“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Our Salvation
In Judeo-Christian tradition the scales of Saint Michael the Archangel measure souls for eternity, weighing not only justice and mercy for us but also from us.
In Judeo-Christian tradition the scales of Saint Michael the Archangel measure souls for eternity, weighing not only justice and mercy for us but also from us.
September 27, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae
In September 2010, when this blog was but a year old, I wrote a post that was to become one of the most-read posts of the last decade. I had no idea at the time that it would find readers year after year on six of the seven continents. (Is there no one reading BTSW in Antarctica?) The post was “Angelic Justice: St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.”
The last word of its title, “Hesed,” is a Hebrew term associated with two central tenets of salvation: Mercy and Righteousness. The story that post tells began within these stone walls and brought about a resurgence of interest in this Patron Saint of Justice. Over time, his Angelic Presence — his name means “who is like God” — has developed a seemingly mystical connection with this imprisonment.
This connection began with a simple gesture from a devout young man named Alberto Ramos. Sent to prison at age 14 for murder — a back-alley drug deal gone horribly wrong — Alberto was a psychology student of mine at age 18 in a prison program for college credit. Alberto also lived in the same prison unit as me and Pornchai Moontri. His painfully amazing story was told at Beyond These Stone Walls in “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being.” We will link to that post again at the end of this one, and if you click on it you will see a wonderful photo of Alberto and Pornchai as they are graduating from high school.
A startling thing happened after I wrote it. The mother of the young man who died in that Manchester, NH alley that night read it. Then she agonized over it. Then she had a conversion of heart, something she says she would not have thought possible after years of entrenched bitter resentment toward Alberto. She forgave him, and wrote of her forgiveness in a moving comment on that post. She also decided to try to help him.
Mere words cannot capture the meaning of “Hesed” relative to the Scales of Saint Michael and the weighing of souls, but the mother of that murdered boy attained it as much as any human being can. A conversion of heart that sets aside bitterness to give way to mercy made her righteous in the eyes of the Lord.
Some of the images of Saint Michael with his scales depict Satan, even while subdued under his feet, reaching to tip the scales by stifling our ongoing conversion. The battleground of spiritual warfare is our very soul, and the battle is real. One day Alberto walked into my cell carrying a card with a painting on it. He silently climbed up onto a concrete counter and taped the image above my door. “You need this here,” he said, “and you should never take it down.” It was a startling image depicting this scene from the Apocalypse:
“War broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, the ancient serpent who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world — he was thrown down to Earth and his angels were thrown down with him. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, ‘Now have salvation and power come, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Anointed One, for the accuser of our brothers is cast out, who night and day accused them before God.’”
— Revelation 12:7-10
At the center of the painting was St. Michael the Archangel, sword in one hand and scales in the other, subduing Satan after a fierce battle. I asked Alberto why he thinks I need this. “Because you were falsely accused,” he said, “And you need his protection so you won’t be bitter and never trust anyone again.” Now, almost 14 years later, that image is still above the door of my cell.
Guardian of the Covenant
Sometime later, Alberto was moved to another prison in another state, but I have for years pondered what he said. I did not include his warning about bitterness when I first wrote in “Angelic Justice” of his placing that image above my door. I am not certain why I left it out. But I have come to see that false witness is a powerful tipping of the scales in the measure of souls, and so is succumbing to bitterness. We are far more spiritually vulnerable than most of us realize. It took a long time, but I was finally able to convince both Pornchai and Alberto of a tough lesson I was slow in learning myself. Bitterness is like a toxic brew that we mix for our enemies just to end up drinking it ourselves.
In Jewish tradition, Saint Michael is one of the four angels who stand in the Presence of God. The Book of Daniel (12:1) also identifies Michael as “One who stands beside the sons of your people,” an allusion that he is the guardian of God’s chosen people. His name is mentioned in the Shema, a prayer from Hebrew tradition:
“In the Name of the Lord God of Israel, on my right hand stands Michael, on my left, Gabriel, before me, Uriel, behind me, Raphael, and above me, the Divine Presence of Yahweh.”
Every mention of Michael in the Hebrew Scriptures identifies him as an advocate for Israel and therefore an advocate for the Covenant relationship with God. Advocate in that sense is used in the same manner that someone falsely accused of a crime might describe his defense attorney. And Satan is presented as prosecutor. It is fascinating that in the Book of Revelation, the scene of Satan’s expulsion from heaven by Michael and his angels ends with a declaration: “The accuser of our brethren is cast out.” The offense for which Satan accuses us is something he himself is denied: a hope for salvation. In ancient traditions, Michael defends the righteous in the presence of Yahweh in our final judgment.
Like much of what I write at Beyond These Stone Walls my post, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?”appeared on the professional social media site, Linkedln where it had hundreds of views. I rather like Linkedln even though I have never actually seen it. It’s a little tamer than some other social media platforms where the give and take can become overbearing. And on LinkedIn, you will never have to look at pictures of other people’s cats.
So I was a little surprised when even at the venerable LinkedIn, my rational and factual defense of Cardinal Pell ran into some pointed opposition. One writer who identified himself as “a practicing Catholic” wrote that Cardinal Pell is in prison where he belongs for “abusing children.” Several readers responded that the evidence does not support that claim. In my response, I wrote that his practice of Catholicism needs more practice. And as you know, Cardinal Pell was ultimately exonerated in a unanimous decision of Australia’s highest court.
The abuse crisis in the priesthood is a two-edged sword in seemingly equal measure. It is a story of clerical corruption, but it is by same measure a story of false witness. Clerical corruption has had ample play in the news media, and social media has been no exception. False witness, however, is grossly under-reported.
Also under-reported are the wonderful expressions of Catholic faith by people of real fidelity undaunted by the arena in which scandal plays out on the front page. Father George David Byers sent me a link to a short video of the Eucharistic Congress Procession in the Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina. Wonderful!
The Origin of the Eighth Commandment
From the first signs of Satan’s pursuit of the hearts and souls of humankind, the Covenant conscripts us into Saint Michael’s battle against evil. The separation of light from darkness in the human relationship with God portrays Saint Michael as a warrior tasked with the protection and defense of human souls, and the preservation of the covenant.
Written contracts did not exist in the Hebrew society of our Old Testament. In their place, the spoken word had the authority of a signed contract. A blessing or curse was understood to follow the person to whom it was directed for all of his or her life. Spoken words were thus carefully considered. The parties of a covenant were bound by mutual agreement with serious repercussions for those who violated its terms. God’s covenant with Abraham was seen in Jewish culture as the foundation of our relationship with Yahweh. For that story, see “The Feast of Corpus Christi and the Order of Melchizedek.”
However, the covenant with Israel itself, the covenant that made Israel a people of Yahweh, was the Sinai Covenant in the Book of Exodus (19:1-ff). It made them a people because it set down ethical standards for being a people. The Covenant was set down in the stone tablets of the law, and had the authority of God’s Presence housed in the Ark of the Covenant.
One of these sacred tenets, the Eighth Commandment — “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” — is thought by both Jewish and legal scholars to have an unusual origin: Genesis, Chapter 39. When Joseph was betrayed by his brothers and taken down to Egypt, he was purchased as a slave by Potiphar, a high ranking officer of Pharaoh. In the account in Genesis (39:6-21), Potiphar’s wife repeatedly pursued Joseph but he would not consent. In one episode, she tried to grab his garment, but he fled, tearing off a section of his garment in her hand. She later accused him of sexual assault using the garment as evidence against him.
