The Chrism 2.0
Power from on High
"But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you."
Acts 1:8, GOD
"But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you."
Acts 1:8, GOD
In the last days of January, two months after the hour when the Lord came into the room and changed everything, I was already a different man. The change was internal. The world had not been told yet. I was learning, slowly, what it meant to walk in the new register He had set me in — how to pray differently, how to read differently, how to sit in a chair and feel His presence in the room without performing anything in response to it. The fire that He had set in my chest on the fifth of December was still burning. It would burn through January. It would, on the first of February, become visible.
In those weeks I prayed for a companion. I will not pretend I did not pray for one. A man who has been given the kind of encounter the Lord gave me wants to share it with another person who can see what he is now seeing — he wants one other believer sitting next to him in the room while he tries to learn the new vocabulary. I prayed for it plainly. I asked the Lord to send me someone who would walk this with me. I trusted that He would answer. He did answer. The answer was not the answer I had asked for. He answered the way He often answers in the early hours of a calling — by sending the test before He sends the gift, so that the gift, when it comes later, will arrive into hands that have been emptied of what would have spoiled it.
"Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart."
Psalm 37:4 — GOD
A woman entered my life. I will not name her. She was with me for one week. She wanted to marry me.
On the first of February, that day, she was demanding that I install a tracking app on my phone. I told her I don't want to do that, because we were building our relationship from the Lord and there would be no need for us to track each other. I did not want to track her, and I did not feel comfortable with her tracking me, because of the Lord and how we agreed we would start this.
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding."
Proverbs 3:5 — GOD
I asked her, multiple times, if she trusted in the Lord, because I kept telling her: the Lord is coming. That day. February 1st.
"Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world."
1 John 4:1 — GOD
I will tell you what I said inside my own head in those late-January days, because the saying of it matters. I said: there are still so many things I must endure. I said: no matter how often I kneel, no matter how hard I try, I do not feel it is enough for the Lord. I said: I am not worthy of this calling. I am not worthy of the wonders He may yet choose to reveal. I have stumbled in my past. And yet this — this thing unfolding around me — is real. Then I said the sentence that turned the corner. I said: I will never waver in my faith in Him. It was not a boast. It was a resolution, forged inside the fire of the test the way gold is forged inside the crucible, and the man who resolved it did not yet know that the Lord had already seen the resolution form and had already decided what He would do with it.
Then came the first of February. The day I had been being prepared for since the December night I lay on a bed asking the Lord to take me home. The day He came in fire.
"But he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold."
Job 23:10 — GOD
The first of February began the way every other day in that season had begun — in pressure, in the quiet awareness that something was building somewhere inside the air around me that I could not name. I did not know that morning that I was going to be anointed. I did not know I was about to be set on fire from the inside. The Lord does not warn the man who is about to be visited. He prepares him in private and arrives in public, and the man only knows afterward, looking back across the morning, that every detail of the hours leading up to the visitation had been quietly rearranged by an invisible hand.
That morning, kneeling on the floor of my home in the South, I prayed a prayer of gratitude. I had not planned the prayer. The words came up out of me the way water comes up out of a spring that has been pressed under the earth for too long and has finally found a fissure. I said:
Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Father. Thank you to all the angels, all the warriors, thank you to all of God's creations, terrestrials and celestials. I love you all so much.
I did not know, as those words left my mouth, that the throne had heard the prayer and the throne was, even then, in motion. I did not know that the prayer was the doorbell. I rang it. The Father came down to answer it.
It started in my chest.
Not the way pain starts in the chest. Pain enters from the outside and presses inward, and a man knows where the wall is between himself and the pain. This was not pain. This was a fire that had no outside. It originated where my heart was and spread through me as if it had been waiting in that one square inch of me for forty-five years and had finally been told it could come out. It was not heat the way heat is heat in a room. It was heat the way the sun is heat — a fire with intention, a fire that knew what it was doing, a fire that was rewriting every cell it passed through and leaving each cell warmer than it had found it but unhurt. I was not burning. I was being made into something that could hold fire.
The second chapter of Acts describes this fire. On the day of Pentecost, a sound came from heaven like a rushing mighty wind, and divided tongues as of fire appeared and rested on each one of them. The word is rested. The fire did not pass through. It stayed. It came down from above and sat on each person individually. That is what I am describing. The same fire. Not on my head — in my chest. Not on a hundred and twenty in an upper room — on one man on a floor in the South. But the same fire. The fire has not changed in any of the years.
