Better to illuminate than merely to shine, to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate. Thomas Aquinas
The first time we ever hear the divine God of the Universe speak he says, Let there be light. Four words that birth light itself – an agent that behaves as both a wave and a particle, both in continuous motion as they emanate from a central source outward toward everything around it.
The first time we see water flowing on earth, it is in a river that originates in Eden and then divides into four headwaters. One river that births four that then proceed in continuous motion to water everything they touch. In Hebrew, the word for river is the same word as the word for radiating light. A river flows. Light flows.
And then we have Ezekiel’s wheel within a wheel, a mysterious object in motion that flashes light and bears multiple iterations of a creature with four faces: a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. Together, these radiant beings move back and forth, left and right, along the primary compass axes. Together they symbolize that God’s presence continuously radiates in every direction.
And finally, we see the four Gospel writers. Four men who entered orbit around the Gospel story of Jesus and then chose to share that story through the light of their writings. Saint Matthew, the man. Saint Mark, the Lion. Saint Luke, the Ox. And Saint John, the Eagle. The light of the Gospel is in continuous motion, emanating from Jesus to these four and then on to the entire world. Including now you.
This pattern of God’s light emanating from him through a primary four and then onward to everyone else is played out not just in the foundations of Scripture, but also in those of science.
When Galileo Galilei, the father of science, first turned his telescope skyward towards the planet Jupiter, he was stunned to see four tiny stars on either side of it. He watched night after night and finally concluded that Jupiter had four visible moons revolving around it. What convinced him was the motion of the moons. He noted the changes in their position not just over weeks or days – but over hours.
He reported his findings in a publication called Starry Message in March, 1610.
Since then we have discovered no less than 79 moons encircling Jupiter. The light and motion of the first four were only the beginning.
The name Jupiter is comprised of two roots Dyeu and Pater. Dyeui means sky or God, which is where we get the name Zeus or the Latin Deus as in the phrase Deus ex Machina, which translates to God, out of the machine. And pater means father. Jupiter, it seems, means Father God.
The New Testament book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is the radiance of of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being. Jesus doesn’t just radiate the divine – he is the radiance itself. He is light in motion – and that motion is toward us. Jesus seeks us out. He is for us.
The four Gospel writers reflect this divine radiance in sacred Scripture.
Today we will review how all four Gospel writers are doing this by taking a look back at the previous six episodes. There is a pattern in the Gospel stories there that emerges – a radiance that continues to shine. It begins with the four Gospel authors, who each have so far shared different vantage points in the life of Jesus. And for the first time, our most recent episode featured a single Gospel story told by all four writers simultaneously.
Seen as a whole, the last six episodes cover four stories that give us an experience much like Galileo’s first sightings of Jupiter and it’s four satellites – it is something that, when documented and shared, will change the outlook of the entire world.
So let’s get moving.
Source Scripture
This is the Way: John 1:1-18
Genealogies with Geographies: Matthew 1:1-17; Luke 3:23-38
The Woman at the Well – Part 1: John 4:1-26
The Woman at the Well – Part 2: John 4:27-38
The Woman at the Well – Part 3: John 4:39-42
Jesus announces the Kingdom of God:
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The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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Two Genealogies – Why are they Different?
The Story of Rahab the Prostitute
The Story of Abraham and Isaac
The Story of David and the Threshing Floor of Araunah
The Story of Jehoachin and the Temple’s Destruction
The Chosen: (Woman at the Well Scene: Download the app and Watch Episode 8 beginning at 40:10)
Abraham Builds the First Altar in Israel in Shechem
The divine is in the present and you must be present to experience it. When you vacate the present and recede into your mind, allowing worries or work to remove you from the moment, you leave the plain upon which the divine dwells.
When you are constantly under the anesthetic of digital distraction, you withdraw; you are no longer conscious, and therefore are in no fit state to commune with the sacred.
