And Their Wings Touched Each Other
art by Elizabeth Honer
There is a reason I have written, in slow spurts, this strange long essay. Many reasons, probably, braided together, different threads from different places woven into something that would never have made sense to me before, and maybe won’t make sense to me later…
But it is almost making sense to me in this moment.
These thoughts and images are not sorted or tidy.
They are about the experience of living in mind-blowing times and engaging in a challenging process around an epic vision that may offer momentary relief, sustenance, refreshment for the heavy realities we face. Processes that include some dangers - of avoidance, by-passing, ambition and inflation - but also may allow for a deep gulp of oxygen before we are swallowed up again by the entanglements, horrors, cruelties and heartbreak of living in the here and now.
I need to take a breath sometimes.
I need a birds-eye, angel-eye, cosmic-view sometimes.
Just for a moment, so I can keep going.
I just need an occasional peek at an utterly complex interdependent cosmos that includes every single thing that I hate or love, that I understand or cannot. A perspective that helps me live and work on the earth with a more courageous heart.
I’ve been reading Bruce Chilton’s “Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography” - and when I finished, I wanted to ask Rev. Dr. Chilton one question:
“Did this work change how you pray?”
Spiritual teacher Ham Sok Han, a Korean Quaker, known as the “Ghandi of Korea” because of his role in helping to facilitate a peaceful revolution - spoke about practicing the faith of Jesus, rather than faith in Jesus. That sentence struck me in the heart twenty-five years ago like an arrow and certainly is folded into my imaginary question for Chilton.
A central premise of Chilton’s popular book and academic research revolves precisely around how Yeshua might have learned to pray, and the mystic, esoteric practices he may have been trained and initiated in. Chilton explores the possibility that John the Baptist, The Immerser – may have, like several other itinerate rabbis of the place and era, practiced and taught an esoteric practice known as Chariot (Merkabah) mysticism, - using Ezekiel’s vision as a focus of contemplation and that Jesus may have spent some time as a student, initiate, and master of the practice.
I do not know enough about Biblical scholarship to know or even care how legitimate or likely this notion is. But it interests me, and is it any stranger, really, then the meditations that infuse and emerge around Tibetan Buddhist thangkas, or Hindu mandalas or Hildegard of Bingen’s illustrated visions?
Why wouldn’t Rabbi Jesus have spent time contemplating Ezekiel’s mystical vision of the cosmos and creation? After being surrounded by hordes of people in an occupied authoritarian state demanding miracles, wisdom, exorcisms, and healing who wouldn’t want to retreat to the wilderness and gaze at into the sky and contemplatively inhabit a vision that offers enough distance from suffering that we are reminded of how beautiful it all is?
I know I need that, now.
Another thread led to this: I’ve had a cockamamie idea for a long time – long before undertaking my various dream projects – a fantasy of writing, contemplating, reflecting my way through every dream and vision in the Bible.
I’ll never do it. I’ll never have the time. It would be a full-time job for a year or more and life has never offered me such a luxury. And too many pointless follies can become exhausting. So maybe this essay will scratch and satisfy that ongoing itch.
A few more threads in this braid:
I, of course, sit with other people’s dreams all the time.
And my own.
I assume we share some underlying symbolic matrices and that there is value to sharing dreams with each other. I believe there are ineffable realities we can communicate only with images, and that we don’t need to decipher such images as much as we need to let them pour over us and move through us and do whatever they came here to do.
And so did Ezekiel or he wouldn’t have recorded and shared such a vision. And so does everyone who writes a poem or a parable or tells a child a bedtime story or reads a fairy tale.
And in the dream circles I facilitate every week, we consider what the dreams, visions and archetypes that emerge for others might mean to us. If it were our dream, what might it open up for us? What personal resonance might the collective aspects of an archetypal image have for those who listen, who have ears to hear? What might it mean to me, here, now in my own body, if it were my dream?
