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July 28, 2004
Hello everyone,
What is reality? Have you ever asked yourself this surprisingly difficult question? Do you consider such questions to be without true meaning, the stuff persons with too much time on their hands ponder? Is it true that reality is largely what we make it? Can such a statement fit accurately together with declarations that truth is absolute and objective? If we say that reality is largely what we make it, are we falling into the trap of relativity? Are we stating that the only truth is that there is no known truth? What is more, why do we even bother with such questions? Either all truth is objective or else reality is entirely subjective and it doesn’t matter, right? That is what we often hear, in any case, but is it true? So then, let us attempt to throw aside what we have learned for a moment, or rather, let us take what we have learned from life (and not from rote) and use it to aid our understanding of a world in which the only objective reality finds it origin in God, for He alone is unchanging in a universe of ceaseless activity.
Many of the difficult questions we face in life become emotionalized to us. Often we learn to chant a particular mantra and are willing to go to battle with any man who says otherwise. But sometimes the mantras that we chant are just as fuzzy as the ones we wage our war against: both can be caricatures of reality. Perhaps the best prevention we can take to ensure that we do not stagnate or unfairly crush others beneath our feet is to reflect carefully on exactly what we mean when we make certain statements. Good, solid definitions can go a very long way in the process, though there is a logical limit to how far words alone can carry us. Still, we must begin somewhere and there is much ground to cover today.
Let us begin by stating that “Reality is largely what we make it.” Would you agree with this statement? If so, why? If not, why not? Chances are very good that those who agree with this statement and those who disagree with this statement (along with the ones who remain somewhere in the middle) do not disagree in reality, merely in definition. The difficulties arise by what we mean when we make such a statement. Do we mean that if we happen to dislike the greenness of the grass we can simply make it blue? I suppose if we took a spray can outside we could accomplish the effect to limited degree, but globally? No, no. Surely we don’t mean such a thing if we state that “Reality is largely what we make it.” Surely to assert that this is what we mean is a distortion, unfairly assuming that we have entirely taken leave of our senses. If we say “Reality is largely what we make it?” whatever do we mean?
Is it possible that we have divided reality into different parts or assigned different meanings to various aspects of reality? What if, for example, we have simply divided reality into “in here” and “out there.” Now that in itself can make quite a bit of difference. For “out there” the day can be sunny and warm, but “in here” it can be bleak and dreary. One woman returning from her honeymoon remains so elated that the gray skies and windswept lanes seem to celebrate her triumph; another woman tenderly lays the cold, lifeless body of her child into the earth, her tears mingling with the very same rain and wind. For her, there is no celebration of triumph. Yet has reality changed? Can we objectively speak of subjective reality without subjectively speaking of objective reality in our attempts to gain understanding? What if the bulk of our cultural wars were little more than the reversal of conversations, so that when our “foes” said left we thought right, and when they said right we thought left, failing to notice that our right is the other’s left? Perhaps if we learned to speak and think in terms of stage right and stage left?
Two men upon whom the sun has been caused to shine: why does one end a hellish life on earth in eternal torment while another finds the kingdom of heaven at hand long before he ever meets his Maker? One man is a member of the walking dead, half alive at best. The other man, though he die, is fully alive. Is reality what we make it? Can we once again make such a statement if we consider the difference between the world “out there” and the world “in here”? For surely God is God over all, surely the skies are still blue and the grass still green, surely both men have a pulse and a beating heart. How then, can we say that one man is among the living dead, the other among the dead living? Scriptures tell us that no man dies but his soul passeth onward; surely heaven and hell and their equivalents on earth have to do with the quality of life, not merely the fact of existence. Perhaps we have been defining death from the perspective of one who sees only the here and now, not as one who sees that all life continues ever on: some lives to great gain, others to eternal ruin.
Let us speak for a moment of the blue, sunlit skies. Is the sunny sky I see here the same that you are seeing there? Can not these same skies vary even so much as across the same town? Have you ever seen the rain on one side of a seemingly arbitrary line and cloudless skies on the other? (You surely have if you have ever flown for any distance on a commercial airline.) Is not even the sun itself variable in its own way while remaining objective? That is, if the sun were in the same relative position to the sky where you live as it is in mine, would not the condition of the sky then be the same? But because the sun is only in one place at one time and because the earth is only in another place at the same time, the condition of the skies vary from place to place. On one side of the earth, the flowers are in bloom, on the other the howling winter winds assail. It is the same moment in time, yet two different geographic locations. So perhaps you can see why it seems to me that reality is not so much a matter of black and white as full living color.
If we take a child and set her down in a field of butterflies, does she see them as we—tired, often grumpy “grown-ups”—do? If wonder and awe dance in her eyes, do they do the same in ours? Perhaps we have affixed so many labels upon our world we have blotted out the sight? Perhaps the very labels we affix like so many yellow post-it notes to help us think, remember, and clarify concepts begin to block our vision. Maybe the one we’re tempted to scorn is, in fact, far more alive than we. He may see no need to force dead theology onto living reality. Perhaps his theology is but a child’s attempt to describe for us what he lives day by day. His life itself may declare from the rooftops, “This is what it means to truly live.” What does it mean to truly live? What would the world look like through eyes that danced with joy and wonder? Would it seem to us objective? subjective? Would such terms lose their meanings? Would reality be what we make it? Or would it, perhaps for the first time, be really real: more real than all the labels and classifications with which we affix our world, conquer and divide it often at the expense of our own souls?
Have you ever stopped and considered poetry and it purpose? Poetry has to be one of the most paradoxical forms of art upon the planet. The content of poetry is almost always concrete, made of the clean, crisp lines that comprise the world of things. Yet it seeks to describe the abstract, often evanescent (though no less eternal) aspects of reality. When one is climbing a stairway, one rarely considers the stair for its own sake. Rather the stair is meant to take a person to a different place. Just so, the words of a poem are like the staircase: concrete, solid, tangible. Yet the purpose of the staircase is to provide a path a person may travel to take him someplace else altogether. This may even work when the person is focused on the stair for its own sake; in fact, it may work even better when we stop to examine the quality of the craftsmanship, seeing the soft sheen of the varnish or feeling the luster of the woodwork subtly shimmering beneath our fingers. And of course we may as well confess (and have it over and done with) that not all stairs are created equal: some are undoubtedly far more austere and utilitarian than others.
The poet—I am now specifically referring to the vocation—is caught between worlds. He has the world of things with which to describe the indescribable, to explain the unexplainable. The things he most wishes to share are states of consciousness, new levels of awareness, the exhilaration of experience shared. Self-expression burns in his bones and he cannot rest until it is unleashed (like his kissing cousin the prophet); he does not wish to merely write about how he feels, but he rather wants to take you there, by the hand, an intimate encounter between poet and patron. He longs to press his lips against yours, he wants to take your hand and guide it to his heart. But it is never enough and it never will be, for he presses on to the unobtainable goal: the goal he will never achieve. For there is no end to self-expression, there is no end to creating. And that is his gift; that is what he has to teach us, peculiarly fashioned as he is by his Maker. His life is not about the goal achieved but about the process involved in getting there. And if you stop and consider, that is what life is all about, is it not? When the final stopping point of death descends upon someone we love, we feel robbed, cheated somehow. There must be more to life than this, we cry: surely we are not merely born to die. And of course there is more to life, for the living of life is not about any point of termination, but about the eternal quest. If, old before our time, we clutch after eternity, it will surely never perch in the palm of our hand; but in the eternal now, the fountain of perennial youth will bubble up within us at the sheer wonder of living life. We were never created for the temporal; we were created to laugh death in the face, outliving it in the lifetime of an eternity.
I was recently pouring my heart out to a friend, and as all my friends can attest, this reflection is but par for the course in the green of my thoughts as of late:
Lately, the poetry on the printed page has been coming to life more and more, sometimes roaring in my face, sometimes arching its back as it drowsily brushes up against my leg, other times seductively tracing the outer outline of my ear with soft fingers and delicate touch. In fact, I thought to myself how some men with darkened understanding vainly search the word of God, uncomprehending; yet, for the man whose soul has awoken, God is likely to strike up a conversation “any old where”: perhaps nudging him gently and pointing to the marquee above the theatre, perhaps in the living theology witnessed in lovers locked in embrace in the park, perhaps in the breeze that whispers through the branches. The earth is His and all that is therein: the whole earth is filled with His glory and the trees clap their hands for joy. I am as a man reborn, experiencing for the first time the sheer wonder of life: I see visions of worlds I never before dreamed existed, my soul lighter than air as it hovers now above the treetops, now inches from the ground, praising its Maker with a tongue known only to it and to Him. It seemed to me today that perhaps I have the calling of a poet on my life: I see the world through different eyes—a consciousness transformed—a man who has awoken for the first time in his life to a wonder that I both yearn to share and am content to savor for its own sake in the intimacy of the dance between my soul and its Lover.
Of course, many will be the days of darkness in this life and we do well to say so from the onset; the poet knows altogether too well that this world is not his home. And that is why the evanescent is nonetheless eternal, for, as Lewis might write, he is experiencing the pangs of his home country. Sometimes his soul floats above the trees, enraptured in the beatific vision of the world beyond. Yet even when he charts the seas of sorrow, he has his head in the clouds for he is drawn there, almost instinctively, by his Maker, the Preserver of his sustenance. Consider, for example, the poetry of the Psalmist, man after God’s own heart, pouring his heart out to his Maker, holding nothing back for the fear of men or religious authority. We can enjoy his words in English, but if we could but understand Hebrew as it was meant to be spoken (perhaps you do; I do not), it would take our breath away, for few other languages are as comprised of pictures as this one. It’s near distant relatives are the pictogram and the hieroglyph; consider this excerpt from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. IV brought to my attention some time ago by a friend:
. . . Of the Hebrew words for pride, one presents the notion of mounting up, one of strutting, and one of seething, as a boiling pot. What fundamental idea of similar concreteness does the English word “pride” suggest?
There were not many abstract ideas to be conveyed in Biblical Hebrew; the absence of the words is a sign of the absence of the ideas. Such a sentence as “The problem of external perception is a problem in metaphysics,” or “The modifications produced within our nervous system are the only states of which we can have a direct consciousness,” would be untranslatable into ancient Hebrew. It is hardly too much to say that every generalisation—or, better, every general truth—expressed by the Hebrew is rendered with the utmost directness, and in phraseology as pictorial, as elemental, as transparent, as stimulative to imagination and feeling, as could possibly be. Such a language is the very language of poetry. The medium through which poetry works is the world of sensible objects—wine and oil, the cedar of Lebanon, the young lion, the moon, the cloud, the smoking hills, the wild goat, the coney and the stork; or, if we turn to Homer rather than the Psalmist, a plane-tree, the bright water of a spring, a snake blood-red on the back, the cheeping brood of a sparrow, or beaked ships and well-greaved Achaians. What is necessary in order to make poetry out of such materials is intensity of feeling, with elevation and coherence of thought. These, we have seen, were the endowment of the Hebrews. On the one hand, they were close to nature; they had not parcelled out their human constitution into separate and independent faculties; they had not interposed a cloud and hubbub of words between themselves and things; they had not so dissipated their powers in minute and laborious analysis that they were incapable of naïve views, powerful sensations and vigorous convictions. On the other hand, they had, as tending to coherence and elevation of thought, what to them was a sufficient explanation of all the wonders of the universe, and a sufficient impulse to lift up their hearts: these they found in their overmastering belief in God the Creator, God the Maintainer, and, for those who trust and love Him, God the Deliverer. (§ 3. The Nature of the Hebrew language, poetry and prose)
There is a bit more to be said for the sheer sophistication of Biblical poetry, in this case the Greek, but we must first revisit the last issue of Le Penseur Réfléchit. If you recall from Chiasmi of the Kristos: WORD Above all Words, the parody “the wonderful thing about words is words are wonderful things” was a type of chiasmus, a structure that can be conceived grammatically as unfurling into an X, something like this:
Dr. Mardy Grothe’s excellent article What is Chiamus? shows how we can more simply diagram the above structure as ABBA: that is, we assign an A to the first occurrence of the key word and a B to the first occurrence of the second key word, then we notice the order of the key words reverses, which we note by a little mark called a “prime.” In fact, this process can extend further out, as Dr. Grothe indicates with Genesis 9:6:
A Whoever sheds
B the blood
C of man
C' by man shall
B' his blood
A' be shed
Yet what is even more amazing than this elongated pattern is what Grothe says next: “Technically, it doesn’t make any difference how many words are reversed. Some scholars believe that a chiastic structure can be found in much larger passages, including entire sections of the New Testament and other ancient sacred writings.” Who is to say that prophet and poet did not unite in the prose of the Apostle Paul? For most of us, our problem is again that we do not read Greek, for then we should surely see some of these literary flourishes. And who ever said that God wasn’t into beauty? Who exactly was it that fashioned the foundations of the earth and every good thing in it? Who laid its corner stone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Who set the bars on the doors of the sea and said “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be styed?” Is there any good thing that does not come from the hand of God?
When I wrote to my friend that “the poetry on the printed page has been coming to life more and more,” I had just finished reading a selection of poems from Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), though alas, I do not know the native German to feel their full import. Still, the images caught my attention. Playing off flamear, the Spanish root that means “to flame,” he writes of the flamenco in his “Spanish Dancer.” As we catch this fiery dancer in the middle of her act, we get an amazingly vivid portrait of her castanet clicking fingers midway through. (This excerpt and all subsequent “recitations” of Rilke’s poetry in this newsletter have been translated by Stephen Mitchell.):
One upward glance and she ignites her hair
and, whirling faster and faster, fans her dress
into passionate flames, till it becomes a furnace
from which, like startled rattlesnakes, the long
naked arms uncoil, aroused and clicking.
When was the last time you looked at the arms of a Spanish dancer, castanets on her fingers, as “startled rattlesnakes” that “uncoil, aroused and clicking”? For me, that formed a quaint and compelling picture. And then, in “The First Elegy” of the Duino Elegies, he writes of “the loyalty of a habit so much at ease / when it stayed with us . . . it moved in and never left.” So it is not surprising that these images left me elated. However, what moved me most is well within the keeping of the editor’s gloss, when he writes of Rilke’s inspirations; in Rodin, for example, Rilke recognized and admired “an intense concentration on visible, tangible objects, and above all, a belief in art as an essentially religious activity.” I do believe that all true art (there is “art” that is not true) is “an essentially religious activity,” for all artists—whether they choose to acknowledge it or not—are image bearers. Created in the image of our Maker, we too are creators, and there is something in the act of creation that unleashes the spiritual within. Before we continue with Rilke, however, we must sound a note a caution. It is entirely possible to be immensely spiritual and yet be spiritually impoverished.
Several days ago as I was lying in bed between that realm of sleep and wakefulness, a strange and fascinating scenario played out before my mind. Two women presented themselves before my consciousness: a young woman, interested in flirting with spirituality in the form of the New Age and various practices like meditation, yoga, and dream interpretation was juxtaposed with an older woman somewhat disillusioned to lose the luster and charisma of her youth. This older woman was more deeply involved in these spiritual practices, feeling a great devotion and reverence for the Native American beliefs. Yet, for all their interest and desire for spiritual things, neither woman—or the one woman, if they were both the same—had ever learned the truth. There was beauty in what they sought: there was noble intent. But there was no substance. There was spirituality without the spark, for they were both as spiritually blind to the only true food of the universe as they ever were. They were still dead though they had even persuaded themselves that they had life. Theirs was not the sin of commission but of ignorance. And in my mind I wrote to them and I spoke in glowing terms of the true beauty these spiritual ideas hold and how at their essence they all seek to uncover the deeper truth. But yet, in a very gentle and loving way, in accordance with the rare gift God has given me with my words and my sensitivity, I was able to write to them (in my mind) like a poet and pluck the strings of their heart, revealing the truth to them in a way that made them hunger for it; caused them to become aware that all the beauty in the world points to a common source. As I lay there I wondered if I should write of it; if I should capture the rare combination of sensitivity and insight onto the printed page. Alas for you, I did not, and some of the immediacy has been sacrificed as a result.
But you see, it is not that there are no such things as auras, it is not that meditation and yoga contain no truth, it is not that ch’i and other concepts are false, that the Native Americans have nothing to teach us by the deference they pay their dead and all things living, their animistic conception of the cosmos their guide. Rather it is that these things are incidental truth. They reflect the created order and the mystery of the universe, but they are not ends to themselves. They deserve neither to be deified nor demonized. In and of themselves, they do not form any solidity upon which to build. And if they are diabolical, it is because they masquerade as the essential rather than the incidental; they become tragic when they glorify the creation without giving due credit to the Creator. Their tragedy, when they are tragic, is the same as the psychologist who has studied love his entire life but never been wrapped in its tender embrace. He knows many things, but he has never experienced the truth: his life remains as hollow as it ever was. So I submit to you that it is entirely possible to be immensely spiritual while being spiritually impoverished; it is possible to write with rare beauty and grace and fail to find those virtues within your own breast. But have we not seen as much in the writings of the Apostle? Does he not instruct the burgeoning Titus that “Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled”? That is why we can also understand on a much deeper level Madeleine L’Engle’s words when she writes in Walking on Water:
. . . Of course, because I am a struggling Christian, it’s inevitable that I superimpose my awareness of all that happened in the life of Jesus upon what I’m reading, upon Buber, upon Plato, upon the Book of Daniel. But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. To be truly Christian means to see Christ everywhere, to know Him as all in all.
I don’t mean to water down my Christianity into a vague kind of universalism, with Buddha and Mohammed all being more or less equal to Jesus—not at all! But neither do I want to tell God (or my friends) where He can and cannot be seen! We human beings far too often tend to codify God, to feel that we know where He is and where He is not, and this arrogance leads to such things as the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch burnings, and the result of further fragmenting an already broken Christendom. (32)
Do you see how the pieces fit? Because Christ is the assumed center, He can be seen in all things. But we must also admit—and pray that we keep that delicate balance of truth and sensitivity—that while we may see Christ in all things, not everyone does, including some of the people who produce the very things in which we see Christ so beautifully portrayed. Can we dictate where God will and will not be seen? Of course not. Whatever the case, when the Spirit clearly reveals the spiritual poverty of those around us and our heart aches for them, to keep silent would be like walking with a full sack of groceries past a man starving to death, ribs piteously protruding through threadbare fabric.
Sometimes Christians get portrayed as being unloving—and sometimes (it must be confessed) with good reason. But surely the believer with a heart after God’s own has also often been misunderstood. Nowhere do we see a portrait of such treachery played out more clearly than in Shakespeare’s Othello, the diabolical dealings of the villain Iago pitilessly pitting character against character and ultimately turning Othello the Moor into a raving lunatic, convinced that the beautiful and chaste Desdemona, who loves him dearly, has been unfaithful—when the audience knows that absolutely nothing could be further from the truth. The height of dramatic irony, we long to leap upon the stage, grab Othello by the collar and shake him hard screaming, “Wake up! Would you kill the wife who loves you dearly, you blind oaf, you jealous fool?” We do not wish to do such a thing because we are mean but because we have seen the noble man made drunk on Iago’s poison, his eyes and ears closed to reason, utterly blind to the truth that would set him free. All we can do is watch helplessly: we feel the urge to cover our eyes with our fingers, sickened to watch, sickened not to watch; we long to set things right even as the blade claims the lives of first the innocent and then the deluded, the latter only lately—too lately—privy to the truth. We are right to mourn and call the play a tragedy, for indeed it is tragic: it is an all too vivid portrait of the machinations of evil men (and ultimately of their master) and how men with eyes can nonetheless walk around unseeing, blinded even to the clear light of day.