If you wish to hear the answers you seek, you must be present to hear them. If you wish to partake in the insights there to be known, you must be present to receive them. If you wish to know the divine, you must be present to meet it. L.M. Browning
The present moment. The here and now. The naked now. Can we ever actually get there? Stay there? Be there. When it calls, we are evasive. When we reach for it, it is elusive. When we do attain it, it is intensive. So intensive we may not be able to maintain it.
For the most part, we opt not to live in the present but in those two other, much easier states of attention: past and future. We wallow in the past, contorting our ability to live in the here and now. We hobble in regret, remorse, resentment, or we wish we could go back and relive something that seems better than what is in front of us at the moment.
Or we focus on the future: what could be, should be, what might be, what will be as far as we can tell.
Or – and this is where we really prove ourselves masters of dodging the present moment – we throw ourselves into distraction. We may not be caught up in the past or the future, but we’re not here. We’re checked out, sedating ourselves with screens, substances, and seizing anything and everything but the day.
Today, we’ll look at some practical steps to help you to live in the present. To seize the day. To be here, now.
Source Scripture
The Woman at the Well – Part 3: John 4:39-42
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Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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The Chosen (Woman at the Well Scene: Watch Episode 8 beginning at 40:10)
The world beneath us spins in circles
And this life makes us twist and turn and sway
But we were made for more than rhythm with no reason
By the one who moves with passion and with grace
As He dances over all that He has made
Stephen Curtis Chapman
We all have a profound longing to experience being – that nearly indescribable essence – that rush – of ecstasy as our soul within aligns and connects with the body and its brain without and all that we are cannot help but erupt in joy. Bliss. Wonder. Awe. We feel worthy. We feel whole. We feel alive. We feel ourselves. And we dance.
But we are impatient. And shallow. And we begin to confuse being with the fleeting pleasures available to us on the surface. We see money as the power that allows us to purchase an endless supply of amusements. We begin to see people not as fellow beings, but as objects that merely provide, assist, or prevent us from obtaining those thrills. We pursue popularity because, in our surface-level thinking, it validates our worth.
And once we make the conscious choice to pursue pleasure through popularity, power, and prosperity – we harness all of the energies within us into seizing the bounty.
Enter a most woeful irony.
In our obsession with procuring these prizes, we give ourselves over willingly into indentured servitude. The daily grind. The treadmill. The rate race. The hamster wheel. We lose ourselves in grueling work in exchange for the someday spoils. But before we realize it, our lives become the grind. And there we sit, wallowing in the two-fold misery of the burden we willingly accepted and the frustration of failing to find euphoria.
A prolonged quest into these fruitless ventures produces an oppressive fatigue. We become restless. Jaded. And so we turn our attention to anything that can bring escape: staring at a screen, ingesting a substance, purchasing a toy, indulging in sensual encounters, fantasizing what could be instead of relishing what is.
And yet, as we toss and turn in our self-inflicted maladies, there are moments when a whisper of being captures our attention and we catch a glimmer of hope. It might be the wet nose of a puppy nuzzling your ear and asking to play or the unexpected kiss of a loved one on the forehead who has just come from far away to see you. Or the sight of a surprise snowfall through the window on Christmas morning.
Is it possible to capture the essence – the being – we experience in such moments? Can we live in bliss instead of hanging onto mere morsels of memories?
Yes. We were designed to live this way. Let’s explore how.
Source Scripture
The Woman at the Well – Part 2: John 4:27-38
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Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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The Chosen (Woman at the Well Scene: Watch Episode 8 beginning at 40:10)
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible.…In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. – C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Our seemingly wholehearted devotion to applying the scientific method to ascertain the nature of reality has produced in us a remarkable blindspot. Science, by definition, aims to discern objective truth through observation and experiment.
But here’s the blindspot. While holding tightly to the belief that nothing can be true apart from scientific proof, we find ourselves in the possession of an inheritance of long-held theoretical truths that are yet to be proven or impossible to prove. And rather than employ the scientific method, we leave the decision to whim.
Enter the ego, whispering if it hasn’t been proven, then it must not be true. Reject it if it suits you.