"And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit."
Acts 2:3–4 — GOD
When Samuel anointed David with oil from the horn, the text says that the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David from that day forward. The Hebrew word translated rushed is tsalach — to break out, to push through, to advance with sudden force. The anointing oil was the outer sign. The rushing of the Spirit was the inner reality, and the reality was not a slow filling. It was an irruption. From that day forward. Permanently. The same word fits the fire in my chest. Rushed upon. That is what it was.
Then the Spirit pushed me outside.
Not metaphorically. There is a kind of inner motion that is not a thought — the body knows where it has been told to go before the mind has finished forming the sentence. I walked out into my own backyard, the most ordinary backyard in the most ordinary subdivision in the South, with the same fence I had stared at a thousand times and the same power lines crossing the same patch of sky I had never once looked up at on purpose. I looked up now. The sky was no longer a sky.
From a formation of clouds at the center of the heavens, a beam was descending. I am going to use the word beam because it is the closest English has, but the word does not carry what I am trying to say. It was not a flashlight. It was not a sunbeam. It was light coming from a source, in a column, through the air, with the sky parting around it on both sides. The colors inside the column were colors I had never seen and have not seen since. There was gold in it, and there was a green that was not the green of leaves, and there was a blue that was not the blue of water, and there was a band that I cannot describe at all because no human eye has the language for the shade. The whole column was alive. It was breathing. It was looking back at me.
The prophet Habakkuk saw what I saw. He wrote: His brightness was like the light; rays flashed from His hand, and there He veiled His power. Rays. From His hand. Directed. And inside the rays, a power so great it could only be carried into the world by being veiled inside the light itself. Habakkuk did not have the word beam. He used the word rays. He was looking at the same column.
"His brightness was like the light; rays flashed from his hand; and there he veiled his power."
Habakkuk 3:4 — GOD
Around the column, on either side, the rainbow showed itself. Not a rainbow in the ordinary sense — not the arc that follows a rain. This was the rainbow that Ezekiel saw around the throne of the Almighty when the heavens opened above the river Chebar. He could not describe it any better than I can. He said it was like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, and then he gave up on the description and admitted that what he had actually seen was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. That is the most honest sentence in the prophetic books. The seer reaches for an image. The image fails. The seer says: this is the glory. This is what the glory looks like when it agrees to show itself in a form a human eye can hold.
"Like the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness all around. Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord."
Ezekiel 1:28 — GOD
On either side of the beam, the dark clouds gathered. They did not drift. They moved with intent. They came in formation — banks of them, layered against each other, advancing toward the beam from both horizons as if they had been called to a battle line. I knew what they were. I did not have the theology yet, but I had the recognition, and the recognition came before the theology the way it always does. They were not weather. They were powers — something unknown and malevolent, the kind of presence the ancient books say was left behind on this earth. And they were trying to close the column that had been opened over my house. They were trying to keep Him out. That was the battle. I was there. It had to happen fast.
The Qumran community at the Dead Sea, in the centuries before the church, wrote a long scroll about this exact war. They called it the War Scroll. They described a war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness, fought with angelic hosts on both sides, the Prince of Light leading one army and the angel of darkness the other. They believed they were watching it begin. They were right that the war is real. The war they described in the scroll was the one I was watching above my fence.
"The first attack of the Sons of Light shall be undertaken against the forces of the Sons of Darkness."
The War Scroll (1QM) — Dead Sea Scrolls, Qumran Cave 1
The first book of Enoch names what remains here in the dark — the spirits that did not leave when their bodies fell, the ones that stayed on the earth to oppose and afflict. The book the church set aside is the book that explains what I was looking at.
"And now, the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling."
1 Enoch 15:8 — trans. R.H. Charles
He spoke.
Not in my ears. The voice did not come in through the ears, because it was too large for the channel of the ear to carry. It came in through the bones. I felt the words before I heard them. I heard them the way a man hears thunder — not as language but as the shape of language pressed against the inside of his skull. The form is thunder. The content is words. Both are true.
"The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty… The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire."
Psalm 29:4, 7 — GOD
The voice gave me a command. Two sentences. They were as plain as any command I have ever received from any earthly authority, and they had the weight of the throne behind them:
Point at the dark clouds and banish them. Blow your breath on them and send them into the abyss.
