Messianic Transformation

A growing number of people have marginalized their thinking process to 'tweeting and texting shapes' to such a level that the skill set required of non-violent transformation of conflict makes the process environmentally unfriendly to their state of mind, and terrorizes their senses knowing there is depth to the change we must make as we chant, and pray for and work towards transformation.

For many more there is the Messiah. But, looking for a Messiah preys on intelligence and creates a mind set able to make do without the required integrity it takes to be a powerful shapeshifter, or non-violent, or skilled in listening and conquering internal fears that obscure the vision of transforming lives.

That being said those are minor considerations because making oneself into the kind of soul and spirit to transform conflict within is the foreplay. Afterwards, it takes a small number of people to change, and transform at the deepest levels. That release into the ethers is strong enough to begin reshaping the weak minds without spiritual base elements in there. We don't need everyone. We need the skilled and committed because we know the weak follow the strong, and the unsure followed Moses at night because of the fire in front leading each night of their military jaunt away from the armies of Pharaoh.  - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 8.25.14

Josephine Baker's hat cocked ace deuce & a quarter

"The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling... How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do?" - Josephine Baker 

Josephine Baker 2

Parenting LIGHT

Parenting the Light of the World is erroneously thought to be the exclusive role of Mary, his mother. That assumption stopped creative processes the world over as women in every country birthed light into the world. It is a special privilege raising light. Believing there was only one light limits that light and intimidates the light out of lives that could do better than Jesus' life. It was his fervent wish that we do better and more than he and live life more abundantly. Belief, since he expressed that wish, suppressed creative people's dreams. In other words mothers and fathers suffocated the possibility and the notion of another child becoming a Messiah simultaneously killing the unction within many spirits to be God-like and create with the power Jesus said we had access to. To make it plainer, the Church didn't believe a cotton pickin' thing Jesus said that required more than rudimentary belief in authority, and blind obedience to simple rules.


In a very real sense belief became a 'mother fucker'. I say that with heaviness and deep sensitivity to the negative power and connotation of the word. Motherfucker is one of the two most despised words in the English language to me, but in this instance it is a logical fit into understanding the bad programming we live with as a society! The word speaks to a horrible thought process, and tells the long story of an awful assimilation into mediocrity twenty centuries of people have submitted themselves to as a superior force outside of nature because they couldn't and didn't believe and understand what Jesus said and meant as a legacy for the following generations!  

- Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories 11.23.14

Jesus say no . . . 

... it (the cartoon)brings to a point of consideration the unique challenges of raising a gifted child. How do you raise one gifted child to be a child amongst other children without spoiling or killing their spirit? - Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories 11.23.14

of Lady Gaga: form

Lady Gaga has low body fat with muscular definition across most of her body
down to her strict diet and toning workouts. In short, she is fine and worthy of the
body idolization she inspires. Her creativity worked a path towards an audience of people
mistitled and feeling like outsiders in American culture and around the world with voiceless; hence powerless
 people dulled by unacceptance and others charged with purpose despite living in societies
bent on conformity.

Messiahs come in various forms.

- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories
9.30.15

 

the Messiah as Superman!

Why Superman is a Better Jewish Messiah than a Christian Messiah: A Mythic Movie Review of Man of Steel

Pearl Praise afloat...

I got to see Man of Steel just before vacation (I stood atop a Mayan pyramid - about as close to a ziggurat as I'm  gonna get, being a Jew, so that was awesome) and now I am ready to comment on it.

Much has been made about the christological spin given the Superman mythology in this movie, and I found much of it quite moving, if somewhat heavy-handed (I'm thinking of the "surrender yourself" come-to-Jesus moment with the priest, where a picture of Jesus is hovering right over his shoulder). It certainly shows how a really, really good myth can be the bearer of many vectors of meaning. The screenwriter(s) foregrounded some nice elements of the Superman mythos that resonate with the Christ story. Good christ-figures fill popular culture, from Klaatu to Gandalf, and only a first-class whinger would complain about bringing together two great western mythic tales ("Chocolate!" "Peanut Butter!" "Wait, they taste great together!").

I must observe, however, that the Man of Steel as the Prince of Peace is, IMHO, an awkward fit. The narrative proves Kal El = Christ to be something of a case of Procrustean bedding (Sorry to throw in a third mythic tradition here). And here's why I think this is so:

For while the plot contrives that Kent must surrender himself for the good of humanity, he neither has to suffer death at the hands of the people he has come to save, nor does he die, crucified or otherwise, by anybody, not even General Zod (Yea, Michael Shannon!), the Prince of Darkness. Indeed, he actively works to escape his fate, and does so successfully. The only two people who willing and successfully sacrifice their lives are his father (the Joseph stand-in) - who does so for the ethically questionable principle that it is better for others to die than for his son to prematurely reveal his true nature - and the Air Force colonel who does, in fact, destroy himself for the sake of saving humanity, but in a way that is more Torpedo Squadron 8 (look it up) than Jesus of Nazareth.