For this, Joseph was unjustly imprisoned. Alan Dershowitz, a Jewish scholar and Emeritus Professor of Law at Harvard, addressed this in his book, Genesis of Justice (Warner Books, 2000):
“The Ninth Commandment [Eighth in the Christian texts] — “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” — derives directly from Potiphar’s wife bearing false witness against Joseph and Joseph then bearing false witness — even as a pretense — against his brothers. [His brother] Yehuda’s desperate question, ‘How can we clear ourselves?’ is answered by this prohibition and the subsequent procedural safeguards that rest upon this Commandment.”
— Genesis of Justice, p 250
The subsequent procedural safeguards were laid out in the Books of Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus. The accusation of a single witness, without evidence or corroboration, could not result in a conviction. The testimony of a witness who had a financial stake in the outcome of a juridical trial could not be admitted as evidence against the accused. Today’s juridical proceedings have fallen far from these safeguards.
In both its active and passive forms, false witness was seen in the Covenant as a slayer of souls. Safeguards against it were implemented from the earliest days of Salvation History. In its active form, false witness was any testimony not based on absolute truth. In its passive form, it spreads through rumor, innuendo, and judgments based on bias and agendas instead of facts.
The Necessity of Allies in Spiritual Warfare
It is because of the great danger to the soul that false witness poses that Saint Michael the Archangel took up his cosmic role, as described in the passage from the Book of Revelation above, to cast out the false accuser who no longer has a place in heaven.
Hebrew Scripture and tradition was not unique in this concept. Egyptian mythology depicts a rite in the underworld in which the heart of the deceased was weighed on a set of scales against a “truth feather.” If the heart was heavy with falsehood and false witness, it could not pass on to paradise.
The grave effect of false witness on the person accused, on the souls of accusers, and on the Covenant with God is reflected throughout Sacred Scripture as evidenced in just this partial sampling of passages:
Exodus 20:16 “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
Exodus 23 1-2 “You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with the wicked to act as a malicious witness. You shall not follow a majority in wrongdoing to bear witness in a lawsuit.”
Exodus 23:6-7 “You shall not pervert justice. Keep far from a false charge. Do not kill the innocent or those in the right for I will not acquit the guilty.”
Deuteronomy 5:20 “Neither will you bear false witness against your neighbor.”
Deuteronomy 19:18 “If the witness is a false witness, having testified falsely against another, then [the judge] shall do to that witness what he intended to do to the other. So shall you purge the evil from your midst.”
Psalm 27:12 [This is one many priests could plea to their bishops] “Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries, for false witnesses have risen up against me.”
Proverbs 6:16-19 “There are six things that the Lord abhors: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, a hand that sheds innocent blood, a heart that plots wicked plans, a lying witness who testifies falsely, and one who sows discord in a family.”
Proverbs 19:20 “A false witness will not go unpunished.”
Proverbs 25:18 “Like a war club, a sword, or a sharp arrow is one who bears false witness against a neighbor.”
This list of excerpts from the Word of the Lord could go on for pages. We live in an age of falsehood, a time when the rule of law is collapsing under the weight of political correctness, identity politics, expediency, and moral relativism. These will spell the ruin of both souls and society.
This is why we have allies in spiritual warfare behind and beyond these stone walls, and we are more than willing to share them with you. They include Mary, Mother of God, whose heart was wounded by seven swords; Saint Maximilian Kolbe, wrongly imprisoned under an evil regime, who gave his life for another; Saint Padre Pio, falsely accused, suspended from priestly ministry, even while openly bearing the wounds of Christ.
And Saint Michael the Archangel who prevailed when “the accuser of our brothers was cast out who night and day accused them before God.” (Revelation 12:10) False witness, sans repentance, is a path to spiritual ruin for eternity.
Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do you, O Prince of the Heavenly Host, cast into hell Satan, and all evil spirits who prowl about this world seeking the ruin of souls.
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: You may also like these related posts :
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POSTSCRIPT
As indicated in this post, my friend Alberto Ramos was sent to another prison about six years ago. While I was writing this post he was returned to the New Hampshire prison to prepare for his coming release after 30 years “inside.” At his earliest opportunity, he came to the prison law library where I am the clerk. His smile was visible in Heaven. As he took my hand in his firm grip he asked three rapid-fire questions: “How are you?, Where is Pornchai? Is Saint Michael still above your door?”
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
Divine Mercy in a Time of Spiritual Warfare
In the 1970s, Fr. Seraphim Michalenko smuggled the Diary of St. Faustina out of Communist-occupied Poland. Forty years later he smuggled Divine Mercy into a prison.
In the 1970s, Fr. Seraphim Michalenko smuggled the Diary of St. Faustina out of Communist-occupied Poland. Forty years later he smuggled Divine Mercy into a prison.
April 20, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
In a 2022 post, “The Annunciation and the Consecration of Russia and Ukraine,” I wrote about an old and dear friend, Fr. Tony Nuccio, a priest who became my surrogate father at a time when I most needed one. I was 16 then, and lost. When I was 18, two years after I commenced the practice of my renewed faith, Father Tony brought the Cursillo movement to our parish. I was invited, but I did not want to go. When I finally caved in, I did as he asked: “Participate. Don’t anticipate.” But it wasn’t easy. I was 18, and I already knew everything!
A year later, at 19, I was asked by Father Tony to be a team member for a subsequent Cursillo weekend, and to present a talk — called a “Rollo” (pronounced “Roy-o”) in the Spanish language of Cursillo. Father Tony knew exactly what he was doing. The Rollo he assigned me to present was entitled “Obstacles to Grace.” I was, of course, terrified, believing that I had no frame of reference for such a topic. Father Tony laughed and said, “Trust me on this. You’re an expert in the field.”
He was right about that. Trust itself — or actually its almost total absence — was always the source of my expertise. Trusting others, trusting life, trusting faith, trusting God were the great challenges of my youth. There I was fifty years ago in 1972, a 19-year-old kid already battered by life instructing a group of adult Catholic men about obstacles to grace and how to overcome them. My own words were meager, but in preparing the Rollo, I stumbled upon a passage from Saint John Henry Newman.
I cannot recall how or where I found it, but the passage struck me as one of life's Essential Truths then and still does today. For my entire life since, I have been both challenged and guided by this passage. I committed it to memory a half century ago and it is still there:
“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good;
I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments. Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever, wherever I am. I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.”
— Saint John Henry Newman
Behold Your Son! Behold Your Mother!
Over the course of the last dozen years of writing from prison, several readers have sent me that same passage. They say that it reminds them of what happened in my life, and in Pornchai Moontri’s life as well. I believe, and many believe, that I have found the work that God has committed to me alone, a work He has committed to no one else. All the rest of the passage is simply about trust. This passage goes to the heart of Divine Mercy, and at age 19 I surrendered to it without ever even hearing the term. My natural inclination was to resist, but resistance was futile!
I know today that just about the time I was discovering the above passage from Saint John Henry Newman in 1972, Marian Father Seraphim Michalenko was in Communist-occupied Poland. While there he devoted his life to the cause of Divine Mercy and bravely smuggled the Diary of Saint Faustina — the Manifesto of Divine Mercy — to bring it to the free world. Divine Mercy would one day become for me the framework of my existence as a man, as a priest, as a prisoner.
