Captivity Captive

Time shall be no more.

I have defined the Machine as “a metaphor for the interplay that separates and pits the masculine against the feminine… The competitive masculine fuels our capitalist and consumeristic economic system. The devouring feminine… attempts to allay fears by overcompensating... This unholy alliance … threatens to collapse our country and each of us individually.” The competitiveness and hostility between the masculine and feminine separates. It divides our society but, sadly, also families and churches. What’s the solution?

Jesus died to unite us, to draw all to Him, to give us peace everlasting, to make us one. In so doing, “he led captivity captive.”

When (Christ) ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men (Ephesians 4:8, emphasis mine).”

Scholars often considered captivity death. Death begins at birth and ends with the dust we return to.1 Others have believed captivity is sin. But there is something that encompasses both�"time.

Here’s the Kicker: Time has no scientific definition beyond the rate of decay.

And what are death and sin but forms of decay? Jesus led time captive to destroy sin and death and to give us life everlasting in his kingdom.

In the last couple of weeks, I have listened to Iain McGilchrist’s Sophia lectures.2 He begins by saying “Time is not a succession of moments but a continuum.”

In his lectures on the hemispheres of the brain, McGilchrist rejects the left hemisphere as being labeled male and the right hemisphere as female, and rightly so. However, I am convinced that the left hemisphere is the masculine and the right the feminine. Masculine and feminine are ways of interacting and developing relationships with God, the world, and with others, not our biological sexes.

Here’s the thing: Each person must use both hemispheres, or the masculine and the feminine, to exist optimally in the world.

The Christian Way to interact in the world is both rationally (the masculine) and emotionally (the feminine). But what do the hemispheres of our brain have to do with time? Hear me out.

To be Christlike is to integrate the feminine and masculine within us and within our societies, to re-orient and re-establish our minds and bodies and to “see” the real, see God in all His mysterious glory. To see beyond time. The proper integration of the masculine and feminine transcends our earthly realm.

This is happening now. Science, philosophy, and Christianity are bumping into the boundaries of the rational, including the space-time continuum, to expose the real. The real of quantum physics, the real of consciousness, the real of structures in our universe, the real of visions, the real of nonverbal autistic telepathy, the real of the oneness of Man.

The rational facts and figures that captivate us are dissolving away as our knowledge grows. The masculine’s perfect delineation of space and time, what we think is objective reality is giving way to something more�"the comforting, joyful, and freeing that is the feminine.

How do we move beyond the objective? By knowing the world subjectively, through Christ, through the feminine aspects of God�"creation, mercy, and wisdom. Christ has destroyed the boundaries of the rational to unveil more�"to reveal the real.

And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared to his servants the prophets (Revelation 10:6-7).

Dust and decay are the fertile soil that give Way to the Kingdom that goes beyond the boundaries of this world. 

The mysteries of God are being sounded, the veil torn to reveal His presence. May we have ears to hear and eyes to see. May we have masculine rational minds to know the Father and feminine hearts to feel the work of the Comforter.

Amen.