So, I’m not concerned with what any such dream or vision or psychedelic experience means objectively, or even, in this case what it may mean to Ezekiel or John the Baptist or Jesus or Jewish scholars or Christian fundamentalists. I’m interested in exploring what the vision recorded in Ezekiel 1 might mean, if anything at all, to me.
I’ve read Ezekiel before of course. I found it as mystifying and exhausting as Revelations which I’ve never been able to get through. A firehose of archetypal gibberish, written in some symbolic code that I didn’t have the time, energy or curiosity to read closely or unearth all the history of. Nor did I even allow it to wash over me like a poem or a painting, it felt too much, too extreme, too nightmarish, too psychotic. I’d skimmed it: “Yeah – wheels within wheels and eyes all around, a face of lion and an eagle, that kind of stuff…”
But this time I decided to read it closely. To sit with it a bit and listen. To wonder and sing it to myself, chanting bits here and there, as I rode on two fat spinning trail bike wheels, propelled by gears within gears, my own mini-chariot, on a dirt path through the Galisteo Basin surrounded by sky and mountains. I tried to assemble the whole spinning picture in small bites, without feeling overwhelmed, without dismissing it, and imagine into it as if it were my own.
What would it mean to envision the cosmos, in the way that Jesus or Ezekiel any enlightened master or wisdom teacher might have seen it? What would it mean to be called to stand up under the great whirling wheels, lights and fire from above, a crystal dome, under a sapphire throne alongside such mystics and prophets - to look up at the firmament and imagine it together? To pray with Jesus, to envision with Ezekiel, alongside them?
I thought about how deeply I’ve yearned to see the world through a deeper more compassionate, more patient, less fearful and traumatizing lens. How often I long for a more just and balanced world, a cosmic reboot – and how relieving even a glimpse of such a view means in times of crisis, cruelty and danger.
We are surrounded by mad impossible visions of new worlds:
Dreams of enslaved laborers on Mars, and dreams of serving and being served by AI gods. Oligarchs summon stories of Anti-Christs, invoke dreams of annihilating and expelling those they consider, weak, other, vulnerable or strangers. Autocrats and mobsters dream of genocides creating multibillion dollar resort properties on the blood and bones of those they have slaughtered, and dream of ruling nation-states, of impregnating thousands of women with their superior seed. They dream aloud of living forever, of actual embodied immortality supplementing their youth with transfusions from teenagers and hoarding the resources they have extracted forever.
And many more of us dream of beloved and just communities, dream of better lives for all children and all future beings. Of an earth healed and regarded as alive and sacred. And to move toward these dreams perhaps we need visions of being surrounded by holy generativity, creative fires, and Divine love.
Ezekiel 1
One of the first things I noticed when I cracked open Ezekiel was how often phrases and cadences repeat; fire flashing, gleaming amber, their wings touched each other, without turning as they went, without veering as they moved, as the spirit moved them, their wings spread toward each other, fire all around, eyes all around, splendor all around, all around.
And how much easier it was to hear and feel these words as a hypnotizing song, as a chant, as call-and-response – dancing, spinning in circles around a central flame, a fire-pit – than to read it as narrative or a description of an event or an environment. It’s rhythms and movement and repetitions as essential as the images.
And all the “something like-s” that Ezekiel struggles with, all his speechlessness, all his attempts to find analogies and correspondences for the incomprehensible spirals that spun through his mind’s eye.
Here, just so we are working from the same translation:
As I looked, a stormy wind came out of the north: a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber. ⁵ In the middle of it was something like four living creatures. This was their appearance: they were of human form. ⁶ Each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. ⁷ Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot; and they sparkled like burnished bronze. ⁸
Under their wings on their four sides, they had human hands. And the four had their faces and their wings thus: ⁹their wings touched one another; each of them moved straight ahead, without turning as they moved. ¹⁰
As for the appearance of their faces: the four had the face of a human being, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and the face of an eagle; ¹¹ such were their faces.
