Pascha, The View from the Top

Climbing this mountain has been challenging, exhausting, exhilarating, educational, and finite. It is over! We finally made it, with the help of our Saints, and with the leadership of the west who went ahead of us.

The air here is thin and clean. The sun shines brightly over the land. From this distance I see no evil, I hear no evil. Neither fear nor death has its grips on me.

I wish I could start again. The only thing I dislike about Easter is that the rigors of mountain climbing are over. I could act the same, but it's never the same. The church doors are locked during the week and the fellowship of mountain climbers has disappeared.

Perhaps I could try to stay on this mountaintop, but I know that the demands of my village below will pull me down whether I like it or not.

As the two sisters taught me though, I always have Wednesday's and Fridays and Sunday's to relive the crucifixion and resurrection experience. It will have to be enough until next year.

But I feel a story coming on...so stay tuned!

Χριστός Ανέστη

With love,
Evangeline

Pascha, The Glorious Eighth Day

I opened my eyes still tingling with joy and sleepiness. The clock read 8:00 to remind me that today is the glorious and mystical eighth day.

God created the world in six days, and on the sixth day, He made man (and on the sixth day, man crucified Him). Then on the seventh day He rested, the Sabbath (Saturday). On both the day after the creation and on the day after the crucifixion, on the holy seventh days, He rested. On the eighth day, the Jewish baby boy gives his piece of life-giver to God in circumcision. On the eighth day (Pascha), God gives immortality back to mankind. God believes in give and take; He is not interested in one-sided relationships.

On the eighth day Resurrection, Israel's quest to be rid of Jesus failed. That hurt. However, the failure also marked the fulfillment of the covenant. The deal that Abraham would become the ancestor of a multitude of nations was paid in full. Abraham is not just the ancestor of the Arabs/Islam, through Ishmael and the Jews through Isaac and Jacob but since the eighth-day Resurrection, Abraham is truly the ancestor of many nations. His Greatest Grandson, Jesus, adopted a world of peoples and brought Abraham more children than he could imagine. It is official. No one can trace a bigger family tree; like the stars on a clear night and the dust particles on the ground the seed of Abraham covers the earth. The eighth day circumcision and the eighth day resurrection are the beginning and the end of a very good deal.

As a parent bribes his child with worldly riches, a bike, a ten-dollar bill, to get him to do something that is more important to the parent than to the oblivious child, God bribed Abraham to get him to mark a body of people of His very own (with circumcision) . The Jews are not Abraham's people. They are God's chosen people, His control group. Abraham received the multitude of nations as God promised. God received one nation, the tribe of Judah, into which He would someday place Himself as a man, and walk on earth as Adam did. What Adam would not do, God would do Himself. God, as Jesus, would trust God. Through Jesus, God would restore His image and likeness to humankind by individual acts of free will; neither by nature, genetics, nor slavery would humankind be immortal as God, but by a human's own desire and self-sacrifice would God's children eventually live with Him on a new earth happily ever after. This is super-long range planning, but so what. God has all the time in the world.

For God, the covenant was never about money and power, or even land; it was always about immortality.

And so on this mystical eighth-day morning Evangeline begins life anew with a refreshed soul that just caught a glimpse of God and won't let go.

Excerpts taken from The Immortal Life by Evangeline Hopkins.

The Slow Birth of the Bride

It is written that God made man on the sixth day, and that it was a terrible disappointment how he turned out because man disobeyed God’s warning not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so the man and his woman died of distrust and disobedience. God does not make mistakes. He knew that was only the first step in the creation of His most glorious opus—self replication for the purpose of creating His Bride.

After many thousands of years when the creation had time to settle in, God’s magnificent endeavor was ready for the next phase. During Passover, the miraculous escape from the tyranny of slavery of the children of Abraham-Isaac-n-Jacob extracted from humankind a chosen body.

Fifty days after Passover Moses brought down from the mountain Sinai the Tablets of Law. Shavuot is marked by the harvest of winter wheat, the Festival of Reaping. From His place on high God sent wheat and words to live by. The Lord provides. The chosen were to replicate God by being Law abiding people. Heppy Shavout or as the Greek-Jews would say, ‘Heppy Pentecost.’