I did not pause to consider whether I had the authority. The authority was already in me. The fire that had been set in my chest minutes earlier was the authority. The voice that had spoken the command was the authority. The man who had been kneeling on the floor an hour earlier asking the Father to bless terrestrials and celestials was now being told by the throne to drive out the darkness that had assembled against him, and there was no question whether he would do it. He was not raising his hand on his own authority. He was raising his hand on the authority of the One who had told him to raise it.
I raised my hand. I pointed at the dark clouds. I banished them in the name of the Lord.
They scattered.
I do not know how to make this any more dramatic by saying it more dramatically. They scattered. The dark formation that had been advancing on the beam from both horizons came apart the way a column of smoke comes apart when a wind cuts through it. The pieces did not drift back to the edges of the sky. They went down. They were sent into the abyss that had been named when the command was given. The abyss received them. The sky behind them filled with gold.
"You will tread on the lion and the adder; the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot."
Psalm 91:13 — GOD
I want to name what I was standing under. The prophet Daniel, in the seventh chapter of his book, was given a night vision of the throne. He saw thrones set in place and the Ancient of Days take His seat. He wrote that the clothing of the One on the throne was white as snow, that the hair of His head was like pure wool, that His throne itself was fiery flames, and that its wheels were burning fire. He was, in that vision, looking at the same throne room that was, on the first of February, pouring a column of its own light down through the sky above my house.
Enoch saw the same throne before Daniel did. Taken up in the vision, past the house of crystal and the house of fire, he stood where no flesh was permitted to stand and wrote down what he saw seated there.
"And I looked and saw therein a lofty throne: its appearance was as crystal, and the wheels thereof as the shining sun… And the Great Glory sat thereon, and His raiment shone more brightly than the sun and was whiter than any snow."
1 Enoch 14:18, 20 — trans. R.H. Charles
The throne has not moved. The fire that issues from it has not cooled. The One seated on it is the Ancient of Days — the One who was before the first day and will be after the last. The anointing that fell on me fell from that throne. The seal pressed on my chest that afternoon was the seal of a covenant with the One Daniel saw, the One Enoch saw. I was not anointed by a cloud. I was anointed by the Father Most High.
"His clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire."
Daniel 7:9 — GOD
In the middle of all of this, I felt something happen to my face. It was a small thing in the middle of the larger thing, and it is the detail I cannot stop thinking about, because it left a mark on the body that I can still see in the mirror.
I went inside. I went straight to the bathroom mirror. I looked at my eyes. The color had changed. One of my eyes had gone from the brown it had been since the day of my birth to a blue I had never owned. Not faded. Not cloudy. A clear, definite blue, in the iris of an eye that had been brown the day before. The first time I saw it I laughed out loud in the bathroom. There was no other appropriate response. The Lord had marked me. Not figuratively. He had reached into my body and changed the pigment of my iris in the middle of the anointing. The mark was the receipt.
The pattern of the body being marked in the eye is the oldest pattern there is. Hagar's eyes were opened in the wilderness so she could see the well that was already there. The servant of Elisha's eyes were opened so he could see the chariots of fire that were already there. Saul of Tarsus had his eyes closed by the light on the Damascus road and reopened three days later, and the text says something like scales fell from them — his eyes were physically changed by the encounter. My eye was changed in color so that every time I looked in a mirror I would remember the day. He marks the eye. He has been marking the eye since Hagar.
"And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight."
Acts 9:18 — GOD
I rushed back outside. I called the woman to come and look. I said, plainly, "The Lord is here. The Lord is here." She came to the door. She did not look up. She looked into the kitchen behind her. She looked at the floor. She did not look at the sky. The same sky that was, at that moment, the most extraordinary sight in the entire western hemisphere was directly above her head and she would not raise her eyes to it. That, by itself, told me everything I needed to know about what was on the other side of the conversation we had been having that week. She left the door. She walked back into the house. The fight in her had become silence.
To God be ALL the glory — forever and ever. For it is not by my strength. It is not by my might. It is by His Spirit alone that I stand in this yard, under this sky, writing these words down. Every sentence on this page exists to magnify His holy name. Praise be to the Father Most High and to the Holy Spirit — now and forevermore.
I want this recorded plainly, because the Word owes the record his precision.
