes in his Letter to the Philippians, God has highly
1:47:50
Speaker 1: exalted him and given him the name that is above
1:47:53
Speaker 1: every name, so that at that name every knee should
1:47:56
Speaker 1: bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
1:48:00
Speaker 1: and every tongue. Confess that Jesus Christ is lord every knee,
1:48:05
Speaker 1: not only the willing knees, every knee the full register
1:48:10
Speaker 1: of everything that exists, every force. The ancient text names
1:48:14
Speaker 1: as opposing the building, Orneus and Beelzebul, and Asmodaeus and Ephippus,
1:48:19
Speaker 1: and the seven and all the thirty six, and every
1:48:23
Speaker 1: capacity in every generation that has worked against every worthy thing,
1:48:27
Speaker 1: every knee. Before that name, the Ring of Solomon was
1:48:32
Speaker 1: given to one man for one project at one moment
1:48:35
Speaker 1: in history. The name of Jesus is available to every
1:48:38
Speaker 1: one who calls on it for the whole project of
1:48:41
Speaker 1: what God is building in the world, at every moment
1:48:44
Speaker 1: from the resurrection until the day when the last knee bows,
1:48:48
Speaker 1: and the last authority that refused to serve is finally
1:48:51
Speaker 1: and permanently made to serve. The ring was the sign
1:48:56
Speaker 1: the name is the reality. And the name is not
1:48:59
Speaker 1: something you hold in your hand. It is something you
1:49:02
Speaker 1: speak into the specific darkness of a specific night. It
1:49:06
Speaker 1: does not require you to be Solomon, or to have
1:49:09
Speaker 1: Solomon's wisdom, or to have accomplished what Solomon accomplished, or
1:49:13
Speaker 1: to still possess what Solomon lost. It requires only a voice,
1:49:19
Speaker 1: however small the voice is to night. In the earliest
1:49:22
Speaker 1: days of the movement that followed the Resurrection, a man
1:49:25
Speaker 1: who had been lame from birth was sitting at the
1:49:28
Speaker 1: gate of the temple begging. Peter and John came by.
1:49:32
Speaker 1: The man asked for money. Peter said, silver and gold
1:49:36
Speaker 1: I do not have. But what I do have, I
1:49:39
Speaker 1: give to you in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
1:49:43
Speaker 1: Rise up and walk in the name, not in the
1:49:47
Speaker 1: authority of a ring given by an archangel, not in
1:49:51
Speaker 1: the wisdom of seven years of interrogations, not in the
1:49:55
Speaker 1: accumulated standing of a long and faithful practice, in the name.
1:50:00
Speaker 1: And the man rose and walked, and leaped and praised
1:50:03
Speaker 1: God in the temple that Solomon had built, the same temple,
1:50:07
Speaker 1: the same hillside of Jerusalem, the same stone that Ifhippus
1:50:11
Speaker 1: had carried to the corner, the same foundation that Asmodius
1:50:15
Speaker 1: had cleared, the same walls that Orneas had cut with
1:50:18
Speaker 1: a precision beyond human tools. And in that temple on
1:50:22
Speaker 1: that day the name was spoken that made the ring unnecessary,
1:50:26
Speaker 1: because the authority the ring had pointed toward was now present,
1:50:30
Speaker 1: not in an object given to one man, but in
1:50:32
Speaker 1: a name given to every one who calls on it. Now,
1:50:35
Speaker 1: let us return, at the end of this long night
1:50:39
Speaker 1: to where we began. There is an ancient book attributed
1:50:43
Speaker 1: to the wisest king who ever lived, about the most
1:50:46
Speaker 1: extraordinary work of his life, about the knights. He descended
1:50:49
Speaker 1: into the hidden architecture of the world and asked the
1:50:52
Speaker 1: questions no one had asked before, and wrote down the answers.
