This article was inspired by a comment from Koala Quill on the article “On Bread: What We Actually Talk About When We Talk About Bread.” Here’s what they wrote:

I totally get the bit about bread feeling wrong to eat alone… I still feel slightly guilty eating a heel of sourdough standing over the kitchen sink at midnight, like I’m committing a minor misdemeanor against civilization 😅…

End of quote.

For this, I want to express my sincere gratitude for their comment. I felt that the substance of their observation was compelling enough to warrant deeper exploration, and so I decided to write an article on this very topic. As for the article itself, I had the help of artificial intelligence in writing it.

So…

There’s something peculiar about how we treat bread. Not like other foods—there’s an emotional weight to it that transcends mere nutrition. Walk into any culture, and you’ll find it. The same reverence, the same underlying anxiety, the same sense that bread is never just bread. It’s woven into prayers, into superstitions, into the way we respond when someone wastes it. And I’ve noticed something: this isn’t random. This is inherited.

I started thinking about this when I watched an elderly person in my neighborhood refuse to throw away stale bread. She kept it for days, fed it to birds, used it in odd recipes that made no practical sense. When I asked her why, she shrugged. “You don’t waste bread.” Simple as that. But there was something deeper in her voice—not mere habit, but something that felt like genetic memory. Her grandmother’s anxiety had somehow become her reflex.

We carry within us the weight of centuries we never lived through.

The memory of scarcity doesn’t need to be our own to haunt us. It travels through gestures, through sayings, through the way our parents and grandparents moved through kitchens. It lives in the back of our minds even when we’ve never known true hunger. We grow up in times of abundance, in supermarkets overflowing with bread—white bread, brown bread, artisanal bread, keto bread—yet we maintain this peculiar reverence. We’re moved by images of hungry children in ways that images of hungry children shouldn’t move us if abundance was truly our native state.

Here’s what I think: we sense something that’s difficult to articulate. Not consciously, but like recognizing a face you’ve never met but somehow know. Our civilization carries the memory of moments when bread wasn’t guaranteed. When harvests failed. When winter stretched longer than stores could hold. When a family’s survival depended on grain not rotting, on flour being precious beyond measure.

These aren’t abstract historical facts to us. They’re imprinted into the way we value things.

Walk through any traditional culture and you’ll find elaborate rituals around bread. The breaking of bread as a covenant. Bread as the centerpiece of religious ceremonies. In some languages, the word for bread and the word for life are nearly interchangeable. This isn’t metaphor—or rather, it’s metaphor that has calcified into truth because it was true for so long. For millennia, bread genuinely was the difference between living and not living.

But something shifted in the last hundred years or so. Suddenly, in parts of the world, bread became abundant. Cheap. You could buy a loaf for a few coins. Flour sitting in bags on shelves indefinitely. No rationing. No rationing boards. No empty baskets returned from bakeries. For the first time in human history, a significant portion of humanity could take bread for granted.

Yet we didn’t stop treating it like it was scarce.

I wonder if this is because the memory is too recent. The abundance is only a few generations old. My grandmother’s grandmother might have known genuine hunger. That’s not ancient history—that’s a handful of generations back. Our bodies remember what our minds forget. There’s something in us that still expects scarcity, that still prepares for it, that still feels a small shock of gratitude when bread is present.

But let’s imagine something more extreme. Let’s imagine the scenario that seems to genuinely terrify something deep in the collective consciousness: what if flour disappeared? Not bread itself—flour. The foundational material.

I’ve noticed people can imagine the absence of almost anything without true panic. No tomatoes? Inconvenient. No beef? Adjustable. No oil? We’d figure something out. But the absence of flour? There’s something about this scenario that produces a different quality of reaction. It’s visceral in a way that seems disproportionate if you really think about it.

Why?

I think it’s because flour represents something beyond itself. It represents the conversion of raw nature into the basis of civilization. It represents the transformation of grain—something that grows according to forces beyond our control—into something stable, storable, transformable. Flour is potential. It’s the bridge between survival and culture. You can make bread, yes, but you can also make pasta, cakes, pastries, thickeners, binders. Flour is foundational in a literal sense.

If flour vanished tomorrow, the disruption wouldn’t be uniform. The wealthy would adapt faster. Alternative grains would be cultivated. Scientists would offer solutions. But there would be a period of chaos—a period we’ve never really experienced in the modern world, where the basic starch that feeds billions suddenly disappears. Societies run on bread and rice and pasta and all these things made from grain. We’ve built our cities, our populations, our cultures on the assumption of their availability.

And perhaps our ancestors knew this. Perhaps that deep anxiety about grain scarcity wasn’t irrational—it was prescient. It wasn’t just about this year’s harvest. It was about understanding, at some level, that grain was the load-bearing wall of everything. Lose your grain stores, and you don’t just go hungry. You lose society’s operating system.

This might sound like exaggeration, but look at what actually happens in societies where grain becomes genuinely scarce. The historical record is clear: chaos precedes adaptation. Cities starve before countryside flourishes. Social orders collapse. The difference between a functioning civilization and one in freefall is often just a few months of bread shortage.

Our ancestors lived with this knowledge constantly. They weren’t wrong to fear it. They understood, perhaps not intellectually but through lived experience, that they were one bad harvest, one disease, one war away from catastrophe. And they didn’t have our safety nets. No government food programs. No international trade. No supermarkets. Just the grain they had stored, and the prayer that it would last.

