Reckless global elites - are they afraid of something?

The second coming - WB Yeats- written 1919

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


The global elites are getting very reckless - they are doing all kinds of nasty stuff and barely troubling to concoct cover stories; or rather, their cover stories are so obviously faked, dishonest and incoherent that they are only carrying a small minority of the most psychologically-enslaved population with them (such as the mass media).

Because of this reckless haste to pursue the evil agenda at home and abroad, there are more and more threats against anyone who dares to be skeptical, or to voice disagreement. Are they afraid that their time is running out? Do they know something we don't about what is imminent?

Maybe... Too many threats are being too carelessly made - because the baddies don't have the power to enforce a large number of simultaneous punishments. They rule by consent - by the corruption of the masses; and direct coercion is only available for sparing and selective application - but maybe they have also forgotten this?

So, the ruling class are currently careless, the mask is slipping - or even being cast aside and the hideous leering face beneath revealed shamelessly.

Maybe they will get away with this - because no matter how 'cynical' the population becomes about the motivations of politicians, leaders, the mass and social media... nothing constructive can happen until people believe there is an alternative; and that can only happen if God comes back into consciousness...

God is the falconer in Yeats's poem above, the falcon - the populations of the West - cannot hear him; indeed deny his reality.

Thus the centre cannot hold, and things fall apart.

A century ago, Yeats wondered what rough beast might be born to 'replace' God - we already know the answer, indeed the rough beast had already been born in 1917 with the Russian Revolution, and has had many incarnations since. But of course, anti-God does not perform the same function as God - and totalitarian tyranny is in practice the agent of self-fuelling chaotic evil, not of static compliance.

So we still await the second coming - or rather, Christ patiently awaits our turning towards him - when he will be ready and willing to provide exactly what is needed.

Our problem is that what is needed is not what we believe we want...  If we can awaken from this delusion, that is the only hope.

And global political-media events are currently moving in a direction that tends to make an awakening significantly more likely now than it was even three short years ago...

Empire and Albion

The British Empire gets a bad press these days. It was, so the story goes, greedy, rapacious, exploitative, racist, snobbish, well, you know the rest. And no one can deny that all those elements did exist within the totality of what it was. It certainly started off as an exercise in plunder and, while it probably wasn't so at first, it did end up being what we now call racist, though more or less the whole world was that then and not just Europeans.

But I submit there was considerably more to it than that. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that the British Empire had a divine mission, an opinion which would probably get me escorted to the exits in most civilised places nowadays. So be it. We have become far too over-sensitive to truths that don't coincide with our modern prejudices, but those who look for truth above all have to be prepared to look for it in places where it may not currently be thought to exist.

There can be little doubt that when what became the British Empire began in the 17th century, and right through the 18th, the impetus behind it was enrichment of the mother country with little to no thought of the countries colonised. But the motives in the 19th and early 20th century gradually changed and so did the actual purpose of Empire viewed from above. It became a vehicle to spread civilisation throughout many parts of the world that had either fallen into a kind of stagnation or else needed bringing up to speed because they lagged behind in terms of development, both intellectual and technological and even, dare one say it, moral. It had, I truly believe, a spiritual purpose which was linked to the evolution of consciousness, a new phase of which began in the West and needed to be spread worldwide. This was how it was done. It's no good saying it could have been done in ways which did not involve one country taking over another. At the time that was simply not possible in many places.

The British in the late 19th and early 20th centuries may have been racist, they may have been snobbish and they may have been rather limited as regards imagination. But they were mostly fair and they were mostly honest and they had a strong sense of duty. I don't think it is understood how many people genuinely thought they were serving a cause for the betterment of humanity. Of course, all the usual human sins and foibles were present. How could they not be? But I would say they were considerably less present than in previous and other contemporary exploits along similar lines. When I lived in India in the 1980s practically everybody I met who had been alive before Independence in 1947 recognised the qualities of the people who had governed them, and they admired them. There was appreciation of what had been accomplished in their country even if they all knew that what may have been beneficial at one time had certainly run its course by the mid-20th century.

