Speaker 1: C. S.
Speaker 2: Lewis in his Narnia series.
Speaker 3: He has this image that in fact, the great lion
Aslan sang the world into being. And this is the
analogy that I want you to maintain in your mind.
As we go through the days of Creation, you will
see that all of the discussion about creation in Genesis
one and two is really something like variations on a theme.
God presents a theme at the outset and then plays
with that theme all through the description of creation and
gives us variation on the first pattern that he established
at the beginning. Now, of course, unlike our musical experiences,
that theme is not just.
Speaker 2: A theme, It is the theme. It is the pattern.
Speaker 3: Right, He's describing the very pattern of the cosmos itself,
and as he goes through the days, you will see
how that pattern is repeated and is played with.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pechel, Welcome to the symbolic world.
Speaker 4: What you're about to see is a concert slash speaking
event that I did at Saint Michael's Anglican Church in Charleston,
South Carolina. It was an event that was organized by
my friend Matthew Wilkinson, who runs the Pursuit of Beauty podcast.
You might have seen me on that podcast. He's been
doing a great job and he's an old friend of mine.
It was a wonderful event where I would explain the
symbolism in Genesis and then the choirs would sing different
pieces of music. It was of course Saint Michael's choir itself,
but also the choir from Holy Ascension in Charleston, a
Paris that I love very much, and so it was
a wonderful time and a wonderful surprise to be able
to do an event like that, and I think you'll
enjoy it very much.
Speaker 5: Good evening, and welcome to you Saint Michael's Church, on
the Reverend al Zatic director here and on behalf of
our entire music ministry and our director Matthew Wilkinson. Welcome
to Saint Michael's on a Sunday night. We are so
glad that you are here. Thank you for coming to
this extended meditation upon the seven Days of Creation.
Speaker 2: This entire concert series is.
Speaker 5: A way to engage our collective community beyond our walls
with the beauty not only intrinsic to the gospel and
the arts, but ultimately to the gospel itself, the Gospel
of Jesus Christ and so I'd like to thank.
Speaker 2: The acchoirs from St.
Speaker 5: Michael's Church tonight, along with our friends from the Holy
Ascension Orthodox Church and their director Olivia Reman. Our format
tonight includes teaching from the spoken word and the best
of classical hymnity. Our guest Jonathan Pagot upstairs here will
read from Genesis through each of the days of Creation
and then respond to the scripture with symbolic insights and interpretation,
followed by choral and instrumental music. All the proceeds from
tonight's concert will do offset the cost of the concert
and go to furthering this particular concert series, including our
next concert, which will be the annual Saint Michael's Christmas
Tide Concert on Sunday, December twenty first.
Speaker 2: At the very same.
Speaker 5: Time, we extend a special gratitude to Bill and Phyllis
Johnson for their incredible generosity and helping catalyze this concert
series and making it all possible.
Speaker 2: So thanks be to God.
Speaker 5: Immediately following this concert, please join us for coffee, tea
and treats in the narthex for reflection and conversation about
what we've heard this evening. You know, we never learned
from our experience. We only learned from the reflection of
that experience. So join us in the Narthex tonight right
after this concert. Now, let me introduce to you our
guest speaker this evening.
Speaker 2: His name is Jonathan Pagot.
Speaker 5: Jonathan is a world renowned iron carver, a main contributor
to the Orthodox Arts Journal, where he has written extensively
on Scripture, art and symbolism, and is probably best known
for his online community and podcast, The Symbolic World, where
he and colleagues break down all of the patterns that
make up our experience of the world. Jonathan also provides
incisive cultural critiquing of movies and stories and grounds these
symbolic patterns within the Holy Scripture and of course, the
Church Fathers.
Speaker 2: Jonathan also established the Symbolic.
Speaker 5: World Press, which is currently producing a series of fairy
tales for kids and for adult alike, and he offers
classes on his website with renowned experts on Dante, Boethius, C. S.
Speaker 2: Lewis, and more.
Speaker 5: So please join me in welcoming Jonathan Pajo Jonathan Above.
Speaker 6: Min I tell you what the con.
Speaker 7: It is.
