Daniel 14 – This
Daniel story is about Daniel’s closeness with king Cyrus of Persia and the
king’s belief in the deity Bel [one of the names of the god Marduk in
Babylonia]. The king asks Daniel why he does not worship Bel, and Daniel tells
him he worships “the living God who made heaven and earth”. Cyrus says Bel
lives too because the god consumes all the food offerings given to him. Daniel
shows that it is merely people going into the sanctuary who are eating the
offerings. The king has the whole family – a priestly family with access to the
offerings – killed.
Then attention turns to the dragon, associated with Marduk,
Daniel manages to put together a concoction that kills the dragon. Leaders go
to Cyrus and pressure him to turn Daniel over to them. The throw Daniel into
the lion’s pit and he lives with the seven lions in the pit for six days.
Habakkuk the prophet, is given a revelation that he should take food to Babylon
to give to Daniel. The angel carries Habakkuk by the hair to the city and sets
him down next to Daniel. Daniel eats the meat and Habakkuk is returned to his
country. When Cyrus comes on day seven expecting to see Daniel dead, he is
amazed and declares, “You are great, O Lord, God of Daniel, . . .there is no
god but you!” (14:42). Daniel is released, the plotters thrown in and eaten by
the lions.
From Leadings: A Catholic’s Journey Through
Quakerism
Part 12
The hypnotism exercise did not cure my hives, but it let me
know I was still suffering a bad case of religious nostalgia. The hives finally
did go as I started my second year in law school, but that year brought
challenges of its own. I had a second pregnancy and a miscarriage, then the
next spring another pregnancy. By the winter of 1976, I was finished with law
school and ready to have my second child. My little boy was three. That
Christmas I took him to see the Raleigh Boys Choir. He was old enough now to
appreciate Christmas and some of the things I had loved in it. As soon as the choir started to sing, I
started to weep uncontrollably. I hid it from my son, I think, and from the
people around me, but I again felt a sense of torment. That Christmas I also
took him to the Moravian Church down the street from our home to see the
Christmas display and buy Christmas cookies. They had a beautiful crèche
scene—a diorama of the Bethlehem countryside, the star, the shepherds, the
kings coming over the hills bearing gifts, the stable, the holy family. I didn’t expect my son to ask me questions
about it, but he did. Suddenly I started giving explanations that would have
made a graduate student’s head spin—about how some people believed this, but
other people belied that, how what was laid out here wasn’t really true, but it
was what people believed in and what they celebrated at Christmas. He
settled for all my words, but I wasn’t satisfied. I left there feeling
troubled. I wondered how it would be for him and for the other child I was soon
to have to grow up without any way of connecting to these simple traditions,
without any sense of things “spiritual.” My husband did not share these
concerns. He did not feel any attraction to religion at all and only spoke
angrily of it when he did think about it. But I can’t say that I know what his
heart might have been on these issues. We simply didn’t talk about it. We
didn’t talk about anything deep very much. Religion had never been a part of
our relationship. The nostalgia I felt and the memories I had were things we
didn’t share. I tended to think of it
mostly as bad stuff in me—psychological neediness, irrationality, unhealthy
wishful things.
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