Iain Atkinson

A vivid dream left me waking up shivering with excitement to write it down.

It started with many images of happiness and heaven: I was taking my family – Maggie and Amos, parents, brother and sister in law – to the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue, near Columbia University in Manhattan. There a church service began led by Jim Salladin of Emmanuel Anglican Church NYC.

This pastry shop is opposite the cathedral of St. John the Divine. A Chinese takeaway nearby provided the first meal Maggie and I ate in New York when we moved there. The place represents hope and mystery. The cathedral’s statue that is ostensibly of the archangel Michael represents to me the mystery of the angelic realms. The pastry shop is very fond to me for a variety of reasons. I read much there, perhaps most influentially A Course In Miracles, during one reading of which a regular staff member of the shop sat down opposite me and expressed great surprise and respect at my reading this book that he said his father, I think, loved, and had modelled the angelic and multi-coloured designs in the window after.

So this was the setting of my dream, but the first plot-point took us immediately away from here and into a series of combat situations. It was like a video game in which I was shooting many people in the head in order to protect my family. I was fairly unmoved by it all, as if it were indeed a simple enough video game, and I was succesful.

The enemies being killed and the goal being reached, I arrived in a standing circle of people under some trees, much like the place of the sculpture of Michael in the cathedral. In the circle Mooji was leading a conversation about spiritual awakening. One small Italian man was giving all the right answers but with a shifty yet somehow tired sense of not meaning or not understanding what he was saying. Being asked how he understood spiritual understanding, he said with I sigh “Yeah I know I am all in all”. Being asked by a woman next to Mooji if he knew this in his heart he replied “Yeah I’m like a wave in the ocean”. Mooji chuckled and commented “OK OK” as if to prompt the woman to stop asking him questions.

On reflection, the man’s thoughts were not wrong, and nothing of value was gained in doubting him or questioning him. I suppose he, being a slight Italian man, represented some Roman Catholic thoughts in me, perhaps, indeed, Leahy’s thoughts. I say “indeed” because Leahy features in the dream.

Next in the dream, Mooji turned to me and said something like “you must be sad”, to which I responded “no, I’m well”. But he clarified, “no, you must now be sad”, which I then received as a command. I immediately had the idea that I had to act being sad and to dramatize the realization of happiness, perhaps as a lesson to the Italian man. So I pulled a comically sad face, and everyone and the scene transformed.

I was now nowhere in particular, but I was reading the bible: Romans 8. There was a verse there that said something like: “The Lord is his glory, and if we give glory to God without that glory being God, then the God is not the Lord”. I had the feeling in the dream of reading a very coherent little sentence, and I have the feeling now of trying to remember exactly what that sentence was in the dream. But perhaps this can happen in dreams: that something feels vivid without having been so. Have you ever dreamt that a person’s face was amazingly vivid, for example, and then awoken to feel that, without your having forgotten any aspect of the dream, it wasn’t vivid after all. You had dreamt the feeling of vividness without vividness. Anyway, this is thought that I read in “Romans 8” – a chapter, of course, of decisive display of God’s goodness and love- namely, if we think that we give glory to a God that is other than us, this is not the true God. The glory we give is God and is us in our glorifying Him. To give glory to God is to give him our minds, our souls, our spirit, and He is that spirit. I had the feeling of reading this thought in the bible, in a famous and well-known passage, as if it were an innocuous enough verse. But then I felt as if the verse struck me with titanic weight.

I suddenly remembered a line in Leahy’s Foundation in which he discusses the death of God, and writes something like “the God who died was the God of death. The God who died was Molech”. The realization that hit me was that the God of Christianity who had died in modernity was Molech. In connection with the verse in Romans, I realized that the God to whom we give a glory that He is not, the God whom we sense to be other than our very selves, the God worshipped in Christianity, is Molech.

In my dream, this realization hit me with such a force that I began to have a seizure. I was transported from the nowhere-place back to Mooji’s circle, and I grabbed a pillow and started to hit Mooji with it in ecstasy, as if to say “you knew all along! It says it right there in Romans that we are the Lord, and no one believes it! God’s been saying it all along!”. Mooji laughed at me.

The scene in the dream shifted to a table at which I sat with two dear friends. These friends are a couple in which one relates intimately to God and spirituality, and the other has decidedly pulled away from Christianity, belief in God, and, I think, yes, spirituality. I have sat in a bed with that first friend as he had a kind of seizure, alarming his partner. So the partner represents to me fear of such seizures. In the dream, I was explaining to her why I had had a seizure.

I said that I had had a realization that hit me on a deep neuronal level. The thoughts I had had in connection with it were not self-conscious thoughts like “I think this, or I understand that”, but were like a single idea that triggered a series of dominoes down my spine and left my whole body shaking. The simple thought is this: the God of the Christian religion is Molech. Really accepting this, I quaked. She accepted my explanation peacefully, and this is where the dream ended. I feel such a sense of joy in this long and revelatory dream. May I now expand on its revelation somewhat.

As the spirit gives life but the letter kills, religion is death. The God of the Christian religion is Molech, who, as Leahy discerned, is the God who died in the death of God. How amazing and strange is it – isn’t it? – that I can say that what is called God is not God but is his enemy, Molech? For whom do we call when we call on God but on God? Is not the true God worshipped by Christians? Surely He is. But the true God allowed Molech within himself. When we worship the true God, we sometimes incidentally worship idols along the way. Indeed, I am reminded of the title of a book I would like to peruse – The Idolatry of God by Peter Rollins. When we worship what we think of as God, we can also well worship people or ideas we idolize, but certainly God receives glory along the way. Yet he can receive a glory that we take to be other than the God we are worshipping. Out / up there is God whom we are giving glory. We are unworthy servants. But that God out / up there who seems to be other than us is, as well as the true God, Molech, the God of death.

Molech is embraced within God, even this reprehensible demon and enemy of the God of Israel, by being a god of death which God embraced by dying in Jesus. In Christ, God died. In modernity, theism died, and indeed God died …. but – plot twist – as Molech! The demon of death was redeemed in getting to die as God. This evil demon is revealed as an aspect of the perfectly good Father God (whom we are) inasmuch as he let himself die for our sake. We are that perfectly good God who dies for the sake of the other, embracing the evil one absolutely.

So Molech had previously won an untold victory. When the world of, let’s say, the millennium – the first thousand years of Christendom – worshipped God, they worshipped Molech. The God of Israel had lost his battle against the Canaanite gods, and Moses wept, but no one noticed.

The Lord is His glory. Glory is doxa, to which we can relate the ideas of opinion and mindset. God is the mindset we have of Him. God is us in relation to Him. God is themselves in relation to us. God is the relation we are. The Trinity is we, ourselves, and us. Romans 8 truly says this when it says that nature groans in eager expectation of the revelation of the sons of God. The sons of God are, like Jesus, those who are in such intimately relation to God as to reveal him to others. So may you be.