It's very easy to condemn the British Empire from the vantage point of present day morals and ideals. It's also completely absurd and, to use a popular sniffy word of our time, inappropriate. The British Empire accomplished mighty things in that it spread certain standards and values around the world. It had its faults, sometimes grave ones, but show me something that does not. On balance, it did a lot more good than harm, and I believe most of the people who lived under it appreciated what it did for them, how in many respects it liberated them. My particular knowledge of it extends only to India but, as I have said, when I met people there who had been alive during the time of the Empire hardly any had a bad word to say about it. You might say that was just politeness but I think there was more to it than that. There was a genuine recognition that the country had been well governed by largely honourable people who were far from perfect but also sensed and tried to carry out a real mission.

The question then arises as to whether this has any relevance at all now or is it just a period consigned to history along with Henry VIII who probably seems no more alien to young people today than members of the British Raj. Here's a conjecture. A groundwork was laid both culturally and linguistically which might be able to be exploited further on down the line. I see a parallel with the Roman Empire which, after it was no more politically, rose again in a certain manner in Catholicism and the Latin language which were two of the most important ingredients of the religious Medieval civilization. Might something similar occur with the old British Empire? Patterns in history tend to repeat themselves though not in the same way so we should not look to an exact repeat of what happened in the past. Nevertheless, the seeds of something might be there. If a spiritual Albion has any role to play in the future that might be built from the ashes of the old Empire even if the two things seem very different in their basic orientation.

Rediscovering the Centre - T.S. Eliot's 'Four Quartets'

Whatever disasters and disappointments the twentieth century might have seen, the quality of poetry emanating from the British Isles throughout this time remained generally very high - W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Louis Macneice, David Jones, David Gascoyne, Kathleen Raine, Elizabeth Jennings - the list goes on. Not all twentieth century poets were as spiritually attuned as the 'magnificent seven' named above, of course, but the very existence of such a 'cloud of witnesses' during this age of philosophical materialism should surely give us cause for hope. The spirit 'bloweth where it listeth' and God will always find a way to make His presence felt, no matter how dark the epoch. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's writings on the Soviet labour camps are terrific examples of this.

There's no finer English (or Anglo-American to be precise) example, to my mind, than Eliot's Four Quartets. This sequence of interlocking poems - Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942) - is especially worth reflecting on at a time like the present, with storm clouds gathering and the drums of war pounding. They give comfort in a time of darkness, just as they did in the Second World War. They acknowledge the darkness too. They don't pretend it isn't there. But they're not intimidated and overmastered by it, as Denethor was by Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Neither do they offer platitudes and facile solutions. They simply show - in rich, sonorous, almost liturgical language - how that darkness can and must be defeated.

'Things fall apart,' wrote Yeats in The Second Coming. 'The centre cannot hold.' If this stands as a pinpoint diagnosis of our current political ills, then Eliot's remedy, as set out in Four Quartets, is equally germane. It's not to fight fire with fire or lurch from one extreme to the other, tearing the fabric of society apart, as the Communists and Fascists did in the 1930s. Nor is it to look nostalgically backwards. 'We cannot revive old factions,' he writes in Little Gidding. 'We cannot restore old policies / Or follow an antique drum.' No, the way forward is a tougher, more exacting thing than that. The way through is the way down. We have to let go of our egos, our expectations, and even our belief in faith, hope and love. The waiting, and the humility that comes with waiting, is all:

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love for the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought;

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. (Burnt Norton)

The goal is the rediscovery of that centre which Yeats felt the modern world had lost. This is an inner centre - 'the still point of the turning world', as Eliot calls it - the secret, silent place where the creative logos - Christ Himself - sits enthroned in the depths of our hearts. It is a personal rather than a corporate rediscovery, based on a Dostoyevskyan recognition of the colossal importance placed on the value of each and every human soul by both God and the Devil. C.S. Lewis does something similar in The Great Divorce when he depicts the angelic powers, both good and evil, playing for the eternal future of living souls on a giant chessboard.

