In 1994 an old Kurdish shepherd walked over a hill in south-eastern Turkey and kicked a stone.
That stone turned out to be the top of a pillar.
Beneath it lay a temple.
Not an old temple. The OLDEST temple we know of. It is called Göbekli Tepe and it is almost 12,000 years old - twice as old as the pyramids, older than the wheel, older than writing, older than pottery. And here we come to the thing that made the archaeologists drop their theories on the floor - and that they are still scratching their heads over - the temple is older than agriculture.
Read that sentence again. Slowly.
We have told ourselves a particular story for a long time. It goes something like this.
First man learned to till the soil, then he built cities, and then - when there was surplus and time to spare - he invented religion. The gods as a luxury. Faith as a superstructure.
Göbekli Tepe, however, says - emphatically no. Hunters and gatherers, people with no fixed abode, no grain in the barn, no metal - they dragged pillars of ten or fifteen tons up a hill and raised a holy place, a temple, BEFORE they built themselves a house.
The temple came before the city.
Worship came before bread.
Man looked up before he looked down.
That is the only conclusion, if we hold on to our usual understanding of the narrative and of history. And I am not going to dispute it.
....
And this business of raising a temple - it is not a curiosity.
It is a pattern that recurs everywhere we find traces of ourselves. Of Man. There has never - NEVER - been found a people without it. Not one. The anthropologists have searched every jungle and every island, and they have come home with a thousand different pictures, a thousand different stories - and zero exceptions. Grave goods and ochre among those who buried their dead a hundred thousand years ago. Hands painted on cave walls deep inside the darkness, where nobody lived. And everyone who is a parent experiences it with a child of about four, who one day at dinner asks, without anyone having taught them the question - "Who actually made all of it?"
There is a movement in Man. Built in. A structure.
That points upward.
And if you lay all the pictures side by side, something strange happens. The Egyptians called it Ma'at - the order that holds the world up, and to which even Pharaoh was answerable. The Indians called it Rta - the rhythm that carries the stars and the sacrifice and the truth in one word. The Chinese called it Tao - the way that cannot be exhausted. The Persians called it Asha. And a Greek in Ephesus, five hundred years before Christ, called it Logos - the reason that flows through everything.
Different languages. Different altars. Strangers to one another, separated by oceans and millennia.
And all of them with their hand on the same thing - that BEHIND it all - behind the weather and the war and the births and the stars - there is an Order. That the cosmos is Not chaos with patterns in it. But Pattern with chaos in it. And that something, or Someone, behind it all is holding it together.
You can read that as proof that it is all human projection. Many people do in our time. We will come back to them.
Or you can read it the way you read a hundred witnesses who each, independently of one another, criss-crossing time and place and culture, describe the same figure from each their own angle.
....
But then - and this is where you need to listen, especially if you are from these parts, because this is where the waters of world history divide - then something happened in a small, insignificant corner of the Middle East, among a tiny little people with no empire, no fleet, no pyramids.
Try to notice the movement - and see if you can get hold of it.
The other peoples had gods that were BORN of the world. Read all the old creation accounts from Babylon, for example. The gods arise out of the primeval sea, they fight among themselves, and Man is created at the very end - from the blood of a slain god - as a SLAVE, so that the gods can be spared the work. That was the view of Man they lived inside - you are created and exist in order to carry. To be a slave.
And then the Book of Genesis opens - set down by that small people with no empire - and from there everything is different.
In it God is not born of the world. It is the other way round. The world is born of God. He is not inside matter as a force - He stands OUTSIDE it and SPEAKS it forth. The Word orders the deep. And Man? Here comes the most wonderful and unexpected shift. So hold on.
Man is not created as a slave. He is created in GOD'S IMAGE - as the ONLY thing in all of Creation that resembles its Source. Set to steward, not to toil.
And stop for a moment at that word. Steward. We do not hear it anymore - it sounds like an office. But listen to what it actually says - a steward is set over something he does not own. The estate is not his. But the keys are.
It is a dizzying middle position that Man is given here.
The slave has neither the estate nor the keys - he only carries. The owner owes nobody anything. But the steward stands in between - entrusted with EVERYTHING, owner of NOTHING - and one day the Owner asks the question - what did you do with what I gave you?
Therein lies the whole of the Dignity. A slave cannot fail - he can only obey or be punished. But a steward can fail, precisely because he is FREE. The trust is given in advance. The keys are already in your hand - your body, your abilities, your years, the piece of the world you stand on. Nobody comes along and takes them from you on the way. But the day of reckoning is part of it, because without it the trust would not be serious.
That is why we speak of Freedom under Responsibility here. It is not a political phrase. It is Man's position in the cosmos, issued on the first day of Creation.
And then feel the difference in your own spine as you read it.
