Temple Mysteries and Spiritual Efficiency

by Rollan McCleary

ABOUT

Temples are crucial markers of human consciousness and we are all in them, even if like French Revolutionaries to worship the Goddess of Reason. Jerusalem's Temple was uniquely special and influenced original Christianity's self-understanding and its apprehension of God far more than is realized. Against the background  of crises within Christianity from declining numbers to the sex scandals which represent not just sin but outright inefficiency, this book popularizes and considers implications of aspects of the controversial new Temple theology of British Hebrew scholar, Margaret Barker. Having established certain principles these are then critically applied to a raft of topical issues in contemporary life and religion from healing and exorcism to questions of gay psychology and the nature of creation and evolution. The final chapter summarizes the new outlook and offers solutions and practical advice of relevance to religion, its renewal and more efficient working. This is a book not just about spirituality, theology, ethics and more but about right vision itself, a Temple vision of reality.

TOPICAL AND NEWSWORTHY

Certain of the book's themes are not just broadly topical but sometimes (from chance rather than design) newsworthy in addition.  The chapter on exorcism includes critical consideration of Matt Baglio's account of the new exorcism in The Rite, to be released  as a film starring Anthony Hopkins at the end of Jan 2011. The account of a prophetic dream  experienced during writing of the book offers a different perspective on the tragedy and what is felt to be the unsolved mystery of rising pop star Charles Haddon's suicide in August 2010.  Mary MacKillop has recently become Australia's first saint but reports of her current appearances and activity raise new questions for the cult of the saints. Parts of the material on gay issues have ongoing relevance to the problem of radical homophobia in Uganda that has become of international concern. The examination of Jung's crucial Red Book is in itself a novelty. When it first appeared, this strange work considered by some reviewers almost unreviewable, has scarcely had any detailed assessment since its much hyped publication at the end of '09.

CONTENTS

EXCERPTS

INTRODUCTION:

THE PROBLEM OF SPIRITUAL INEFFICIENCY

How could Christianity get it quite so wrong? How could spirituality be so inefficient for its stated purposes? From the Inquisition to modern sex abuse scandals the religion of love and extreme ideals is again and again exposed as vicious and corrupt amid the good, dangerously dark amid the light. Sometimes to such an extent that for many people believing in Christianity and Christians is almost more a test of faith than believing in God.

There are the familiar, conventional responses. We are assured that all humans (and religions) are imperfect, that leaders of the faith have loved power too much, that believers haven't been compassionate or faithful enough, that they didn't pray enough or absorb their Bibles enough, or — a modern flourish from the Jungian school — they simply tried to be too good altogether; they didn't assimilate evil and the shadow. It's always best not to try to be too good!

Although these and similar responses cannot be wholly wrong, somehow none seem quite adequate to the spectacle of extremes we are faced with through much of history into our own times. We remain sceptical, suspecting there has to be more. This book will suggest that the scepticism is largely justified and there are indeed matters we haven't understood or attended to. Although Christianity is widely perceived as the religion of faith and "amazing grace" rather than techniques, in fact it does have techniques and hidden laws of a sort and these are ignored at its and our peril.

At least some of the technique and its meaning can be symbolized through "the temple" whether the Temple of Jerusalem anciently or the temples of mind we construct or the temples of our body we inhabit. Hence the title of this book which is timely in the light of the new perspectives on belief introduced by such as Margaret Barker's controversial studies of Israel's Temple and the intention of circles in Israel actually to build a third Temple. But this is only one perspective. In fact, the first intimations I might write this book came to me when I was hearing and reading about rather different issues like autism and got to read the bestseller which became a film, The Horse Boy. I suddenly recalled some things and began to wonder if I couldn't connect some dots in an unfamiliar pattern. Which I found that I could.

So, starting from the modern Temple of Reason, this is an exploration into the territory around and beyond it, not merely the irrational but what lies beyond the merely rational framework of things as surely as the infra-red of the electro-magnetic spectrum we can't see with our eyes. This is the world of alternative or rather additional forces and geometries with their own laws we need to be able to read and apply.