The way to this 'still point', for Eliot, is through a reconnection with history and place. These are the things that anchor us, that connect us to the Real, and both have been continually undermined since Four Quartets was written, and with dizzying speed since the end of the Cold War in 1991. A triumphant Liberalism has defined the greatest good imaginable as the individual's right to choose, whether as a consumer in the unfettered free market or as a 'liberated' self in the wider cultural and social sphere. 'All that is solid melts into air', said Karl Marx about capitalism, and that is one thing - perhaps the only thing - that he got right. We have slipped our moorings completely. Our roots have been cut from under us. All the things that gave us a solid, stable identity from which we could face the world in confidence and strength have been belittled and diminished - belief in God, love of one's homeland, a happy family life, meaningful work, even bodies like Trade Unions and workers guilds, which looked after the labourer and artisan, ushering him or her into something grander than the 'daily nine to five' - a lineage and tradition which gave work a wider context and meaning. Now even something usually so rock-solid as one's gender is being called into question.

None of this makes us happy or fulfilled. Quite the reverse. It leaves us feeling cut-off,  free-floating and alone, stripped of identity and our core sense of self, putty in the hands of those who would manipulate us, 'who would turn us into an automaton, a thing with one face,' as Macneice put it in Prayer Before Birth. We are told by the great and good to 'embrace globalism' and become 'citizens of everywhere', but all too often it feels like we're 'citizens of nowhere.'

Eliot would have railed mightily against all this. For him, history was everything. Past, present and future are deeply interwoven in his poetic vision. They are cut from the same cloth; all of a piece:

A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light falls

On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England. (Little Gidding)

History, as we see here, is intimately bound up with a sense of place. The titles of all four quartets refer to specific locales, and these are sites redolent with history. The chapel in Little Gidding, for instance, is a place where 'prayer has been valid.' Our ancestors speak to us here. The voice of tradition comes to us on this sacred, time-honoured ground:

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication 

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

*******

'With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling,' writes Eliot later in Little Gidding, 'We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.'

The key word here is 'exploration', and this again should serve to cheer us. Rediscovering the centre is not a fixed, static affair. It's not about subscribing to a set of rules or bowing down before a 'heavenly beard.' It's a living, dynamic thing:

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner 

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving ... (Burnt Norton)

It's not easy to achieve though. It isn't straightforward to write or talk about either. Language has its limitations and the material world can feel like a hard, intractable place at times:

... Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still.

But we have to try. This is our calling - to search for meaning, to scope out a pattern, to light up the dark with whatever fire we've been given, knowing that as we do so more fire will be given to us and more light will be revealed. If we take one step forward, God takes ten towards us, because we're in a relationship with Him, not a contract, and this is what He wants from us, to become Divine as He is - what the Orthodox world calls theosis. This can give us confidence and hope when times get tough, both in our personal lives and on the world stage. We are not helpless, free-floating automatons but sons and daughters of the Most High God, whose lives and what we do with them matter every bit as much as the judgement calls of Presidents and Prime Ministers. It is only the Enemy who says that they don't. Our time here on Earth forms part of a much larger narrative which our limited minds struggle to conceive. Sometimes, as with Eliot in the rose garden in Burnt Norton, the veil is lifted and we are granted an insight into that greater story:

And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,

The surface glittered out of heart of light ...

But it seldom lasts for long:

Then a cloud passed and the pool was empty.

It doesn't matter though. What does matter is that we do our best to follow our calling and keep scoping out those patterns. As Eliot exhorts us in The Dry Salvages, 'Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers.' Or, in the words of Christ from the last book in the Bible, 'Behold, I make all things new.'

How these increasingly-evil times helped a soul to Christ (my own)

I think that if I had been born into less evil times, I probably would not have become a Christian.

The reason is that I have always had an ethic of truthfulness - that was what I tried hardest to live up to. And this was a reason why I studied science and became a scientist.

