and the Spirit hovered

I have been returning in my mind to the opening words of the Bible lately, for various reasons. The book of Genesis opens with the beautiful, mystic words

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.

Some translations render it hovering, brooding over the dark deep waters. Regardless, I find it a truly imagination-capturing image. It is the first glimpse of the Trinity, of God being not a solitary isolated God, but one who is in some vastly mysterious way in communion: The Father in perfect and eternal union with the Son, which unity breathes forth, or spirates, the Spirit.

And God said . . . First, He says, Let there be light. Reach forth in time, and the opening words of the Gospel of St John (which are read at the close of the Tridentine Mass in supreme fittingness) expound this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. He was in the beginning with God , and all things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. 

And so: God the Father, who creates through speaking His Word, His one and perfect Word, Who is Jesus, Yeshua, and this act of speaking is spirating, or breathing forth, the Spirit.

I have been thinking of these things so much lately. Speech was broken at Babel into our thousands of babbling imperfect languages, but before then . . .
My tenth-grade physics teacher told us how they were discovering that the smallest particles vibrated constantly, that essentially they are sound. Whether they are or not, in fact, the smallest particles, I don't know, but certainly there is the fact that everything has a vibrating point, that every object will answer, respond to, a certain frequency.
We are separated from the spiritual realms, in this fallen state at least, by our bodies . . . Christ's glorified body was not: even as the Son of God, His body still respected the bounds of physical limitations. After He rose again, however, He was walking through locked doors and such, because His body was glorified. I do believe after the Second Coming and Final Judgment, we in our glorified bodies still will be physical beings, but untainted any longer by the restrictions, the limitations, of sin--also why some of the saints have overcome some of these bonds and have levitated, bilocated, &c.
Likewise, because of sin our words were broken, limited, bonded to and by speech. Like bodies, they can be corrupted, disappear, shift meanings as our bodies change with age . . . but what is perfect speech?

God spoke . . . the Word was with God, and the Word was Go d . . .

Many many many know the power of music. Hans Christian Anderson phrased it, "When words fail, music speak." My mind half-remembers a quotation I ran across in high school along the lines "When all else fails,  when art has nowhere left to go, people turn to music."
What then is this draw to, this pining for, relief in music?
I think it is the closest thing we have to the unbroken, perfect Word. Somehow, when all is said and done in irrevocable finality, when our bodies are glorified and the world made new, our speech will be no longer bounded by these cumbersome letters and phrases, but will be akin to music.

and He became sin

last friday, 14 September, the Catholic Church celebrated the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross. i lost track of the dates and couldn't have told you that, but the boys and i try to make it to Mass on fridays, regardless, so by the grace of God, we made it.
the first reading of this feast is the story of the israelites compaining in the desert, so they are punished with a course of serpents. as they lay dying, they begin to repent, so God tells Moses to raise up a serpent on a pole, and whomever gazes on it will be saved from death.

photo courtesy of artvalue

this is viewed as one of the first images of the Crucifixion, but it always has puzzled me. a serpent is a symbol of satan and sin, not of Christ, so why is this an image of the crucifixion?
the biggest sin that the israelites commit after leaving egypt, the one that kept them in the desert for forty years and brought the serpents to them, was grumbling against God--some translate it as "murmering" against God for not leading them directly to the promised land. this whole thing has so many layers of symbolism that it is hard to stay focused: for us, egypt is our own sin, and the desert is our own life, which gives us the opportunity to become pure, to enact our salvation and live out grace so that we can stand with God, with nothing between Him and us. because any speck of sin is incompatible with God's presence (hence the strongest argument for Mary being pure from sin: if Christ was to live in her, she could not have had original sin. Christ and sin cannot cohabitate). so it makes sense that sin must die, typified by the serpent on the pole, before we enter heaven.
but Christ was sinless.
then i remembered an image that an artist i knew many years ago had been given. i do not remember the whole scene, except that it depicted Christ in profile. in iconography, saints are always shown with their whole face, which is why if one is looking off to the side, the face looks out of proportion: so it can show the whole of it. and which is why, if you look at an icon of the last supper, you can tell which is judas, because he is the only one shown in profile. so this friend remarked that this image was blasphemous, unless taken in the context of that verse that Christ was made sin . . .
the verse is 2 Corinthians 5.21, and the KJ translation reads, "For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him."

giotto's crucifixion

this, then, is why the image of the serpent can typify Christ: the Christ who died on the Cross took on and became our sin. and this is the only way in which we can be saved, is if we nail our sin to the Cross with Christ. our sinfulness must die, because anywhere that sin holds, is not held by Christ. every sinful habit, every vice to which we cling, is not saved. this, then, is what purification means, and what it means to be crucified with Christ so that the new nature may live, so that we may be God's righteousness.