I once heard a fellow African Methodist Episcopal (AME) preacher agonize in a sermon over the gory details of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, here in Kansas City, Missouri.
In like manner, today, I read that "Prophet" Nat Turner's skin has been flayed from his lifeless body and made into souvenir belts for trousers.
Physical life departs once and with it all sensibility and sensation.
Postmortem memorials or pleurae in word, craft, or artifact, neither ennoble their living bearers, nor ignoble the long-since dead, who are far beyond vain attempts to ridicule or to mock them.
Rather, such ghoulish revelry with gory details, or tokens, are merely to frighten or to intimidate many living observers into cowardice of some form!
Frankly, it's appalling!
Such fear-baiting is a form of witchery, of devil worship, of idolatry, of satanic skull & bones, whether it is written or recited or crafted, to disengage your uncertain mind, to hobble your already-weak body, to cripple your empathetic spirit.
But, push through! Push through. There is a limit and relief and rest, for you, too, just as surely as there was for Jesus! Just as surely as there was for Prophet Nat Turner in 1831 in Jerusalem, Virginia.
All pain has a limit: death.
But all human, physical deaths--no matter how gory, no matter how long ago, no matter how painful--are not necessarily be the end of any human "life" on earth.
For human "life" is both spiritual and physical. Therefore to leave the physical realm is to enter more fully into the spiritual realm of our "life."
All human lives reside both in the physical, earthly dimension, and, most permanently, in the realm of the eternal spiritual dimension.
This is the realm that we now vaguely know as:
the metaphysical,
the philosophical,
the theological,
the mathematical,
the astronomical
the divine.
The spiritual realm is also immured in realms that are: legendary, mythological, historical, allegorical, archaeological, musical, geometrical, natural, scriptural, testimonial!
Jesus LIVES!
Nat Turner LIVES!
I know that Nat Turner "lives," because just today, I began reading about him in a book that I bought, but had not read until now: THE RESURRECTION OF NAT TURNER, PART TWO, THE TESTIMONY by Sharon Ewell Foster (2012). In the spirit is Nat!
I know that Jesus "lives," because he lives in side of me, and of those who produced me.
Thursday, September 15, 2016
JESUS LIVES AND NAT TURNER LIVES
I once heard a fellow African Methodist Episcopal (AME) preacher agonize in a sermon over the gory details of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, here in Kansas City, Missouri.
In like manner, today, I read that "Prophet" Nat Turner's skin has been flayed from his lifeless body and made into souvenir belts for trousers.
Physical life departs once and with it all sensibility and sensation.
Postmortem memorials or pleurae in word, craft, or artifact, neither ennoble their living bearers, nor ignoble the long-since dead, who are far beyond vain attempts to ridicule or to mock them.
Rather, such ghoulish revelry with gory details, or tokens, are merely to frighten or to intimidate many living observers into cowardice of some form!
Frankly, it's appalling!
Such fear-baiting is a form of witchery, of devil worship, of idolatry, of satanic skull & bones, whether it is written or recited or crafted, to disengage your uncertain mind, to hobble your already-weak body, to cripple your empathetic spirit.
But, push through! Push through. There is a limit and relief and rest, for you, too, just as surely as there was for Jesus! Just as surely as there was for Prophet Nat Turner in 1831 in Jerusalem, Virginia.
All pain has a limit: death.
But all human, physical deaths--no matter how gory, no matter how long ago, no matter how painful--are not necessarily be the end of any human "life" on earth.
For human "life" is both spiritual and physical. Therefore to leave the physical realm is to enter more fully into the spiritual realm of our "life."
All human lives reside both in the physical, earthly dimension, and, most permanently, in the realm of the eternal spiritual dimension.
This is the realm that we now vaguely know as:
the metaphysical,
the philosophical,
the theological,
the mathematical,
the astronomical
the divine.
The spiritual realm is also immured in realms that are: legendary, mythological, historical, allegorical, archaeological, musical, geometrical, natural, scriptural, testimonial!
Jesus LIVES!
Nat Turner LIVES!
I know that Nat Turner "lives," because just today, I began reading about him in a book that I bought, but had not read until now: THE RESURRECTION OF NAT TURNER, PART TWO, THE TESTIMONY by Sharon Ewell Foster (2012). In the spirit is Nat!
I know that Jesus "lives," because he lives in side of me, and of those who produced me.