Yet, because of the evil of these times, I was under constant and increasing pressure to be dishonest in my work; and dishonest at many levels. I was supposed to work on subject matter that attracted external grants and funding, rather than where I felt I could make the best contribution. I was supposed to conduct the work in ways that optimised income and prestige rather than in the ways most likely to yield success. Publication, discussion, self-evaluation, 'research assessment' were all supposed to be done with an eye to institutional obedience to whatever was the latest managerial priority. And I was expected to censor my work (or avoid topics in the first place) whenever these led to politically incorrect conclusions...

Therefore, the pervasive and increasing dishonesty of The System had a direct impact on every aspect of my work that I most valued, to which I was most committed.

I was in a direct and existential confrontation with my own metaphysical assumptions - which were overall atheist, materialist, utilitarian... The World wanted me to discard my deepest ethical intuitions - and I found myself more and more puzzled why I did not just get on and Do this (as almost everybody else did).

My theoretical understanding implied that I ought to be a worse person, and all the rewards were aligned to making me a worse person - why didn't I simply become that worse person? I had ample excuses...

Specifically, why wasn't I just dishonest (in a 'good cause')? Why did I sacrifice my career and my colleagues careers to this ethic of honesty which I could not justify - which indeed my professed beliefs contradicted? Why did I try to be better when almost everybody wanted me to be worse?

The only barrier was conscience - yet my theory was that conscience was merely a product of natural selection - that is, of contingent, selection factors operating on my ancestors and having zero validity except in terms of reproductive success.

It was this conflict between my intuitive conscience and the world that led - eventually, after many years of delay, of putting-off the job - to examine my preconceptions; and that led (within a few months) to becoming a Christian.

But what if the world had been less evil? What if I had been just left-alone to get-on-with my science? - as the previous several generations had been - Well, then I would never have realised the incoherence of my convictions; I would never have become a Christian.

Thus the evil of the world, the increasing evil of the world, brought me to a point of clarity and choice that otherwise I might never have reached.

Is Leftism Atavistic?

The hero's journey is a well-known archetypal tale in mythology in which the hero breaks out of tribal consciousness and the warm embrace of mother nature, and forges an identity for himself as a self-conscious individual. This he does by achieving some great deed which often involves overcoming a fearsome monster. By differentiating himself from the mass he blazes a trail for the whole of humanity to follow. This is what we have been doing as a species throughout the period of recorded history and it has brought us to where we are now.

But we have reached the point at which the next step must be taken. This next step requires becoming aware of the transcendent spiritual world and entering it as the authentic individual we have become. We have to build the reality of the spiritual world into ourselves and not just be passive to it. However, this is a daunting process that requires courage and sacrifice if it is to be done properly and we are to become fully conscious spiritual beings as opposed to the largely natural ones we are at present.

We have to go to the Father and accept the responsibility of our sonship. However, what we currently appear to be doing is returning to the Mother, a state in which the individual is subsumed and there is no proper judgement or discrimination for all are equally valuable whatever their personal qualities might be. There is no better and no worse and anything that attempts to break free of this levelling down is condemned for disturbing the peace. It is a withdrawal from the differentiated state to an undifferentiated union.

Leftism represents the return to the Mother. It is a refusal of spiritual responsibility and a retreat to an infantile environment in which the hero is feared and denied his chance to grow because that would imperil the whole. The leftist preoccupations with equality and the state indicate its dislike of the free individual who dares to stand alone. This may seem far-fetched when you take leftism on its own terms and as a purely political movement but when you look beneath the surface at underlying motivations another story emerges.

Of course, this is not the whole story. The hero can become arrogant and selfish, proud of his achievements and dismissive of those who cannot match him or who he thinks cannot do so. It is then that he needs to learn lessons of humility and loving kindness, and to understand that, while human beings are far from equal, that is no cause for looking down on anyone since we truly are all the sons of daughters of God, all with the potential to become godlike.