Speaker 3: It is truly a joy to be here. Some of
you know this, and some of you don't. Charleston is
one of my favorite places in the world. I absolutely
love to come here, and I look for reasons and
opportunities to come here. So when my friend Matt Wilkinson
suggested that I come and speak to you about creation,
it was impossible to say no. In the beginning, God
created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was
without form and void, and darkness was upon the face
of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon
the face of the waters. And the earth was without
form and void, and darkness was on the face of
the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the
face of the waters.
Speaker 2: And God said, let there be light. And there was light.
Speaker 3: And God saw the light that it was good. And
God divided the light from the darkness. And God called
the light day, and the darkness he called night. And
the evening and the morning were the first day. C. S.
Lewis in his Narnia series, he has this image that
in fact, the great lion Aslan sang the world into being.
And this is the analogy that I want you to
maintain in your mind. As we go through the days
of creation. You will see that all of the discussion
about creation in Genesis one and two is really something
like variations on a theme. God presents a theme at
the outset and then plays with that theme all through
the description of creation and gives us variation on the
first pattern that He established at the beginning. Now, of course,
unlike our musical experiences, that theme is not just.
Speaker 2: A theme, It is the theme. It is the pattern.
Speaker 3: Right, He's describing the very pattern of the cosmos itself,
and as he goes through the days, you will see
how that pattern.
Speaker 2: Is repeated and is played with.
Speaker 3: A good way of thinking about this when you look
at the image that God describes. The first terms of
the pattern are three. In the beginning, God created the
heaven and the earth. So you have three patterns. You
have God, you have Heaven, you have earth, and you
have the idea that it is.
Speaker 2: In the beginning.
Speaker 3: One of the ways to translate in the beginning is
in the arch or in the head. Another way of
thinking about it in the principle is another good way
of describing what it is that we're talking about. And
if we understand a principle right as something like an
invisible pattern or an invisible prince, let's say impetus that
then yields motion. This is really the way to understand it.
So God traces these two opposites. And what I want
you to imagine in your mind, just to give you
an image in the relationship to what we're doing, is
to think of something like a string that is pulled
across the surface of the waters. So you have above
and you have below, and there's this taut string that
is pulled on the surface of the deep. And you
already have repeated if you want to hear, you already
have repeated the pattern. So God says heaven Earth. Then
he says spirit void. So he's doing this moving up
and down, showing you what's above and what's below.
Speaker 2: And then God says, let there be light.
Speaker 3: And a good way of thinking about is to really
imagine the light like a hand that comes down and
plucks the string. And then things start to move up
and down right and start to dance from heaven to earth,
from Earth to heaven, and there's this exchange that happens
between what is above and what is below, and the
musicality of it is a good way of understanding. It's
a rhythm, right, It's a it's a poem, it's in verse.
Speaker 2: It has a structure to it, right, It.
Speaker 3: Is a beautiful dance that is being started at the
beginning of creation. And so God then again does it again.
He says, God calls the light, day, calls it darkness, night,
and the evening and the morning was the first day.
And so he does it three times in the verse.
If you've noticed it more, I think it's four. So
he says heaven and earth. Read then he says spirit
and void, right, light and dark and day and night.
So these two opposites that are now going to start
to play with each other. And you could realize that
ultimately all of this is the same. It's all about
the relationship between heaven and earth. And you can almost,
like I said, imagine or imagine it again like a
like a like a stone that falls into a puddle,
and then things start to move back and forth, and
these concentric rings start to flow out into the waters,
and it gives us this beautiful, meaningful pattern. And so
what we're going to see in the rest of the
days is we're going to see.
Speaker 2: That play out. And one of the.
Speaker 3: Problems with a principle and one of the problems with
a pattern is that often it appears very small. Think
of a seed is a good way of thinking about it,
something that you don't totally understand what it is yet,
because when you see a seed, you're like, what's this
little dot?
Speaker 2: I don't know what this is.
Speaker 3: It's just the point, right, just this one little, uh
little place. And it's only when it starts to develop
itself and then it starts to take root and starts
to gather the earth in itself, and then it starts
to play itself out, it starts to reveal what it
is really. And that's what I think you see in
this in this first verse. You know when God says
heaven and earth, spirit and void, what is he talking about?
I don't know what that is.
Speaker 2: I don't know what that means.
Speaker 3: And it's only as we move forward that we're going
to see its song.
Speaker 1: Its sons, so so.
Speaker 6: U S speak, so speak.