Father Seraphim was appointed by the Vatican to be Vice-Postulator for the cause of canonization of Saint Faustina. Internationally known as an expert on her life and famous Diary, he became the catalyst for publishing it and documenting the miracles that became the basis for Faustina’s beatification and canonization. Pope Benedict XVI called Divine Mercy “the nucleus of the Gospel.”
Four years before his death in 2021, Father Seraphim was brought to this prison for a Mass. After Mass in the prison chapel, Pornchai Moontri and I were both asked to remain because Father Seraphim wanted to speak with us. I had no idea what to expect. We both knew about him but had no idea how he knew about us. Pornchai was anxious. “I don’t know what to say,” he whispered. When Father Seraphim approached, he asked to speak with Pornchai first. Fifteen minutes later, a smiling Pornchai told me that I am next.
As Father Seraphim and I spoke, he asked about our connection with St. Maximilian Kolbe, how he entered our lives, and how we came to Divine Mercy. So I told him of my lifelong regard for the passage above from St. John Henry Newman and of how it has guided me. I remember saying that I am not certain of the “definite service” God has committed to me that He has committed to no one else. Father Seraphim leaned a little closer to me and said with quiet certainty “He is standing right over there.”
I want to emphasize this lest anyone think that it was me at the center of God’s attention in this story. It was never me. For some reason, the entire Divine Mercy apostolate in North America took up an interest in the life of Pornchai Moontri and committed him to the care of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is easy to scoff a bit at such a thought, but I first discovered it to be true when Marian Helper magazine published “Mary Is at Work Here” in 2014. The article, by Marian Helper editor Felix Carroll, included this startling passage that I have written about before:
“The Marians believe that Mary chose this particular group to be the first [invited to Marian Consecration]. That reason eventually was revealed. It turns out that one of the participating inmates was Pornchai Moontri who was featured in last year’s Marian Press title, Loved, Lost, Found: 17 Divine Mercy Conversions... As [the book] reveals, Pornchai experienced a dramatic conversion several years ago in no small part due to a friendship formed with fellow inmate — and now cellmate — Fr. Gordon MacRae who chronicles their lives in his celebrated website. [Beyond] These Stone Walls has gained widespread public support for their cause, including from the late Cardinal Avery Dulles. Father Gordon joined Pornchai in the Consecration and called it ‘a great spiritual gift’ that opened a door to the rebirth of trust during a dark time for both men. Great suffering requires great trust.”
— Marian Helper, Spring 2014
Our Marian Consecration was the culmination of a 33 Days to Morning Glory retreat based on the book of the same title by Father Michael Gaitley, MIC. “Behold Your Son! Behold Your Mother!” That is the title that the Marians of the Immaculate Conception gave to an article of mine about how Divine Mercy entered our lives behind these prison walls. It began as a pair of December 2013 posts that were later combined into a single narrative by Marian Helper editor Felix Carroll for posting at the site of the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy. Felix said that this article “lit up our website as never before.”
As Spiritual Battle Rages
What happens to Divine Mercy when life begins to descend — as it does for many right now — into the discouragement and trials of spiritual battle when evil has the appearance of coming out on top? The rest of this story takes up the latter part of the passage quoted above by St. John Henry Newman: “He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about."
Sadness is not always a negative state of mind only to be avoided. Sometimes, we should just allow ourselves to become immersed in it. Imagine the tragedy of going through life without ever loving another human being whom you will one day miss with great sadness. Imagine never caring about someone else enough that absence leaves you in pain.
I had been in prison for 26 years on September 23, 2020. That month was among the saddest of my life, and yet the sadness was necessary and in the end, even welcomed. For the previous 15 years, every sign told me that I am powerless to do anything about my own unjust imprisonment, so I worked hard to become a catalyst of liberty for another. I wrote of that September day of desolate losses in a special tribute to a Patron Saint in “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.”
America was caught up in a torrent of grief and chaos then. The global pandemic made its way out of China and wreaked havoc in places like the one where I live. In an over-crowded prison, social distancing was impossible. The only step that could be taken to ward off a disaster was to shut everything down and lock everyone up. There is no protection from a pandemic in a place where 24 grown men share two toilets and two sinks. And when 12 of them are sick, there is nowhere to hide.
Meanwhile, at the height of the pandemic across the land, mobs of protesters became unhinged as the death of George Floyd at the hands of police played out ad infinitum on the news. Cities were ablaze with violence while the news media told us these were just peaceful protests. News media and government officials (and even some bishops) claimed that our churches posed a high risk for contagion while mobs of looting protesters, an even greater mobs amassed at the southern border, posed no risk at all.
The pandemic and all the social chaos could not have come at a worse time for me in those awful months leading up to “The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri.” I made that a link for those newer readers who may not already know of this story. Because of the pandemic, what should have been for Pornchai a few weeks in ICE detention awaiting deportation to his native Thailand — which is always a grueling experience — turned into five months. I am not sure who was suffering more from the ordeal, Pornchai or me.
I knew from experience that without help he could be easily lost in the ICE system so I worked from inside a 60-square foot prison cell in New Hampshire to coordinate a small team of advocates in the U.S., Thailand, and Australia to help guide Pornchai from a distance through the ICE minefield.
But the grief and losses I encountered were still not complete. Spiritual warfare chose that moment — from September to November of 2020 — to try to silence my voice. Father George David Byers, who had been helping me to post what I write, began to notice that at the very time my life was preoccupied with Pornchai’s departure, some of the content on These Stone Walls began to disappear. By the end of October 2020, a decision had to be made to take These Stone Walls down. Eleven years of writing and nearly 600 posts were simply gone. And so was my friend, into a cauldron of misery. We were both stranded and alone in our grief. But not for long.
Allies in Spiritual Battle
Living in a hellish environment with 70 men to a room in round-the-clock torment in a for-profit ICE facility in Louisiana, Pornchai was able to get out only one ten minute phone call each day. But he and I could not call each other. It was clear to me that he could not cope with this alone for five months, so one of our friends and helpers, Claire Dion in Maine, devised a way to help us both.
Though we could not call each other, Claire suggested that at a pre-set time each day, Pornchai and I could both call her on two different cell numbers, then she would put the phones together. It was not ideal, but it worked and it saved the day every day for five months. There were times when Pornchai met the limit of his endurance, but that simple reassuring 10-minute daily call renewed his trust in Divine Mercy, and mine.
That’s our friend, Claire, and her ingenious phone rescue pictured above. But my spiritual battles of the fall were just getting started. Soon after Pornchai left, I became miserably ill with Covid. There was no treatment so I just toughed it out for three weeks in October along with all the others in my living area. Our housing unit was quarantined, but that only meant temperature checks twice a day while locked in with our misery.
Then I received a handwritten letter from a stranger in New York who had stumbled upon this blog. Four years earlier, Father Seraphim told me that my mission is to be like that of St. Joseph in Pornchai’s life. In the very week These Stone Walls came down, the stranger’s letter told me that she found a post of mine about St. Joseph and was very moved by it. With a Ph.D. in computer science, she was well placed to understand what took place in the cyberspace at work against us. To my awesome surprise, I learned that she had quietly uploaded to her own server all 600 past posts and all the other content of this site just before it was all taken down. I thought everything was lost only to find out nothing was lost.
