A Glorious Refuge
Growing toward the garden of God
In the beginning . . .
Humanity’s story began in a garden. So do my stories — I spend my time tending and toiling, thinking and trying to understand the world around me.
In the messy middle, there was a garden: an olive grove, where the Savior of the World was crushed by the weight of every sin, but “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross . . .”
I cannot claim to have borne such a terrible load, but certainly I am navigating the messy middle of my journey through this life, striving to undertake my life’s mission: to articulate the possibility of a better world through every possible means. Through my daily work and my words, I strive toward a vision I have only seen, perhaps, peripherally — caught in snatched moments of joy and longing.
Toward this end: the true garden of God. Not a return to Eden, that childish innocence that once beguiled. On the other hand, God’s course, it’s said, is one eternal round. So, perhaps Eden, but also Zion, the New Jerusalem.
Only dimly glimpsed through scriptural accounts and prophetic words, its location contested by differing sects of Abrahamic origin, Zion may be a place, but also a people. A place called Peace, a people united in purpose. Enochian lore claims that “[T]he Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them.” What might that look like, as God’s children seek to build it out of the shattered remnants of the past?
As I bushwhack my way through the waste places of my own mind and the cultural wasteland of the West in order to build up a (hopefully good and true) vision of what that place and people of Zion will look like, I hope to bring some ideas of value to those who read my work.