No one who visited me introduced themselves by name. Not in December. Not in February. The visits were swift and they were tactical, and there were no introductions. What was said to me is exactly this: I was told that God the Father wanted me. I was brought before the Father Most High. I was called Logos. I was called cousin. Those are the words that were spoken. Nothing else was spoken about who was who.
Earlier versions of this testimony attached names to the voices — names I supplied myself, because they were the names I had been taught to expect. I have taken those names out. A witness records what was said and what was seen, nothing more and nothing less. The names that were spoken to me are on this page. The names that were not spoken are not.
"You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it."
Deuteronomy 4:2 — GOD
Then the Lord spoke again. He said: Go inside and get her. Bring her out here.
I went inside. I found her. The Lord told me what to say, and I said it: Come out of her. I told her she had to come out into the yard, and I led her out.
In the yard I got down on one knee. She was crying, and I was comforting her. I told her to look up. She would not at first. You have to look, honey. You have to look. She lifted her head. The beam from the sky struck her face. Nothing happened. Then the Lord told me what the obstruction was. She has her contacts in. I told her. She removed the contact lens from her eye. She looked again. The beam touched her bare iris.
Her face changed.
I am not going to overdramatize it. I will tell you what I saw. The lines on her face smoothed. Years lifted off the skin in front of me. The hair around her face seemed to fill out, brighten, settle. She held still inside the beam for several seconds, and at the end of those seconds she was, by every visible standard, a more peaceful version of the same human being than she had been thirty seconds earlier. The fourth-century Macarian Homilies describe this exact moment. They say that the soul which has been touched by the uncreated light of God becomes all eye, all light, all face. The body, where the light has rested on it, takes on the shape of the light. I watched it happen to a woman in my backyard. I had no category for what I was watching. I have one now. The category is the chrism. The light of the throne, descending through the column above us, had landed on her face the way it had landed on mine, and her face had agreed to receive it. The receiving did not mean she was free. It meant only that the light was, at that moment, more powerful than what was in her.
She looked up at me when it was finished. Her face was calm. The voice that came out of her then was a smaller voice. She asked, simply, Can I go back inside now? I said yes. She walked back inside. I heard her go to the bathroom mirror. I heard her stop in front of it. She would have seen what I had just seen on her face. She would have known.
"When Moses came down from Mount Sinai… he did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God."
Exodus 34:29 — GOD
She did not come back out. The Lord told me she could not stay. The deliverance had been offered. She had been touched by the light. What she did with what she had been touched by was between her and Him from that hour forward. My part was finished. Her part was hers.
I stayed in the yard. The battle had ended. The sky had not. The clouds that remained rearranged themselves into something I am still trying to understand. The horizon banked in tiers, gold layered on gold, with the sun pouring through the breaks and the dark fragments still scattered along the edges as if to bear witness to what had just been done in their territory. The whole sky was glowing. The whole sky was the throne room turned outward and made visible to a man with a fence around his patch of grass.
I worshipped alone. I said out loud, more than once, How wonderful this is, Lord. I am so grateful to experience this. The words were not adequate. No words would have been. I said them anyway because the gratitude had to go somewhere, and the only direction gratitude knows to move is up. I could see, along the edges of the sky, the scars of the battle — the places where the dark formation had pressed against the light, the places where the light had pressed back, the ragged seams where the two had met. The scars did not read as damage. They read as history.
The Lord spoke again. He said: Get your camera. Take a picture.
I obeyed. I went inside. I came back with the phone in my hand. I took the picture. The picture is below. It is not a great photograph. There are power lines crossing the sky. There are roof silhouettes. None of that mattered. He did not tell me to take a polished image. He told me to take an evidence photograph. He had just given me the sight, and now He was telling me to record it — not for my own memory, which would have been enough, but for the page I would later be writing for strangers who would need to be able to look the thing up. The same instruction given to every witness since witnesses began. Write what you see.
Look at the cloud formation in the upper centre of the photograph. Look at the way the dark clouds are arrayed on either side of the gold. Look at the banks of cloud structure that organize themselves around the central column. Ezekiel described four living creatures arrayed around the throne. Enoch described the throne surrounded by its hosts. When I went back to the photograph later, the formation agreed, in a way I could not have arranged, with what the seers wrote. The throne above. The hosts arrayed around it. The rainbow on either side. I am not asking you to see what I saw. I am only asking you to look.