But we cannot do that unless we first become full individuals. The hero must learn compassion but when you try to clip his wings and drag him back into the mass you disrupt the progress of humanity and return it to childhood. 

How may we actually, in practice, assist in sustaining and developing the spirit of Albion?

In a nutshell; by being fully here and fully conscious - such that my own thinking of that time, place and nature is woven-into the evolving web of creation.


To backtrack and explain... There is an attuning to time, place and the nature of things which we may turn an epiphany - a passive, absorptive, time-less 'snapshot' of a situation.

You may recall such things from early childhood: a numinous picture (or perhaps sound, or smell); deep, engaged, lively... and detached. We have, in a state of raised sensitivity, taken a true-impression. 

Such epiphanies do not affect creation - they are not, at any level creat-ive. As I said, they are the true impact that Life has upon-us.

This is in its essence dreamlike, child-like, a resurgence of the primal consciousness of Man lost-in-Nature; still metaphorically in the womb of the Earth Mother...

Such are valuable; yet they do not sustain or develop Albion. They are Albion affecting-us - a memory that is valued; but tinged with regret because gone as soon as registered, and powerless to prevent it.


More is possible, desirable and - indeed - ought-to be aimed-at by the lovers of Albion.

My example here is of Albion-overseas - of New England, in the United States - and with reference to the mid 19th century world of the Transcendentalists of whom the first I came to know was Henry David Thoreau.

I can illustrate the epiphanies by an example from a library: looking at the cover of The Heart of Thoreau's Journals in Bristol City Library, one Friday evening late-opening... losing myself in an appreciation of Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts - where Thoreau spent two years, two months and two days in a hut he built for himself as an experiment in living: living for the real things.

The next step - and the first step that is actually of material assistance to reality - is to appreciate as a Segment of Life. Not a passive impression; but a state active, alert, wide-eyed, curious - in which my thoughts and the unfolding-reality unite and are woven-together.

The example is again related to Walden Pond; this time an early morning circuit of the pond with my wife in the Fall of 1998; a magical hour in which reality un-folded, and folded-into memory and anticipation, with an unexpected inevitability.

The 'magical' state of consciousness, when sustained in this fashion, becomes a part of ongoing creation - so that creation becomes, to that extent, enhanced by our personal self-awareness.

The effect is permanent, and made distinctive by the human consciousness.


But more can be done than this; when our real-divine self is active, and generative, and in Primary Thinking - which is creative in a primal sense. New thoughts emerge which are uncaused and never have been before - and these thoughts are in loving harmony with the divine unfolding of creation.

This is what JRR Tolkien called Subcreation, and Owen Barfield called Final Participation. So, this is the rare kind of primary creativity which is not given value by its public communication nor by public appreciation nor by any excellence it may posses... but which has intrinsic, instant and permanent value in reality: that is in God's creation.

Such is woven-into and changes creation; not only by its origin in human consciousness, but by its actual addition to the scope and realm of attained creation. After it, everything is somewhat changed and forever.

(The value of any subsequent communication of it, as art or science of anything else, is secondary and inessential - the permanent value is during the actual transformational-process of creation.)


My personal example is the process of selection, sequence and transition that went into the making of my radio documentary Solitude, Exile and Ecstasy, which included Thoreau's words and references to Walden Pond.

For several hours together, I was in an elated and hyper-aware state - and felt not just an external sense of what was right and effective, but that this also came from within my real self.

I have little doubt that those solitary and ecstatic hours of mine left their permanent traces in the web of creation, as it relates to that expression of Albion's spirit that is New England; and that was shaped at Walden and its environment, by Thoreau and others; and which continues and always will as an aspect of God's creating.

The Resurrection

I have never understood people who claim to be Christian but don't believe in the resurrection. That surely is the whole point of Christianity and it demonstrates who and what Christ is. If it's not true, Christianity is built on a lie so why bother with it even if you think its moral teachings are helpful? I grant that the resurrection can be seen as a metaphor but it's a true metaphor. It's the point where myth and reality coincide. For the life of Jesus was the one occasion in history when something utterly real has happened on Earth. Everything else approximates, to a greater or lesser degree, to transcendent archetypal pattern but Christ is the pattern embodied in its perfection.

