Powers In The World

Tengo muchos nombres, que sólo le viente y la lluvia pueden pronunciar
I have many names that only the wind and the rain are able to pronounce
El Fauno

It is 5:08 EDT this morning. One minute ago, I heard thunder.

I cannot remember the last time I heard thunder.
Not at all in the winter just past.
I would have remembered thunder in that winter; thunder is a coda that brings the music of one period of time to an end, and then there starts another.
Thus, there was no thunder, for there was no coda to that symphony of suffering, was there? If I was not in pain, my wife was. If not she, then her dying sister or the sister's daughter. Every day was a recapitulation of the preceding day, and to be truthful, did we not weep a capella?
There was no accompaniment.
Until this thunder.

Thunder is not a power upon the earth, but there are such things. The ancient beings, such as Poseidon of the sea, or Yam, the sea god of Ugarit, were they not so? And the gods of the sky and the subnivial underworld, and the mountains and the valleys, the dryads of the trees and their sisters and their brothers, the fauns.

We have been brought up to dismiss such things as demons. If not demons, then myths and mythologies in the least important sense. They are nonsense, and if not nonsense, then they are diabolic.

Yet, they exist still.
We have changed their names to "angels" or "spirits". They are "lwa" or gods of what we consider to be primitive folk religions that still exist beyond the pale of philosophy and science and biblical criticism.
They can also seem ultra-rational. Sometimes the palaver that comes from academe about The Grand Theory Of Everything, or GUT, of physics seemed to be such a creation of a faith that was swept off it feet upon the earth, and there are other obsessions yet haunting science still.

Then there are the demons behind the politics and religions of those who disagree with us.

A Mexican Family Prays at a Shrine of Santa Muerte  (Holy Death) in Mexico City

There are indeed Powers on the Earth. I have seen them at times.

They are not transcendent. God is transcendent. God comes like a sudden blast of a gun across our bow as we sail along our time-line. It gets our attention, but it is gone as soon as we are aware of it.

The Powers do endure.

There are heroes and heroines, demons and angels, powers and tree-spirits, and they all exist within the World-ing we create in our negotiation with Creation.
We read stories in the Bible and often we scratch our heads, wondering how the children of Israel could turn away from such a demonstrably powerful and omni-present deity such as Yahweh, and we ascribe to them not just a stubbornness and stiff-necked-ness of a normal type, but an obduracy bordering on the unimaginable.

Yet even they were not as stiff-necked as Moses said, but they were as immersed into the study of torah of the powers of creation as their later descendants would be into the Torah of God.
They were ever davening in a negotiation with God.
Moses warned them not against defeat by the Canaanites, but of their eventual victory over the Canaanites:

“Don’t say in your heart – ‘because of my righteousness has God brought me to inherit this land and because of the wickedness of these other nations’ – (but) in order to fulfill God’s promise to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – for you are a stiff-necked people,”  Deuteronomy 9:4-6.

for they are focused like religious autistic savants in the parliament with their God, and they will not bow the head once they think they have found the "truthfulness" of their ways.

It takes a long, long struggle to capture the essence of the God who burst upon our lives like a momentary supernova; much easier, is it not, to latch onto those vasty powers who inhabit God's creation, above and below.

However, having said this, we ignore the powers at our own peril.

Iraq;
my mother thinks that the UN weapons inspectors told the world that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction. She listen to FOX, however, and history has been changed in FOX's Mini-Truth. Yet I well remember how shocked I was at the ease with which we were marched in unison over the cliff of the Iraq War in 2003.
I had a sense of a majority of the public being possessed by madness, a feeling I don't think I ever had before.

The invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq began 20 March 2003, and by 12 May 2003 four soldiers from the 320th Military Police Battalion abuse detainees at Camp Bucca, in southern Iraq, kicking and beating them.
Eventually we had Abu Ghraib and the photos of abuse.
Less than 2 months for the devil in the details to jump up.

I particularly found Abu Ghraib interesting because it the photos were filled with nudity and suggestions of sexual dominion.
I remember at the time wondering how long it would take for the culture to begin to "come out" of the S and M closet:
how long before things like Fifty Shades Of Grey would be commonplace?

It did not take very long, did it, suckers?!

Many of us are in the grips of Powers we cannot begin to comprehend with our present intercourse with Creation.

This time, his head was not covered, but the American flag did cover the legality of the events. This was the death of an individual whom the Mass Media called a "very, very, bad man."

I never met him, thank God. But my taxes paid for this.

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