Their wings were spread out above; each creature had two wings, each of which touched the wing of another, while two covered their bodies. ¹² Each moved straight ahead; wherever the spirit would go, they went, without turning as they went. ¹³
In the middle of the living creatures there was something that looked like burning coals of fire, like torches moving to and fro among the living creatures; the fire was bright, and lightning issued from the fire. ¹⁴
The living creatures darted to and fro, like a flash of lightning. ¹⁵ As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. ¹⁶ As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl; and the four had the same form, their construction being something like a wheel within a wheel. ¹⁷
When they moved, they moved in any of the four directions without veering as they moved. ¹⁸ Their rims were tall and awesome, for the rims of all four were full of eyes all around. ¹⁹ When the living creatures moved, the wheels moved beside them; and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose. ²⁰ Wherever the spirit would go, they went, and the wheels rose along with them; for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. ²¹ When they moved, the others moved; when they stopped, the others stopped; and when they rose from the earth, the wheels rose along with them; for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. ²²
Over the heads of the living creatures there was something like a dome, shining like crystal, spread out above their heads. ²³ Under the dome their wings were stretched out straight, one toward another; and each of the creatures had two wings covering its body. ²⁴ When they moved, I heard the sound of their wings like the sound of mighty waters, like the thunder of the Almighty, a sound of tumult like the sound of an army; when they stopped, they let down their wings. ²⁵
And there came a voice from above the dome over their heads; when they stopped, they let down their wings. ²⁶
And above the dome over their heads there was something like a throne, in appearance like sapphire and seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form. ²⁷ Upward from what appeared like the loins I saw something like gleaming amber, something that looked like fire enclosed all around; and downward from what looked like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was a splendor all around. ²⁸
Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendor all around. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. When I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of someone speaking.
~ Ezekiel 1, The New Oxford Annotated Bible
And here, my attempts to strip the image from the music, in my own words, shorter:
A storm came. Clouds, lightening, fire wind.
There were four creatures, with four faces and four wings each,
standing on shiny calves feet burnished like bronze.
They had a hand under each wing.
Their wings touched each other.
They moved straight ahead without turning.
They each had four faces:
a human face
with a lion on the right
an ox on the left
and the face of an eagle
Two of their wings covered their bodies.
In the center was more fire and lightening
– coals, torches, flames swaying back and forth.
The winged creatures sped to and fro as fast as lightening.
They each had a shiny, translucent wheel near them, all the same,
like a wheel within a wheel. The rims were covered with eyes.
They could move in all directions, in perfect synchronization
– wheels and creatures, moved with one spirit.
A crystal dome overhead.
A sound of mighty waters, a deafening roar,
whenever the creatures moved their wings.
When they paused, they put their wings down.
A voice came down from the dome and everything stopped still.
Above the dome was something like a holy seat - sapphire blue above.
And overhead was a human-like form.
From the waist up the figure shone like gleaming golden amber,
below the waist was fire.
And everything was bright and shining, and
as brilliant as a rainbow.
I fell on my face
– the light too bright to look at, the sight too overwhelming to withstand.
I live under New Mexico skies. Under a crystal dome, the air filled with living creatures with gorgeous wings, clouds of fire and lighting, translucent sapphire blue skies that at high altitudes appear to melt directly into space, that more than once have surrounded me with rainbows.
The chariot I live beneath I can almost perceive in the atmosphere of a miraculous planet, an orb that spins in many directions, with millions of eyes, great and small, consciousness in thousands of living forms, all around.
The “Throne.” I don’t know why it has to be called a throne. It seems to me that human beings created empires and then could only imagine placing God at the top of their empirical hierarchies. I’d rather imagine a ring of grandfathers and grandmothers in Holy Rocking Chairs than a ruler’s throne.
Let’s call it The Seat of Wisdom.