The new publisher volunteered to reconstruct the site on a new platform with a new name — Beyond These Stone Walls. This was happening in the final months of 2020 while we simultaneously struggled to overcome the obstacles of a global pandemic and ICE indifference to return Pornchai home. [He has been in Thailand for a year now, and I wrote of that year in “Pornchai Moontri: A Night in Bangkok, A Year in Freedom.”]
We still speak daily. I deeply appreciate the support of friends and readers that makes that possible — that made all of this possible. Despite hardship and pain, the great adventure of Divine Mercy has won this day, and has won these lives.
God knows what He is about.
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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: That “definite service” that God has committed to me did not end with Pornchai’s departure last year. Please consider helping me to help him and Father John Le, SVD in their ongoing missions of Divine Mercy. See Part Two of our Special Events Page to find out how.
To join Pornchai Moontri and me in the Association of Marian Helpers, call the Marian Helpers Center at the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy at 1-800-462-7426.
Just a day before I wrote this post, Pornchai was invited to tour the Fr. Ray Foundation School in Pattaya, Thailand. At three sites in Thailand, The Father Ray Foundation provides a home and education for 850 underpriviledged and special needs Thai children. Our friends Father John Le, Pornchai’s Thai tutor, Chalathip, and Divine Mercy Thailand founder, Yela Smit, went with him. They sent photos!
Michael, Gabriel, Raphael: Allies in Spiritual Battle
On September 29, the Church honors the three named angels of Sacred Scripture, the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, and on October 2, our Guardian Angels.
On September 29, the Church honors the three named angels of Sacred Scripture, the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, and on October 2, our Guardian Angels.
September 29, 2021
“Because you have made the Lord your refuge, the Most High your dwelling place, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent. For He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.”
— Psalm 91:9-11
The September issue of “Give Us This Day,” a monthly prayer and liturgy guide for Catholics published by Liturgical Press, has a small tribute to the great Japanese novelist, Shusaku Endo. He died on the Feast of Michaelmas, September 29, 1996, at the age of 73.
Shusaku Endo was a Catholic convert best known for his acclaimed novel, Silence, which I read in my early years in prison. It had an enormous impact on me. It is a small book, about 200 pages, first published in Japanese in 1969. The focus of much of Endo’s writing reflects his struggles, as a translator described it, “with the anguish of faith and the mercy of God.”
I read it at a time when I, too, was struggling with both. It is sometimes less of a struggle, and therefore a temptation, to simply not believe. There is a scene in this powerful book that left me spellbound. The story is about a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Father Sebastian Rodrigues, who entered Japan in the 16th Century at the height of Christian persecution at the hands of the Shogun. That is the Japanese name for the military dictatorship ruling Japan from 1192 to 1867. The name is a contraction of the Japanese, “seii tai shogun” (“barbarian-hunting warriors”)
Father Rodrigues was among the “barbarians” hunted by the Shogun military, the samurai, under a constant threat of public torture and death. The scene that made me shudder most was a description of how Father Rodrigues entered Japan. Foreign ships were barred from its ports so the ship that bore him secretly approached a remote part of the 16th Century Japanese coast in the dark of night. The priest swam to shore in the pitch blackness with nothing but the clothes on his back and no idea of where, or to whom, he would go. The fear of the dark unknown and the courage it took to overcome it was vivid and staggering.
Darkness is itself a character in this highly symbolic book. Father Rodrigues spent a good deal of time in a brutal Shogun prison in a constant state of darkness and near starvation. At one point, in an intense scene of fear and despair, he asked — and it is from this that the book takes its title — “Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent?”
I have asked that same question many times in the dark of prison. For the character of Father Rodrigues, however, the silence of God was finally broken. He was tortured by the Shogun in order to force him into publicly trampling on the “fumie,” the Japanese term for a sacred icon. It was a crucifix. Despite the torture, Father Rodrigues refused and endured. Then he was forced to watch while 30 Christian converts were lined up one by one to take his place for torture unless he trampled on the crucifix. An inner voice came to him:
“Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know the pain of your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross!”
— Silence, p.171
Father Rodrigues trampled upon the crucifix.
Spiritual Battle
Upon first reading, that excerpt may seem a betrayal. However, digging a little deeper into the words that came to the priest unveils a profound soteriology, the theology of salvation. The priest bore his own suffering, but by his actions he redirected the suffering destined for his converts onto Christ. “It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”
I was surprised to learn that Shusaku Endo left this life leaving behind the life of his fictional tormented priest, Sebastian Rodrigues — on the Feast of Michaelmas. That was the old English name for the feast day of what was once called Saint Michael and All Angels on September 29. In the Catholic calendar it is now the Feast Day of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, the only angels in the Bible whose personal names are revealed.
The September 29 date was established in the Sixth Century when on that same date the Church of Saint Michael and All Angels was dedicated on the Salarian Way in Rome. The feast day was called “Michaelmas,” meaning “the Mass of St. Michael.” In British custom, it was one of the “quarter days,” traditionally marked by the election of magistrates and the beginning of the legal and university terms. This may have been because — or the cause of — the designation of Saint Michael as the Patron of Justice.
It was on another date — the feast day of the Guardian Angels on October 2 — that I discovered in prison that the silence of God is but an illusion. God has spoken volumes throughout all of human history, and His megaphones are Scripture, Tradition, and the ongoing revelation of grace in our lives. Justice is also not just an elusive and singular event, but a cosmic guarantee, and Saint Michael is its manifestation.
This is a difficult concept that I will try to convey to whatever extent I understand it myself. Scripture suggests to us that the conflicts we face and the struggles we endure in our lives on Earth have an unseen spiritual dimension. The Catholic Biblical scholar, Scott Hahn expressed this in his terrific little book, Angels and Saints: A Biblical Guide to Friendship with God's Holy Ones (Image Books, 2014):
“St. Michael is mighty among the angels. The Book of Revelation (12:7ff) depicts him as the commander of the heavenly host of angels as they battle Satan and the rebellious spirits .... We know how the battle ends, and we know Michael is victorious (12:10). Still, the war will rage on until the final consummation of history.”
— Angels and Saints, p. 84
From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have invoked Michael as a guardian, patron, and leader in spiritual warfare. Our troubles and struggles in this world are not always simple anxieties over material discomforts, painful relationships, or the tragedies that occur in our lives. They are also manifestations of spiritual battle, and should be seen and resisted as such. People of deep faith recognize the spiritual battles within themselves and their environments, and rely on faith and spiritual allies to defend against them.
I have suggested before that priests especially are targets of spiritual warfare, inundated by constant temptation in a culture locked in spiritual combat between Heaven and hell. I have cited a Holy Week post of mine that exemplifies the most active goal of Satan: to prevent our reception of the Eucharist and undermine its truth. Every time I write about this, it is followed by days or weeks of spiritual struggle and painful events all around me. This is clearly a story “someone” does not want exposed. The post in which I first exposed this is “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light.”
The Art of War Requires Allies
For 23 years, I had been living in the Hancock Building in this prison complex. For the first six, though I had done nothing to warrant it, I was forced to live in a place with eight men per cell. Words cannot express the assault on the psyche and spirit that life in such a constant environment produced. Just about everyone living there was given an opportunity to move to better housing within a year. I was there for six years.