I see the resurrection as something you would never have thought possible before it happens but then when it does happen you realise it actually makes complete sense. We all suspect that death is somehow an offence to life, a cruel insult, and to see it defeated in this way has a kind of cosmic logic to it that goes far beyond mere earthly reason. It is confirmation of a truth felt in the heart but not known outwardly until it actually takes place when it seems (for Christ, it would not seem so for anyone else) almost inevitable.

The surrounding events of the resurrection also fall into a pattern of deepest truth. The ignominious death representing the nadir of disillusion and despair. All is lost, all hope and joy destroyed. We have reached the very bottom. But then the wonder of the resurrection and the confirmation that Christ really was who he said he was. You might say it's all too good to be true but that saying only has any rationale to it in the context of a meaningless universe. If the universe has meaning, which if course it must or we would not even have the conception of meaning nor would we feel the lack it, then nothing is too good to be true. Truth and goodness are one and the same. That is why we all crave goodness as we do truth, and recognise them as right. 

And after the resurrection Christ didn't just disappear completely straightaway or else carry on teaching as before, making grand public appearances in Jerusalem. That too seems right. We have entered a new cycle. To return to his previous ministry would have somehow been vulgar and ostentatious. He has risen from the dead but he's not a show off! He doesn't want to force people to believe in him. He wants them to come to him because of an inner movement towards truth in their own hearts. So he stays and he teaches for a certain period and then he ascends into heaven with his risen and transformed body, leaving his disciples to spread his word. All is just as it should be. The important qualities of dignity and beauty are observed. There is glory but there is also reticence. There is no brash shouting about this momentous event but it is left to speak for itself. It is a sacred thing and is treated as such.

Nowadays many people apparently don't even believe that Christ existed never mind that he rose from the dead. The churches have not done this story any favours by reducing both it and Christ to a humanistic level in which the main message is to be nice to each other and treat everyone as equals in terms of this world. But this was not the message of Christ at all. He came to give us the life more abundant and save us from the spiritual death of a materialistic existence. He pointed us towards the higher life centred in the reality of God and demonstrated what this was by dying to his earthly self and then being reborn in a new spiritual state in which the old nature was not destroyed but transformed into something higher. But this old self could not be reborn until it had been allowed to die, and the lesson is that we cannot become like Christ until we too allow our old natural self to die, and this includes the relations it has to the world and to other people on its own level. 

It seems to me that the modern churches don't emphasise this anywhere near enough when it should be central. They don't say that the old self must die to be transformed, but that it must just become better. Stay the same, keep its old centre but be more inclusive and brotherly. This was summed up by C.S. Lewis as the difference between nice people or new men. To be a new man requires the death of the old man not his improvement. He does not become better, he must become new. Not changed but transformed. Resurrection must always be preceded by death. Jesus taught this and he demonstrated it. It is the central fact of his life and mission.

If the resurrection were just a metaphor, it would be worse than a lie because it is purported to be true. Which is not proof it literally is true but if it is then that changes everything. You can reject it if you like but if you do you are rejecting something fundamental about God and his self-revelation to the world. You cannot say it is just a symbol and keep Christianity. It is a symbol but that of which it is a symbol is only possible for us because it was acted out in this physical world by Christ thereby creating the possibility of spiritual rebirth for all humanity. Without the energy released by his crucifixion and resurrection, we would still be living in darkness with escape from this world through the rejection of self the only spiritual possibility. Christ redeemed the material world because he sanctified it through first embracing it and then transforming its darkness, thereby making possible the salvation of creation and its eventual integration with spirit. 

The resurrection is the triumph of spirit over matter but in this victory matter is not rejected, dismissed or denied but raised up and glorified in and by spirit.