The dissolving feeling you get when you lay on your back on the soft earth on an exquisite day – and gaze into the sky, into the blue, as far as you can see: In that very spot, we might inhale a whiff of the infinite through a deep-blue breath, we can almost imagine touching the curve of the earth. At the very top of this sky-dome, is where we might imagine the Seat of Wisdom.
Perhaps it is more properly an amphitheater, rings within circles within wheels, where all the gods and saints, the bodhisattvas, the medicine people, healers, exorcists, miracle workers, mystics, gurus, masters and shamans, the elders and ancestors, and Wise and Holy Ones gather to think of us, to watch and root for us, maybe even to intercede when they can.
We might breathe into this overview with our millions of minds-eyes, this over-look, this super-vision, this out and in-sight, if only for a moment.
What would it feel like to soar like the angels, like the ravens and turkey buzzards do, on glorious muscular outstretched wings? If we could circle the earth and survey all life on earth from above? It may remind us that we are both small and precious, fleeting, miniscule, yet essential, cherished participants in the All.
We know what peering at the pale blue dot from mission Apollo’s eye induced in those humans who were selected to first encircle the earth. Peering down on earth as if from God’s Eye, by all reports they were changed forever. Mystical experiences of ineffable love, humility and gratitude. Some early astronauts were never able to bring their hearts wholly back to earth although their bodies returned healthy and intact enough.
Galaxy brained.
Apprehending our proper place in the expanding cosmos is no easy psycho-spiritual task.
It is exactly as challenging as apprehending our own death, our temporality. We play a small part in something vast and eternal, beyond concepts of time and place. A cosmos filled with particles that touch each other like wings - whose movements, no matter where they travel through the vast Unknowable will always impact each other’s trajectories, spookily, synchronized across all imaginable distances.
A wheel within a wheel, spirals and orbits spinning in all directions at once.
A cosmos conscious of itself, examining itself, peering at itself, creating itself.
Eyes everywhere, all places at once, sustaining and renewing and considering everything.
Life is wholly entangled with life. All energy is one energy.
And in this way, I can almost envision the cosmos – as Ezekiel saw it.
And tremble with awe and gratitude.
To see that we are small and beautiful and terrible, peers with all living things
If we could look down at ourselves from the eyes of the Wise Ones, we might see how rare, how exquisite, how ruthless, how elemental, how generous, how completely feral, powerful and beautiful life is.
Like an eagle, or a lion. Like an ox. Or a human.
Like a whirlwind. Like lightning.
Before I continue, I should explain that if you set some spiritual or contemplative goal to reach the Throne, to sit above and gaze down below, to reach the pinnacle or imagine for a moment it is possible or desirable to camp out there – you are courting danger.
The whole show is incomprehensible. Beyond any sensory IMAX movie or psychedelic trip, or freaky dream you have ever experienced. And yes, these are the wildest seats with the clearest overview up there in those sapphire blue stadium seats.
Do you want to claim a seat?
Be careful what you wish for:
You might not ever be the same. You might go mad. You might never walk contentedly on the heavy imbalanced, unjust earth again. Galaxy brain-flooded. A surge of love so powerful that it will simultaneously shatter and expand your heart, always, continuously.
Your heart and mind will be transformed forever no matter what.
There will be before – and an after. The end of who you think you are.
To lose one’s life is to save it.
And it will likely bring more hardship than honor into your daily life.
Would you dare to approach the Holy Seat?
Could you lift your face from the ground?
Are you sure you want to see?
*********************
The Talmud warns anyone other than the most spiritually developed souls from studying or daring to teach the secret doctrines of Merkabah, and I think it is wise to respect such warnings.
Approaching visions like these in a cavalier way may cause disintegration or manic inflation.
