#musical literacy is a bit iffier but if you hum a few bars i can fake it

[lanteanserver]

THIS is why I'm on Palestine's side. Not Palestinian Arabs' side, but on the side of everyone whose mentality is "coexistence can be more than a myth because we already lived a version of it for a long time", as opposed to "it's them or us, things will never be the same". They don't need to be the same; they can, in fact, be better if children rise up and force their elders' hands.

Here are two sets of readings from the Roman Catholic tradition. The first is the readings from the day I carefully, nervously tottered down to the local Archbishop's House and followed my instincts to find a retired bishop disguised as a security guard, and then I declared myself to be a prophet sent to tell the Roman Catholic Church that they need to change or die. (It's not a threat. I'm not saying I'll kill them. I'm just saying that God seems to be doing exactly what the Church said They would, and sending someone the Hol{e}y Spirit an Echo of the Infinite Divine me, I guess, to tell them to get their shit in gear.) The second is from the day I was born, although there might be an offset that I'm not aware of. It's the one I care more about, tbh; if there's more to any of this than your garden-variety insanity, I still think Our Lady of Tooth and Claw is a good and necessary addition to the roles we scribe to Mary as Roman Catholicism's chosen embodiment of the feminine divine.

Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.

If I am a version of Elijah - a version of the prophet associated with Sandalphon, whose wings can carry him anywhere on Earth in a heartbeat like an email or a blog post - we won't know for sure until I'm long dead. But my parents and I are finally communicating with each other effectively, because the spiritually abusive dysfunction nexus in my extended family finally realised that dying can be difficult but being dead is a lot easier than being alive; and if I can forgive the Catholic Church for everything they have put my family through, both directly and indirectly... Well, I haven't yet, because they haven't actually confessed their sins against us, which makes sense because their sins against other people were so much worse and should absolutely be a higher priority. But I will forgive them if and when they ask me to, and that's why redemption and absolution are different things and they need to be a lot clearer about that going forward.

Absolution is when God allegedly forgives you everything because Jesus took on all of our suffering while on the cross. But I really don't think that makes sense as a moral framework. People keep talking about offering up their suffering, and it makes me feel physically sick when they do. He was already being crucified and transcending space-time to save us, according to the Story that contains His Substance. Shouldn't we be offering our joy? Shouldn't we show Him the beauty His sacrifice wrought?

Children who live in a time and place without war, because He taught us to be peacemakers regardless of the cost to our finite, mortal selves. Recovery from pestilence that once would have resulted in a fate worse than death, and it's barely even noticed or commented on, how miracles and science and magic and faith might as well be the same thing sometimes. Famine becoming a thing of the past because we finally know how to ensure everyone gets a first helping before anyone gets a fucking private jet. [Pay yo' fucking taxes.] The current horseman threatening us isn't quite pollution, but is climate change; and I know enough of that danger to say with confidence that it is not too late for human civilization to weather this storm we are already living through, but it's going to take more than a Miku-Luce to get young people to return to any flavour of Christianity given how many of us have already been crucified or chained to the rocks in a Tempest by our elders who thought this was the best way to save us and instead just kept breaking the Third Covenant. At least your generation got to pick out your own fucking crosses and actually earned some kind of reward for lugging them around. I don't even have a home left, because it was destroyed to create a shrine for a false idol who worshipped her image of me from the day I was conceived to the day that she finally proved herself True by being False.

There will be a lot of choices to make, and I've already made the ones meant for me. I can be the Talkative Death, the Woman of the Apocalypse, Swift and Kindly. I can have green eyes or blue eyes or grey eyes. I can be a sovereignty goddess or a goddess of crafts or a tutelary deity or an oracle or a livestock guardian sheepdog or just another gardener. But I'm only going to be one of those things at a time from here on out, so if you've got skin in the game and you have a preference, let me know. I think the deadline might be 11pm tomorrow, but I might be wrong. I keep telling people that, and they keep telling me how fascinating I am and how they could listen to me all day, and then don't bother actually hearing a Word I've said. (Don't worry. I still love you. Just take a bath-tism and follow the ritual for the Hol{e}y Spirit if you want a hug. And if you want nothing to do with me, that's fine. I'm the rear guard anyway. Once you're all safely inside the walled city at one of the House Parties, my job will be to turn around and become Maxwell's Next Daemon. But only long enough for the ones on the inside to shut the city gates; and once that's done, I can start looking for the lost sheep who got left in the Hinterland of the Forest/Garden instead of making it safely to the walled city.

I understand why Moses didn't enter the city. It wasn't that he never could. Just... Not in that lifetime.

I've inadvertently fulfilled more prophecies than you can shake a crozier at. I'm pretty sure that if people want to, we can actually declare a Messianic Age based solely on the bullshit I've been dealing with for the past few months (and especially the past one month, when I went Full Mad Prophet and I am barely recovering as it is).

People keep telling me to take care of myself, but they don't understand that part of being a livestock guardian sheepdog is that I literally cannot take care of myself while others are suffering in a way I can help with and in a place I can see. I'm trying to recover, but with the world as it is, I'm not sure how feasible a full recovery is. I don't think God or humans are just trinities, although it's not a bad start.

Accident: mind and body (Father Hashem and Son Jesus, or your preference of equivalent subdivisions of the transcendent infinite)

Substance: soul (eyes are the windows, and the soul carries the True Name of the Infinite Self), story we tell ourselves and/or others about who we are (how we transubstantiate accident to substance), and context we live in (both the objective reality of God's world, and the subjective reality we experience as individuals).

I think we finally made it back into the Garden, and I think I've explained why at some point. But Jesus told us that the poor would be with us always, even to the end of time. If we go for full-on communism, either it will be implemented in a corrupt fashion that results in unnecessary suffering, or we will stagnate because there will be no reason to grow and change.

Late-stage capitalism is as least as bad, though. Speculative trading is allowing the Haves to drain the substance of the Have-Nots on an unprecedented scale. I would legitimately have an objectively better social context if I was in medieval times. That doesn't mean I would have a better life; but if I could avoid the four horsemen, I (Eimear, specific individual with complex needs and simple wants) would probably be much happier. At least I would know which parts of the work were mine to complete and which ones I didn't need to worry about abandoning because they were genuinely someone else's responsibility.