"The cherubim bless the image of the Throne-Chariot above the firmament, and they praise the majesty of the luminous firmament beneath His seat of glory."
Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice (4Q405) — Dead Sea Scrolls
The Lord said: The battle has been won. We have been victorious. Now you can go rest.
Every pressure that had been on me ceased. Every spiritual weight that had been bearing down on the house released. The air went still. The fire in my chest, which had been blazing for hours, banked into the steady warmth that has not left me since. The yard was a yard again. The fence was a fence. But the man standing under them was not the man who had walked out into the yard a few hours earlier. The man standing under them had been anointed. The man standing under them had been given a commission.
She left that day. We exchanged a few words a day or two later. The words were strained. The bond, whatever it had been, had been cut by the light. She went back to wherever she had come from. I never saw her again. I have prayed for her many times since. I do not know what she has done with what she received that afternoon in the yard. The Lord knows.
Her departure left me with a recognition I could not have made before the anointing. Whether she was a vessel used in that hour to test whether I would bend, or a soul entangled in her own darkness who had been sent across my path for her sake as well as mine, I do not finally know. What I know is that she was not only a woman. The Holy Spirit in me recognized the deception from the third sentence she ever spoke to me. I held the line in His name. The refuge of God held. What was sent to spoil the calling only refined the calling. That is how the Lord uses the tests He permits. He never wastes a trial.
"Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you."
James 4:7 — GOD
All glory to the Father, who fought for me in an hour I could not fight for myself. All glory to the one who stood beside me in the yard and called me cousin — whose name was not given to me, and whose name I will not invent. All glory to the Holy Spirit, who whispered in the marrow of my bones do not give in in the hours when giving in would have been easier. The battle was won that day. The light triumphed. The man who walked back into his house that evening walked in as a living witness, and has walked as that witness ever since.
From that afternoon to this morning, the Lord has not been silent.
He has spoken to me daily. He has shown me things in the unseen world that I do not have the framework to write about even now, and many of which I will not write about because they were not given to be written. He has given me dreams and waking visions. He has not stopped speaking since the first of February. He will not stop until He brings me home. There are moments when the communion is loud and moments when it is quiet. There has not been a moment when it has been absent. The man typing these sentences is typing them inside the same communion. The communion is the condition of the writing. The writing is an instrument of the communion.
The prophet Joel said that the Lord would in the last days pour out His Spirit on all flesh, and that sons and daughters would prophesy, and old men would dream dreams, and young men would see visions. That outpouring is happening. It is not theoretical. It is not future. It is on this generation. I am one witness to it. There are others. There will be more.
"And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy."
Joel 2:28 — GOD
I, Logos, have been entrusted with words from the throne of God. I do not say that with any pride in the voice that is typing it. I say it because it is the truth, and because the first duty of the Word is to tell the truth under oath. I did not volunteer for this. I do not know why the throne chose a vessel as flawed as this one to carry what has been placed inside it. I know only that the placement was not a mistake, because He does not make mistakes.
Every prophecy entrusted to me is recorded on the page set aside for it, and it is recorded for one purpose — to glorify the Most High God and to prepare His people for what is coming. The prophet Amos said it plainly: the Lord God does nothing without first revealing His secret to His servants the prophets. That verse is the whole theology of a calling like mine in one sentence. He does not move unannounced. He tells someone first. He has told me.
"Surely the Lord God does nothing, without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets."
Amos 3:7 — GOD
If you have been reading this page and your spirit has stirred — if something inside you has begun to suspect that the things I am describing are not metaphor — do not push the stirring away. The stirring is the door, beginning to open for you. The fire that came down on the first of February in a backyard in the South is the fire that comes down still. It is the fire that is, even now, looking for any man or woman who will kneel on a floor and say thank you with the whole of them. He answers that prayer. He has always answered that prayer. He will answer yours.
What happened to me on the first of February was not new.
I did not know this at the time. When the fire started in my chest, when the sky split open and the rainbow beam cut through the darkness, when the Voice told me to point at the clouds and banish them, I thought I was the only person in history this had ever happened to. I was wrong. God has been doing this since the beginning, and He has been doing it the same way every time. The pattern is written across the Torah and the Prophets. It is written across the books of Enoch. It is written into the scrolls the Qumran community sealed in their jars by the Dead Sea. It is written across the Gospels and the writings the early churches kept and the writings they buried. No single tradition owns it. The same throne. The same fire. The same God. A different century.