One story says - "You are the gods' labour force".
The other says - "You are the King's child!".
And there is more still. This God has a name that is not a name.
When Moses later stands at the burning bush and asks - "who shall I say has sent me?" - he is given four Hebrew letters. YHWH. Yahweh. It is not a name like Zeus or Odin or Ba'al - it is not a label on one god among many. It is a form of the verb TO BE. "Ehyeh asher ehyeh" - or in our own tongue, as far as we can translate it -
I Am Who I Am.
Feel what happens in that sentence. All the other gods have names, because they are things in the world - the thunder god, the sea god, the fertility goddess. You can point to them. But this God answers with a verb. He is not one of the things. He is BEING itself - the reason there is anything at all rather than nothing. Everything else that exists BORROWS its existence. He is the only one who simply IS.
And then the most beautiful thing, which you may have noticed in these times when we are once again discussing that small people, as we have consistently done almost ever since - the Jews do not pronounce the name. They have not done so for over two thousand years. When they read aloud and reach the four letters, they say "Adonai" instead - the Lord.
Think about it, if you read last Friday's post - the Masoretes counted every single letter in the whole of the Torah - but the four holiest never touched their lips. The name was carried through the millennia like an ember you do not pick up with your hands.
It is not superstition. Even though many would like to make it that nowadays. It is precision. A name you can pronounce is a name you can use - drag down into incantations, election campaigns and war cries. 'The unpronounceable name' nobody can take out a patent on.
This God is not one of the things in the world. He is the reason there are things.
Nowhere else on the planet was it thought like this. And nowhere else was Man set SO high - and God SO free.
....
But let us return to here, where the three rivers met.
Jerusalem gave the vertical - the spiritual - Man as God's image, inviolable, and a Truth above every king. Athens gave the form - reason, philosophy, the confidence that the world CAN be understood, because it is ordered. Rome gave the frame - the law, justice, the institution that binds even power.
You can see it in the symbolism -
The cross above the crown. The king under the law, the law under the Truth, and the Truth with a source that is higher than the king.
It is not one culture among many. It is THE ONLY model in the history of mankind in which Freedom and Foundation exist in the SAME construction. Science grew out of it - because only someone who believes in a lawgiving Creator goes looking for laws of nature. Human rights grew out of it - because only where Man bears an image is he inviolable simply by existing. Conscience, doubt, yes even atheism grew out of it - children denying their parents in their parents' own voice.
Everything you call self-evident was built on that word.
God.
....
And then, the anomaly everyone thinks is the norm.
About sixty years ago - a little gust of wind in the history I have just told - we began to tell ourselves something completely new.
That there is nobody behind it. That you are an accident - a little dust and chemistry and a blink between two darknesses. Some began to say that meaning does not exist, but is "created", privately, like a hobby. That Man is not the image of creation, but its mistake - a burden, some go so far as to tell a story in which the planet would rather be rid of us.
Try to see it from outside, the way an alien civilisation would see it.
A species spends a hundred thousand years looking up. Builds temples before houses. Finds the same Order behind everything, independently, on every continent. Raises on that foundation the freest and strongest load-bearing civilisation that has ever existed.
And then spends sixty years - SIXTY - declaring the whole thing a misunderstanding.
And they did not do it because a disproof came along. No disproof came, and none has ever come. What came was a story - and it was repeated until it sounded like knowledge.
And then look at the fruits, because that is the test we were given - we stand in an epidemic of existential anxiety in the youngest generation, loneliness measured as a national disease, birth rates in free fall and a youth numbing itself through the life that nobody has told them anymore is an adventure. That they live inside a Mystery they are meant to explore. That the future is Light. That it will all be better than here where we are now.
It is not that they lack anything. They have more than any generation before them.
They do not lack things. They lack an address to exist FROM.
Man can endure almost anything. But he cannot endure that nothing matters.
And that is the Story that something - or someone - has spent a long time and consistent effort installing and getting as many as possible to believe in.
There was that word again. Believe.
And I will not meddle in what you believe. That is yours. But whatever you decide to believe has consequences and outcomes in your life. So. If nothing else, it is worth exploring whether your belief about where you are, what you are and why you are - leaves you with an aim, an orientation and an experience of reality that serves you.
....
So here is what I would have you take with you from today, if I could decide -
Sixty years is nothing. The movement "upward" in Man is not gone - it cannot be removed, only disturbed. It lies in there waiting, as it lay in the hunter who dragged pillars up a hill, and in the scribe who counted letters at his table. It lies in your child, who asks who made all of it - without anyone having taught them the question.
It is not we who have held on to God through a hundred thousand years.
It is He who has held on to us.
❤️🔥🪽
Happy Friday and have a good weekend, friends ☀️
Shall we play some music soon?