So they made it sacred. They made scarcity memory into ritual. They passed down the anxiety wrapped in stories and superstitions and table manners. Don’t waste bread. Bread is blessing. Bread is survival. These weren’t quaint customs—they were survival techniques encoded in behavior.

And here’s what’s strange: even now, even when we’ve apparently solved the bread problem, even when we live in genuine abundance, we haven’t been able to shed this anxiety. It persists. It manifests in odd ways. In the person who compulsively buys extra bread before a storm. In the way we feel vaguely guilty when we throw bread away. In the way that “breaking bread” still carries emotional weight that “sharing a meal” doesn’t quite match.

We’re living on two timelines simultaneously. The timeline where bread is abundant and available. And the deeper timeline where bread is sacred and rare and the difference between life and death. Our conscious minds inhabit the first. Our inherited memory inhabits the second.

I think this is actually healthy in a strange way. Not because we should go back to living in fear of hunger—that’s never good. But because this anxiety, this reverence, it keeps us connected to something true about how the world actually works. We can produce abundance, yes. But abundance is fragile. It depends on systems that we don’t always control. It depends on climate, on logistics, on continued functioning of mechanisms we often take for granted.

The person who cannot throw away stale bread isn’t wrong. She’s holding a truth. Not the truth that bread is currently scarce—it’s objectively not. But the truth that scarcity is possible. That what seems permanent can disappear. That respect for foundational things is never wasted.

If all flour vanished tomorrow, we’d face a crisis the modern world hasn’t experienced. Not because we couldn’t survive—humans are adaptable. But because we’ve built everything on the assumption that grain is available. Our population density, our food systems, our economies. We’d have to restructure society. And before we could restructure, we’d experience years of genuine suffering.

This is what our ancestors were always protecting themselves against. This is what their anxiety was about.

And maybe that inherited memory, that sense that bread is never just bread, that scarcity is never truly past tense—maybe it’s actually useful. Maybe it’s inoculation. Maybe it’s the wisdom of countless generations saying: remember that what you have is fragile. Remember that some things matter more than others. Remember that systems can fail.

We live in comfort now. But the ancestors live in us. And they’re whispering: don’t forget where you come from. Don’t forget what it costs to eat. Don’t forget that abundance is not a given, it’s an achievement that requires constant tending.

The shadow of scarcity will never fully leave our civilization, and perhaps it shouldn’t. Perhaps it’s the price of remembering that we’re not separate from the earth, from seasons, from the vulnerability of all living things. Perhaps the reverence we still feel for bread is not a leftover superstition, but an accurate reading of reality—that some things really are more fundamental than others.

When you watch bread being made—flour and water and salt transforming into something that feeds you—you’re watching the core mechanism of civilization. And every time you respect that process, every time you refuse to waste, every time you feel that small gratitude for bread on the table, you’re remembering something your ancestors knew: this is important. This is real. This is what survival looks like.

The anxiety about flour disappearing isn’t paranoia. It’s remembering.

The myth is told in Book III of the Metamorphoses and tells the story of Echo, a mountain nymph from Mount Cithaeron, and Narcissus, a hunter from a Thespiae in Boeotia, known for his many admirers and his beauty but also his callous rejections of those admirers.

Echo was a “very talkative nymph” whom the goddess Venus admires for her magnificent voice and song. She distracted the goddess Juno by talking for hours while her husband Jupiter had affairs with other nymphs. One day, when Echo tricks Juno into believing that Jupiter was in the city, Juno curses Echo by making her unable to initiate a spoken sentence on her own and instead only being able to finish a sentence started by someone else. “Yet a chatterbox, had no other use of speech than she has now, that she could repeat only the last words out of many.” This is the explanation of the aural effect which was named after her.^[1]

Narcissus was born to Liriope, a Naiad, and Cephissus, a river god. When he was born, Liriope asked the prophet Tiresias if he would live a long life, to which he replied “so long as he never knows himself.”^[2]

The prophet’s words would prove to be true as, sometime after being cursed, Echo spied Narcissus while he was out hunting deer with his companions. She immediately fell in love with him and, infatuated, followed quietly. The more she looked at the young man, the more she longed for him. Though she wished with all her heart to call out to Narcissus, Juno’s curse prevented her.^[3]

During the hunt, Narcissus became separated from his companions and called out, ‘is anyone there,’ and heard the nymph repeat his words. Startled, Narcissus answered the voice, ‘come here,’ only to be told the same. When Narcissus saw that nobody had emerged from the glade, he concluded that the owner of the voice must be running away from him and called out again. Finally, he shouted, “This way, we must come together.” Taking this to be a reciprocation of her love, Echo concurred ecstatically, “We must come together!”^[4]

In her delight, Echo rushed to Narcissus ready to throw her arms around her beloved. Narcissus, however, was appalled and, spurning her, exclaimed, ‘Hands off! May I die before you enjoy my body.’ All Echo could whisper in reply was, ‘enjoy my body’ and having done so she fled, scorned, humiliated, and shamed.^[5]

Despite the harshness of his rejection, Echo’s love for Narcissus only grew.^[6] Echo’s fellow nymphs prayed to Nemesis to punish Narcissus with a love that was equally not reciprocated. Nemesis caused him to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water where he wasted away and died, unable to take his eyes away from the beautiful youth he did not recognise as himself. Narcissus, looking one last time into the pool uttered, “Oh marvellous boy, I loved you in vain, farewell”, Echo too chorused, “Farewell.”^[7] When the time came for Narcissus’s funeral, people came to where he lay, but found no body. All that was left of Narcissus was the six-petalled white flower arranged around a golden centre that was named after him.