With the main Temple and spiritual efficiency themes stated, the book is more a collection of essays which circle those subjects applying some of the implications in often unexpected ways than a thesis continuously unfolding from first to last chapter. And since the object is primarily to stimulate imagination, spirituality and general inquiry, not to offer a forbidding academic treatise, I usually keep notes to the minimum, just enough to let it be clear I am not inventing some ideas. The book was written between May and September of this year and due to the extreme topicality of some of the themes included, like the canonization of Australia's first saint and the international controversy around homophobia in Uganda, I have not this time attempted to go the slow route through standard publication which might come later. The main thing is that the various messages of the book can get out and be absorbed. I do believe they are important and need to be known, some are secrets, some are inconvenient truths and that is always a potent combination. . . .

South Burnett, October, 2010

1. A CONFLICT OF SACRED AND SECULAR  SPACE

THE CEREMONY OF REASON

There are people who don't acknowledge the significance of any places of worship and some, including priests, who increasingly maintain there should be no difference between a church and a factory. [1] Undeniably America's mega-churches, now virtually devoid of religious symbols, are dissolving the difference between shopping malls and cathedrals. But opinion and trends in this direction can miss rather badly the deeper point as regards the mental "space" within which beliefs function and which at very least our shrines and workplaces reflect. Like the first apostles "daily worshipping in the Temple", ultimately all of us are always worshipping at the temple of one God or another who defines, limits or expands our perception.

There's not much question about which temple the modern West is presently worshipping in and defending with considerable fervour both at home and abroad in the global village. It's the house of the goddess of Reason and it's assumed there is scarcely any truth she offers that isn't purely objective and material, based upon and linked to whatever the current state of scientific knowledge happens to be. She is the reason some have decided factory space is as sacred as any other. We have more or less been in this place for the past two centuries if a bit more enthusiastically today in the wake of neo-atheist campaigning and Richard Dawkins, the evolutionist who has jokingly called himself "the devil's chaplain". The name is apposite to the extent he limits the knowledge spectrum in the name of knowledge.

We are also now living in the wake of a sexual revolution which, on its more commercial and pornographic side, also has connections with the Goddess of Reason, if more in her Black Madonna than Bright Maiden mode, when it over-rationalizes and appropriates the traditionally secret, sacred or irrationally romantic. For those who can accept with Jung astrology's irrational symbolism as applied to historical eras, what is occurring on the psycho-symbolic plane is that the Piscean era (whose automatic ideal is found in its opposite, Virgo, a sign of "earth") having begun with ideals embodied in the Virgo-born Jesus [2], ends with the Virgoan ideal of perfect rational control. It corresponds to a move from incarnation "into" the world towards a purely secular organization "of" the world. At the same time, those Virgoan impulses more inclined to self-separation from society and thus sometimes to celibacy, are exchanged for autonomy in relation, hence often promiscuity. Anciently, as the sign of service and slaves, Virgo was the sign of porneia, sex slavery, though insofar as the prostitute is "independent" of men through avoidance of fixed relation, Virgo is also the sign of the whore goddesses. Depending upon time and place, society's Lady of Reason can show the face of Mère Sotte or Folle in the Abbey of  Misrule.

Consequently and suitably, the new direction in modern "worship"  was at once symbolized and adumbrated by an event at a shrine of the Virgin, Notre Dame in Paris. It took place at a moment of extreme power — Jung compared it to Christian destruction of the shrine of Wotan [3] — on Nov 10th 1793 or rather 20th Brumaire of the new revolutionary calendar which had abolished the Gregorian one. In previous weeks, the French Revolutionary Convention had also abolished the worship of God, forbidden public reading of the Bible and closed churches in Paris and many in the provinces — Lyons, always a religious bellwether, was especially strong in revolutionary cults — dedicating them to Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité.

It was on November 10th that Mlle Malliard an actress or prostitute (depending upon the report) dressed in the red, white and blue of the deified Fatherland, was enthroned at the high altar of Notre Dame where she lit a candle representing the light of Reason. She herself represented the Goddess of Reason of the new Cult of Reason to which many surrounding churches were rapidly being converted assisted by the fact that the Bishop of Paris had adjured the Catholic faith in line with popular feeling. At the same time, this goddess was Liberté, the same who would later stand out as the torch-bearing Liberty of New York's harbour Statue, donated by France to the  New World republic it had helped to birth a century before.

At Reason's liturgy, attended by many who were half drunk, women bared their breasts, men disrobed and orgies took place both in the sacristy and outside the cathedral. A troop of girls processed up and down the cathedral's nave singing a hymn to Reason and saluting a temple to "philosophy" which was mounted on a central rock.  Busts of Montesequieu, Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau and Voltaire were on display. . . .