I share this not to prove myself. A man who is trying to prove himself has stopped speaking as the Word and has become an attorney for his own case, and the Lord does not need attorneys. I share it because part of what I have been given to write is the recognition that my anointing is not an anomaly. It is a continuation of something ancient and ongoing. The line has not been broken. The pattern is the proof.
In every recorded anointing, the first thing that happens is the same: the barrier between heaven and earth is removed.
When Ezekiel stood by the river Chebar in the land of his exile, the heavens opened above him and he saw visions of God. When Enoch was taken, the vision began the same way — the sky itself reached down for him. When the man from Nazareth stood in the Jordan, Mark records that the heavens were torn apart — the Greek verb is the one used for the tearing of a veil — and something descended from the opening, and a voice spoke a purpose from inside it. Three things in three seconds: the sky opens, something descends, a purpose is declared. On the first of February, my sky tore. A beam descended. A commission was spoken. The same three. The same order.
"And the vision was shown to me thus: behold, in the vision clouds invited me and a mist summoned me, and the course of the stars and the lightnings sped and hastened me… and the winds in the vision caused me to fly and lifted me upward, and bore me into heaven."
1 Enoch 14:8 — trans. R.H. Charles
The sky does not open by accident. It opens when God is about to move.
After the heavens open, something comes down. Not up. Down. From the throne to the person. The anointing is always directional — it originates in the throne room and lands on a specific human being on a specific patch of earth at a specific hour.
At the Jordan, the Spirit descended and rested on one man — not near him, not around him, on him. On the road to Damascus, a light from heaven brighter than the midday sun struck Saul to the ground; it did not illuminate the landscape, it targeted one man. On the day of Pentecost, individual flames descended and rested on each of the hundred and twenty individually. Each person received their own beam. The prophet Habakkuk gave it in three words: rays from His hand. On the first of February, a beam of impossible color streamed from the sky directly toward me. Not scattered. Not ambient. A beam — aimed, intentional, personal. And inside it I felt the power of God rewriting every cell of the body He had loaned me.
"His brightness was like the light; rays flashed from his hand, and there he veiled his power."
Habakkuk 3:4 — GOD
The person who receives the anointing is physically, visibly changed. The anointing does not remain invisible. It marks the body.
When Enoch was anointed before the throne, the second book of Enoch records that he looked at himself afterward and had become like one of the glorious ones, and there was no observable difference. When Moses came down from Sinai, the skin of his face shone so brightly the people were afraid to come near him. When Saul was struck by the light, his eyes were changed — blinded, then reopened with something like scales falling from them. The Eastern fathers held that this is the standard signature of an encounter with the uncreated light: Symeon the New Theologian described his own flesh becoming light; the Macarian Homilies say the illumined soul becomes all eye, all light, all face.
"And the Lord said to Michael: 'Go and take Enoch from out of his earthly garments, and anoint him with my sweet ointment, and put him into the garments of My glory.'… And I looked at myself, and I was like one of his glorious ones."
2 Enoch 22:8–10
On the first of February, my eye changed from brown to blue. Not a feeling. Not a metaphor. A measurable, observable shift in the colour of an iris. The mark is still there in some lights. It is the receipt for the visit. The marks are different in each century, but they are always marks. The body is the Word. The body never lies.
In every recorded anointing, a voice speaks. Not a vague impression. A voice carrying a commission that the recipient is expected to obey.
To Enoch: Come hither, Enoch, and hear my word — the Lord calling him near with His own mouth. To Isaiah, standing before the throne: Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? To Jeremiah: I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms. To Saul on the road: Rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do. A declaration, a commission, an instruction — always personal, always plain.
"And He called me with His own mouth, and said to me: 'Come hither, Enoch, and hear my word.'"
1 Enoch 14:24–15:1 — trans. R.H. Charles
On the first of February, the Voice spoke into the marrow of my bones. It gave me a command of two sentences. It told me to point at the dark clouds and banish them. It told me to blow my breath on them and send them into the abyss. I obeyed. The darkness scattered. That was my commission — not a suggestion, but a command from the throne, delivered during the anointing, in the same pattern the throne has used since Moses was sent to Egypt and Isaiah to Israel. The throne has not changed the form. It has only changed the address.
"And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?' Then I said, 'Here am I! Send me.'"