As the other nymphs took Narcissus into the afterlife, they wailed a sorrowful song, and Echo repeated the last syllabic wails back in sadness. When the river master of death brought Narcissus on the boat across the Styx into the afterlife, Narcissus stared at his reflection, in unrequited desire.

Eventually, Echo, too, began to waste away. Though she was immortal, her body faded and her bones turned to stone until all that remained of Echo was the sound of her voice.^[8]

Narcissus and Echo (45–79 AD), wall painting from Pompeii

Source Wiki

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How the hell did we get here?

Working on two philosophies to see how we got here. First is not looking where you fell, but where you slipped. Funny enough this led straight to the second philosophy, find the source. For this particular slip we need look no further than:

Psychiatry .

These “doctors” are on the forefront of our legal drug dealer trade, i.e. The Medical Profession. While at the moment everyone seems to be on about Big Pharma, let’s take a look at this branch of the business.

As it is generally accepted that Sigmund Freud was the founder of this “profession” best we look at him first.

He seemed to start off quite well…..

Freud initially believed his patients’ reports of sexual abuse by caregivers, creating the “seduction theory,” which linked childhood trauma to adult neurosis.

But. It would seem he got “persuaded “ to not just change his mind but do a 180!

He later shifted his focus to the “Oedipus complex,” arguing that such reports were often fantasies rather than actual events.

Now that, under the lights that have recently been turned on, makes me conclude that the same people ruling and programming you now, got to him! Another woman thought it was just to cover up parental abuse on a TINY scale to what we now know, the baby farms and orphanages…..

Florence Rush

Florence Rush (23 January 1918 – 9 December 2008) was an American certified social worker (M.S.W. from the University of Pennsylvania^[1]), feminist theorist and organizer best known for introducing The Freudian Coverup in her presentation “The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View”, about childhood sexual abuse and incest, at the April 1971 New York Radical Feminists (NYRF) Rape Conference.^[2] Rush’s paper at the time was the first challenge to Freudian theories of children as the seducers of adults rather than the victims of adults’ sexual/power exploitation.^[3

Then, lastly a look at Freud’s mail.

He wrote a lot of weird stuff to his friend Wilhelm Fliess.

The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess

Thank the stars a chap called Carl Jung arrived about that time!!!

Carl Jung’s school of psychological analysis came to have a major impact on the psychiatric profession in the twentieth century. In contrast to his rival Sigmund Freud’s essentially mechanistic and rationalist approach to mental illness, Jung sought to dramatically widen the purview of psychiatric theory and practice.

I hope that helps you see the pattern and whom we are dealing with.

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or maybe,

lack of in this case. From the Chronicles II

We had one person that use to often walk in just before we closed and ask the prices on any equipment we did not
have tagged. He never bought a thing. I would let one of the other staff members deal with him, as I could not trust my
tongue or my temper. On one fine evening, about one minute to closing, he waltzed in and started his normal shit. Ten
minutes later I had had enough and told him we would like to close. He looked down his nose at me like I was some
unsavoury creature and continued to ask my colleague Robert about prices. I stepped back and thought about this for
a few seconds and then decided to tell him to leave. When I did this he started shouting, ‘Do you know who I am, do you
know who I am?’ Then he proceeded to tell me that he was a doctor and a personal friend of the owner. I am not
particularly impressed with doctors; their ineptitude at their chosen profession has nearly got me killed once or twice,
and the free way they handed out prescription drugs to my mother has caused me to view them as little more than legal
drug pushers. Plus, any salesperson with half a brain should naturally hate all personal friends of the owner, so the
combination pushed all my buttons at once. My reply was to uncover my gun and tell him, ‘This is a Smith & Wesson
and doesn’t give a shit about your degree!’ Then I picked him up and bodily threw him out the door.
That sorted that out, and we locked up and went home. The next day the owner phoned me and was highly pissed
off. Still not impressed, I told him his friend was an arsehole. Since most people actually like money more than their
friends, and the owner did the commission sheets himself, I managed to keep my job.
I was starting to miss days at work for a couple of reasons: sometimes I was too sick from alcohol abuse, and
sometimes I would not allow work to interfere with my drinking.

eBooks. R100.00 each. Series of 7.

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New blog post. This one is about land "development" and how we can learn about worship from watching the trees.

catecheticconverter.com/theres…

#theology #ecology #environment #nature #Episcopal #Anglican #Christianity #Jesus

The Catechetic Converter

2026-09-16 23:52:40

There’s No Such Thing As Undeveloped Land

When I was a kid I used to dislike driving up to Deltona to visit my aunt and uncle. I generally liked my aunt and uncle, so it wasn’t them. It was the Deltona area at the time that garnered my disdain.

This was the early-to-mid-90s. Deltona is an early exurb of the Orlando, Florida area, really close to Sanford. Both communities were “developed” in the 1980s as a place for “starter homes” for new families. Centex Homes billboards were a regular sight on I-4 in those days, one of the leading companies building cheap houses all over Central Florida. Eddy, who was my youth pastor growing up and a mentor figure for me for many years, was a carpenter by trade and he helped build all the houses in the Deltona area. He said that he’d hop in the back of a truck to ride to the job site, dodging rattlesnakes to then get on a roof and just hop down the line of houses, moving from roof-to-roof. He told me that guys would sometimes attempt to kill rattlesnakes from the back of the truck by using rebar like a spear and throwing it at them.