[1] Controversial priest and religious programmes presenter Peter Owen-Jones told The Guardian (Sept 3, 2005) "Why should a church as a building be any more sacred than a factory? I don't buy into any of that." Likewise the hippy vicar, Rev Bob Hollings of St John's, Newall, Derbys, "...the idea that the sacred happens in the church and the secular outside is total rubbish", International Express, (August 24th, 2010)

[2] Jung's writings on astrology and eras (in especially CW Vol 9. Part 2) does not denominate Jesus specifically a Virgo. Numbers of theologians and astrologers have nonetheless suspected a September birth for a range of technical reasons and I supply the strongest possible case in my Testament of the Magi: Mysteries of the Birth and Life of Christ, (2009)

[3] Carl Jung CW. Vol X. Civilisation in Transition, p.143, para 174

2. REDISCOVERING ISRAEL'S TEMPLE

CHRISTIANITY AS A TEMPLE RELIGION

As a theme for the reflections of theologians the Jerusalem Temple is a recent arrival that borders on an alien import. Although believers are supposed to be St Paul's wild olive graft onto the tree of Israel, thus Israelites by adoption (Rom 11:17) — not an idea exclusive to St Paul as Jesus himself regards salvation as being "from the Jews" (Joh 4: 22) — the concept is little stressed. Indeed, it is nowadays almost always a novelty if anything substantially Christian is perceived in a Jewish light unless underminingly to prove in the style of scholarship since Geza Vermes that Jesus was so Jewish he would never claim, or recognize, anything like the messianic or divine identity Christians have attributed to him.

The impulse to the new and rather revolutionary emphasis originated in a series of studies by Hebrew scholar and Methodist minister, Margaret Barker. These challenge the last two centuries of post-Enlightenment biblical scholarship, if not many Christian assumptions going back much further. Barker is the kind of scholarly visionary with whom it is not important to agree on many things — and almost everyone would disagree with her on something — to gain new and vital insights. Among a large array, I shall try and set forth a few salient points, enough to allow me to expand into other areas of religion that fall outside Barker's purview, though they are connected.

Modern writers on Christianity, whether scholarly or just conspiracy theory popularisers, have tended to make much of the supposed paganization and hellenization of Jesus which allowed him to become divine. From Jesus to Christ for example is a much cited work by Paula Fredriksen. Jesus is assumed to have evolved into Christ in exaggeration of a species of doctrine which simply kept growing as it got uttered and expounded.[1] The assumption was that Jesus would never have made the claims made by himself or his disciples. He was too Jewish and none of this was Jewish.

In fact, all this can be seriously questioned, even stood on its head. As Barker insists in Temple Theology, (2004), "It is beyond doubt that the faith of the temple became Christianity".[2] Christianity, it emerges, had a quite specific direction based on suppressed, ignored or forgotten traditions of Jewish belief like those contained in the Book of Enoch or the Melchizedek text of the Dead Sea Scrolls and which reveal a modified monotheism or "second God" beliefs. Against this background Christian claims become more comprehensible, and can be seen as largely prepared for. The agenda was in some sense, through spiritualization, to restore and fulfil traditions of the Temple, specifically the first rather than the second Temple. Within that programme claims by and about Jesus as "Son of Man", meaning the incarnated "Angel of the Lord" or "Son of God" or "the great High Priest" make perfect sense and have no need of outside influences to account for them. Indeed what's entailed looks back even to before the times of the Temple. When the mysterious Angel of the Lord appears to Manoah, father of Samson, who asks to know  his name, he is refused because "my name is too wonderful". It's too "wonderful" because the Angel of the Lord is the Lord, the visible aspect of deity and hinted at is the sacred, mysterious YHWH name, the same one that St Paul assumes when he declares (Ph 2:9), therefore God...gave him [Jesus] the name that is above every name". . . .

[1] Paula Fredricksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of New Testament Images of Jesus, New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

[2] Margaret Barker, Temple Theology: An Introduction, London: SPCK, 2004, p.11

FROM CHAPTER 6 on exorcism

......Since theoretically anyone could be attacked by the devil this would hardly be grounds for "exorcism" and it's possible Mother Teresa was losing the plot with age and sickness. Yet if Dickerman is anywhere near on target, and given certain peculiar facts related to Mother Teresa's life, the "saint of the gutters" could have had perfectly relevant suspicions about her total condition. All said and done, chronic depression and a total absence of God's presence for fifty years would qualify under the head of demonic oppression!

