APOCALYPTIC LEADERSHIP &

In the secular modern world, where our lives are often commodified, we live largely without a village, without lineage, without an ecosystem, and without cosmovision … isolated and doing our best, we’ve slowly but surely imagined our way into a western, individualist and merit-based picture of Christ.

We’ve in many ways reduced the Chief of this Village to a solitary figure in our minds. The one and only, who in our imaginations achieved great things on his own with and as God. We’ve slowly but surely reduced our perception of a humming continuum of rooted and Indigenous Belonging to the excellent performance of one singular being that we should emulate.

The One Singular Being is not the problem. The One Singular Being is the teaching. But in our grasping and isolated minds, we reduce this to a solitary person and their outstanding efforts.

This is no accident.

At Easter, we are reminded that it was a corrupt government seeking to enforce its power that accused, found guilty, and sentenced a mystical, deeply rooted and Indigenous Essene Nazarene Grand Chief to death.

But what no corrupt government imagines is that even in persecuting the brightest of leaders, they fail entirely to wipe out a lineage.

Lineage is not rooted in one person alone. Nor is it rooted in just a family. Or just a village. Lineage is not only rooted in its people. It is rooted in its landscape. Lineage is rooted in its more-than-human creatures with DNA millions of years older than our own. Lineage is rooted in its rivers, its mountains, its stars. Lineage is an expression of fundamental belonging and inviolable unity with the source of all things and its expression as the cosmos. Including this precious Earth.

Illuminated and Anointed Lineage is as perennial as the grass.

Trying to stamp out Illuminated Lineage is like trying to destroy a dandelion puff. Any disturbance to it causes the seeds to fly off and propagate. In her book The Flowering Wand, Sophie Strand writes about the exhortation to “have faith the size of a mustard seed” so that we can move mountains. She reminds us that the mustard plant, 2000 years ago in Galilea, was a weed. A weed that refused to go away and that multiplied seemingly no matter what you did to it. Illuminated Lineage is like that.

We care about Lineage because it is a River that carries us in all moments that we fear drowning. Lineage grants us all the miracles we hear about in the old stories of our ancestors. Lineage grants us food in the famine, whether it is manna from heaven or multiplying the loaves and the fishes.

Lineage brings us out of exile and back home again and makes the lamp oil last long enough to illuminate our Way. Lineage grants us healing when we are sick, sight when we cannot see, tenacity to wrestle with our resistance, an ability to rise to challenges, and a willingness to be utterly transformed.

Lineage grants us a capacity to convert challenge into blessing. The ability to be guided by stars. To bring forth immense gifts from within ourselves. And ultimately grants us a gateway to Life Everlasting.

It is Lineage that sustains us in times of uncertainty. Lineage that multiples when we seek to stamp it out. We can no more eradicate an illuminated lineage than we can remove stars from the sky.

Jesus and the Essene Nazarenes were persecuted by the Romans of Judea, who sought to overthrow a Prophet who threatened their authority, and insisted on God’s goodness, omnipotence, invincibility, and embodied presence in each and every Living thing.

That same empire, upon failing to stamp out the prophet and its people, decided instead to co-opt, to adopt and to effectively steal Christianity from its roots and employ its rites for its own uses. Not for the glory of Ultimate Reality and its blessings. But for the pursuits of Empire.

To do that, it had to crucify its leader in an attempt to kill him (well that backfired), and try stamp out the Essene Nazarenes, which caused them to flee to all the corners of the earth taking and sharing their teachings with them (so that backfired again). The only thing left to do was to attempt to steal it entirely.

This Roman adoption of the teachings of Christ is the move from rooted, Indigenous Essene Nazarene Christianity, to coopted, stolen, institutionalized and mobilized religious technology for the pursuit of Empire. This is what we call “Christendom”. This is the Weaponization of God.

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It strikes me, each time I sit especially in a Roman Catholic Church, that the obsession with sin is actually correct. Amidst the stunning beauty of the teachings that you can unearth from beneath the ossified rites, there is the nail-scratch-on-the-chalkboard emphasis on how very bad we are.

Here is a church whose Roman beginnings crucified a prophet and Son of God, and committed genocide against his people. And when it failed, it wholesale stole their teachings and employed them for the pursuit of dominance and the expansion of empire. In the process, waging blood baths, holy wars, witch hunts and imperialist campaigns whose echoes continue, to this day, as colonizer governance.

In that context, hair shirts and monks who flog themselves in penance, and a general obsession with unworthiness and a continuous begging for forgiveness seems … nothing short of entirely appropriate.

Thank goodness the stolen and once-persecuted Messiah has forgiveness and the absolution of sin as a core teaching, and rose from the dead to remind them of it.

Of forgiveness this massive, no one is worthy.

But that is the point of God’s mercy upon wretchedness entirely. Perhaps the pouring out of mercy and the washing clean of Empire is the fullest dispensation of the Teaching.

This refusal to die, or the insistence to die and rise again, is celebrated at Easter. And it is the hallmark and signature of Illuminated Indigenous Lineage. Even in the midst of genocide, it rises again to demonstrate the indomitable, inviolable and essential reality of Life Everlasting. The Great Spirit lives through, outside of and beyond death and demonstrates itself in full glory in the midst of cataclysm.

The essential inviolability and everlasting Life Divine, the perfection of the Creation and its inseparability from Spirit REVEALS ITSELF at its loudest, in the midst of cataclysm.

This Revelation of Ultimate and Omnipotent Goodness in the midst of cataclysm is what we call APOCALYPTIC LEADERSHIP.

The word apocalypse is rooted in the ancient Greek word ἀποκάλυψις (apokálupsis, “revelation”). With "apo" being the prefix "un" and "kaluptein" meaning "cover"… Apocalypse means “to Uncover.” Apocalpyse means “To Reveal”. Apocalypse is literally an Act of Revelation.

Most literally, in ancient Greek context, Apocalypse means “to pull the lid off something.” When the Light of God is being stolen and coopted, hidden in a basket, Revelation swoops in and pulls off the lid, letting the Sun and Moon rise again in all their glory, for the blessing and sustenance of all the Creation.

Raven Brings the Light.

Apocalyptic Leadership is not a uniquely Essene Nazarene tradition. It is the gift of Indigenous and llluminated Lineage. To continuously celebrate that God is Risen. That Raven Brings the Light. That Mithras lives on. It is the tradition of Sol Invictus. The tradition of the Unconquerable Sun.

Apocalyptic Leadership is the Illuminated Lineage and blessing of Indigenous Nations that have in their traditions the deep covenant of the Unconquerable Sun.

In the moments when war breaks out, when conquerers invade, when governments seek to enforce their power, when leaders of the Good are persecuted because they pose a threat to the established order, we dare to celebrate.

We dare to celebrate that Life Everlasting is already guaranteed and indelibly written into the fabric of creation. We draw close those who remember this, and we invoke, celebrate and magnify the essential goodness and Deep Reality that persists, no matter what anyone does to it.

Not because we are ignoring the harm. But because we remember what is more powerful than it. And to invoke and celebrate what is more powerful than the harm, is to MOBILIZE the Miraculous Restoration of Life Divine in our Lives and Lineages.

In times of great turbulence, when one Lineage is threatened and fighting for survival, it is the calling and vocation of its fellow lineages to stand in holy alliance with it. To join hands with it, to gather the nations and the clans, and to mobilize together the great grace that is built into and woven through the entire Creation.

This is the Apocalyptic Ancestral Alliance that survives the flood and grows again, the flourishing garden that is our shared divine Inheritance.

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