Speaker 7: So as not sit.
Speaker 8: Side, said s.
Speaker 2: S.
Speaker 9: S S speaks.
Speaker 10: Schools So.
Speaker 11: Greeting's friends, cosmographers, fellow symbolists. This is Joshua from Eighth
Day Books, inviting you to join me and studying a
remarkable cosmic coincidence. Why is it that writers, philosophers, and
prophets from many times and places have all told us
that contemplating the night sky makes our own souls similarly
more beautiful and more ordered. Hebrew and Hindu, Greek and Chinese.
They've all told us that looking up is the same
as looking in, and that we are as much citizens
of the sky as we are of earth. We will
be looking at Pythagorea and folk tales, biblical wisdom, literature,
and contemporary novelists to ask these questions. It'll be a
challenging course, but not technical. I teach medieval philosophy and
Renaissance literature, and I'm condensing a year's worth of information
into a few wonder filled hours. Please join me for
some Plato, some poetry, and some practical skygazing, all to
help us pursue the art of imitating Heaven. See you
very soon.
Speaker 3: So when you read the First Day and you pay attention,
you realize that.
Speaker 2: In the way that the world is being described, we're
really using deep, deep.
Speaker 3: Analogies, because in some ways what is being described on
Day one is something that doesn't completely exist yet, at
least not the way that we think things exist with mass,
body and form, I've never experienced an absolute void. I'm
sure you have never experienced an absolute void either. We
experience relative voids. We experience as places where meaning breaks down.
We experience as places where particularity seems to be screaming
in a way that is making the unity of something questionable.
Speaker 2: We experience a moment when things cease to make sense
and are a puzzle and our confusion.
Speaker 3: So we never can experience the great metaphysical void that
is described in Genesis in the first verse of Genesis,
but we do experience a relative version of that of
that reality.
Speaker 2: And it's the same with meaning.
Speaker 3: We never experience pure meaning, or rarely, maybe the saints
experience the pure light, but in general we experience a
mitigated light. We experience a light that is refracted in
all the things around us. We experience meaning in their examples.
And so the pure spirit that is hovering above the
waters and the light, the divine light that comes down,
as well as the void that is below, are in
some ways beyond the creation that we can deal with
in everyday life, but they are nonetheless the pattern. They
are that first string of the bow right, that first
beginning of the great dance, or the vibration of the
musical pattern.
Speaker 2: So really that's the way to kind of understand Day
two and so, and God said, let there.
Speaker 3: Be a fearament in the midst of the waters, and
let it divide the waters from the waters. And God
made the fearmament and divided the waters which were under
the fuarament from the waters which were above the fearmament.
And it was so, and God called the fear moment heaven,
and the evening and the morning were the second day.
That is a very strange description for modern people to
understand what exactly is going on. And I think that
us as modern people, the best way of understanding what
is happening is that God is putting in the earth,
would say, another version of the world, a smaller one,
a more particular one, one that is closer to our
capacity to experience it. So, notice that God is repeating
the pattern from the beginning again. And so he told
us that the waters are the earth, and then in
those waters he creates a new heaven. And then he
creates a new Earth inside the waters. And he separates
the waters from themselves in order to represent or to
recast the pattern that was at the beginning, but a
pattern which is so far from us and so pure
that you know, we don't have access to it. So
we can understand that this second division, right, this division
the fear Moment and the Earth, is much closer. It's
already a particularization of this great duality. And it is
now in this second heaven and second Earth that the
things that we now recognize as being meaningful, the things
that we recognize as having purpose, the things we recognize
also as being puzzling and confusing, will appear in this
second division, in the second division of the heaven and
the Earth.
Speaker 2: But like I said, this is going to continue.
Speaker 3: Every single day you will see will repeat again this
pattern of division and this pattern of relationship between that
division and between the opposites. So for centuries now there
have been some pesky anthropologists and pesky theologians who have
told us that this story is either an ancient myth
that is using all the myths of the that is,
using the myths of the other cultures, that it is,
you know, just another gloss on the ancient mythical prototype,
and therefore we shouldn't take.
Speaker 2: It too seriously.
Speaker 3: You'd see it as just something that is very old
and dusty, and the other, on other hand, we have
people that have told us, no, what's described here is
scientifically exactly what has happened in that at the.
