The Necessity of Babel

By Fred Pruitt

(Taken from a letter to a friend written in 2006)

First, you my friend, are always a challenge to me, and you do always “provoke thought” as you mentioned in your last to me. I echo you completely in so many many things.

Some of what you say is perhaps what is (in former terminology) something of a “burden” to me, because I so thoroughly know what you declare, that it is not “doctrine” or “theology” we seek to share, but the “reality” itself (or God Himself). The reason it is as a “burden,” is because this is precisely where for me there is no capability of any sort to do this thing. God is outside reason, beyond all ability of human power, and utterly unknowable except in His own revealing of Himself. How does one communicate the Incommunicable Who in finality must communicate Himself?

To “teach doctrine” (in the sense you mean), however, is easily done, since that which “is not” (as to this world) is falsely and incorrectly formulated into precepts, codes and traditions — “things” — which in themselves take on the form of God as if they are God, yet as the apostle says, they “deny the power of it.” That is the “Babel” you speak of, the “division of tongues,” the strife of “religion,” with which we are all too familiar. Babel has reduced God to concepts and ideas palatable to human reason, and sets that up as a tower of strife.

But to be fair, this “Babel,” which appears to be “out there,” cannot in any sense be separated from what appears (from my point of view) to be “in here,” so that I know Babel because I hear it in me. I speak of Babel and I tell my own story.

We know The Godhead has no form and can’t be identified as a thing and is thus to human reason unreachable, unknowable, indescribable. Since this is not a “thing,” no “thing” can come to it or approach it by any means whatsoever, and yet this “no thing” is in itself everything in everything, or all in all.

Babel is also “not a thing” though it thinks it is, and has grasped itself as if it is a thing in order to become itself, or to manifest or express. God has told everything to be fruitful and multiply (manifest, express, shine your light, salt of the earth, etc.) and it cannot help but seek to do it. But Babel only knows a “thing,” and all phenomena, including thought and selfhood, as objects to be outwardly seen, known, grasped and held. This is both its hell and its salvation.

To find itself it must seek itself. But it discovers itself trapped there in its desire to be itself. Trapped in the desire, in the seeking, never becoming itself, it never ceases from strife. Like a dog chasing its tail, it continually circles itself.

It is hell because it is trapped there as a thing when it is not a thing, but it cannot give up wanting itself as a thing, nor give up wanting all the other things which serve it as a thing, since it sees itself in all the other things. It is trapped in itself and in its desire to please, build up, and serve itself. For that purpose, therefore, it is continually drawing everything into itself. Now, because of that trap and continuous round and round the desire that has sought to draw everything into itself now finds itself contrarily seeking to escape the trap it has created in itself. Now it opposes itself by seeking to escape the trap to find rest and freedom from the anguish set up by the continuous strife and seeking, which very action creates even more unrest and strife,  because the more it seeks to escape the more it is trapped and in anguish.

This is classic “double-mindedness” — two in one continually opposing itself in continuous enmity, stoking the fires of hell.

But I said it was heaven, and that is true, because all that strife and opposition has only been the necessary fuel and engine, to propel into existence the manifestation of God by us. We seek to give out “God” but find ourselves trapped in our own desire to give out because if it is “God” that we “give,” then it must be truth and must be love and for either of those to be so then it must of all things supremely be free of self-desire, because anything which grasps in self does not know God and is not known of God. Therefore it is not only impossible for the creature to communicate the non-creature, if it could be done it could not be done without the grasping of self-reward and pleasure. The creature has been subjected to vanity and remains there until the manifestation of the Son comes as its liberty to release it from vanity.

Because at this point a miracle occurs. Something outside the anguish and the strife of wanting and seeking for myself comes out of nowhere and causes the anguish to burst into light and freedom. A death occurs in the darkness, a loosing, a release, a final consummation, a giving up the ghost. The strife and opposition had been inescapable darkness but now in the midst of that darkness a freeing light suddenly shines, releasing the original desire from the anguish of continuous compression, to finally become what it is without the encumbrance of the strings of self-attachment. This is where the living word of God is known as substance and manifestation and produces rest in harmony.

Now all of humanity is or previously has been caught in this inescapable wheel of anguish, in self-seeking, in our inmost selves. And that light that comes in the darkness, which is inward in us all, is the eternal cross that is at the center of God and through which God is known forever as a lamb slain from the foundation of the earth.

One of the wondrous glories of this revelation is to be able to look around and to know that if God is in everything, if He is indeed, as we see and say, All and in all, then everywhere there is also a Cross or a Lamb Slain in the middle of everything that is, both corporately as the ONE CENTER of all things, and particularly an individual center in the inmost of each individual form. I may be seeing with my outer sight the appearance of death, but in my true sight I see the continuous resurrection, and that is only because He has made Himself known in His own continual heaven in me and in you. There may be great swirling vortexes of energy and lightning coming out of darkness – the daily living of human life with all its ups and downs and joys and sorrows – but we have learned they have forever been made safe in Him as His abode and as the advent of His unfailing coming.

Hallelujah!

fred