In any case, something like exorcism was at least implicit in early Christian baptism ceremonies with their rejections of the devil. Baptism is categorized as the lesser or general exorcism. And though in western churches infant baptism came to be strongly influenced by purely mechanical and superstitious Augustinian notions of "original sin" so that people couldn't cleanse newborns quickly enough to avoid their possible damnation, the practice also aimed at freeing the child from malign influences more generally.

This is clearer in the Eastern rites where the devil or demonic forces is actually spat at three times by the infant's sponsors.  This moment of the  Russian Orthodox ritual supplied a well-attested colourful edge to family record of the baptism of Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy. [1] Blavatsky's baptism was arranged with great speed, though still performed with high ceremony, as she was born amid a cholera epidemic. In the first row behind the priest was Princess Dolgorukova's three year old daughter, Nadyezhda. At the moment near the end of the rite where the sponsors renounce Satan and must spit at the invisible force, Nadyezhda's candle hit the base of the priest's robes. This went unnoticed until the priest and several persons present were severely burned. Blavatsky's own sister, always believed Helena was "possessed". Helena's mother died worried what would become of her daughter who throughout childhood behaved in the oddest ways sometimes apparently chased by demonic entities and communing with invisible spirits.

The baptism story and Blavatsky's subsequent biography raise important questions. If evil forces attended the ceremony why were they not bound? What sort of undiscerning and powerless priests were these? If Blavatsky possessed negative powers from earliest childhood on, what would this mean for freewill? Are evil forces inherited as Dickerman insists they can be,  and if so how and why? (Notice that as Strieber records, those people who report UFO type experiences in adulthood will like Strieber himself usually have memories suppressed or otherwise of contacts with entities at much earlier age and/or the experience runs in the family, so that the pattern begins early, often before the age of reason).[2] And what is it about ritual spitting, what sort of early Christian custom might this be looking back to? . . .

[1] See Marion Meade,  Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth, New York: G P Putnam's Sons, 1980, p.21

[2] Whitley Strieber, Breakthrough: The Next Step, New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1996, pp 104, 105, 130 etc

9. EXAMINING JUNG'S VERY RED BOOK

NOT QUITE A CHRISTMAS PRESENT

I had not assumed that Jung's Red Book or Liber Novus would be quite so large — it's folio sized — heavy or red. In fact it's lipstick red or perhaps just blood red in harmony with one of the spirits described in the book who persistently demands to suck the author's blood. The Liber arrived so padded and wrapped that it had to be delivered in its own separate postman's sack. As orders from America don't usually arrive so quickly in Australia I couldn't guess what it was that was being delivered and the event seemed as though it should be reserved for Christmas. Yet as might be imagined even from what I've already said, once opened the book's contents exuded something less than the atmosphere of Christmas. Even so, the facsimiles of Jung's visionary images and mandalas were impressive. Clearly this was the work of a genuine artist, one well on the way to rank with the likes of a William Blake for communicating the mysteries.

But then the whole book is a mystery as is its author and his beliefs the more one learns about him and them. And that's the whole point. The publisher, Norton, had been taken by surprise, overwhelmed at the sudden public demand for an expensive specialist work, but like many others I had obtained what Jung deemed a foundational text for his theories (foundational, yet long hidden and unpublished), in quest of truths I felt might be eluding me. In my own case as someone once considerably influenced by Jung, I had begun to suspect even the archetypes might not be quite what I had imagined, and that Jung's relation to religion and to Christianity were never quite what they seemed. In a very different way for different reasons might this person, like Mary Daly with whom he shared something both of the "elemental" philosophy and the legacy of Nietzsche, be a mis-praised and misinterpreted pioneer of modern thought?  Was Jung's at once new and perennial temple of belief so many now in habit quite what I believed in and where I wanted to be?