I wondered about the archetypal relationship between Ezekiel’s Chariot and the Chariot card in the tarot deck, and thought the Anonymous author of the handy Meditations on Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism sitting on my bookshelf might be useful to sit with, and it was, but not in the ways I expected. Not a single reference to Ezekiel’s chariot, Kabbalah or Merkabah mysticism but plenty of useful guidance about how to approach both the creative and destructive aspects of such powerful archetypes.
And yes, the speed, the power, omnidirectional motion, the splendor of the chariot carries plenty of temptations, and can invite many harrowing missteps. Don’t get cocky.
Many things may be set in motion when the Chariot is constellated. The dangers are embedded in the terrible pleasures we may indulge when we imagine the powers that Ezekiel beheld are our own. None of this has anything to do with how special you are, how hard you have worked, or how much you wish for enlightenment.
What flies too high will be brought low. The least among you will be first.
A fundamental law of sacred magic: a “no” below opens a “yes” above.
We imagine that our desires set the possibility of fulfillment in motion, but the truth is that it is the renunciation of false, instilled ego desires set us free.
Subtraction, not addition. Smaller not bigger.
Pride and vainglory are entanglements. To lose consciousness of how small we are, to become over-identified with an archetypal force, is to be over-taken, possessed. Inflation is the essential hazard for those interested in depth.
If you attempt to imagine your way into this vision and try to skip over the fear and trembling, you are not doing it right. This will become evident through the tasteless, rotten, or even poisonous fruits that emerge from an inflated ego.
You will know how its going by the fruits.
Another law of spiritual health: Awe and terror activate the humility that makes one immune to megalomania.
No human being who has seen and heard will be able to make an idol of himself… Authentic experience of the Divine makes one humble; he who is not humble has not had authentic experience of the Divine.
And Mr. Anonymous continues this thought:
All those who are humble have certainly seen and heard - no matter where or when, whether they remember or not.
In dreams or visions, in early childhood, or maybe even before birth for all we know.
Humility is a grace. And to dwell in the vicinity of this vision is to learn something unique, particular, and small about our proper place, our role to play, our specific task within the All. A Wise One, an integrated person is one who can join those sitting around the Holy Seat, and who never forgets that they also simultaneously look out of the eyes of a specific, mortal body on tiny unjust planet in a vast ocean of galaxies.
Coming together and apart, unity and separation, breathing in, breathing out, eternal and finite.
Work and Prayer are the grounding prescriptions of the anonymous Christian Hermetic. And I will add that Love and Humility are the only methods to ward off psychological and spiritual hazards of such a vision.
Without humility it is best to keep your face turned to the ground.
I am not a student seeking out secret teachings. I am not striving or reaching for enlightenment. I am not attempting to travel to other spiritual realms or dimensions or cultivate altered states so that I can see seraphim and cherubim and look upon a fiery god in human form. I do not consider myself a Wise One or a prophet. I am not studying or teaching any established practice other than listening deeply to another’s vision-dream, deposited squarely in the public domain, sitting right there in scripture for thousands of years for all to read.
I sit with this vision because it kept crossing my path, and because it offered some relief, some fuel, some visceral reminder that life is sacred, some clarity that helps me keep going, that reminds me of our inalienable cosmic interconnection in a time of cruelty and suffering. As I work and pray, as I try to fulfill my individual assignment, as I lug this heavy, tired human body through the world guided by love and humility, it refreshes me to imagine my small breath intermingling with the Great Breath, swirling through the cosmos, surrounded by glorious four-winged creatures honoring a living god.
And in a way, it is not surprising at all that such a vision might offer strength and consolation. Ezekiel also lived in a time of crisis, his people subjugated, persecuted – and this encounter explicitly sustained, empowered, commissioned him to stand in humility and love and speak the truth as he understood it.
The meeting of the soul, face to face, in love.
That is precisely what a beatific vision does, if you are called to stand upright and face it.
And seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form - A head and chest - gleaming translucent and golden as fossilized resin, with legs and loins of fire below.
Faceless. Genderless. A creative fire. A primordial archetype of humanity. A human-shaped love so elemental that it burns and glows.
