From the archive Showing posts from April, 2023

The Stone, the Bird and the Eye

The Benben of Heliopolis, the missing capstone of the pyramid, and the Eye of Providence Three images run through this essay, and they belong to cultures separated by four thousand years. The first is a stone the Egyptians called the Benben, kept in the temple of the sun at Heliopolis and remembered as the first solid ground to rise from the waters of chaos. The second is the empty summit of the Great Pyramid, which once carried a capstone shaped like that stone and now ends in a flat platform of weathered blocks. The third is printed on the back of every American one-dollar bill, an eye inside a radiant triangle floating above a pyramid that has no top. The three are connected by more than resemblance. The capstone of a pyramid was the Benben made in stone, and the designers of the Great Seal of the United States put an eye of light exactly where the capstone should be. This essay follows that line from Heliopolis to Philadelphia. The Benben The name comes from the Egyptian verb wbn ,...

Ronnel D. Chua·

Ra, Lord of the Sun

The sun god of Egypt, the Eye that heals and destroys, and his return in our time I am Yesterday, To-day, and To-morrow, and I have the power to be born a second time; I am the divine hidden Soul who createth the gods. (Book of the Dead, chapter 64, in Wallis Budge's translation) Ra, also written Re, was the sun god of ancient Egypt and for long stretches of its history the greatest of its gods. His name appears in royal names by the early third millennium BC, and his worship lasted, in one form or another, until the temples closed under the Christian emperors in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, a span of some three thousand years. For the Egyptians he was the source of life, of order, of kingship and of power. He was the creator who rose from the primeval waters, the king who ruled the first age of the world, and the traveller who crossed the sky by day and the underworld by night and was born again each morning, as the voice of the Book of the Dead says, "a second ...

Ronnel D. Chua·

The Science of Divine Healing

Faith, its rivals, and the Master who gave the power away Divine healing is the belief that God can heal sickness of body or mind, injury and disability by a power beyond nature. Many Christian churches and movements practice it, and so do many other faiths. Its Christian form rests on the gospel accounts of Jesus and his apostles healing the sick and casting out demons, and on the promises of the Old and New Testaments, from "I am the LORD that healeth thee" (Exodus 15:26) to the charge in the Letter of James that the elders should anoint the sick with oil and pray, since "the prayer of faith shall save the sick" (James 5:15). For those who believe in it, a healing is more than a cure. It is a sign of God's power, his love and his compassion for human beings. The Forms It Takes The simplest form is prayer, spoken or silent, alone or with others, with or without the laying on of hands and the anointing with oil. Faith healing, in the narrower sense, centers on a...

Ronnel D. Chua·

The Son of Man and the Banner of Reuben

From Daniel's vision to the Templars' vault and the Royal Arch of the Freemasons In the Old Testament, "son of man" is usually a poetic way of saying "human being." When Balaam declares that "God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent" (Numbers 23:19), the phrase sets the faithfulness of God against the fickleness of mortals. When the psalmist asks, "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" (Psalm 8:4), it expresses wonder that the God of the heavens should care for creatures so small. The prophet Ezekiel hears the phrase as a name. God addresses him as "son of man" more than ninety times, usually just before a message or a vision, and the title reminds him that he is a mortal standing before the holy Lord, sent to a rebellious people, the "children of Israel" (Ezekiel 2:3). One Like a Son of Man One passage uses the phrase in a way...

Ronnel D. Chua·

Fatima and the Year 1960

The third secret, the Redemption Cycle, and a resurrection in Mindanao Fátima is a small town in central Portugal, and in 1917 it became known to the whole world. Three shepherd children said that the Virgin Mary had appeared to them in a hollow called the Cova da Iria, and on the last of the appearances, October 13, 1917, a crowd estimated at tens of thousands saw what they described as the sun dancing in the sky. The Catholic Church approved the apparitions as worthy of belief in 1930, and Fátima has become one of the great shrines of the Catholic world, visited by millions of pilgrims a year and by four popes. What follows is a short history of the apparitions and of the secret entrusted to the children, and then my own reading of the part of that secret that the Church kept sealed for most of a century. The Apparitions The story begins a year earlier, in 1916, when Lúcia dos Santos, then nine, and her younger cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto said that an angel had appeared to th...

Ronnel D. Chua·

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