Speaker 2: Beginning of time. In those two groups, they strangely stand against.
Speaker 3: Each other, one desperately holding on to the importance of
the text but sadly trying to issue the meaning from it,
and the other seeing all these meanings in it but relativizing.
Speaker 2: The importance of the text.
Speaker 3: And I think that this text is one of the
most powerful stories that have ever been written, because they're true.
Speaker 2: Until now. You know, I have used very lofty.
Speaker 3: Images and very kind of metaphysical looking images, and people
will say we have, But the Hebrews, Jonathan, they were
practical people. There were people that lived, you know, they
were not philosophers in the way that we think of them.
And that is absolutely true. And it is now in
day three and in day four that you are going
to start to see how real and how practical this is.
And at the same time you are going to see
how inevitable that first.
Speaker 2: Description I gave you.
Speaker 3: If you've been questioning me until now, and you've been
thinking that I'm glossing this text by talking about heaven
and Earth. It's in day three and in day four
that you really see how it plays out. So day
three and God said, let the waters under the heaven
be gathered together into one place, and let the dry
land appear. And it was so, and God called the
dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters
called the sea. And God saw that it was good.
Now you notice, right, God is doing it again. He's
separating two aspects of the world, separating Earth from the sea.
What's the difference between the Earth and the sea. It's
very simply. Earth is higher than the sea.
Speaker 2: It just is. It has to be.
Speaker 3: There's no other way. The Earth has to be above
the sea, sea has to be below it. It's just
how it works. And so he is separating the land
and the sea. And now the land will become heaven
or the sea will become an image of heaven or
that which is below. Right, it repeats that duality. This
is where you start to see that the descriptions they're
not the reductionist descriptions of modern science and kind of
alienated cosmological descriptions of satellite floating and quasars and all
of that stuff.
Speaker 2: Nonetheless very real. It is.
Speaker 3: If you do not, if you're not able to distinguish
the difference of level between earth and sea, you will
die called drowning.
Speaker 2: Right, It's quite simple.
Speaker 3: And there is a reality to the earth and to
the possibility of the Earth of gathering itself into these
places that in our experience connect Heaven and Earth together.
Speaker 2: So think of it as a fractal.
Speaker 3: You have now the heaven above you have the Earth,
and that's a duality, and then the earth plays the
role of Heaven towards the sea.
Speaker 2: And that type of opposition will continue.
Speaker 3: But if you want, honestly, if you want to have
a little experience of heaven, you can go up a mountain.
It actually works because one of the things that happens
when you're at the bottom of a mountain is that
everything is very particular, everything is very granular. You can
start even by putting your face on the ground. If
you want, lie down on the ground and look around.
You see what you see.
Speaker 2: Maybe you'll see a bug or two, maybe a few
blades of grass. But what happens when you go up.
Speaker 3: When you go up, all of a sudden, that granularity
starts to fuse together. And then you start to see
things come together into patterns, You start to notice things,
things start to coalesce. If you go up a mountain,
by the time you're up at the top of the mountain,
you have the sense that you can see the entire cosmos.
Speaker 2: Because it's all around you. You have this vision.
Speaker 3: You can gather the entire earth and your experience at
that time. It's not the entire earth, relatively the earth,
and you can gather it into one experience. You can
make sense of the entire landscape that stands, that lays
itself out around you. Right.
Speaker 2: That's why we love going up.
Speaker 3: That's why we enjoy going up mountains and going up hills,
to have that little experience of things coming together and
all of a sudden seeing seeing creation lay itself out
in its fullness. And like I said, it's very practical
and it's very, very very real. My brother once came
up with this analogy, which is very simple.
Speaker 2: One.
Speaker 3: We're all standing in a room together and there's one
person who steps up on a chair. That person will
immediately command authority necessarily because he can see everyone. Everybody
can see him. But I can't see everybody around. I
can just see the person next to me. So just
this vision of standing up on a chair is a
little glimpse of what it is that Heaven is talking about.
It is this idea of a little, very small one
of what we mean when we say that Christ is
the head and the Church is the body. It's a
little glimpse of why we have this image of God
going revealing himself and giving law at the top of
a mountain. Because law, what's law. They have thought about
what laws. Law is a pattern of behavior.
Speaker 2: That's what law is.