To even think of it scrambles my thoughts.
Only bits and questions:
Firey sun chariots and their Divine charioteers.
Why isn’t this faceless glowing archetypal form everywhere, in all our houses of worship?
Why isn’t it painted on ceilings, hung on the wall behind altars?
How would it change our relationship to the Divine if it only anthropomorphized this far and no farther?
A shape, a container summoned by/for a human who desperately needed to be reminded that this is the shape of the Divine fire that animates every single beating human heart.
An outline of what is sacred in each human life.
A radiant primordial energy that animates every living thing.
Being. Is-ness. Life.
Or maybe call it Love:
The voice of cosmic Love speaking according to Hildegard of Bingen:
I saw… a beautiful and marvellous image of a human figure; her face was of such beauty and brightness that I could more easily have stared at the sun.
The figure spoke: I am the supreme fire and energy. I have kindled all the sparks of living, and I have breathed out no mortal things for I judge them as they are. I have properly ordered the cosmos, flying about the circling circle with my wings, that is, with my wisdom.
Thus I am concealed in things as fiery energy. They are ablaze through me like the breath that ceaselessly enlivens the human being or like the wind tossed flame in a fire. All these things live in their essence and there is no death in them for I am life.
~ The Book of Divine Works
It is not impossible to consider the force which binds and entangles the cosmos together as a kind of Love-force, and all the confused and desperate ways we humans attempt and fail to love each other as a process of attempting to return to our most elemental self.
Or perhaps this awe-some kind of Love may be fuels us, encourages us, allowing us to return to our little selves with some more durable kind of hope and clarity. When we are offered the briefest glimpse of the Whole, a peek at a pale blue distant dot floating helplessly in space, perhaps we may locate ourselves in the vast interconnection, a tiny speck, our place in the dance of Wholeness.
We need visions that show us our proper place in a glorious cosmos, of a great cleansing wind that breathes life and justice into every nook and cranny of this stressed-out planet.
Our spirit merges with the wind that rushes over the land, connecting with the sapphire throne towering in the heavens…
~ Bruce Chilton
Our small breath entangled with the world respiration, with the charged particles that swirl in the cosmic winds. Spirit, pneuma, flies throughout the skies with the speed of a massive chariot, in all places at once, sustaining and renewing creation.
What if this throne and this chariot and these angelic wheels are always encircling us? What if we can only see it when the noise, agendas and worry stop, when we look up, look out beyond the confining human-created systems we are embedded in?
What if ambition to “get higher” or more enlightened has nothing to do with recognizing that truth, and in fact obscures it?
What if we can only see how we are free when we are release from the illusion that we have to attain it?
No upper limits to strive or climb or fly toward.
Simply learning to direct our gaze toward what has always been with and all around us, all that we have ignored, taken for granted, exploited, monetized, objectified.
Perhaps this holy seat, this chariot is the ride we are always on, a layer of reality that infuses and surrounds us, an everyday truth about what already is, and always has been, now and forever. The sky, the clouds, lightening, consciousness, flying and seeing, wheels within wheels, circles within circles spinning, orbiting, everything touching everything else, everything moving as though with one spirit through all the universes and dimensions and all that is.
Maybe what Ezekiel saw is simply the world, the cosmos, as it is, and we only need to strip away our projections and delusions to see the miracles all around us.
Maybe we all need, in this moment of extreme imbalance, injustice, to momentarily, look at the skies above us, to the winds that encircle us and see Ezekiel’s vision reflected in skies and the living creatures, and in every human form that we encounter.
And when the tasks of daily living have called our attention away from the crystal blue above, when we are too afraid, or stressed, or numb to see that all wings touch each other, that life emerges continuously, miraculously from the primordial fires, Ezekiel’s chariot might remind us of a dancing, orbiting, spinning reality that we are all embedded in, whether we can see it or not.