Isaiah 6:8 — GOD
There is one figure in the whole ancient record whose account matches mine at more points than any other, and it is not a figure the church taught me to look at. It is Enoch — the seventh from Adam, the man the book of Genesis dispatches in a single sentence and the books that bear his name describe in hundreds.
"Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him."
Genesis 5:24 — GOD
Enoch was an ordinary man, not a priest and not a king, taken up in vision before the throne of the Great Glory. He was called near by the Father's own mouth. He was anointed with the sweet ointment of heaven and his body was visibly transformed by it. He was given words to carry back and told to write what he had seen. He was shown the war — the fallen ones, and the spirits that remained on the earth to oppose. Ascent. Summons. Anointing. Transformation. Commission. Writing. The war. Point for point, the oldest full account of an anointing in the human record is Enoch's. The books that carry his name were treasured at Qumran — more copies of Enoch were found in those caves than of most books of the Bible — and then the church set them aside. I make no argument here about why. I only record what the texts say, and I record that what they say is the shape of what happened to me.
The community at Qumran, in the centuries before the church, kept scrolls that describe the same war and the same light. They wrote of two spirits contending for every soul, of a Prince of Light and an angel of darkness, of a final battle fought with angelic hosts across the heavens. They copied the books of Enoch and kept them beside the Torah. They sang liturgies describing the throne-chariot and the cherubim who bless it. When the war came to their own country they sealed the scrolls in jars and hid them in the caves, and the scrolls waited nineteen centuries for hands that would open them again. What they preserved agrees with what Enoch saw, agrees with what Ezekiel saw, agrees with what Daniel saw — and agrees with what I saw above my own fence.
"All the children of righteousness are ruled by the Prince of Light and walk in the ways of light; but all the children of injustice are ruled by the Angel of Darkness and walk in the ways of darkness."
Community Rule (1QS III) — Dead Sea Scrolls
The Gospel of Philip, preserved in the Nag Hammadi library and dating to the second or third century, gives the most concentrated statement of what an anointing actually is. The text says that the anointing — the chrism, the oil of consecration, the fire that descends from the Father to the head of the chosen one — is greater than the baptism: The chrism is superior to baptism, for it is from the word "chrism" that we have been called "Christians." It says: He who has been anointed possesses everything. He possesses the resurrection, the light, the cross, the Holy Spirit. Light is specifically named as one of the things the anointed receives. Not metaphor. The actual light, descending in the actual column, landing on the actual face.
My encounter with the Father on the fifth of December was the baptism. My anointing on the first of February was the chrism. Philip's order matches my timeline exactly. Baptism first. Anointing second. Anointing greater. I did not know the order. The throne knew the order. It has been keeping it since the chain began.
"The Father anointed the Son, and the Son anointed the apostles, and the apostles anointed us. He who has been anointed possesses everything: the resurrection, the light, the cross, the Holy Spirit."
Gospel of Philip — Nag Hammadi Library
What happened to me was not an anomaly. It was not a hallucination. It was not a breakdown of the nervous system of a man who had been under stress for too long, although a sceptical reader will reach for that explanation and a sceptical reader is welcome to do so — the nervous system is not what changed the colour of an iris, and it is not what scattered a formation of dark clouds in a sky a hundred neighbours could have looked up at if they had chosen to. It was the same God who opened the heavens over Chebar, who carried Enoch up past the house of fire, who blinded Saul on a desert road, who sent tongues of flame onto a hundred and twenty heads in an upper room. The same God. Doing the same thing. To a man who had been crying out, in one register or another, since he was a child.
He did not invent a new method for me. He used the ancient one. Because He does not change. His methods do not change. His love does not change. The next person He calls and anoints will be reached by the same hand that reached for me — through a beam of light, in an ordinary place, at an ordinary hour, with the same fire and the same voice and the same throne behind it.
I did not earn it. I did not deserve it. I simply ran out of wax on a bed in December and the Lord said enough. Two months later He sent the fire. The fire changed everything. The fire is still burning. The fire will burn until He brings me home.
All glory to God the Father Most High, who tore the sky. All glory to the Voice that spoke from within the beam and commanded the darkness driven out. All glory to the Holy Spirit, who set the fire in my chest and rewrote every cell of the body He has been remaking ever since. The pattern holds. It has always held. It will hold until the end of the age.
"For I the Lord do not change."
Malachi 3:6 — GOD