“You had one shot,” he’d tell me from the driver’s seat of his van as we drove past the Deltona exit on our way to New Smyrna to surf, “a rattlesnake has like an 8-foot striking range, so if you missed there was a real risk that the snake could bite you in the truck bed.”

This story was often accompanied by a phrase I’m sure lots of us have heard before; that, before the houses, there was “nothing out here.”

Nothing.

This was what I didn’t like about Deltona. The surrounding area felt like there was nothing. Just miles and miles of what I would later come to know as “scrub pine”—forests of tall pine trees and small palms, the ground beneath being sand littered with pine needles, cones, and dry sticks. A landscape that seemed boring and banal. Tearing it up for houses and strip-malls seemed like an absolute improvement.

The epitome of land that is “undeveloped.”

My first memories of my mom as a working person were when she worked as the bookkeeper for a real estate developer. The concept of “undeveloped land” is something I unconsciously sublimated from my earliest years.

I remember when my childhood church, the First Baptist Church of Pine Hills, was eyeing its future growth and owned a 50-acre plot of land in the Ocoee area of Central Florida. Eventually this plot of land would become my high school and the main place of worship for the church. But when I was like 8 and we went out for the ground-breaking ceremony for the building that would house classrooms and a gymnasium, the area was a seemingly endless stretch of orange trees. There was one hill, heading West on Highway 50, that when it crested you could see almost all the way to Claremont. In 1990 it was a horizon of green, a single road bifurcating fields of citrus. Everyone who grew up in Florida prior to the 2000s likely has a story about some area that “used to be nothing but orange groves.”

But, to my mind, orange trees were something. Scrub pine was, truly, nothing.

***

When I was in seminary I was first exposed to the theologians of Radical Orthodoxy that would become deeply influential to me. In particular is Catherine Pickstock. A friend of mine had given me a burned CD of an interview she and John Milbank gave (I think to the BBC) and Pickstock said something that has stuck with me ever since: all things were created to worship and so when we look at a tree and see it as a being in worship this changes our relationship with the tree—it is no longer a commodity to be used but a creature that glorifies its creator.

Like I said, I this stuck with me and I think of it often, especially now that I live in Hawaiʻi which is a place that pretty openly celebrates the fellowship and sacred participation of all creatures. In Hawaiian thinking, trees and animals are a “people” who share our spaces with us and it is our kuleana (responsibility) to care for them and treat them as part of our ʻohana (which, as Lilo all taught us, means family). The continued use of valleys and islands for live-fire drills and bombing practice, the sullying of our wai (water), the loss of indigenous agriculture to pineapple and sugar farming to export wealth out of our communities is all seen as actions that hurt our family. The ʻaina (land) is part of us, is something that participates in a sacred life. Hawaiians rightly understand that all of creation worships its creator and so we are not free to casually exploit creation and treat it as a kind of impersonal “resource” for consumption.

Calling land “undeveloped” carries with it an assumption: that turning that land into something that can be monetized is the realized telos (its end or purpose, to use an academic theological term) of that land. The assumed thinking here is that a piece of land is effectively “wasting its potential” by simply existing.

Members of the Church are not innocent here. Centuries of interpreting passages about tilling the land or our God-given “dominion” over creation as though it is our obligation to transform land into something for financial gain have their genesis in various corners of the Church. The truth is that our “dominion” is supposed to look like the Kingdom of God, which is defined by Jesusʻ own humility. A gift that indigenous Christians give back to the Church is the reminder that our relationship with the land is defined by what Hawaiians call pono, which is most closely translated as “righteousness” (but is also deeply related to the concept of sovereignty). We are stewards of a creation that is not ours, set in the midst of a worshipful mosaic of fellow creatures, expected by God to do right by them.

I’m of the mind that Christianity itself has been the victim of a kind of intellectual colonization that has caused it to lose focus on things that Jesus called to our attention. Wealth-hoarders/addicts throughout generations have the habit of forcibly wrenching religious beliefs into something that supports their exploitative vision. Jesus, ever the agrarian, repeatedly directs our attention to the created world in order to teach us about the Kingdom of God—which is to say that the exploitative impulse we see coming from Christian Nationalists and others of their ilk is not something intrinsic to the Christian faith itself, but is the result of the colonizing impulse to rework anything and everything into justifying these actions.

The “undeveloped land” mindset is subtle. What starts as “there was nothing but orange trees” can quickly turn into “there was nothing.” And of course there was never nothing.

***

When I was in Thailand in 2007 I met guys who had grown up in the US while their dads were being educated for ministry. Once they returned to Thailand they took to their Thai culture to a degree that even astounded other Thai people. I went through a similar thing when I returned to Florida after my time in Northern Virginia/DC during seminary. I became extra Floridian.

An author who was important to me at this time was Jeff Klinkenberg. His Seasons of Real Florida should be required reading for anyone moving to the state. It was him who got me to understand that scrub pine land was far from “nothing.”

Turns out that this type of land, ubiquitous and seen as the kind of bland “cookie matrix” between the chocolate chips of “civilization” (to borrow an image from Chuck Palahniuk), is a completely unique ecosystem. It’s a rare example of a “wet desert,” meaning that even though the area gets rain like 200 days out of the year (calling Florida the “Sunshine State” is just the first of many falsehoods about the state that charlatans came up with to sell land starting in the 1800s) because the ground is mostly sand, the water doesn’t stay and runs through down to the aquifer beneath the surface. There are crazy lizards that swim in the sand. And the whole thing has evolved to rely on lightning.