We do this not because we are firm believers in science, but because our egos now have a loophole in which to exploit the realm of the unproven in order to to mine it for favorable resources.
Rather than seeking to discern universal, objective truth, we proceed with impunity to determine personal, subjective truth.
For example, it has long been held that forgiving your enemy when wronged is the only way to inner peace. But science has yet to prove this. The ego seizes this uncertainty to its advantages and proposes other, personal truths. Anger, hate, bitterness, vengeful fantasies, or outright retaliation.
The ego wants to determine truth in order to get what it wants. The soul longs to discern truth so it can fall into rhythm with it, live by it, and share it.
Today we will take a journey through time and space via sacred Scripture to three wells where we will discover those truths that exist in not in the domain of scientifically proven fact, but in the realm of the Logos, the Tao, the Way, the objective Truth of the Universe that permeates everything and reveals itself in the soul.
Let’s begin with well #1.
Source Scripture
The Woman at the Well: John 4:1-26
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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The Chosen (Woman at the Well Scene: Watch Episode 8 beginning at 40:10)
Abraham Builds the First Altar in Israel in Shechem
Joshua Builds the Altar of Fulfillment in Shechem
Joshua Renews Abraham’s Covenant in Shechem
Levi and Simeon Take Murderous Revenge in Shechem
Joseph’s Bones are Carried from Egypt and Buried in Shechem
Joseph’s Story of Curses to Blessings (Read Genesis 37-50)
All beginnings are delightful; the threshold is the place to pause. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Genealogies have become a recent fascination with our society as science, history, and technology collide, giving us the newfound ability to traverse backwards through time and accurately trace our roots – the names and dates and places and relationships that all somehow worked together to culminate in our birth.
If you look at an unfamiliar genealogy, it may seem dry and uninteresting. But if it is yours and you have spent time in research, those names and places and dates and relationships connect and come to life, evoking your origin stories.
Today, we’re going to take what many would arguably call the dullest two passages of the New Testament – the two genealogies of Jesus – and bring the origin stories to life in a way that will leave you awestruck.
Source Scripture
Genealogies with Geographies: Matthew 1:1-17; Luke 3:23-38
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Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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Two Genealogies – Why are they Different?
The Story of Rahab the Prostitute
The Story of Abraham and Isaac
C.S. Lewis says the following in his book, The Abolition of Man…
The Chinese speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar….This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.
We’ve lost the grip on this truth of objective value – that we as humans are part of a grand design that includes conforming all activities to that great exemplar. The Tao, C.S. Lewis’ best word for communicating this ultimate truth, is also the best translation from Greek to Chinese for St. John’s use of the word logos in his very first sentence in sacred Scripture where he said, In the Beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God.
In the West, we have diluted the strength and scope of the word logos by rendering it into the English word word. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.
This is not a mistranslation, because logos can mean word. But it also means way, or road or the overarching truth that describes the governing force of all creation. It is simply unfortunate that English readers most often see the word wordand take it to mean nothing more than a written or spoken unit of speech.
This is why Chinese translations of John 1:1 are often translated as In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God.
Today, we are going to attempt to restore the essence of Saint John’s logos in order to rediscover that Jesus is not merely the Word of God. He is the Tao. He is the Way. He is the ultimate Truth. And He is the Life.
Source Scripture
This is the Way: John 1:1-18
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Extras
The state of mind and body that blocks any awareness of the presence of greater being inevitably produces a special kind of suffering….We must strive to reach a state where our transparency to Divine Being endures….It is essential to discover within ourselves an attitude – even a physical posture – in which we can be open and submissive to the demands of our inner being while at the same time allowing this inner being to become visible and effective in the midst of our life in the world. And for this to happen we must so transform our ordinary daily life that every action is an opportunity for inner work. Karlfried Graf Durckheim
None of us want to be ordinary. We long for the extraordinary. Our inner being – our soul – longs to soar above and beyond the mundane.
And so we strive for greatness, searching for whatever will help us clamber….higher.