In that same six years, my friend, Pornchai Moontri, was in the neighboring state of Maine living in the spiritual madness of endless solitary confinement. We lived with polar opposite prison anxieties, and each was in its own way devastating.
In 2000, I was finally moved to a saner place with two prisoners per cell. In 2006, Pornchai Moontri arrived. For the next 15 years we lived in the same cell. Then, in 2016, both of us, along with 94 others, were forced in a mass migration back into the place with eight prisoners to a cell. It was because of a development in the prison that had nothing to do with us. We were promised a return to a better housing situation in a matter of weeks. One year later, we were still there.
In mid-July, 2017, I was summoned from my job as the legal clerk in the prison law library and handed a few trash bags. After 23 years in the dreaded Hancock Building, I was given one hour to unravel from it and move to another unit on the opposite end of this prison complex. I was told that Pornchai would be joining me there on the next day. After my arrival, another officer told me that Pornchai was supposed to come with me, but some unseen hand changed that order and he was to be sent somewhere else.
The next day, from a top floor stairwell outside the law library where I work, I saw Pornchai in the distance looking forlorn as he wheeled a cart in the opposite direction from where I now lived. I thought I would never see him again. It was a crushing blow for us both. I knew he would be facing deportation in a few years and now would face it alone. I cannot make sense of what happened next.
The outcome of this spiritual battle was stunning, but became so only when I sought help from our allies in spiritual warfare. I knew in my heart that I was called to bring some justice and hope to the burdens Pornchai carried. I described them in “Pornchai Moontri and the Long Road to Freedom.” Three weeks after our parting, I returned from work one day to find the person living in the bunk above me gone, and in his place was Pornchai Moontri. This never happens here. We were shocked, perplexed and overjoyed.
There were later signs that our allies summoned other allies behind the scenes who had come to know of us. On the day we were reunited, they were in just the right place at just the right time saying just the right things to just the right people. It was the most unlikely symphony of actual grace. Incredible!
This computer generated image depicts the constellation Triangulum and galaxy RD1, 12.2 light-years billion from Earth, formed in the early period of the Universe after the Big Bang.
3:00 AM in a Dark Prison Cell
I’m sorry if this gets a little weird. Just before all these clouds gathered on the horizon and our chaotic upheavals took place, I had a mysterious dream. It was early in the morning of October 2, 2016, the day the Church honors our Guardian Angels. Had I ever really believed in them? I do now.
I found myself at 3:00 AM standing and staring into a small stretch of sky that I could see beyond my barred cell window. There was an older man standing with me. I could see Pornchai fast asleep in his upper bunk. The older man was very familiar and someone I felt I implicitly trusted, but I cannot remember what he looked like. That part of the dream was erased when I awakened. He pointed to the sky and asked, “What do you see?”
I said, “I only see the prison lights.” “Look beyond the prison lights,” said the mysterious man. Then in the dream my vision suddenly changed. I was able to see far, far away into the vast darkness, and there in the center of my field of view I saw a constellation, a triangle of three stars. Within the triangle, the stars were joined by streams of glowing light. “It looks like neon,” I said stupidly in the dream. Then the companion said, “Michael dwells within the light.”
It seemed that I stood for a long time, mesmerized by this vision. Then I awakened in my bunk. It was very dark. I got up and walked to the window wondering whether it was a dream or real. I saw only prison lights, but I have since learned to look beyond them. I could not forget the simple statement that “Michael dwells within the light.” Later that morning, I called a friend to search an astronomy database to see if such a triangular constellation even exists. This was what was sent to me:
1998 — The Most Distant Object Yet Discovered: Astronomers have stumbled upon the most distant galaxy ever found, an object 12.2 billion light-years from Earth. It was announced on March 12, 1998. A light-year is the distance that light travels in a year. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. So a light-year is a distance of 5.6 trillion miles. The distance of this object in miles is that times 12.2 billion. [Good luck with the math!]
A team of scientists led by astrophysicist Arjun Dey of John Hopkins University, was analyzing the light from a distant galaxy inside the Constellation Triangulum when they noticed the spectral signature of a faint and far more distant galaxy at its center. By taking longer exposures with the Keck-II telescope they were able to identify the new galaxy which is 90 million light-years farther away than the previous most distant galaxy discovered.
Based on knowledge that the universe is approximately 13 billion years old, “RD1” was formed soon after the Big Bang gave birth to the universe. By studying it, astronomers hope to learn how and when the earliest galaxies formed. Little is currently known about these early galaxies. A report on the discovery was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
This, of course, rocked my world. You might recall from our recent post, “Fr. Georges Lemaitre, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang,” by priest and physicist Father Andrew Pinsent, that the Church and science are on the same page about the origin of the Universe in an instant, “out of nothing.”
In the Fifth Century, Saint Augustine proposed that in the Genesis story of creation, God’s declaration of “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) was the moment the angels were created. In the next verse (Genesis 1:4), God separated the light from the darkness. For Augustine, this was the moment the fallen angels were driven from Heaven by Saint Michael in the battle of the Heavenly Hosts.
This all left me with a profound sense that our stories are not just our own, nor are our struggles or pain. We are a collective part of an immense fabric God has woven toward a specific end. And we have allies who connect with us within the threads. I have written about three of them who now appear together in our BTSW Library under the Category, “Spiritual Warfare.” I also link to them here.
Angelic Justice: St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed
St Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us
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Most glorious prince of the heavenly armies, Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in our battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness. Corne to the assistance of us whom God has created to His likeness, and whom He has redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil. Holy Church venerates you as her guardian and protector. To you the Lord has entrusted the souls of the redeemed to be led into heaven. Pray therefore the God of peace to crush Satan beneath our feet, that he may no longer hold us captive and do injury to the Church. Offer our prayers to the Most High, that without delay they may draw His mercy down upon us. Take hold of the dragon, the ancient serpent which is the devil and Satan. Bind him and cast him into the abyss so that he may no longer seduce the nations.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, we beseech you to intercede for us at the throne of Divine Mercy. As you announced the mystery of the Incarnation to Mary, so through your prayers may we receive strength of faith and courage of spirit and thus find favor with God and redemption through Christ our Lord. May we sing with the angels and saints in Heaven forever the praise of God our Savior through your Annunciation: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”
O Raphael the Archangel, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us. Raphael, Angel of happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those we are looking for. May all our movements be guided by your light and transfigured with your joy. Angel, guide of Tobias, lay the request we now address to you at the feet of Hirn whose unveiled face you are privileged to gaze. Lonely and tired, crushed in spirit by the separations and sorrows of life, we feel the need of calling to you and pleading for the protection of your wings so we may not be as strangers in the province of joy. Remember the weak, you who are so strong, you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder in a land that is always at peace, bright with the resplendent glory of God.
Qumran: The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coming Apocalypse
The community of believers that left behind the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran awaited an apocalyptic battle between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.
The Angel Michael Binding Satan (“He Cast him into the Bottomless Pit, and Shut him up”), 1805 drawing by William Blake.
The community of believers that left behind the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran awaited an apocalyptic battle between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.
My annual Holy Week post this year was somewhat unusual. It profiled an announcement from the government of Israel about a new archeological discovery in the general region of Qumran in modern day Jordan. The discovery includes 2,000 year-old remains of the Bar Kochba rebellion against the Roman occupation of Jerusalem about 100 years after the Crucifixion of Jesus. My post was, “The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage.”