See, scrub pine is sandy because it used to be ocean. Florida was basically an underwater sandbar until relatively recently (in a geological sense). The plants that grow there are opportunistic plants that have adapted to eke out enough moisture from the sand to thrive. That and they can make use of the consistent rain that falls (nearly every day in Central Florida is a thunderstorm starting around 3 pm). These tall and thin pine trees are also perfect lightning rods. The lightning strikes the palms, they catch fire. The fire opens their cones and the rising heat helps carry the seeds. The fire also burns off parasitic plants and over-zealous undergrowth. With Florida being the lightning strike capitol of North America, this is ideal.

Basically, this is an ecosystem that has adapted perfectly to its environment—one could argue that it does so in worshipful response to what God has ordained it to do, moving as it does through the long evolutionary process of God’s creative act. It’s a rare and beautiful thing when one really considers it.

But, it also so happens to be flat and easily transformable land that also just so happens to exist around some of the most active tourist hotspots in the world. Which means that it is not in the best interest for the investors that we see this land for what it is and celebrate it as a means to glorify God and draw us all closer into His love. No, it has to be seen as “undeveloped.” As “nothing.”

This scenario is playing out all over the world. You’ll hear this language as the wealth-addicts eye the construction of yet another data center. Or high-rise that will never be filled. Or shopping center that will put other places out of business. Or agriculture land that will grow corn or beef to be exported elsewhere at the expense of feeding the hungry who live in the detritus of what we might call “post-developed land.”

For us Christians there can be no such thing as “undeveloped land.” No vista contains “nothing.” Rather it is all rife with the creatures of our God and King, living in uninterrupted worship of Him.

“You love all things that exist and loathe none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it.” (Wisdom 11:24, ESV)

If God loves it, then we’re meant to love it. It’s not “undeveloped.” It’s something entirely more valuable.

A pen and ink drawing of a scrub pine forest that I drew after learning to appreciate them

---

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#theology #nature #ecology #Jesus #Episcopal #Anglican #Christian #Bible

St. Mary's in Mo'ili'ili

Welcome to the website of St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Hawai'i. We are located in Honolulu on the island of O'ahu, and welcome all to worship with us!

^{St. Mary's in Mo'ili'ili}

When I was a kid I used to dislike driving up to Deltona to visit my aunt and uncle. I generally liked my aunt and uncle, so it wasn’t them. It was the Deltona area at the time that garnered my disdain.

This was the early-to-mid-90s. Deltona is an early exurb of the Orlando, Florida area, really close to Sanford. Both communities were “developed” in the 1980s as a place for “starter homes” for new families. Centex Homes billboards were a regular sight on I-4 in those days, one of the leading companies building cheap houses all over Central Florida. Eddy, who was my youth pastor growing up and a mentor figure for me for many years, was a carpenter by trade and he helped build all the houses in the Deltona area. He said that he’d hop in the back of a truck to ride to the job site, dodging rattlesnakes to then get on a roof and just hop down the line of houses, moving from roof-to-roof. He told me that guys would sometimes attempt to kill rattlesnakes from the back of the truck by using rebar like a spear and throwing it at them.

“You had one shot,” he’d tell me from the driver’s seat of his van as we drove past the Deltona exit on our way to New Smyrna to surf, “a rattlesnake has like an 8-foot striking range, so if you missed there was a real risk that the snake could bite you in the truck bed.”

This story was often accompanied by a phrase I’m sure lots of us have heard before; that, before the houses, there was “nothing out here.”

Nothing.

This was what I didn’t like about Deltona. The surrounding area felt like there was nothing. Just miles and miles of what I would later come to know as “scrub pine”—forests of tall pine trees and small palms, the ground beneath being sand littered with pine needles, cones, and dry sticks. A landscape that seemed boring and banal. Tearing it up for houses and strip-malls seemed like an absolute improvement.

The epitome of land that is “undeveloped.”

My first memories of my mom as a working person were when she worked as the bookkeeper for a real estate developer. The concept of “undeveloped land” is something I unconsciously sublimated from my earliest years.

I remember when my childhood church, the First Baptist Church of Pine Hills, was eyeing its future growth and owned a 50-acre plot of land in the Ocoee area of Central Florida. Eventually this plot of land would become my high school and the main place of worship for the church. But when I was like 8 and we went out for the ground-breaking ceremony for the building that would house classrooms and a gymnasium, the area was a seemingly endless stretch of orange trees. There was one hill, heading West on Highway 50, that when it crested you could see almost all the way to Claremont. In 1990 it was a horizon of green, a single road bifurcating fields of citrus. Everyone who grew up in Florida prior to the 2000s likely has a story about some area that “used to be nothing but orange groves.”

But, to my mind, orange trees were something. Scrub pine was, truly, nothing.

***

When I was in seminary I was first exposed to the theologians of Radical Orthodoxy that would become deeply influential to me. In particular is Catherine Pickstock. A friend of mine had given me a burned CD of an interview she and John Milbank gave (I think to the BBC) and Pickstock said something that has stuck with me ever since: all things were created to worship and so when we look at a tree and see it as a being in worship this changes our relationship with the tree—it is no longer a commodity to be used but a creature that glorifies its creator.