Speaker 3: So it's a way to organize behavior coherently. And that
is really what Heaven is all the time. And what
does God give Moses at the top of the mountain?
Speaker 2: Gives us two things, gives them two things. He gives
them the law, and he gives them a pattern for
a building.
Speaker 3: I think that's kind of odd that that's what God
would give Moses at the top of the mountain.
Speaker 2: But no, that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 3: He gives him this pattern, and then they, the Israelites,
will gather the earth together and make this building in
the image of the pattern that is above.
Speaker 2: Now, this is where this is.
Speaker 3: Going to start to make sense, because the next part
of this day is the strangest for modern people.
Speaker 2: I think in the entire layout of the creation aready.
Speaker 3: So when God said, let the earth bring forth the
herb yielding seed and the fruit, tree yielding fruit after
its kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth,
and it was so, And the earth brought forth grass
and herb yielding seed after its kind, and the tree
yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself after his kind.
And God saw that it was good. And the evening
and the morning were the third day. Now, why, for
goodness sake is God creating grass before he created the sun.
I'm sure you've heard people who have attacked the creationists
on this front.
Speaker 2: It's a very odd thing. Why would God create grass
before he's created that.
Speaker 3: So the only way to understand it is to understand
this play between above and below, between heaven and earth.
So in this version of the duality, God starts below
and he creates this multiplicity. And it's super interesting because
we always have this idea that God creates everything. That's
not how the text describes creation. It says he tells
the earth bring forth. He's saying, bring forth something on
the ground which has being, But will also have in
it the pattern.
Speaker 2: So it can continue, so it can reproduce itself. Because
it's an odd phrasing. He says, make herbs with seed
inside and the seed of it to make it of
its kind. What's going on, That's exactly what God is doing.
Speaker 3: God is asking the earth to create variability. Think about
it that way, multiplicity. He's saying, create this, generate this
multiplicity in the constraint that I'm giving, which is this
herb that has seed in it.
Speaker 2: And for it to be good, that's what it has
to have. It has to have seed in it.
Speaker 3: It has to have its own pattern inside so that
it can continue this great dance at its own level,
so it can continue to produce. The seed that falls
from above down into the earth, enters the earth, generates
a tree, the tree goes up, the seed falls back,
and you have this beautiful dance of the relationship between
heaven and earth, very practically and actually how plants function.
But also because of what a seed is. There's a seed,
like I said at the beginning, is something like the law.
A seed is something like a pattern without a body
that will find body in the earth.
Speaker 8: As said I.
Speaker 6: No ic, I see.
Speaker 7: As says, that's say not my soul.
Speaker 12: Sory Wna.
Speaker 9: Wanted to bother to decide to.
Speaker 7: Mo still now to matures, and.
Speaker 8: I'm amama to be.
Speaker 7: On.
Speaker 3: Let there be lights the firmament of the heavens, to
divide the day from the night, and let them be
for signs and for seasons, and for days and years,
and let them be for lights in the firmament of
the heavens, to give light upon the earth. And it
was so God made great, two great lights, the greater
light to rule the day and the lesser light to
rule the knight.
Speaker 2: He may the stars also.
Speaker 3: God set them in the fearment of the heavens to
give light on the earth and to rule over the
day and over the night, and to divide the light
from the darkness. And God saw that it was good,
and the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
So again, for the last few hundred years, we have
been told that these things we see up in the skies,
they're you know, balls of flaming gas. They're dead rocks
that reflect the light. That the idea of astrology is
completely stupid and super fit and superstitious and ridiculous. I
would like you to reconsider that. I'm not saying go
check your horse, go tomorrow, that is ridiculous.
Speaker 2: But notice what's happening.
Speaker 3: So God the day before and he creates this multiplicity
on the earth, right, this multiplicity in the darkness, that
all has its seed. It's almost like it's just bursting, right,
It's like this potential that he's here on the ground.
Speaker 2: And then the God goes up.
Speaker 3: Then he starts the same pattern reflecting the earth up
into the heavens.
Speaker 2: Have you ever thought that the stars in the heavens
are like the grass of the field.
Speaker 3: Have you ever had that intuition that the infinite number
of points of light in the heavens are like this
explosion of glory? Right, this multiplicity that is all up
there in the heavens. But what's the difference between the
one we see up there the one we see below.
