When we were finishing off the cabin up nort,’ I bought a faux-marble (read, linoleum) counter top that needed a hole cut into it to fit the kitchen sink. I had done this before, and took it into the garage right here down south to power-tool it into perfection. At the back end of the counter top was a rise to keep water from flowing off the back, and with the fit of the sink, I simply couldn’t force the jig saw against the small space it provided to finish off the hole. After much thought, I got much longer saw bits with which I could hold the saw above this rise. It did eventually do the job, but I broke several of the saw bits and, having no support for my hand on the table, the hole that was cut was wretchedly jagged. It didn’t matter, as the sink lip would cover that mess, but it did make me puzzle: how had I done it before so easily?
Well, duh. What I had to do was trace the outline of the sink on the bottom of the counter top, where everything was nice and flat. That’s what I had done before, but this time, I couldn’t see it until I had finished the job the wrong way. This was almost 12 years ago, and as I can still remember my wife’s name, this was not a case of early Alzheimer’s. Rather, I had simply overlooked the best way for what seemed at the time to be the most obvious. I had, then, seen only the immediate cutting without grasping the overall concept of cutting such a hole. This happens. Recall the NASA engineers when they crashed a 20 million dollar rocket on Mars because they had mixed up English and Metric measuring units. I can hear their giggles of embarrassment as I write.
Welp, considering the bigger interests of this blog on the miraculous, the unexplained, and the spiritual, I missed the forest for the trees again on the last essay. Not that the essay was bad. Maybe it was a bit too heavy on the philosophy side, but still, there was a valid point to be made and it was made well-enough, I hope, to be understood. Recall that I had gotten the main idea for the essay from a quote by Mark Sykes about his hatred for his own English ruling class. But there was something even more interesting in the book found not at the very beginning, but towards the end, and something that was more relevant to the book (The Man Who Created the Middle East, by Christopher Sykes) at large. That is, that Mark Sykes, the co-author of the infamous Sykes-Pico Treaty, had also been behind the Balfour Declaration.
Of course we all remember the Balfour Declaration. OK, of course we probably don’t, unless you’re an Israel or Middle East buff, and it was poorly named, to boot. Arthur Balfour was First Lord of the (British) Admiralty at the time of the First World War, and his greatest contribution to said declaration was to deliver it to the War Department from the hands of Sykes and some influential Zionists. Without Sykes, then, the Declaration would not have been made. The meat of this declaration was to ascertain the right of the Jewish peoples to occupy a homeland in Palestine. It led directly to the beginning of the establishment of the Jewish nation of Israel.
It gets more interesting. Mark Sykes should never have been born. His father, Sir Tatton, was unbelievably wealthy and unbelievably neurotic, even more “eccentric” than the average wealthy bachelor of Victorian England. He worried constantly about his health, and wanted nothing to do with women in the romantic sense (nor men). Having reached his middle fifties, it seemed that he would make it to the end as a rich and lonely old man, but fate – and a scheming mother – threw him a curve-ball. The wife-to-be, Christina (also of the elite class), was a single young woman who came in need of help during her travels. It was then that she happened to ask for the support of Tatton, who was there at her moment of distress. As a gentleman, he escorted her to a respectable hotel, and there got her a room, and himself another, for the night. The following day, when the mother heard about this (maybe she had cooked the whole thing up in advance?), she threatened scandal if Tatton did not marry her. As that was the worst that could happen to a gentleman of the era, he agreed. Six months after the marriage (that is no misprint), he took his bride for the first time (reportedly while drunk, and in a very awkward manner), which is when Mark Sykes began his life on earth.
Almost everyone knows that the Second Coming, as promised in John’s Book of Revelations in the New Testament, is not to occur until after the re-formation of Israel. 1900 years after the Jewish Diaspora – a blink in the eyes of God’s good time – that part of the prophecy was fulfilled. And as we now know, this would not have happened were it not for the feminine manipulation of an aging neurotic gentleman who managed to get drunk and perky for at least once in his life. This is oddly reminiscent of Abraham and Sarah, the old infertile couple that was promised by God a son (Isaac), who would start a nation “as numerous as the stars.” As it so happened, Mark Sykes managed to father 6 children before his death in 1919 (?) of the Spanish Influenza, that disease being the father of our fears over Covid, which has led to actions that have changed the world profoundly in ways we do not yet know.
Connections and connections. In the previous essay, I saw the more obvious traces of world history, as calculated by Man. In this, I write about another connection far more profound. Who could have guessed that the eccentricity of Tatton would lead to the rebirth of Israel and its re-entry into world politics? In this latter, world politics, Israel stands large as one of the focal points of history, for both possible good and horrible evil. All this is based upon one weak strand of a family line, leading in its way to the new David, a democracy-king of a united Israel on earth.
Some may see the craziness of it all as just another quirk in time, but one has to think: what was the likelihood of Israel ever becoming a nation again? And by such a random glitch in human society? Who could have put that together, ever?
I finished the last essay proclaiming the ultimate leadership of the Holy Spirit, which is underscored here. I have no proof of its existence other than the apparently random creativity that often comes before meaningful movements in history, all far beyond anyone’s calculations. These movements happen in each life too, if we look for them. It appears that we are not the authors of our own lives so much as the pens or the key boards. We can run out of ink or break down if we choose to fight the Spirit, or we can choose to move along with it as best we can. With the latter, we might then sit back on occasion to contemplate the forest surrounding our lives rather than each single tree, and marvel at the great power that is imbedded in each of us, even as each is but a whisper or hair in eternity.