Like I said, I this stuck with me and I think of it often, especially now that I live in Hawaiʻi which is a place that pretty openly celebrates the fellowship and sacred participation of all creatures. In Hawaiian thinking, trees and animals are a “people” who share our spaces with us and it is our kuleana (responsibility) to care for them and treat them as part of our ʻohana (which, as Lilo all taught us, means family). The continued use of valleys and islands for live-fire drills and bombing practice, the sullying of our wai (water), the loss of indigenous agriculture to pineapple and sugar farming to export wealth out of our communities is all seen as actions that hurt our family. The ʻaina (land) is part of us, is something that participates in a sacred life. Hawaiians rightly understand that all of creation worships its creator and so we are not free to casually exploit creation and treat it as a kind of impersonal “resource” for consumption.

Calling land “undeveloped” carries with it an assumption: that turning that land into something that can be monetized is the realized telos (its end or purpose, to use an academic theological term) of that land. The assumed thinking here is that a piece of land is effectively “wasting its potential” by simply existing.

Members of the Church are not innocent here. Centuries of interpreting passages about tilling the land or our God-given “dominion” over creation as though it is our obligation to transform land into something for financial gain have their genesis in various corners of the Church. The truth is that our “dominion” is supposed to look like the Kingdom of God, which is defined by Jesusʻ own humility. A gift that indigenous Christians give back to the Church is the reminder that our relationship with the land is defined by what Hawaiians call pono, which is most closely translated as “righteousness” (but is also deeply related to the concept of sovereignty). We are stewards of a creation that is not ours, set in the midst of a worshipful mosaic of fellow creatures, expected by God to do right by them.

I’m of the mind that Christianity itself has been the victim of a kind of intellectual colonization that has caused it to lose focus on things that Jesus called to our attention. Wealth-hoarders/addicts throughout generations have the habit of forcibly wrenching religious beliefs into something that supports their exploitative vision. Jesus, ever the agrarian, repeatedly directs our attention to the created world in order to teach us about the Kingdom of God—which is to say that the exploitative impulse we see coming from Christian Nationalists and others of their ilk is not something intrinsic to the Christian faith itself, but is the result of the colonizing impulse to rework anything and everything into justifying these actions.

The “undeveloped land” mindset is subtle. What starts as “there was nothing but orange trees” can quickly turn into “there was nothing.” And of course there was never nothing.

***

When I was in Thailand in 2007 I met guys who had grown up in the US while their dads were being educated for ministry. Once they returned to Thailand they took to their Thai culture to a degree that even astounded other Thai people. I went through a similar thing when I returned to Florida after my time in Northern Virginia/DC during seminary. I became extra Floridian.

An author who was important to me at this time was Jeff Klinkenberg. His Seasons of Real Florida should be required reading for anyone moving to the state. It was him who got me to understand that scrub pine land was far from “nothing.”

Turns out that this type of land, ubiquitous and seen as the kind of bland “cookie matrix” between the chocolate chips of “civilization” (to borrow an image from Chuck Palahniuk), is a completely unique ecosystem. It’s a rare example of a “wet desert,” meaning that even though the area gets rain like 200 days out of the year (calling Florida the “Sunshine State” is just the first of many falsehoods about the state that charlatans came up with to sell land starting in the 1800s) because the ground is mostly sand, the water doesn’t stay and runs through down to the aquifer beneath the surface. There are crazy lizards that swim in the sand. And the whole thing has evolved to rely on lightning.

See, scrub pine is sandy because it used to be ocean. Florida was basically an underwater sandbar until relatively recently (in a geological sense). The plants that grow there are opportunistic plants that have adapted to eke out enough moisture from the sand to thrive. That and they can make use of the consistent rain that falls (nearly every day in Central Florida is a thunderstorm starting around 3 pm). These tall and thin pine trees are also perfect lightning rods. The lightning strikes the palms, they catch fire. The fire opens their cones and the rising heat helps carry the seeds. The fire also burns off parasitic plants and over-zealous undergrowth. With Florida being the lightning strike capitol of North America, this is ideal.

Basically, this is an ecosystem that has adapted perfectly to its environment—one could argue that it does so in worshipful response to what God has ordained it to do, moving as it does through the long evolutionary process of God’s creative act. It’s a rare and beautiful thing when one really considers it.

But, it also so happens to be flat and easily transformable land that also just so happens to exist around some of the most active tourist hotspots in the world. Which means that it is not in the best interest for the investors that we see this land for what it is and celebrate it as a means to glorify God and draw us all closer into His love. No, it has to be seen as “undeveloped.” As “nothing.”

This scenario is playing out all over the world. You’ll hear this language as the wealth-addicts eye the construction of yet another data center. Or high-rise that will never be filled. Or shopping center that will put other places out of business. Or agriculture land that will grow corn or beef to be exported elsewhere at the expense of feeding the hungry who live in the detritus of what we might call “post-developed land.”

For us Christians there can be no such thing as “undeveloped land.” No vista contains “nothing.” Rather it is all rife with the creatures of our God and King, living in uninterrupted worship of Him.

“You love all things that exist and loathe none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it.” (Wisdom 11:24, ESV)

If God loves it, then we’re meant to love it. It’s not “undeveloped.” It’s something entirely more valuable.