After many thousands of years when the chosen of God had time to settle in, His magnificent endeavor was ready for the next phase. Just as the first step of the sixth day birth of mankind was not a failure; the second step of replication by Law was not a failure either. They were the slow deliberate steps-necessary for the formation of the immortal Bride of God, a single golden thread of light glimmering in the woof and weave of earthly life. Birth takes time.

The third trimester began at Pascha/Easter after the miraculous escape of the natural body from the tyranny of death by the archetypal Golden One among the chosen ones, the immortal Christ Jesus.

Fifty days later, from a mountaintop light-years higher than Sinai, the gift of the Law was supplemented by the gift of the Holy Spirit. God’s opus to create His Bride, His helpmeet, His counterpart was complete. She was born in a room filled with men of the Law of Likeness. She spoke in words everyone could understand. She was crowned with tongues of fire. This Bride of God gives birth to children of God, filled with His Holy Spirit to replicate Him throughout the world and unto the ages of the ages!

This, my aspiring immortal friend is why and how it took so very long for God’s Bride to be born. The Pentecost of the Law and the Pentecost of the Spirit mark release from slavery into freedom, from darkness into light, and release from mortality to immortality with one purpose, to replicate God in His Bride.  In English Her name is Church, Ecclesia in Greek. She is Jewish and she is gentile. E pluribus Unum, ‘Out of many, One.’ She is One, Holy, Universal, and Apostolic, a genuine beauty!

Heppy Birthday Bride of God. Let’s get our white gown ready! I hear the Bride Groom coming!

Pascha Eviction

I don’t know about you, but all this bright week I have felt like I have been tossed out of the Garden of Eden by the collar. I was given the boot! Door slam in my face.

In floats my guardian angel who asks me, “Now what are you going to do?”

“I want to go back, I’ll do that! I’ll find the road and when I get to the royal doors, I’ll bang real hard.”

“That won’t work,” argues my angel, “the road has been hidden. Time and times have covered it with minute-dust so that you’ll never find it.”

“Then, I’ll just sit here and wait for it to appear again.”

“Evangeline, you know that’s impossible too. No one can stand still in time.”

I am beginning to think my angel to be a bit sinister. Whose side is he on anyway?

“Well then," I am desperate for the answer I want to hear “maybe I’ll just become a vegan. Or every time I eat meat I’ll think that the poor animal died for my sin. Then maybe I can at least feel light again. Why did they tell me that I couldn’t fast? I think it was part of the plot to get rid of me. I mean they didn’t say, you don’t have to, they said it is forbidden! Don’t you think all this meat and eggs swimming around my innards are making me drunk with animalness?”

At this point in the conversation I think my angel is beginning to feel sorry for me; exactly what I was hoping would happen!

He says, “Maybe if you ate less earth food and more spirit food you’ll feel better, but I’m afraid you can’t go back. All you can do is keep walking the circle.”

Now I get whiny (even ashamed of myself.) “But the more I walk the farther away I get.”

“Today is Sunday, my child. You can go home.”

“It’s not the same, I was home, I mean the real forever-home. I want to be there. It was so wonderful and fresh and clean. Now I’m stuck back here with the news and all of these blind people who I don’t even feel sorry for anymore.”

“Evangeline, did you feel evicted then?” Now my angel is acting like a psychiatrist and I play along.

“Yes, I did!” I reply stubbornly.

“Well, Evangeline my dear. You are right. You are out here, evicted, or booted as you put it. My advice to you is to work on your own perception of where you are. When you get that chip off your shoulder that irritates you so much and weighs you down, then you’ll see the value and purpose of the eviction.” Then my angel gets mean. “Perhaps the Master was wrong to allow you to enter heaven at all. Wake up, you will find pieces of light on the circle that you can use to see more when you reach the pinnacle again. Stop fretting my child over what you have lost. You must just work on your purification out here. A little less friendly environment, a little more difficult, but you should be stronger now and more up to the task than before you visited heaven. ”

“Thank you angel. Let’s go home before they say we can’t go in there either.”

He was being very nice now as he reached for my hand.