The Feast Day of the Prophet Moses

“Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. Now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.’ But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’ He said, ‘I will be with you…’

But Moses said to the Lord, ‘O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.’” (Exodus 3:7-12/4:10).

The Liturgical New Year ends with the feast day of the beheading of St. John the Forerunner and Baptist. Our calendar ends with the violent death of the Forerunner, who went to his death holding fast to his ministry of repentance and proclaiming the gospel of Christ the Lord. His death was a martyr’s death, and he went to Hades to continue his preaching to the dead, awaiting the light…

As we all are now that the days grow darker, awaiting the birth of our Savior.

The last days of August and the Forerunner’s death signifies a true symbol of a faith worth dying for and that which awaits us all.  

The first day of September marks the beginning of the year and last year I wrote something about setting intentions with the end of the harvest season and church year looking ahead to the year to come.

This is a time of reflection and contemplation.

Truly, our traditional calendar is an artistic masterpiece, and one which offers much for the contemplative. Calendars are significant to a culture even when holidays are forgotten or ignored because what we choose to celebrate, with their intentional order, defines what and who we are…  

With that, Monday was the feast day of the God-seer and prophet Moses.

St. Moses is a pivotal figure in my own coming to this faith tradition who was full of self-doubt with some thinking he had a speech impediment, perhaps anxious. St. Moses’ story follows a Biblical tradition of prophets being called, resisting the call for a personal reason, being encouraged by God, and finally surrendering to God’s plan and their mission. Funnily enough, both prophets Moses and Jeremiah both complain about a lack of speech.

St. Moses was living as an outlaw in Midian, a stranger in a strange land, on the lamb after killing an Egyptian when he was called by God to lead His people out of Egypt. The story of Moses’ call is one of the most fascinating and captivating events in the Bible: The Unburnt Bush.

“The bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed” (Exodus 3:2).

The flames arising from the bush, as Church tradition teaches, is God’s uncreated energies also known as His Glory, seen by Moses as light. God allows Moses to see His energies and the Voice that spoke with Moses was the pre-Incarnate Word.

Here in this meeting, Moses is given the task of liberator for God’s people, to bring them out of the land of Egypt. This image of Moses being tasked with something greater even though he is of slow tongue and in hiding shows us the powerful energies working within all of us that are our means of participating in the divine essence of God, which is eternal. These energies make us holy, as we “are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

The image that we are being transformed into is the image of God.

St. Moses is given his marching orders by God, becoming a liberator, a prefiguration of Christ and one of the most recognizable figures in history. The prophet Moses continues to refuse the job given to him by God, and then something crazy happens,

“But Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, The God of your ancestors has sent me to you, and they ask me, What is his name? what shall I say to them?’ God said to Moses” (Genesis 3:13-14):

YHVH.

It is no accident that the feast day of the prophet Moses, the prophet whose story reveals the Name, or HaShem, of God falls at the beginning of the Liturgical New Year.

HaShem, ehyeh asher ehyeh means “I Am That I Am” or “I will be what I will be” which implicitly states God is and will not be bound or defined by our language; He is not predicated by His Name. A name or description of an object fixes that object within time and space through the use of language, and so God’s given Name presents a God that is beyond Time and Space, a Deity that cannot be fixed… at least not yet.

Taoism is a naturalistic worldview in which the practitioner strives to live in balance and harmony with the natural order, aspiring to become one with source of all things which is the Tao: ‘the Way.’ The Tao is the only truth worth pursuing in this system, the only truth worth dying for, and to follow ‘the Way,’ or ‘the Path,’ is not to be swayed by the material world, not concerning ourselves with the things of this passing world, but to focus on our spiritual journey on the Way.

As HaShem cannot be readily defined and has a flowing, eternal quality to it so does the Tao, which is not the All-Tao, because the Tao that is named is not the Tao—si comprehendis, non est Deus.

Taoism has a concept: Pu. Pu means ‘uncarved block’ and represents the natural state of Man. This concept relates to the do-without-doing Wu wei, or effortless action. The uncarved block is wood that has no ornamentation, no disguise. Taoism’s concept of de means one’s inherent character or inner power, however one cannot attain de without returning to the state of being known as pu.

“The sage says,

I take no action and the people are transformed of themselves;

I prefer stillness and the people are rectified of themselves;

I am not meddlesome and the people prosper of themselves;

I am free from desire and the people of themselves become simple like the uncarved block” (Tao Te Ching 57).

The state of being, pu, is attainable by removing desires, overcoming and transmuting unwelcome states of consciousness. To use a Christian lens, attaining the state of pu is achievable by uprooting our passions, our vain desires, and fleeting wants. We surrender our I-making self, weighed down by the push and pull of clinging to things of this world, and aligning ourselves to God’s Will, and by doing so we are able to accomplish that which would not be possible with Him.

The state of pu is a state in which we have renounced ourselves and presented our being as a living sacrifice to God, and in this state, we are allowing God’s glory to affect us and with it bear an unveiled identity,

“when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror” (2 Corinthians 3:16-18).

The uncarved block is that state in which our face shines forth bearing the image of the glory of God.

Our true state. Humanity, perfected.

Taoism has practices like Tai Chi, Qigong, and the microcosmic orbit that not only allow the practitioner to align themselves with the Tao by cultivating Qi, but also these practices act as a functional ‘yes’ to this alignment; the practices are saying ‘yes’ to working with the Tao, ‘yes’ to the Tao flowing through them, changing them.

While the Tao, named or not, is an impersonal force of nature these practices are still surrendering to the Absolute. The Christian practice of surrender is similar except we, like the prophet Moses, surrender and say ‘Yes’ to a personal God: YHVH.

This is a God that asks, because He respects our personhood.

To be concluded…

Si comprehendis, non est Deus