A pen and ink drawing of a scrub pine forest that I drew after learning to appreciate them

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#theology #nature #ecology #Jesus #Episcopal #Anglican #Christian #Bible

من الشخصية الكرتونية المفضلة لديك؟

In this stage, the Quran was brought by Jibreel from the Preserved Tablet (in the Seventh Heaven) down to the First Heaven (sky) and placed in the ‘Place of Power or Honor’. First, the Quran mentions the Preserved Tablets in the verse (which means): “Nay! This is a Glorious Quran, inscribed in a Preserved Tablet” [Quran 85:21-22]

Stages of the Revelation of the Quran

Essential to learning the history of the Quran is the study of the stages of its revelation, which is usually referred to by the term “‘Tanzeel’ of the Quran”, literally, the descent or the ‘sending down’ of the Quran from the Heavens to the Earth. Some of the aspects to be discussed in relationship to this would be the meaning of the ‘Tanzeel’ and why it happened in stages, what was revealed first and what was revealed last, and the significance of understanding the sequence in revealing the different parts of the Quran, among others.

Certainly, the study of the ‘Tanzeel’ of the Quran is one of the most important aspects of the Sciences of the Quran, because it is related to the beginning of the last revelation, and to being certain of its descent from Allah, which is the foundation of believing in the Quran as the Word of Allah that came from Him, as well as in the truthfulness of the Message of Prophet Muhammad sallallaahu `alayhi wa sallam ( may Allah exalt his mention ).

The Meaning of ‘Tanzeel’

Lexically, the term ‘Tanzeel’ is derived from the Arabic root ‘Nuzool’, which means the descent or the movement from a high place down to a lower one. This is exactly what happened in the process of revelation where the Angel Jibreel (Gabriel) used to come down from the Heavens with a varying number of verses of the Quran to deliver to Prophet Muhammad sallallaahu `alayhi wa sallam ( may Allah exalt his mention ). The exact nature of this ‘Nuzool’ and how Jibreel actually brought the Quran with him are matters of the unseen, the details of which Allah chose not to clarify for us, perhaps because they involve matters that may be very difficult for humans to imagine or grasp. What we should understand is that this ‘Nuzool’ happened in a fashion that is befitting to the greatness and sacredness of the Word of Allah. Allah Almighty Says about the Holy Quran (what means): “ (It is) a Quran which We have divided (into parts from time to time), in order that thou (O Muhammad) might recite it to people at intervals: We have revealed it by stages (in 23 years).” [Quran 17:106]

The Quran was revealed in two stages:

Stage One:

In this stage, the Quran was brought by Jibreel from the Preserved Tablet (in the Seventh Heaven) down to the First Heaven (sky) and placed in the ‘Place of Power or Honor’. First, the Quran mentions the Preserved Tablets in the verse (which means): “Nay! This is a Glorious Quran, inscribed in a Preserved Tablet” [Quran 85:21-22]

Then it tells of the fact that it was sent down during a specific night, in the verse (which means): “By the Book that makes things clear; – We sent it down during a Blessed Night: for We (ever) wish to warn (against Evil). In the (Night) is made distinct every affair of wisdom.” [Quran 44:2-4]

And (which means): “We have indeed sent down this during the Night of Power.” [Quran 97:1].

These two verses indicate that the Quran was revealed in a single blessed night in the month of Ramadan that is called the ‘Night of Power, or Decree’.

Stage Two:

This stage of revelation lasted for about 23 years in which the Quran was sent down in response to the development of events and in accordance with the sequence needed to complete the delivery of the Message.

The Prophet sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam ( may Allah exalt his mention ) after receiving revelation, would automatically memorize the Quranic verses that were revealed to him and would recite them to whomever was in his company, and order them (the Companions may Allah be pleased with them) to write them down immediately. The Messenger sallallaahualayhi wa sallam ( may Allah exalt his mention ) himself used to keep a copy of the revealed portions in his house. The Quran, the last of Allah’s Scriptures, is divided into 114 ‘Surahs’ (Chapters) of unequal length. It is the first fundamental source of Islamic Sharee’ah (Islamic Law). Allah, Most High, Says (what means): “… A Quran which We have given seriatim (separated out) in order that you may recite it to the people at intervals and We have caused it to come down successively (by stages).” [Quran 17:106]

But verse 6:7 observes (what means): “If We had sent unto you (O Muhammad) a written (message) on parchment, so that they could touch it with their hands, the unbelievers would have been sure to say: “This is nothing but obvious magic.’” [Quran 6:7]

Recording cynical speeches of the unbelievers, Almighty Allah Says (what means): “Why has the Quran not been vouchsafed to him (Muhammad) in one single whole?” [Quran 25:32]

And the answer to that is the verse (which means): “…that your heart (O Muhammad) may be strengthened, We have rehearsed it to you in slow, well-arranged stages, gradually.” [Quran 25:32]

There is no nation that has ever cared about, revered, and preserved its Divine Scripture as the Muslim nation has cared about, revered and preserved the Quran. Unlike the other Divine Scriptures, the Quran is not kept in the hands of a particular group or elite of the Muslims, and for this reason, it is not subject to suspicion that it might have been tampered with or altered. Rather, it has always been within the reach of all Muslims.

• 
  The Chronological Analysis of the Quran
• 
  Stages of the Revelation of the Quran

I Love Israel: Manila-Tel Aviv Direct Flights to Launch in January 2027

Starting January 3, 2027, direct flights between Manila and Tel Aviv will launch with Israeli airline Arkia in-charge of the service, according to a news report by the Manila Bulletin. For many Filipinos who desired to visit the Holy Land in Israel, this is a dream that will come true and the new route is the first non-stop air link between the two major cities.

To put things in perspective, posted below is an excerpt from the news report of the Manila Bulletin. Some parts in boldface.