The one we see below is dark? It is naturally
in the darkness. I always tell people to remember that,
Like if you dig a hole and go inside and
cover yourself, and you'll notice there's a little light there.
Speaker 2: Now up above of God sets a clock. Basically, what
he's doing, he's setting a great.
Speaker 3: Quantity of lights that are above in the heavens, and
that move in a regular fashion, and they rule over
the earth, and they rule over the seasons, they rule
over the days, they rule over the nights, and so
you don't have to you don't have to go very
far to realize that they're providing the pattern. If they're
the stars in the heavens, the sun and the moon,
they are providing the regularity of the pattern what happens
down here. It's not that it's completely unpatterned, obviously, like
I said, all of these things are mitigated.
Speaker 2: But it's a lot messier down here.
Speaker 3: The patterns that are here, they're harder to discern, right,
You almost need some insight from above to be able
to kind of see what's going on down here. But
the clock up here that is regular, So you know,
windspring is if on that day it's hotter than it
usually is, you know, when winter is.
Speaker 2: Even if there's some weird.
Speaker 3: Weather phenomena or something that happens that doesn't seem to
be in tune with what it is that the stars
are saying, this is the clock. Notice then again, how God,
even in the heavens on the earth, he says, the
grass and the seed, so he separates right. Even in
the earth he does the separation. Now he does the
same in the heavens. So he says, there are two
great lights. There is the Sun, there is the moon.
The Sun is a pure light, the moon is a
mitigated light. If the moon is a changing light moves
from waxes in wangs right from dark to light. And
so it does become exactly this image of heaven and earth.
But now in the heavens themselves, this duality is set
up as the pure light and the reflective light are
the pure light and the mitigated changing light.
Speaker 2: And so you can see that.
Speaker 3: It's the only reason why God would create grass before
it creates light, is simply to remind us of the
meaning of these things, simply to help us understand how
we experience them in the world, how we experience grass,
how we experience the dirt and the roots and all
of that, and how we experience these lights in the heaven.
Speaker 2: But the giant clock that directs our days and our
nights day five.
Speaker 3: And God said, let the waters bring forth abundantly the
moving creature that hath life and foul, that may fly
above the earth in the open fearament of heaven, and
God created great whales and every living creature that moveth
which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and
every wing fowl after its kind.
Speaker 2: After his kind.
Speaker 3: And God saw that it was good, and God blessed them, saying,
be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the sea,
and let foul multiply in the earth. And the evening
and the morning were fifth day. So hopefully at this
point you've entered into the dance. Hopefully at this point
you've now started to move your hips to the rhythm
of this story, and you're starting to see this beautiful
swaying that is part of the general pattern that God
is setting forth. Now, God creates beings that have motion.
They create beings that are closer to his image, not
yet in his but closer to his image. They are
not locked to the earth like the grass, They're not
locked up in the heavens, but rather they move freely.
Speaker 2: But again, on the same day, what does he do.
Speaker 3: It starts by making the fish below and the birds above.
It starts by creating what is down there and what
is above.
Speaker 2: And they say whales.
Speaker 7: I hate that.
Speaker 2: They say whales, not whales. We all know what it is.
It's monsters. We know that's what God creates on that day.
Speaker 3: God creates the monsters on that day because the monsters
are closer to the earth, right, because monsters are the
things that you don't know what they are, right. They're
the lurking chaos that can come and ivar you. They're
different from the other animals because most of the other
animals were able to rule over. Those are harder to
rule over because they kind of come up and swallow.
You have a powerful example of that in the story
of Jonah. But you can see clearly that God is
continuing his beautiful pattern. And what we're going to see
is we're going to start to feel again that this
is getting closer. It's almost as if Heaven and Earth
are in a romantic relationship. It's as if it's the
song of songs here and there is a call and
a response, and there is a action from below and
an action from above. And what we're going to start
to see is that this is coming closer, closer towards
a union of that first separation that God established at
the outset. And again you can see that just like
God said to the plants, he sang similar things to
the You notice he said again, he said, it's the
waters that produce these The waters produce them. But he
asks one thing that they be produced in their kind,
that they have the seed inside them, just like what
he said about the plants, that they are coherent beings
that are capable of reproducing their pattern over a time.