There are people who have seriously guided their lives by Jung. I even know a person in religion and the arts who, following the kind of Jungian "active imagination" exercises that have been adopted in some church circles, started taking walks mentally talking with a Jesus who soon became as real in his way as the tulpas that a type of advanced Tibetan meditation can produce. It cannot be said the experiment finished too healthy or successful. Other Christians have been persuaded by Jungian theory that they can be Christian and belong to all the other religions too. This is not strictly true or spiritually efficient (even the broad-minded Dalai Lama has warned about mix-and-match religion), but if you are determined to travel that path it might at least be more comfortably pursued via the likes of Unitarianism than the Jungian way. So I had questions. And Liber Novus was the literary/publishing event of late 2009.[1] Finally translated, edited and commented the book, kept for decades in a vault by fiat of the Jung family, was to see the light of day. The more intimate knowledge of Jung bound to emerge had been deemed risky for his reputation — he might emerge more like a madman than a genius. It was nonetheless hoped at least to justify a master of modern psychology and New Age against some of the aspersions cast upon him that he might not be quite so well-intending as usually portrayed. . . .

[1] Carl Jung,  The Red Book Liber Novus (ed. Sonu Shamdasani), New York: Norton, 2009

10. RELIGION AND THE RIDDLES OF GAY CHARACTER

CONTROVERSY AND UNREASON  GUARANTEED

Sometimes affairs of the Temple are best dealt outside it where their mystery and power complement rather than destabilize what goes on within. Rabbinic tradition has it that even the great, wise and much married Solomon failed to understand the mystery of the Red Heifer and its ceremony (Num 19). The puzzling and supremely important red heifer sacrifice takes place "outside the camp" and no temple can even be built without possession of her ashes. Nobody quite knows what the red heifer is about. She's plain queer, the exception to all the rules but in some respects their condition, a linchpin of the system she threatens to subvert. She makes for purification yet renders the priest unclean who sacrifices her. Plainly she represents a paradox, the mystery of the sacredness of the impure. As such, among other things, she stands as a warning that things will not always be clear, the best systems never completely cut and dried, never completely black and white, there are grey areas or perhaps we should say "red" ones. But needless to say, this heifer isn't precisely "red", she's more like tan! After all, if this heifer points to something like a Judaeo-Christian version of the union of opposites, she's still not any kind of red devil that the irreverent Jung would like to marry to the Trinity.

There is something here that speaks to the church in relation to the debate, which is more like a war, on homosexuality. A far better treatment of same sex issues than currently prevails is required for the spiritual efficiency and self-understanding of people of whatever sexual orientation. In recent years homosexuality has been dividing churches internationally, causing a maximum of turmoil and confusion though none of this is without all historical precedent. Japan might even have become Catholic and the first converts been spared one of the most horrific persecutions in Christian history if it had not been for situations sparked by out-of-control denunciations by St Francis Xavier and other Jesuits of Japanese courtiers and converts whom they denounced as the filth of Sodom, lower than pigs and dogs, outbursts and opinions which occasioned anger or shocked silence. A leading noble who gave the missionaries lands and encouragement to preach declined baptism over the matter of being homosexual.[1] In South America the conquistadores were so severe that  "sodomites" were thrown to wild dogs to be eaten. The treatment of gays and homosexuality in Latin America under the rule of religion and machismo was so unsatisfactory ab initio that confusion reigns to this day. Argentina's society has recently been split and priests more denounced by church authorities than elsewhere for child abuse for lending support to the divisive issue of legalized gay marriage which the country has finally passed.

The same kind of bitter, blanket condemnation heard in inquisitorial late medieval Europe and Sengoku era Japan, (peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nominandum - that detestable crime not to be mentioned among Christians) is heard again today across Christian Africa from clerics like (retired) Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria and church leaders in Uganda where gays are in danger of mob violence from outraged Christians. Those involved in this violence believe the ignorant falsehood that homosexuality is unknown to nature and to traditional African life alike. They also promote the serious libel that homosexuality is identical with and/or causes paedophilia and seem to believe like the fanatical North African church father Tertullian — who finished a heretic — that the person of same sex passions is a demoniac to be driven from the church door, a person  committing less sins than monstrosities). [1] Gay porn is now being played to Ugandan church congregations (not without some protest from Christians and Muslims) [2] to prove, in case they weren't aware, how disgusting gays really are, hence deserving of policies against them which at the time of writing church circles are attempting against international protest to get their government to ratify. Church leaders do this in the name of the "true" Christianity they feel the West has abandoned (and which western atheists rejoice it has abandoned given such perennially absurd expressions of intolerance from religious circles).

Treatment of almost anything to do with homosexual issues can take leave of the rational. It even marks, along with the Inquisition, one of Christianity's lowest points and like the Inquisition its least specifically repented failure. . . .