But too often, we confuse the extraordinary with what seems to be the highest peak in the realm of the ordinary. And yet a caterpillar does not seek transformation by climbing the highest tree to feast on the best leaves or becoming the fastest on its many feet or seeking a name for itself amongst all other caterpillars. No, a caterpillar eventually reaches a stage in its life when it seeks to go beyond the ordinary entirely. To seek the truly extraordinary. And to do so, it spins a beautiful cocoon out of silk, ceases all of its normal ways to living, and enters a place of silence. Stillness. Here it allows the natural unfolding of metamorphosis to transform it into something entirely new.
We humans are equally designed for such transformation, but unlike the caterpillar, we resist the call to cocoon and change because we don’t like stillness. And silence.
And you will remain unchanged as long as you ignore the call within. As the villain in the book S by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst illustrates, you will remain firmly planted in the ordinary…
As long as you choose extraction over creation, as long as you mistake commerce for art and destruction for progress, as long as you remain drunk on the juice that issues from the crush of a thing or place or person…. as long as you conflate power with influence, primacy with honor, goal with purpose, duty with responsibility.
These earthly shadows of the extraordinary are no substitute for the divine.
Today we will review the last six episodes of Awestruck to see the overarching depiction of how we can live in the tension between the external demands of an ordinary world and the internal yearning for transcendent being.
Source Scripture
Eradicating Evil: John 1:35-51
Muditation: John 2:1-11
Telos – Why You’re Angry: John 2:13-25
Love Like So: John 3:1-21
None Compare John 3:22-36
Who is Really In Prison? Matthew 14:3-5; Mark 6:17-20; Luke 3:19-20
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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Suggested Movie: The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise
TikTok User @PonderingWorshipper
It may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly. – J.R.R. Tolkien
When someone calls us out for doing something we know is wrong, it hurts. It stings. It hits us where we live.
And the cognitive dissonance that erupts in that moment elicits action. The ego’s impulse? Defend itself with one of its all-too-familiar tactics against the voice of rebuke: muffle, muzzle, discredit, destroy.
In the rush to defend ourselves, however, we would be better served to harness our swelling psychic forces and use them in service of the soul’s deep longing to know truth – even when that truth wounds us.
A rightful rebuke exposes our inner darkness – whether buried unknowingly in our shadow or in plain sight but hopefully hidden from others by some cunning veneer.
And that darkness within us is the true source of the indignation we channel toward the rebuke. The very reason we have that reserve of repressed resentment at-the-ready is due to our extant spiritual dissonance over harboring the darkness in the first place.
And so we must choose. We can protect the ego with misdirected energies that assail the rebuke, which only tightens the noose of inner tumult, or we can let those striking words find their intended mark and bring about the illumination that leads to transformation.
Source Scripture
Who is Really In Prison? Matthew 14:3-5; Mark 6:17-20; Luke 3:19-20
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
Comparison is the thief of joy. Theodore Roosevelt.
When we live centered in the self, we analyze the world around us in terms of what will benefit us most. And to do so, we must compare. And the easiest way to compare is to divide things into two parts and choose the one that seems better.
This habit is so foundational to the ego that it cannot imagine any other way to live. I prefer this to that. I have done more for you than you have done for me, so it’s your turn to serve me. My political party is better than yours. This sunset is not as pretty as yesterday’s.
The result of our habitual comparisons, we think, will be a better life. After all, we have surrounded ourselves with a collection of better people, places, and things.
The real result of this lifestyle is frustration in a number of ways…
- We are never satisfied, because everything can always be “better”
- We reduce people to transactions – I did this so you must do that.
- We develop a sense of entitlement. I deserve this.
- We habitually divide everything into two parts, never taking in the whole. This is called dualistic thinking.
In short, the ego’s dualistic and frazzled search for contentment produces just the opposite. It’s an endless dance
Today, we’ll look at the non-dual, soul-centered approach to finding contentment – and keeping it.
Source Scripture
None Compare John 3:22-36
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Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras