As the long week-end here in Toronto comes to a close, I reflect on the few days that I’ve spent. It’s been a week-end of soul searching; not what I had planned at all. But, I expect no less when I turn my life back over to the Grace of God; for you see, without Him I am not. Just now I received my daily e-mail from Aish (I’ve mentioned them time and again, and shall continue to do so). One might think I am “Jewish” but, no I wasn’t born into nor have I converted to that “religion.” I am nothing more, nothing less, than a child of God, who seeks to know her roots.
This e-mail contained a link that allowed me to download a pdf document entitled Three Crowns. It is 11 pages in length and I only got to the beginning of the first page when my eyes glanced upon and stopped at the following:
WHAT’S IN A CROWN? (from Aish.com article Three Crowns by Rabbi Belovski)
The word used by the Torah for the decorative crowns on the sacred objects in the Mishkan is zer. This word is closely related to the word nazir, designating a nazirite, someone who dedicates his life to holy purposes by abstaining from wine and certain other things for a designated period. The Torah teaches us that he must avoid contact with corpses for:
…the nezer [crown] of God is upon his head. (Bamidbar 6:7)
The crown of God is upon his head – know that all humans serve earthly desires, but the true king, who has the crown and diadem of malchus on his head, is one who is free from earthly
desires. (Ibn Ezra loc. cit.) So it seems that the zer symbolizes raising oneself above the usual desires of humanity and entering a holier and more spiritual realm. Just as a crown sits on the king’s head, above his whole person, so too, the spiritual crown sets a person above the norms of the physical world.
Beginning with the first sentence of the second paragraph, “The crown of God is upon his head – know that all humans serve earthly desire….” I stop right there, because it does speak to me and it does speak to the journey that I am on at this time. I am on a journey where I seek to seek that which cannot be seen nor heard by the human senses; I seek to know who I am and in order to do that I must go beyond the physical, the world. Earthly desires that formulate into lusts are the causes of all evil that reigns upon planet earth. We desire and when we get it, we desire more. There is no end to it. The flesh cannot be satisfied, is never satiated.
I seek to wear the Crown that frees me from earthly desires and longings, that I might enter a, “holier and more spiritual realm” I am not talking about some ghostly, spooky kind of place. Yahshua said that the kingdom of heaven is here, right now; is within. Therefore to find and enter into that holier and more spiritual realm I must seek within. These few words that I’ve copied from an article from Aish speak much to my soul, to my spirit. For me they are an affirmation that I am indeed on the right path; that all I seek is to be found within.
But I have to stop there and ask myself, “Why do I seek such?” Can it be that I am seeking these things that I might be “more important” and “lifted up” in the eyes of men? Are my motives selfish and self-serving? I like to think they are not; that I am seeking because He is calling me to seek. Yahsua said, “Seek and ye shall find.” I take Him at his Word; He spoke only the Father’s Word, my Father’s Word. We are told as well that the Father’s desire is that, “none be lost.”
I live in a lost world. I live in a world that seeks pleasures that pass like ships in the night; like whisps of wind, they come and they go, and the world goes on seeking more of the same; trying to grasp at contentment and joy in the material things of the world. We shall never find these things in the created things of the world. They are empty, shallow and impermanent. But joy and contentment is us; is our very makeup. We were made complete, in all ways, and it is within our very nature to return home to our beginnings.
As long as we seek “out there” we shall never be satisfied and this world we live in will always be at war: at war with it’s very self and each of us with the other.
If I am at-one as it was meant to be (Yahshua, we are told, is our at-one-me[a]nt], then I am whole; we are one just as the Father is One. “Hear O Israel, the Lord, the Lord thy God is One.” Hold it folks, before you go off on a tangent, it’s not about only the people in the land of Israel…and even if it were, dig back far enough and we’ll all find our human roots in Adam & Eve; ergo, we are all related, we are all brothers and sisters. So I say to you, reader, “Hear O reader, the Lord, the Lord thy God is One.”
Religion, to me, is the greatest weapon of warfare that the evil one has formed against us, disguised as something good, then placed in our hands for our own self-destruction. We may start out on the right path, but then man’s (my) ways take over and we try to prove to the rest of the world that “we got it right, you got it wrong.” So the warfare, the never-ending bickering, hating, fighting and killing….in the name of religion and some even dare to say in the name of god continues.