[1] Cited in David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, Chicago IL, Chicago University Press, 1988, p.218.

[2] "Uganda: Christians and Muslims protest Gay Porn shown in Churches", Afrik News: 19.2.2010. http://www.afrik-news.com/article16977.html

[3] Tsuneo Watanabe & Jun'ichi Iwata, (trans) D.R.Roberts, The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality,London: GMP, 1989, See, Jesuit Missionaries Against the Sin of Sodom, pp.19-31

12. READING SCIENCE AND THINKING EDEN

A LOSS OF AWE AND WONDER

Worship, or at least acknowledgment of a Creator God as the source of all the rest within a religion, is common to most faiths. The decline of this figure in the public consciousness of the West and in response largely to the (mainly evolutionary) science which limits or erases the traditional sense of awe or dependence, marks a major development. Believers variously try to challenge the science or accommodate to it, protesting that science and faith are compatible, but either way damage has been done. The image of the Creator has been confused or marred in the course of the debate with all notion of a Cosmic Father lost and religious devotion needs focus. The subject of Creator and creation ought to be one of the clearest points of focus and for many Jews it was so. The creation story could be repeated as a kind of mantra in its own right. As mentioned earlier, its outline is imitated in the structure and symbolism of the Tabernacle.

If a suitable approach to the Creator and creation is almost key for spiritual efficiency, what attitude is appropriate today towards the still much disputed Genesis source for our notion of origins? Will it be allegorical, mystical, theological, true-to-fact historical? Can we restore vision, or even improve upon its past limitations over and above the maelstrom of controversy? I believe we must so strive and we can, because a lot of the problem is less as some imagine about advanced science (about which like most people I am unqualified to speak) than philosophical and spiritual issues. These are of an order all of us should be able to manage if we can also resist the element of almost bullying in treatment of this area of belief by some scientists who reckon to take the high ground as though they alone had final access to truth—in—itself, the so-called  "scientist" attitude.

Though distinguished physicists and mathematicians periodically express their scepticism regarding a Creator, pre-emption of the religious argument with aggressive denial is strongest in the domain of the evolutionists. Necessarily so, because prior to specifically Darwinism, outright refusal of belief in a Creator or First Cause was rare. In harmony with "the fool has said in his heart there is no God" (Ps 14:1) atheism was considered sufficiently counter-intuitive to equate with eccentricity. This was the position of radical sceptics, even those like Voltaire dismissive of the biblical account of creation (he believed it was absurd for light to appear first, though we now know it would need to have done). God was simply what most people believed in, and amid many differences more or less agreed upon. Traditional scepticism was directed instead upon miracles and understanding of the divine personality, not divine existence as such.

Today, due to the greater variety of mundane distractions along with medical advances against illness and aging, the increasingly popularized atheism of scientists and rationalists, (neo-atheism) is a position easier to sustain. Run of the mill adherence is nonetheless often a convenience (including a reason to shoo Mormons from the door) and not necessarily a highly reasoned belief, nor even automatically exclusive of various spiritual assumptions. Writes Marianne Faithfull, "I'm sorry, I don't believe in a Creator...I follow the Darwinian principle. However, I do believe there's a divine spark in everybody where all art and beauty and truth come from and it's our job to uncover that." Marianne Faithfull also believes in spirits of the dead she prays to. She maybe believes in and has "sympathy for the devil" too. Richard Dawkins is in glamorous company. . . .

[1] Marianne Faithfull, Memories, Dreams, Reflections,  op. cit. p. 274

FROM CHAPTER 14, conclusion

In an imperfect world there are no perfect solutions to anything. Certainly there are no ideal institutions or alternative formulae to fetishize, but we can at least try to avoid situations in which the blind lead the blind and beliefs are placed on the wrong foundations which  too long Christians have permitted. Not that in rectifying the situation one can go back to absolute origins or romanticize them because it's not possible that what is seeded at the birth can be fully understood from the outset. It is because there is always development that there is always "tradition", but the tradition, if it is not to become merely another impediment, must be nourished and adjusted by prophetic insight. The Temple which is site of the priestly is also the site of what's prophetic. Reason (which for Christians resides ultimately not in formulae of natural law but in Christ as Logos, one of whose meanings is Reason) must be balanced by vision because "the Spirit of Christ is the Spirit of Prophecy". It is the selfsame apostle whom some claim as first Pope who declared "You are....a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people in order that you may proclaim the might acts...." (1 Pet. 2:9). But who believes it? The nationality, the priesthood, the birthright is not claimed if it hasn't been sold into the hands of religious horse dealers. Nor is any real proclamation of salvation being made amid the substitute talk about human rights et al.