That's what he means when he says he wants beings
of their kind. He doesn't want just a chaotic jumble
of things that are always changed. He wants there to
be order in the creation.
Speaker 10: Louise suss.
Speaker 9: Song no.
Speaker 10: So so yeah so.
Speaker 7: Sun who sat.
Speaker 12: So in the.
Speaker 7: Song, So.
Speaker 10: Let's s.
Speaker 2: Some fus so.
Speaker 3: As the days progress and as the pattern starts to
become more explicit and more visible, but you realize is
that what is being described is really the pattern of
the world. It really is the pattern of reality. But
it is the pattern of reality in meaning. That's maybe
the easiest way for us to understand that today. It's
the way that things are meaningful. It's the way that
things have purpose. It's the way that things are recognized
as having relationships with each other. And when we look
at there are mythical description of the origin of the cosmos.
If you think of the Big Bang, it should be
not that difficult to help us as Christians realize that
it is an insufficient description because it doesn't contain meaning.
It doesn't tell us how to be, or how to live,
or how to be with each other. It doesn't give
any image of what our relationship is to these lights
in the sky, or what our relationship is to these
animals around us. Those descriptions are in this text. That's
why it is a better version. I have nothing against
the Big Bang.
Speaker 2: It's fine. That's not my first story. It's kind of downstream.
Speaker 3: This is my first story, because this story is far
greater and includes much more reality.
Speaker 2: In it than the description that we have in the
scientific process.
Speaker 3: So day six, and God said, let the earth bring
forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing,
and beast of the earth after his kind.
Speaker 2: And it was so.
Speaker 3: And God made the beast of the earth after his kind,
and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon
the earth after his kind. And God saw that it
was good. Now again God asks to generate multiplicity. God says,
generate these beasts. But here's the constraint. Here's the way
I want you to do it. I want it to
be creatures that are of their kind, creatures that have
a name, right, not yet Adam will do that, but
implicit name, let's.
Speaker 2: Say, creatures that have meaning in them.
Speaker 3: And this is really where to me, it's one of
my favorite parts of the Creation story because this is
where you really see. The way it's translated is kind
of funny. It makes you wonder, why is it saying
that right?
Speaker 2: Because it says.
Speaker 3: It says beasts of the earth, cattle and things that
creep on the ground.
Speaker 2: What an odd categorization of animals.
Speaker 3: I don't think any biologists today would want to categorize
the plethora of animals into these categories. And I don't
like the way it's translated that well, because the best
way of understanding it is that God creates the wild animals.
Speaker 2: God creates the same animals.
Speaker 3: Then God creates the animals that are creeping below under
the earth about meaning about Heaven and Earth, the same
description as when he creates the monsters and the fish.
Speaker 2: And the birds.
Speaker 3: He's showing us that there are animals that you eat,
and there are animals.
Speaker 2: That eat you.
Speaker 3: Those two are not the same. If you treat them
the same, then you're in serious trouble. So there are
animals over which you rule naturally, that are in some
ways extension of the meaning of humans. These are the
same animals. These are the cattle, These are the sheep.
These are the animals that exist in the kind of
cohabitation with humans. And then there are the animals that
are dangerous for you. So notice it's again a description
of a separation or the relationship between heaven and earth.
Here's these animals that bring chaos. Here are these animals
that participate in order. And here are the animals that
obviously not dead yet, but we are dead, so we
can see what it means. These are the animals that
can eat all of you at the end, when it's over.
These dark things hiding under the ground, all these creepy
crawlers like vermin, they can eat all of you.
Speaker 2: That's why those are the.
Speaker 3: Categories, because they're categories of meaning. They're not biological categories
the way that modern people do taxonomy. They are categories
of meaning. How humans engage in the world. And God said,
let us make man in our image after our likeness,
and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,
and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle,
and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing
that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in
his own image, in the image of God. Created he
him male and female, created he them. And God blessed them.
And God said unto them, be fruitful and multiply, and
replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over
the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air,
and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.
And God said, behold, I have given you every herb
bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth,
and every tree which is the fruit of a tree
yielding seed. To you it shall be for food for meat.
And to every beasts of the earth, and to every
file of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon
the earth wherein there's life. I have given every green
herb for food.
Speaker 2: And it was so.