Like the helpless audience burning to wrest Othello from his stupor, the Christian is no enemy, but rather a friend to those who are perishing for want of knowledge. It is love, not hate, that motivates the Christian, for he knows all too well that the truth will set men free: it was not so long ago that he too clamored helplessly in the mire. Should we wonder at his wild eyes when he grabs us by the collar and screams “Wake up!” shaking us roughly? Should we censure him for shattering our beautiful dream? But what if the beauty we sleep is false? What if true beauty comes not through the deceitful gate of ivory (lovely though it seems), but through the gate of polished horn?
Very well. We have left Rilke and the poetic raptures hanging long enough, so shan’t we thread our way back to see what the poet has to say? We have noted that the poet tries to utter the unutterable, tries to capture the uncapturable, tries to translate the untranslatable. And I was sitting in the park (though you didn’t know it, of course) when I was reading Rilke’s words; it was upon returning home that I wrote of the poetry on the printed page coming to life more and more. And so, we shall examine excerpts of “The First Elegy” in the Duino Elegies, then attend to “The Ninth Elegy” to follow, to see if we can discover why my soles never reached the earth. Rilke writes (lines 26–35):
Yes—the springtime needed you. Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
But could you accomplish it? Weren’t you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)
Now certainly, it seems to me, these words either roar in your face or they don’t: they certainly thundered loudly enough in mine. But let us let Rilke explain himself before we bother intruding again: we turn now to lines 71–83, and then to a selection from “The Ninth Elegy”:
Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one’s own first name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one’s desires. Strange
to see meanings that clung together once, floating away
in every direction. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel
a trace of eternity.—Though the living are wrong to believe
in the too-sharp distinctions they have created.
And again in “The Ninth Elegy” (lines 11–17, 63–71):
Because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.* * * * *
. . . —And these Things,which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,within—oh endlessly—within us! Whoever we may be at last.Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn’t it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday?—Oh Earth: invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?
It seems almost sacrilegious somehow to attempt a paraphrase of his words, though we shall try. Rilke speaks for all poets as he tries to express the inexpressible, for he views the world through different eyes and longs to press his lips to ours, longs to guide our hand to his heart so we may feel it thumping, thumping. Life is fleeting and short. We do not often live in the moment to enjoy the moment, yet in life is found beauty and even the most mundane things are precious to the person who has recently been given a second lease on life. In Rilke’s imagery, these things long to be Innerlichkeit: that is, they long to be drawn inward and appreciated for all that they are worth. They are transient and we are even more so. Yet drawn inward, they are reborn, immortalized. As the Christian sees Christ in all things, we know we have been created in the image of God, we have the power within us to make the voice of creation heard, as together—it and us and it in us—we give praise and glory to the Maker of all things beautiful. Indeed, the mountains and the hills will break forth into singing and the trees of the field will clap their hands for joy. Even the rocks long to loosen their tongues; all created things reflect their Maker; He makes all things beautiful in their time. Nature is beautiful. Life is beautiful. God is beautiful. And Rilke hopes that our consciousness will be transformed. He is interested in awakening within us what has been awoken within him. He is not content to tell us about it; no, he wishes to transport us there.
Which brings us back to our original question, “Is reality what we make it?” And the answer can only be, “It depends on what we mean.” But I suspect, if I may wager a bet, that reality is often far more than we make it. Or perhaps we make too much of it. In either case, I am saying the same thing. It all depends on what we mean: ah yes, it all depends. “I see visions of worlds I never before dreamed existed, my soul lighter than air as it hovers now above the treetops, now inches from the ground, praising its Maker with a tongue known only to it and to Him.” No, I may not always fully understand, but one thing I know for certain: reality (goodness, beauty, truth) all flows from a single source: His name is Christ.
God bless,
Eric
“And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit. And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the LORD come. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered: for in mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom the LORD shall call.”
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