Filipinos can soon fly directly to Israel without making a stopover, as Israeli airline Arkia prepares to launch the first nonstop flights between Manila and Tel Aviv in January 2027.

The new route will begin on Jan. 3, 2027, with an initial service of one flight a week and a travel time of about 11 hours, according to Israeli Ambassador to the Philippines Dana Kursh.

For years, travelers between the Philippines and Israel have had to take connecting flights, with Dubai and Abu Dhabi among the main stopover points, while other options include connections through New Delhi, Bangkok, Seoul, and other Asian cities.

The new service will therefore provide the first nonstop air link between Manila and Tel Aviv.

Kursh welcomed the development in a Facebook post on Tuesday, Sept. 8, saying the route would bring the two countries closer after years without a direct connection.

“For the first time in many years, our two countries will be connected by a direct flight, bringing Israel and the Philippines closer than ever before,” she said.

The Israeli envoy said the new air link would go beyond making travel more convenient, as it could also open more opportunities for tourism, business, investment, and cultural exchanges.

“This is much more than a new flight route,” Kursh said.

“It is a bridge between our peoples, creating new opportunities for tourism, business, investment and cultural exchange, while making it easier for Israelis and Filipinos to discover each other’s beautiful countries,” she added.

The Department of Transportation had earlier pushed for direct flights between the Philippines and Israel, with officials saying improved air connectivity would help strengthen bilateral ties.

Kursh said she looked forward to welcoming more Israeli visitors to the Philippines while encouraging more Filipinos to discover Israel.

“I look forward to welcoming many more Israeli visitors to the Philippines and to seeing even more Filipinos discovering the beauty, diversity and warmth of Israel,” she said.

To all my readers, I encourage you to thank the Lord for this breakthrough of cooperation between Israel and the Philippines. Ambassador Dana Kursh is absolutely right by stating that the direct Manila-Tel Aviv air link is the bridge between Filipinos and the Israelis who will benefit from the new opportunities for tourism, business, investment and cultural exchange. For Filipinos who desire to visit the Holy Land to discover the holy sites, witness the Holy Bible come to life and deepen their faith in the Lord, the direct flights are absolutely golden.

I personally have a desire to return to Israel someday to spend quality with the Lord right there in the Holy Land. I love Israel and I believe strong in the biblical ties between Jews and Christians.

I encourage you all to pray to the Lord for this breakthrough to lead to more breakthroughs for both Filipinos and Israelis.

At the same time, I encourage you all to realize the truth that Israel is the land God designated specifically for the Jewish people (read Genesis 35:10-12) and His command must be followed without hesitation. If you want to be blessed further by the Lord, do so by loving and blessing the Jewish people (Genesis 12:1-3). I did my part when I was in Israel. Also, let me remind you all that the ties between the Jews and Christians are truly biblical!

I encourage you all to pray to the Lord God in support of Israel, to love and bless the Jewish people, and pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

If you truly believe in Lord Jesus, the Holy Spirit and God the Heavenly Father wholeheartedly and you continue to be faithful, you should be aware that Christians are meant to stand united with Israel and love the Jewish people no matter what. You can do your part supporting Israel by donating to Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Do not forget to read the Holy Bible, then pray in tongues to the Lord in the privacy of your room with the door shut.

Always be the fearless and aggressive church of Lord Jesus!

+++++

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Hi Everyone! Some of you know me from my account over on deacon.social and for some of you I am a new face. It is good to be here.

After hearing from a number of followers on my last account that they would miss interacting with me I decided to remain on Mastodon and migrated my account today over here to the theres.life server. Many thanks to the @Big_Diggity for so quickly approving my account here!

For those who don't know me here's a brief intro. I am a Reformed pastor who has a long time love of church history, #liturgy , #missiology , and #biblical #theology ...and obviously #Jesus . Those loves have played an important role in my slowly drifting towards the Anglican Church.

About five months ago my wife and I decided to take a leap of faith, leave ministry in the Reformed tradition, and finally make the transition into the #Anglican tradition. It has been a crazy journey, but a beautiful one for our family. And the bishop of our diocese has been incredibly generous in recognizing my previous call to ministry and is preparing me for #ordination to the transitional diaconate this October. (I will likely be sharing more about my journey into Anglican ministry in the upcoming weeks and months.)

If you and I have not met before, please make sure to introduce yourself! I would love to make your acquaintance. And if you recognize me from over at deacon.social I look forward to reconnecting here!

God bless each of you and keep you in his grace and peace.

#introduction #NewHere

Measuring Up to Jesus

The other day when I was on Social Media a quote I saw from sales guru hit me: “You become what you think about all day long”. It made me ponder on what I think about every day, which lead me to realize how much my thinking – and lifestyle – has changed over the years.

I used to be more selfish, helping and serving others with the end motive of serving my own needs and ego, and praying for my own needs – talking to God more than listening. St. Francis says [that] it is through giving that we receive, and I took it literal.

Today … when I give of myself I don’t look for what I receive, because the real gift is how God is blessing others through me .. which I may never see. My agenda has become God’s agenda. Said another way, I live my life as a prayer.

If we focus our attention on bad news and gossip, and distractions, we will miss God's incredible, visionary, optimistic purpose for every believer: to grow so much in our faith that we shine like beacons to everyone around us!

God's vision for each church is that we would grow so much in our love for God that we'd love people the way He loves them: unconditionally and passionately.

More in description >>>>> fineartamerica.com/featured/me… #lent #jesus #christianity #catholic #fineart #crucifix #photography #fjcasellaPhoto