When we were finishing off the cabin up nort,’ I bought a faux-marble (read, linoleum) counter top that needed a hole cut into it to fit the kitchen sink. I had done this before, and took it into the garage right here down south to power-tool it into perfection. At the back end of the counter top was a rise to keep water from flowing off the back, and with the fit of the sink, I simply couldn’t force the jig saw against the small space it provided to finish off the hole. After much thought, I got much longer saw bits with which I could hold the saw above this rise. It did eventually do the job, but I broke several of the saw bits and, having no support for my hand on the table, the hole that was cut was wretchedly jagged. It didn’t matter, as the sink lip would cover that mess, but it did make me puzzle: how had I done it before so easily?
Well, duh. What I had to do was trace the outline of the sink on the bottom of the counter top, where everything was nice and flat. That’s what I had done before, but this time, I couldn’t see it until I had finished the job the wrong way. This was almost 12 years ago, and as I can still remember my wife’s name, this was not a case of early Alzheimer’s. Rather, I had simply overlooked the best way for what seemed at the time to be the most obvious. I had, then, seen only the immediate cutting without grasping the overall concept of cutting such a hole. This happens. Recall the NASA engineers when they crashed a 20 million dollar rocket on Mars because they had mixed up English and Metric measuring units. I can hear their giggles of embarrassment as I write.
Welp, considering the bigger interests of this blog on the miraculous, the unexplained, and the spiritual, I missed the forest for the trees again on the last essay. Not that the essay was bad. Maybe it was a bit too heavy on the philosophy side, but still, there was a valid point to be made and it was made well-enough, I hope, to be understood. Recall that I had gotten the main idea for the essay from a quote by Mark Sykes about his hatred for his own English ruling class. But there was something even more interesting in the book found not at the very beginning, but towards the end, and something that was more relevant to the book (The Man Who Created the Middle East, by Christopher Sykes) at large. That is, that Mark Sykes, the co-author of the infamous Sykes-Pico Treaty, had also been behind the Balfour Declaration.
Of course we all remember the Balfour Declaration. OK, of course we probably don’t, unless you’re an Israel or Middle East buff, and it was poorly named, to boot. Arthur Balfour was First Lord of the (British) Admiralty at the time of the First World War, and his greatest contribution to said declaration was to deliver it to the War Department from the hands of Sykes and some influential Zionists. Without Sykes, then, the Declaration would not have been made. The meat of this declaration was to ascertain the right of the Jewish peoples to occupy a homeland in Palestine. It led directly to the beginning of the establishment of the Jewish nation of Israel.
It gets more interesting. Mark Sykes should never have been born. His father, Sir Tatton, was unbelievably wealthy and unbelievably neurotic, even more “eccentric” than the average wealthy bachelor of Victorian England. He worried constantly about his health, and wanted nothing to do with women in the romantic sense (nor men). Having reached his middle fifties, it seemed that he would make it to the end as a rich and lonely old man, but fate – and a scheming mother – threw him a curve-ball. The wife-to-be, Christina (also of the elite class), was a single young woman who came in need of help during her travels. It was then that she happened to ask for the support of Tatton, who was there at her moment of distress. As a gentleman, he escorted her to a respectable hotel, and there got her a room, and himself another, for the night. The following day, when the mother heard about this (maybe she had cooked the whole thing up in advance?), she threatened scandal if Tatton did not marry her. As that was the worst that could happen to a gentleman of the era, he agreed. Six months after the marriage (that is no misprint), he took his bride for the first time (reportedly while drunk, and in a very awkward manner), which is when Mark Sykes began his life on earth.
Almost everyone knows that the Second Coming, as promised in John’s Book of Revelations in the New Testament, is not to occur until after the re-formation of Israel. 1900 years after the Jewish Diaspora – a blink in the eyes of God’s good time – that part of the prophecy was fulfilled. And as we now know, this would not have happened were it not for the feminine manipulation of an aging neurotic gentleman who managed to get drunk and perky for at least once in his life. This is oddly reminiscent of Abraham and Sarah, the old infertile couple that was promised by God a son (Isaac), who would start a nation “as numerous as the stars.” As it so happened, Mark Sykes managed to father 6 children before his death in 1919 (?) of the Spanish Influenza, that disease being the father of our fears over Covid, which has led to actions that have changed the world profoundly in ways we do not yet know.
Connections and connections. In the previous essay, I saw the more obvious traces of world history, as calculated by Man. In this, I write about another connection far more profound. Who could have guessed that the eccentricity of Tatton would lead to the rebirth of Israel and its re-entry into world politics? In this latter, world politics, Israel stands large as one of the focal points of history, for both possible good and horrible evil. All this is based upon one weak strand of a family line, leading in its way to the new David, a democracy-king of a united Israel on earth.
Some may see the craziness of it all as just another quirk in time, but one has to think: what was the likelihood of Israel ever becoming a nation again? And by such a random glitch in human society? Who could have put that together, ever?
I finished the last essay proclaiming the ultimate leadership of the Holy Spirit, which is underscored here. I have no proof of its existence other than the apparently random creativity that often comes before meaningful movements in history, all far beyond anyone’s calculations. These movements happen in each life too, if we look for them. It appears that we are not the authors of our own lives so much as the pens or the key boards. We can run out of ink or break down if we choose to fight the Spirit, or we can choose to move along with it as best we can. With the latter, we might then sit back on occasion to contemplate the forest surrounding our lives rather than each single tree, and marvel at the great power that is imbedded in each of us, even as each is but a whisper or hair in eternity.
RSS Feed