Despite everything — from the handling of sex abuse scandals to questionable attitudes towards modern Israel — it must be said that Pope Benedict is a good writer of theology. His Jesus of Nazareth is an insightful study worth reading and as it happens it does engage the themes of Christ as both Reason and Prophet. My main criticism of the book concerns a statement near the beginning where the subject of prophecy is broached. It is stated prophecy is most essentially about revealing God, not the future, which is why Moses and Jesus are classified as prophets despite being associated with other more vital roles. Revealing the future is then classed with soothsaying such as Saul was seduced by and linked to the false prophets Jeremiah castigated. The implication seems to be that the future is not a matter for prophecy or revelatory of God. But surely it is so, otherwise forecasts of the Messiah become meaningless; and since none of those forecasts were fulfilled in the lifetime of those who uttered them, in order for them to be preserved for our knowledge, it was presumably a record of accurate but less weighty forecasts made during the prophets' lifetime, that gave their contemporaries grounds to preserve the rest. It is anyway divine foreknowledge of the course of history which is a proof of divine existence and plan. So I agreed and disagreed and the prophetic theme supplies me pretext to finish...and on an almost light note.

My Cosmic Father had considered the meaning and effect of a number of intense spiritual experiences in '06 during which I was given to understand I had received a measure of prophetic gift. Had I? It's true that, as I described, I'd known and pronounced something in relation to a couple of nations and I believed I knew what God thought of a certain international leader, but outright prophecy? It didn't seem I quite had it, or that much was coming through if I did. I hadn't then had a single prophetic vision (the alarming prophetic dream cited in Chapter Six, if it should be counted, is more recent). So at one point while walking through the woods last year, I put to God that I hoped I hadn't got it all wrong and wasn't deceiving myself and others. Suddenly, as though someone had casually turned attention at a dinner party, I heard  "By the way, Stan Walker will win the competition". I stopped dead in my tracks confused and uncertain how to respond. If the voice seemed right, could I possibly accept the message? Would God even provide such information? Beside which....The unnamed competition was Australian Idol and, Stan Walker an Australian Maori singer. As someone who, ever since years ago I obtained someone a successful screen test, likes to believe they're good at talent spotting, I quite believed Nathan Brake would win. Hadn't the judges been telling him he might well, hadn't he recently put on a stunning performance on the big band night that brought standing ovation? Except that I'm too indelibly European to have a real sense of Australian tastes and trends, it seemed the matter was sealed and settled.

The reader will be relieved to know I don't regard myself as the next Isaiah. It would hardly be possible — as my reactions proved! Faith was never my strong suit and I would be hard put declaring to nations. For the rest of the competition I felt mildly panicked every time I even thought of the matter, which I was no more disposed to do than to tell anyone of the experience. Supposing I'd misheard, what if I'd got it all wrong? True, when Stan won there were those to say it was obvious all along he had to do so. Undeniably he was talented and popular, yet on his own and everyone's admission he had a bad night even near the finishing line that made me giddy with the thought he could still lose. "Praise God" exclaimed Stan when he won. "Thank God" I breathed in relief I hadn't misheard. But questions remain which I now find easier to answer.

Why might I be given such information? Arguably, the message covered my problem in a few words. Yes, I had the designated gift, and yes I could know anything since anything future is known to God. But there's no need for me to know, and I'm hardly the ideal person to entrust with the more dramatic forecasts as my reaction in the test of a small matter proved. Indeed, allowing me to have my reactions was possibly the indirect way of telling me what I'm like!. If and when I'm seriously meant to know and declare something for general benefit, I shall. I have an inkling what this will be. But, rather as Pope Benedict maintains, the real function of "prophecy" lies elsewhere. It's knowing and revealing something about God.

I trust this book has managed to convey something of the kind. Even so, I feel reasonably confident to finish with a forecast....Before long a new temple will rise in Jerusalem. Its construction and everything about it will prove a challenge to many beliefs and be a turning point in the history of religion itself. What the Temple past and future signifies, is something about which you need to be informed and about which you ought to think seriously. . . .