Look, there is no question that the master myth undergirding Superman is a kind of messianism: the particular religious brand of utopianism that centers of the special individual, gifted with unique powers, an individual who can and will transform our reality for the better and advance all that is divine, just, true, and right, improving the human condition. The messianic myth, writ small, is arguable at the very root of the superhero as a genre. Fair enough, but how, then is Superman more Jewish than Christian? While the messiah is the special invention of the Jews, messianism is also at the very heart of the Christian myth. Even so, it is useful to recognize Christian and Jewish forms of messianism as  categorically quite distinct. The uniquely Christian vision of the messiah is the supernal empowered “chosen one” who surrenders and sacrifices himself and dies for the good of humanity, his death bringing salvation in a way his life could not. The Jewish messiah, by contrast, is the empowered “chosen one” who strives and struggles, who to the very end lives for the good of humanity, ultimately to triumph over adversity and evil, but without losing himself. And so too, is Superman. While Christ-motifs will eventually appear in the long story arc of the Superman comic run (7 decades and counting), in their earliest form, and in their overarching mythologies, all comic book heroes conquer evil by defeating its minions, not by transcending it through their own death.  Leading, fighting for, and living for humanity is an archly Jewish myth; the master motif of Superman. This Jewish myth is actually the foundational premise of all the early superhero mythologies. 

There is a second way in which Jewish messianism is different. In Christian thought, there is and can be only one messiah. All other contenders are anti-christ. In Judaism, a messiah is a role and a high office, a role not bound to one person, one time in (or even the end of) history. In point of fact, every king and high priest of Israel was a messiah in their own time. Thus, the appearance of multiple superheroes in a single “universe” - the Justice League of America, for example - has a more Jewish than Christian resonance to it.

There is, finally, a dark side to the Jewish Messianic/Superman myth that I take to be a curious kind of "proof" of Superman's essential Jewishness, and this is the Christian tradition of the anti-christ. It doesn't take much reading of Christian commentaries to realize that the anti-christ, as envisioned in the Revelations of John and then elaborated on by Christian tradition, is at its heart fundamentally a critique/polemic against the competing Jewish vision of the eschatological messiah. Cast as descendant of the tribe of Dan (and therefore a Jew), who triumphs and governs in this world, abet as a viceroy of Satan rather than God, the anti-christ is essentially a dig at the "carnality" of Jewish eschatological expectations.

Why am I reviewing this tangential matter? Because of a revealing conversation I had with a campus minister back in the 1970's, in which he declared Superman to be a cunning pop culture avatar of the anti-christ, a pulp-fiction blasphemy meant to mentally prepare mankind for the coming to the real satanic savior, the ubermensch bearing the the "mark of the beast." This preacher, immersed in Christian myth, intuitively detected this "Jewish" cast to Superman, and then deconstructed him through his the prism of his Christian len and, whola, he is revealed to be anti-christ. Or, Superman = Jewish Messiah = anti-christ. My experience of 40 years ago is hardly isolated; see this Washington Post article: 

So while I enjoyed Man of Steel, his ret-con (look it up) as a Christ figure is ultimately a triumph of marketing over innate narrative affinity. Superman is, and remains, more like Menachem ben David, "Comforter, son of David" rather than Christ,
"...eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end." ~ Geoffrey Dennis (7.7.2013) 

Pearl Praise small before a giant tree.

To learn more, look up the Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism available at Amazon:

MESSIAH

OVERCOMING THE FEAR OF DEATH

Someday I too will die too. When we are young we do not think too much about death. But as we get older, we worry more and more about death. This is because it is a door that are inevitably destined to cross. But what happens to us after death? Do you know why I'm talking about death? To better teach the meaning of life. Who truly understands the value of life? There 

are people who cling to life by all means. The person who really knows life is one that goes into the valley of death. Is the person giving testimony of the sense of life desperately crying out to Heaven at the crossroads of life and death. Why do people fear death? Because they do not know the purpose for which they were born. If you do not know why you are born, will not know the reason for the death. For this reason, the first questions that philosophers do is: what is life? Why are we born? 

If we think about it deeply, we will realize that death makes us reborn within the love of God. In the world people lamented, "Oh no, I'm dying!, What I can do?" in the midst of a major scandal. Does God laughs when we die? Or think God laments also sunk with grief? The truth is that he is happy, and this is because the time of death of the physical body is when we experience the joy of abandoning a finite dimension of love to get into an infinite dimension of love. It is time for our second birth. So when God feels happier, the day we are born in the physical world or the day that we left off? That's the moment we are born for the second time in a dimension where love expands infinitely. We become His new children through death. Therefore, God is happy with our second birth. I say all this because they need to know they can not have a relationship with God unless we overcome the fear of death.

Sun Myung Moon, the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humanity