It told the story of Bar Kochba and a revolt by residents of Jerusalem against the secular suppression of their religious beliefs by Roman Emperor Hadrian in the Second Century AD. The story has many parallels with current events and especially with the growing “cancel culture” disdain for Catholics, our faith, and our public witness of that faith.
Several readers have since asked me to write about the Dead Sea Scrolls, their place in Salvation History, and their connection to Sacred Scripture. Understanding the mindset of those who created and left behind the Dead Sea Scrolls can inspire and empower our own struggle against forces in our own time seeking to eradicate and silence our religious convictions.
First, a little geography. It’s ironic that I am typing this post on my 68th birthday. In the 16 years Pornchai Moontri was here with me, he organized an annual birthday acknowledgment among prisoners I knew. Part of its ritual was the unveiling of a birthday card by a local inmate-artist. The cards were always insulting, but hilarious. One of them declared, “When Father G was born, the Dead Sea was only sick!” One of the other cards was about Latin being my first language. Hmmph!
Anyway, regarding the Dead Sea, Pornchai was not so far off the mark, but its geography is very interesting. It is the lowest inland body of water on Earth. Its surface is 1,290 feet below sea level, and it reaches a depth of 1,300 feet. It is fed by the Jordan River and several smaller streams. The Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18) have long been thought to lie under the waters of the Dead Sea’s southern end.
The term, “Dead Sea” is mentioned nowhere in Scripture. It was known as the Salt Sea in Genesis (14:3) and Deuteronomy (3:37). The Prophet Ezekiel called it the Eastern Sea. The Roman historian Josephus called it the Asphalt Sea. Owing to evaporation, its salt concentration is the highest of any body of water on Earth. Neither animal nor plant life can live in it or around it. But in Biblical times in the valley created by the Dead Sea, there were several settlements such as Qumran and Masada.
In 1947, quite by accident, scrolls were discovered in ancient jars in a cave near the Dead Sea by two nomadic Bedouin shepherds who sold them to antiquities dealers. The writings made their way to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To the amazement of the Judeo-Christian world, the scrolls contained intact Hebrew and Aramaic books of the Bible composed between 250 BC and 70 AD, the latter being the date of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple mentioned in my post linked above.
In 1956, multiple excavations in multiple caves at the site yielded some 800 manuscripts containing complete scrolls and thousands of fragments of virtually every book of the Hebrew Bible. Some ancient apocryphal and Deuterocanonical texts were also discovered and I will write more about these below. A decades-long scholarly translation of the discoveries was set in motion. One of the translators was my late uncle, Jesuit Father George W. MacRae, a renowned Biblical scholar and expert in ancient Semitic languages and texts at Harvard University and the Institute Biblique in Jerusalem.
The Essenes: The Community behind the Scrolls
After decades of excavation and historical analysis, scholars have settled on the identity and origin of the group that created and preserved the scrolls. They arose in the years after the Maccabean Revolt in 167 BC. Hellenism — Greek civilization — spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean region after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Jerusalem, the center of Jewish thought, culture and religion, experienced a wave similar to the progressive “cancel culture” movement of today. The elite among the aristocracy of Jerusalem fostered a strong movement toward Hellenism, and the replacement of Judaism with Greek traditions.
The majority of the Jews in Jerusalem were conservative and resisted this movement. Most, however, did not have the voice and the influence of the left-leaning liberal elite. Signs of rebellion and civil unrest gave the newly installed king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, the excuse he needed to suppress conservative thought and practices among the Jews. He did this by demoralizing them. In 168 BC, his army plundered the Temple and its treasury. They suppressed Jewish worship and the sacred Books of the Law, the Torah.
The final straw came with the “Abomination of Desolation” as described in the Book of Daniel (9:27). Antiochus took the Temple, removed the Torah, and replaced it with an altar to the mythological Greek god, Zeus. This triggered a revolution by Judas Maccabeas and his family which became the central story of the First Book of Maccabees. In 165 BC, the Maccabees led by Judas forcefully retook the Temple, deposed the statue of Zeus, and restored the sanctuary. They held it for eight days while awaiting reinforcements. This is the origin of the Jewish Festival of Hanukkah.
The two predominant religious sects in Jerusalem at that time, the Pharisees and Sadducees, were both tolerant at best, and at worst accommodating, to the Hellenist conquerors just as they would be to Caesar nearly two centuries later. I wrote of their plot in “The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’ .”
To those who have been paying attention to recent trends in our own time and culture, this should all have a ring of the familiar. Just as with the revolt of the Maccabees, resistance is not at all futile. So resist — with fidelity as your sword and Divine Mercy as your shield — the Abomination of Desolation that is being handed to us by the “woke” elite around us. Many have the spiritual depth of mud puddles.
Sorry for the editorial. By 150 BC, the accommodations of the Pharisees and Sadducees toward the wave of Hellenistic culture resulted in the emergence of a third religious identity in Israel, that of the mysterious Essenes. Jews returning from exile in Babylon heard of the successful revolt of the Maccabees and were inspired by it. Their communal reaction was to focus on fidelity to the Covenant. They came to be known by history as Essenes — Hebrew for “Pious Ones.”
The Essenes are not mentioned by name in Sacred Scripture. This was possibly due to the quiet and secret nature of their rebellion. The historian, Pliny the Elder, mentions them as having emerged as a community on the Western shore of the Dead Sea at a place that, by his description, could be none other than Khirbet Qumran. Philo and Josephus, two other historians of the period, describe the Essenes in more detail and their descriptions correspond seamlessly to what is now known of the record they left behind: the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Dead Sea Hosts a Living Faith
The Essenes lived as a structured community believing that over Israel’s entire history, God had prepared for this Community of the New Covenant. The Prophet Habakkuk wrote in this same period that for all those who observe the Law among the Jews, God will deliver from judgment because of their suffering and because of their faith in a Holy One. Habukkuk identifies their time as the final time, but now prolonged according to the mysterious plan of God. This was also a time when expectations of a Messiah and life beyond death became prominent themes in Israel.
In the decades after the Maccabean revolt that restored the Jerusalem Temple after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes, the concept of an apocalypse spread widely throughout Judaism. The prophetic witness of the Book of Daniel, composed at about the same time the Essenes formed, was highly influential. This influence continued well into the early Christian era.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls brought to light the existence of the Essene sect whose way of life was heavily influenced by apocalyptic ideas as a reaction to what they saw as the secular infringement upon their Jewish, and later Jewish-Christian, faith. These ideas included an emphasis on exploration of the heavenly mysteries and a sense of participation in the angelic realm. Their commitment to fidelity and a community of faith was to prepare them for an epic final battle between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness — a battle that raged in both the spiritual realm and the Earthly one.
The Essenes had an influence that reflected far beyond their separatist community hidden for twenty centuries in Qumran on the Western shore of the Dead Sea. Their emphasis on apocalyptic ideas came to be widely accepted. This included a belief in resurrection from the dead and eternal life, a belief that was embraced by the Pharisees and gradually entered the mainstream of Jewish faith by the time of Jesus. The argument could be made that this development was in preparation for the time of Jesus.