Speaker 3: And God saw everything that he had made, and behold,
it was very good. And the evening and the morning
were six day So say Maximuth the Confessor, one of
my favorite theologians, makes a big deal about the difference
I haven't mentioned it until now that God everything that
he creates, he also evaluates. So he says, to the earth,
bring forth, and then God judges. We don't like to
think of it as judging, but that's what God does.
And he says it is good, right, and he notices,
he sees the meaning in it, he sees the purpose.
Speaker 2: He sees that it is good.
Speaker 3: But it is only here that God says that it
is very good, because now heaven and earth have been joined.
Heaven and earth have been brought together in the image
of God. And of course here it is intimated, but
it's really in the next chapter. Writ it's in Genesis
two that it's very clear, because in Genesis too there's
a rehashing of the creation of man. And what God does,
if you remember right, he gathers the dust and then
he puts heaven inside, lows his spirit into the dust.
Your thought about what dust is, Dust is one of
the closest things to chaos that we can experience. Dust
is basically a bunch of things that have nothing in
common with each other. They are residues and little bits
of things that don't have any.
Speaker 2: Type of unity. So the earth that he's taking right.
It's the secondary earth.
Speaker 3: But you can see that it's also in a secret way,
or in a hidden way, or in a kind of
analogical way. It's that void that was right there at
the beginning, bringing it up. And now he's putting that spirit,
remember that spirit that was hovering above the waters at
the beginning of the story.
Speaker 2: That spirit.
Speaker 3: He puts it inside. And now the human becomes image
of God. And then the pattern repeats. We don't see
it right here, but I mean the pattern repeats, because
then he makes them male and female, and he makes
them again although they are one, although there are this
joining of union in earth, of heaven and earth, they
are also participating in their own dance. They will also
be an image of heaven and earth, and they will
also be the image of a head and a body.
This interplay will continue as humans are fruitful and multiply
on the earth. Not only is God describing the pattern
of the world that we experience every day, but is
it is the image of Christ Day seven. Thus the
heavens and the earth were finished, and all the hosts
of them. And on the seventh day God ended his
work which he had made, and he rested on the
seventh day from all his work which he had made.
God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it because that
in it he had rested from all his work which
God created and made.
Speaker 2: The Sabbath is a very mysterious day.
Speaker 3: It's probably one of the hardest things to understand scripture,
especially as Christians. But we have this image of Christ
dying on the Sabbath, we realize that what is this
rest that God is talking about?
Speaker 2: For me?
Speaker 3: And this is now very much my own speculation or
my own meditations on it. I think the way that
I can see into some of the mysteries of the Sabbath.
Speaker 2: Is that God is also revealing to us that.
Speaker 3: This creation, although it is an image of Him, although
it is a great engagement with him, it's not God.
Speaker 2: I mean that is that God is still beyond this.
Speaker 3: God is still has a moment of distancing from creation,
not because he doesn't love creation, because he loves creation,
because he is in some ways enabling our freedom, but
also because he wants to remind us that all the
things down here that you know, they're not him. And
so there is a day that is set to the
memory of that reality, which is a day because you know,
now that you understand this, you realize that work is
something like law that is manifesting itself on the earth. Right,
you can kind of see it now. So you have
a pattern, a purpose, and then you engage it, right,
and you bring together the things that are earthly, you
gather them.
Speaker 2: In that pattern, and you reveal the world. That's what
God is doing.
Speaker 3: That's also what we do when we work, when we
make things, when we imitate God in that way.
Speaker 2: But to always remember that that is insufficient, it's not everything.
That there is a mystery that lies beyond.
Speaker 3: Right, there is a secret that is before them of
the of the Great bo uh and uh and I
think that that's the mystery that that some of the
saints are able to enter into. So uh So I
hope this was this was a little useful play through
the seven days. I hope that it was something that
will help you at least meditate on this in the future.
Speaker 2: Uh. This, like I said, it is it is really.
Speaker 3: One of my favorite texts, not just in scripture, but
really I think it's one of the most powerful texts.
Speaker 2: And I really I've also only skimmed it. You know,
there's so much more.
Speaker 3: There's so much more power in in that, in that text,
and it's worth at this time especially to not be
ashamed of that story, all right, and to not to
not back down from people who would market, people who
would tell us that it's a ridiculous ancient myth, because
it is the best description of the world and its
structure that has ever been told.
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