1:50:57
Speaker 1: We have followed him through the chamber where all is confessed,
1:51:00
Speaker 1: the mechanism of his drain and the naming that begins
1:51:03
Speaker 1: to defeat it, through the long conversation with Beelzebul, and
1:51:07
Speaker 1: the words he spoke under compulsion, words that readers in
1:51:10
Speaker 1: the Christian tradition may hear as pointing towards something Solomon
1:51:14
Speaker 1: could only see from a distance. Through the ancient map
1:51:18
Speaker 1: of the thirty six territories where the invisible presses against
1:51:21
Speaker 1: the visible, through the wind that carried the corner stone,
1:51:25
Speaker 1: through the honest question about what gets between love and
1:51:28
Speaker 1: the person it is reaching for, through the seal jar,
1:51:31
Speaker 1: and the ancient instruction to do the next small thing,
1:51:35
Speaker 1: through the nearly completed temple, and the evidence of what
1:51:38
Speaker 1: seven years of ordinary faithfulness builds through the silence after
1:51:42
Speaker 1: the bow, and the honest account of what the wholeness
1:51:45
Speaker 1: of the heart requires. And now here at the end,
1:51:50
Speaker 1: at the name. The ring was never the point. The
1:51:53
Speaker 1: wholeness of the heart pointed toward the one who gave
1:51:56
Speaker 1: the ring was always the point. And the wholeness, as
1:51:59
Speaker 1: be Elsible knew and Solomon learned at the cost of
1:52:02
Speaker 1: his greatest gift, does not come from the ring. It
1:52:06
Speaker 1: comes from the one who gave the ring, who is
1:52:09
Speaker 1: always more than the sign of his own presence, who
1:52:12
Speaker 1: can fill a temple with cloud and fire, and then,
1:52:15
Speaker 1: when the temple is gone, fill a locked room in
1:52:18
Speaker 1: Jerusalem where frightened disciples are sitting behind closed doors, with
1:52:22
Speaker 1: the same presence in a completely different form. The cloud,
1:52:27
Speaker 1: the fire, the breath on the disciples faces the same
1:52:31
Speaker 1: God always arriving in the form that the moment requires,
1:52:36
Speaker 1: and always underneath every form the same declaration, I am here.
1:52:41
Speaker 1: You are not abandoned. Let us pray, Father. We have
1:52:49
Speaker 1: traveled far tonight, through the chamber of a king holding
1:52:52
Speaker 1: a ring from an archangel, through interrogations and confessions, and
1:52:57
Speaker 1: the compelled honesty of forces that ordinarily operate through concealment,
1:53:03
Speaker 1: through the stone and cedar of the almost finished temple,
1:53:06
Speaker 1: and the evening light falling across the hillside of Jerusalem
1:53:09
Speaker 1: at the end of the seventh year, and through the
1:53:12
Speaker 1: harder silence, the silence after the bow the night the
1:53:17
Speaker 1: ring left the hand of the man who had used
1:53:19
Speaker 1: it to do what no other person had done, And
1:53:22
Speaker 1: the longer silence after that of a man kneeling alone
1:53:26
Speaker 1: on cold stone in the outer court of a temple
1:53:29
Speaker 1: he had built, finding his way back to the only
1:53:31
Speaker 1: movement that had ever mattered. You were present in all
1:53:35
Speaker 1: of it. You were there when Michael descended into the
1:53:39
Speaker 1: chamber with a ring that contained an authority Solomon had
1:53:42
Speaker 1: not earned and could not generate. You were there when
1:53:46
Speaker 1: the ancient text recorded words in Beelzebul's confession that readers
1:53:50
Speaker 1: in the Christian tradition would hear as pointing toward the
1:53:53
Speaker 1: one who was coming. You were there when Ifhippus carried
1:53:57
Speaker 1: the corner stone, and when Asmodius dug into the foundation,
1:54:01
Speaker 1: and when the seven were sealed into the jar. You
1:54:04
Speaker 1: were there when the cloud descended and the fire came down,
1:54:08
Speaker 1: and the priests could not stand to minister. You were
1:54:11
Speaker 1: there when Solomon bowed. You were there in the silence after.
1:54:16
Speaker 1: You were there on the cold stone of the outer court,
1:54:19
Speaker 1: in the dark when the wisest man who ever lived,
1:54:22
Speaker 1: stopped managing the distance between where he was and where
1:54:26
Speaker 1: he should be, and simply turned. You are here now,
1:54:30
Speaker 1: in this room, at this hour, with this particular person
1:54:34
Speaker 1: who has followed this long story all the way to
1:54:37
Speaker 1: its end, and is lying in the dark with whatever
1:54:40
Speaker 1: they are carrying tonight, whatever version of the Nata they
1:54:44
Speaker 1: have been living with, whatever degree of wholeness has been
1:54:47
Speaker 1: lost through the accumulated small accommodations of a life lived
1:54:51
Speaker 1: in a world that is always in one form or another.