It is now widely believed among scholars that the Essenes had a connection with John the Baptist. In the Dead Sea Scrolls about their own community, they described themselves in words identical to those ascribed to John the Baptist in each of the Gospels (see Luke 4:18-19). Both were citing Isaiah 40:3, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
It also appears that the Essenes had an influence on the Gospel of John, the last of the four to come into written form around 90 AD. It was once believed that this Gospel was heavily influenced by Hellenistic philosophical ideas. The Dead Sea Scrolls made clear that John’s Gospel is solidly rooted in Jewish thought and traditions faithful to the Covenant, the Law and the Prophets.
The apocalyptic traditions of the Essenes were also influenced by the Book of Enoch, a Second Century BC work considered by Jewish scholars as a Deuterocanonical text. “Deuterocanonical” is a Scriptural term derived from Greek meaning “Secondary Canon.” Enoch and some other books considered to be deuterocanonical were accepted in the Jewish Canon of Scripture well into the time of Jesus until about 90 AD. After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple — a cataclysmic event for Judaism and one predicted by Jesus — the apocalyptic ideas of Enoch diminished.
Michael Contends With the Devil
Other books considered to be outside the Canon of Hebrew Scripture but later accepted in the Catholic Canon were Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, First and Second Maccabees, and the Book of Tobit which was analyzed here recently in “Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri.”
The Book of Enoch is especially interesting because it had a wide influence on the Essenes — and therefore is also prominent among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Enoch also had an influence on some early Christian writings of Jude, Barnabas, and Irenaeus. Among the Christian Patriarchs, Tertullian regarded it as Scripture while Augustine and Jerome saw it as apocryphal, but influential. In the New Testament Letter of Jude (Jude 9) the Apostle refers to a story that appeared nowhere else but the apocryphal book, The Assumption of Moses, and in references in the Book of Enoch. He wrote as though this account was highly familiar to both Jews and Jewish Christians:
“When the Archangel Michael, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him [which would have been the purview only of God] but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you.’”
The Letter of Jude included a reference to this story from an apocryphal book without explanation. This implies that the story was well known among the Jews of this period. In the story, Moses died in the desert without ever entering the Promised Land. Satan tried to take the body of Moses but the Archangel Michael fought him and won. Michael then escorted the physical body of Moses to Heaven. In the Hebrew Scriptures, only one other human being was taken into Heaven for eternity. It was Elijah. It is for this very reason that Moses and Elijah could appear with Jesus in the Gospel account of the Transfiguration (see Luke 9:28ff) where they represent the Law and the Prophets, the two pillars of Jewish tradition.
It is possible that the Essenes latched upon the Book of Enoch to preserve it. Though composed in their time (the Second Century BC) it is named for the Enoch of Genesis, father of Methuselah. Here is the Genesis account of Enoch: At the age of 65,
“Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years ... thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him.”
Enoch appears, by adoption through the line of Joseph, in the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 3:37).
It was not lost on the writers of the Book of Enoch — or on the Essenes — that the number of his years was also the number of days in a single year. The Book of Enoch explores the Genesis reference to Enoch being taken bodily into heaven for 300 years, and is filled with visions of the cosmos, of angelic tours of the heavenly realm, of the abode of the dead awaiting redemption, and of a pre-existent Son of Man. It is likely that the Essenes sought to preserve it because it was Israel’s first example of a developed apocalyptic faith and the expectation of resurrection.
All of this apocalyptic tradition — and its call to arm for battle in spiritual warfare between light and a growing darkness — entered both Judaism and Christianity as a result of elitist secular values and their infringement upon our lives of faith. The Essenes were short lived. They died out along with the Jerusalem Temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. That their legacy emerged into our world by “accident” 2,000 years later is a gift to our time.
And perhaps there is more of this gift to come. The apocalyptic message of Daniel, also influential to the Essenes, hints at books that are shut up until the end of time:
“At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation ... but at that time your people shall be delivered, every one whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the Earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting contempt ... But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book until the time of the end.”
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Writing from prison is difficult, and has become even more so in this time of pandemic. I rely on the postal service to mail my weekly post for scanning, and I am unable to make a photocopy so I mail the only copy I have. If there is a delay (there have been two late arrivals in the last four weeks) I have no way to inform readers.
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Please also share this post, and these related posts that appear herein:
The Passion of the Christ in an Age of Outrage
The Chief Priests Answered, ‘We Have No King but Caesar’
Archangel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri
and one I didn’t mention, but should have:
Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us
The Gospel of Saint Luke opens with a news flash from the Archangel Gabriel for Zechariah the priest, and Mary — Theotokos — the new Ark of the Covenant.
Prisoners, including me, have no access at all to the online world. Though Wednesday is post day on Beyond These Stone Walls, I usually don’t get to see my finished posts until the following Saturday when printed copies arrive in the mail. So I was surprised one Saturday night when some prisoners where I live asked if they could read my posts. Then a few from other units asked for them in the prison library where I work.
Some titles became popular just by word of mouth. The third most often requested BTSW post in the library is “A Day Without Yesterday,” my post about Father Georges Lemaitre and Albert Einstein. The second most requested is “Does Stephen Hawking Sacrifice God on the Altar of Science?” Prisoners love the science/religion debate. But by far the most popular BTSW post is “Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.” And as a result of it, dozens of prisoners have asked me for copies of the prayer to Saint Michael. I’m told it’s being put up on cell walls all over the prison.
Remember “Jack Bauer Lost The Unit On Caprica,” my post about my favorite TV shows? In the otherwise vast wasteland of American television, we’re overdue for some angelic drama. For five years in the 1980s, Michael Landon and Victor French mediated the sordid details of the human condition in Highway to Heaven. The series was created and produced by Michael Landon who thought TV audiences deserved a reminder of the value of faith, hope, and mercy as we face the gritty task of living. Highway to Heaven ended in 1989, but lived on in re-runs for another decade. Then in the 1990s, Della Reese and Roma Downey portrayed “Tess and Monica,” angelic mediators in Touched by an Angel which also produced a decade of re-runs.
Spiritual Battle on a Cosmic Scale
The angels of TV-land usually worked out solutions to the drama of being human within each episode’s allotted sixty minutes. That’s not so with the angels of Scripture. Most came not with a quick fix to human madness, but with a message for coping, for giving hope, for assuring a believer, or, in the case of the Angel of the Annunciation, for announcing some really big news on a cosmic scale — like salvation! What the angels of Scripture do and say has deep theological symbolism and significance, and in trying times interest in angels seems to thrive. The Archangel Gabriel dominates the Nativity Story of Saint Luke’s Gospel, but who is he and what is the meaning of his message?
We first meet Gabriel five centuries before the Birth of Christ in the Book of Daniel. The Hebrew name, “Gabri’El” has two meanings: “God is my strength,” and “God is my warrior.” As revealed in “Angelic Justice,” the Hebrew name Micha-El means “Who is like God?” The symbolic meaning of these names is portrayed vividly as Gabriel relates to Daniel the cosmic struggle in which he and Michael are engaged:
“Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your mind to understand, and humbled yourself before God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words. The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me. So I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia, and came to make you understand what is to befall your people in the latter days . . . But I will tell you what is inscribed in the Book of Truth: there is none who contends at my side against these except Michael.”