1:54:55
Speaker 1: Requesting a bow, you know the specific shape of what
1:54:59
Speaker 1: they are carrying, the particular direction it has pulled them,
1:55:03
Speaker 1: the distance between where they are to night, and where
1:55:06
Speaker 1: the wholeness would have them be, and you are not
1:55:09
Speaker 1: keeping the distance as a record against them. You are
1:55:13
Speaker 1: standing in the room the same way you stood in
1:55:16
Speaker 1: the temple, the same way you stood behind the stone,
1:55:20
Speaker 1: the same way you came through locked doors to the
1:55:22
Speaker 1: disciples who had given up on the possibility that locked
1:55:25
Speaker 1: doors could not stop you. You come through. Father, Give
1:55:30
Speaker 1: this person to night the thing that no ring and
1:55:33
Speaker 1: no wisdom can provide, the wholly dedicated heart, not the
1:55:38
Speaker 1: perfect heart, the heart of David, the heart that knows
1:55:42
Speaker 1: when it has gone wrong and turns back without requiring
1:55:45
Speaker 1: the good feeling of turning back to arrive before the
1:55:48
Speaker 1: turning happens. Give them the ordinary faithfulness, the unglamorous daily orientation,
1:55:55
Speaker 1: the small choice made in the right direction on the
1:55:58
Speaker 1: night when the wrong direction is warm and familiar, and
1:56:01
Speaker 1: asking quietly for just one bow. Give them the name,
1:56:06
Speaker 1: not in their hand, in their mouth, in the breath
1:56:10
Speaker 1: that carries it into whatever this particular darkness holds, the
1:56:14
Speaker 1: name above every name, the name that Beelzebul acknowledged under
1:56:19
Speaker 1: compulsion that the ancient text recorded without fully explaining that
1:56:24
Speaker 1: a thousand years of human longing was reaching toward before
1:56:28
Speaker 1: It arrived in the form of a person standing in
1:56:30
Speaker 1: Solomon's temple, quoting a psalm about a corner stone, the
1:56:35
Speaker 1: name of the one who suffered many things at the
1:56:37
Speaker 1: hands of men and rose, and is here guard their
1:56:42
Speaker 1: sleep to night. Let the ancient words do the quiet
1:56:46
Speaker 1: work that ancient words do best, the settling of truth
1:56:50
Speaker 1: into places too deep for the waking mind to reach
1:56:53
Speaker 1: on its own. Let them wake tomorrow a little more
1:56:56
Speaker 1: whole than they were when this night began, a little
1:56:59
Speaker 1: more oriented, a little more willing to do the next
1:57:03
Speaker 1: small thing in the direction of the one who is
1:57:05
Speaker 1: already doing the returning. The temple was built by everything
1:57:09
Speaker 1: that opposed its building. The corner stone was carried by
1:57:13
Speaker 1: the wind that disrupted the sight. The foundation was cleared
1:57:17
Speaker 1: by the force that corrupts love. The seven are in
1:57:21
Speaker 1: the sealed jar, and the one who fills every temple
1:57:24
Speaker 1: that has ever been built, in cloud and fire and
1:57:27
Speaker 1: breath and the quiet presence of a room where someone
1:57:30
Speaker 1: has finally stopped moving long enough to be still, is
1:57:34
Speaker 1: the same one who spoke before the first morning, and
1:57:37
Speaker 1: will speak after the last one. Before the Tohu vavohu,
1:57:42
Speaker 1: before the void was the Word, and the word was
1:57:46
Speaker 1: with God, and the Word was God. And tonight, in
1:57:51
Speaker 1: this room, in this darkness, in this quiet that has
1:57:54
Speaker 1: settled over the end of a story that traveled from
1:57:57
Speaker 1: a ring pressed into a king's palm to the name
1:58:00
Speaker 1: that is above every name. The word is here, has
1:58:04
Speaker 1: always been here, will always be here. Sleep. Now the
1:58:09
Speaker 1: ring has returned, not to Solomon, to the one Solomon
1:58:13
Speaker 1: could only see from a distance, and through him, and
1:58:18
Speaker 1: in him, and by the authority of his name, in
1:58:21
Speaker 1: the breath that carries that name into whatever this night
1:58:24
Speaker 1: holds to you. The jar was sealed before the first morning.
1:58:30
Speaker 1: You are living on the inside of that ceiling, and
1:58:33
Speaker 1: you are held to night as you have always been held,
1:58:36
Speaker 1: in the hands of the one who built everything that
1:58:39
Speaker 1: has ever been worth building, through the unlikely and faithful
1:58:43
Speaker 1: labor of everything that once opposed it. Now and always forever, Amen,