— Daniel 10:12-14, 21
In the Talmud, the body of rabbinic teaching, Gabriel is understood to be one of the three angels who appeared to Abraham to begin salvation history, and later led Abraham out of the fire into which Nimrod cast him. The Talmud also attributes to Gabriel the rescue of Lot from Sodom. In Christian apocalyptic tradition, Gabriel is the “Prince of Fire” who will prevail in battle over Leviathan at the end of days. Centuries after the Canon of Old and New Testament Scripture was defined, Gabriel appears also in the Qu’ran as a noble messenger.
In Jewish folklore, Gabriel was in the role of best man at the marriage of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. I found that a strange idea at first, but then it dawned on me: Who else were they going to ask? In later rabbinic Judaism, Gabriel watches over man at night during sleep, so he is invoked in the bedside “Shema” which observant Jews must recite at bedtime in a benediction called the Keri’at Shema al ha_Mitah:
“In the name of the God of Israel, may Michael be on my right hand, Gabriel on my left hand, Uriel before me, behind me Raphael, and above my head, the Divine Presence. Blessed is he who places webs of sleep upon my eyes and brings slumber to my eyelids. May it be your will to lay me down and awaken me in peace. Blessed are You, God, who illuminates the entire world with his glory.”
In a well written article in the Advent 2010 issue of Word Among Us (www.WAU.org) – “Gabriel, the Original Advent Angel,” Louise Perrotta described Gabriel’s central message to Daniel:
“History is not a haphazard series of events. Whatever the dark headlines — terrorist attacks, natural disasters, economic upheavals — we’re in the hands of a loving and all-powerful God. Earthly regimes will rise and fall, and good people will suffer. But . . . at an hour no one knows, God will bring evil to an end and establish His eternal kingdom.”
East of Eden
The Book of Tobit identifies the Archangel Raphael as one of seven angels who stand in the Presence of God. Scripture and the Hebrew Apocryphal books identify four by name: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. The other three are not named for us. In rabbinic tradition, these four named angels stand by the Celestial Throne of God at the four compass points, and Gabriel stands to God’s left. From our perspective, this places Gabriel to the East of God, a position of great theological significance for the fall and redemption of man.
In a previous post, “In the Land of Nod, East of Eden,” I described the symbolism of “East of Eden,” a title made famous by the great American writer, John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for it in 1962. I don’t mean to brag (well, maybe a little!) but a now-retired English professor at a very prestigious U.S. prep school left a comment on “In the Land of Nod, East of Eden” comparing it to Steinbeck’s work. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Archangel Gabriel, but I’ve been waiting for a subtle chance to mention it again! (ahem!) But seriously, in the Genesis account of the fall of man, Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden to the East (Genesis 3:24). It was both a punishment and a deterrent when they disobeyed God by eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil:
“Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good from evil; and now, lest he put out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever,’ therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove the man out, and to the east of the Garden of Eden he placed a Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every which way, to guard the way to the Tree of Life.”
— Gen.3: 22-24
A generation later, after the murder of his brother Abel, Cain too “went away from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod, East of Eden.” (Genesis 4:16). The land of Nod seems to take its name from the Hebrew “nad” which means “to wander,” and Cain described his fate in just that way: “from thy face I shall be hidden; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:14). The entire subsequent history of Israel is the history of that wandering East of Eden. I wonder if it is also just coincidence that the Gospel of Saint Matthew, the only source of the story of the Magi, has the Magi seeing the Star of Bethlehem “in the east” and following it out of the east.
An Immaculate Reception
In rabbinic lore, Gabriel stands in the Presence of God to the left of God’s throne, a position of great significance for his role in the Annunciation to Mary. Gabriel thus stands in God’s Presence to the East, and from that perspective in St. Luke’s Nativity Story, Gabriel brings tidings of comfort and joy to a waiting world in spiritual exile East of Eden.
The Archangel’s first appearance is to Zechariah, the husband of Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth. Zechariah is told that he and his wife are about to become the parents of John the Baptist. The announcement does not sink in easily because, like Abraham and Sarah at the beginning of salvation history, they are rather on in years. Zechariah is about to burn incense in the temple, as close to the Holy of Holies a human being can get, when the archangel Gabriel appears with news:
“Fear fell upon him. But the angel said to him, ‘Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard, and your wife, Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John . . . and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb, and he will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God and will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah . . .’”
— Luke 1:12-15
This news isn’t easily accepted by Zechariah, a man of deep spiritual awareness revered for his access to the Holy of Holies and his connection to God. Zechariah doubts the message, and questions the messenger. It would be a mistake to read the Archangel Gabriel’s response in a casual tone. Hear it with thunder in the background and the Temple’s stone floor trembling slightly under Zechariah’s feet:
“I am Gabriel who stand in the Presence of God . . . and behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things come to pass.”
I’ve always felt great sympathy for Zechariah. I imagined him having to make an urgent visit to the Temple men’s room after this, followed by the shock of being unable to intone the Temple prayers.
Zechariah was accustomed to great deference from people of faith, and now he is scared speechless. I, too, would have asked for proof. For a cynic, and especially a sometimes arrogant one, good news is not easily taken at face value.
Then six months later “Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the House of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary.” (Luke 1: 26-27). This encounter was far different from the previous one, and it opens with what has become one of the most common prayers of popular devotion.
Gabriel said, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” His words became the Scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, that and centuries of “sensus fidelium,” the consensus of the faithful who revere her as “Theotokos,” the God-Bearer. Mary, like Zechariah, also questions Gabriel about the astonishing news. “How can this be since I have not known man?” There is none of the thunderous rebuke given to Zechariah, however. Saint Luke intends to place Gabriel in the presence of his greater, a position from which even the Archangel demonstrates great reverence and deference.
It has been a point of contention with non-Catholics and dissenters for centuries, but the matter seems so clear. There’s a difference between worship and reverence, and what the Church bears for Mary is the deepest form of reverence. It’s a reverence that came naturally even to the Archangel Gabriel who sees himself as being in her presence rather than the other way around. God and God alone is worshiped, but the reverence bestowed upon Mary was found in only one other place on Earth. That place was the Ark of the Covenant, in Hebrew, the “Aron Al-Berith,” the Holy of Holies which housed the Tablets of the Old Covenant. It was described in 1 Kings 8: 1-11, but the story of Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary draws on elements from the Second Book of Samuel.
These elements are drawn by Saint Luke as he describes Mary’s haste to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country of Judea. In 2 Samuel 6:2, David visits this very same place to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant. Upon Mary’s entry into Elizabeth’s room in Saint Luke’s account, the unborn John the Baptist leaps in Elizabeth’s womb. This is reminiscent of David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant in 2 Samuel 6:16.
For readers “with eyes to see and ears to hear,” Saint Luke presents an account of God entering into human history in terms quite familiar to the old friends of God. God himself expressed in the Genesis account of the fall of man that man has attempted to “become like one of us” through disobedience. Now the reverse has occurred. God has become one of us to lead us out of the East, and off the path to eternal darkness and death.
In Advent, and especially today the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, we honor with the deepest reverence Mary, Theotokos, the Bearer of God and the new Ark of the Covenant. Mary, whose response to the Archangel Gabriel was simple assent:
“Let it be done to me according to your word.”
“Then the Dawn from On High broke upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet on the way to peace.”
— Luke 1:78-79
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Note from Fr Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post in honor of the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. You may also like these related posts:
The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God
Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”