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We Do Not Have His Eyes

~ Kern Family ~ Leave a comment

When Jesus says “Do not judge,” he’s warning us about blindness.

We see fragments. God sees the whole person. We see the public act. He sees the childhood, the wounds, the lies absorbed, the habits formed, the long road of choices that ended at that moment. None of that excuses evil. But it explains why our judgments so often miss the mark.

Discernment isn’t condemnation. Christians still have to name sin — parents correct, courts sentence, churches discipline. But discernment names what’s wrong and looks for repair. Condemnation just shrinks a person down to their worst moment. One protects. The other crushes.

Christ alone judges perfectly. He sees intention and ignorance, trauma and freedom, grace resisted and grace received. And he judges with pierced hands. His judgment is merciful truth — he sees the whole mess and still chooses to save. Judgment belongs to God because we’re too blind to carry it without malice creeping in.

In God, mercy doesn’t cancel justice. It brings justice to its proper end. Retribution can punish. It can’t resurrect. Divine judgment tells the truth about sin and aims at repentance, healing, restoration. God doesn’t call darkness light. He drags it into the light.

So how do we live? “Do not judge” is a call to humility. Name evil without turning it into a performance. Protect victims without stripping offenders of their humanity. Refuse gossip dressed up as righteousness. Pray for the people you’re tempted to hate. Leave final verdicts to Christ.

We don’t have his eyes. We’re working with half-sight at best. So we don’t get to play God.

Tell the truth. Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly.

Israel as the Icon of Earth

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The Pattern

Consider the spiral. It appears everywhere: in the unfurling of a fern, the whorl of a fingerprint, the architecture of a nautilus shell. Galaxies wheel in spirals across unthinkable distances. The double helix of DNA coils at the foundation of every living thing. Water drains in spirals, hurricanes spiral, and the very structure of our inner ear, by which we hear the Word spoken to us, is a spiral. God, it seems, has a pattern, and he is not shy about repeating it.

The Small and the Chosen

The spiral appears in Scripture too, though you have to look with different eyes to see it. It is the shape of God’s attention, the topology of his love: always densest at the hidden center, radiating outward but weighted toward the small. Israel was not selected because it was mighty among nations. Moses reminds the people in Deuteronomy that the Lord set his love upon them not because they were more numerous than other peoples; they were the fewest. David was the youngest son, overlooked even by his own father when Samuel came calling. Mary was hidden in Nazareth, a village so insignificant that Nathanael would later ask whether anything good could come from it. And Christ himself tells us that the Kingdom belongs to the little ones, that to become great we must become as children, that the mysteries are revealed not to the wise and learned but to infants.

This is where the weight falls. The center of gravity in salvation history is never where you would expect it, never at the obvious point of power or prominence. It is always displaced toward the hidden, the overlooked, the least.

The Hidden Village of the Cosmos

Now lift your eyes to the heavens. Our sun is one star among hundreds of billions in the Milky Way. The Milky Way is one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies. The observable universe extends some 93 billion light-years across, and what lies beyond its edges we cannot say. Within this immensity, our planet is less than a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

And yet, the Word became flesh here. On this pale blue dot, the infinite entered finitude. The Creator took on the form of a creature. God became a particular man, in a particular place, at a particular time: a Jewish peasant in Roman-occupied Palestine, born in an animal shelter, raised in obscurity, executed as a criminal. If Israel was chosen among the nations, then Earth has been chosen among the worlds. If Nazareth was the hidden village from which salvation came, then our planet is the hidden village of the cosmos.

The Icon

Here is the mystery worth pondering: God’s selection of Israel is the icon of his selection of Earth.

Not a metaphor, not a parallel, but an icon: a window through which we glimpse the deeper structure of God’s creative and redemptive work. The same love that passed over Egypt and Babylon to rest on a wandering tribe of Semitic nomads is the love that passed over unimaginable expanses of cosmic real estate to take root on this small rocky planet. He loves the particular. He cherishes the small. He hides his glory in dust and ashes, in bread and wine, in water and oil. The God who counts the hairs on our heads and marks the fall of every sparrow is not a God of abstractions but a God of this and here and now. The scandal of particularity, which has always troubled those who want a more universal and reasonable deity, is not a problem to be solved but a revelation to be received. The particular is the doorway to the universal, and the local is the gate to the cosmic.

The Kingdom Within

The spiral does not stop at the planetary or the national. It continues inward. Christ told us that the Kingdom of Heaven is within, and the same topology that governs galaxies and nations governs the geography of the soul. There is a hidden center in you, overlooked perhaps even by yourself, and that is precisely where God wishes to dwell.

The mystics have always known this. The great Carmelite tradition speaks of the interior castle, the deepest chamber of the soul where the King takes up residence. Meister Eckhart spoke of the Seelenfünklein, the spark of the soul where God is eternally born. Augustine found that God was more intimate to him than he was to himself. You are your own Nazareth, your own tiny planet spinning in the darkness. And that is where the weight falls: at the center, at the smallest point, where God has chosen to dwell.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Your Mother Never Knew You: Michael the Archangel, Limbo, and Gene Wolfe’s Wizard Knight

~ Kern Family ~ 2 Comments

I tore into The Wizard Knight right after finishing Gene Wolfe’s celebrated Book of the New Sun. I expected another dark alien world with Wolfe’s usual cloaked narrative. Instead I found bright meadows, talking cats, honorable knights, and overall a much more straightforward surface read.

Then I reached the final paragraph, closed the cover, and wept. The novel has not left my mind since.

If you have never read Wolfe, this is the easiest book to start with. Knights, dragons, giants, elf queens, princesses… everything sits right on the surface as you’d expect it in a fantasy adventure novel. Yet beneath that bright surface runs the same ocean‑depth you find in his denser books.

Read it once for the adventure. Let it baffle you. Then come back and try to uncover the deeper meanings of the book.

My thesis (spoilers below)

What finally clicked for me is a simple, if startling, idea that I took in a slightly different form from a writeup from Marc Aramini, a writer who knew Wolfe personally:

Able is a child in the womb who is dying, and his adventure in Mythgarthr is a mystical kind of limbo where he gets to live a full lifetime to become a knight.

Everything literal in the book still holds: he is truly fighting giants, time really does run at different speeds on each plane, and he is really experiencing a “world” for himself while literally in the womb of his mother. But the location of that world shifts. Mythgarthr is less a dimension the boy stumbles into and more a limbo where a life too brief for earth can stretch out and ripen.

A few puzzle pieces that lock into place

Puzzle on first readHow it looks through the womb lens
Able’s memories are “mixed up with a little girl’s.”An unborn son sharing the conscious overflow of his mother.
Parka’s silver bow‑string never breaks and whispers like heartbeats.It is the umbilical cord: bright, unbroken, carrying breath and memory from mother to child.
The sea heals Able, and Garsecg calls blood “the sea inside you.”Amniotic water and maternal blood nurturing a child who must fight for life.
Able sees the real Able in an ambulance in America.The “real Able” (the baby on earth) glimpsed from inside the suspended moment via a vision.
Michael the Archangel pauses Able and says, “Your mother never knew you.”Literal for a baby who will never be born alive; Michael prepares the soul to meet Christ.

Suddenly the “two-dimensional” side characters make sense. They are archetypes in a myth crafted for one child’s formation. The dragon, Setr, far from being an external villain, becomes the ego, formidable but capable of being directed toward selfless courage. Every quest trains Able to choose self‑gift over self‑preservation, so that when the moment of earthly death finally arrives he answers it like a knight.

Michael’s Message in the Last Paragraphs

At the very end of The Wizard, we read the following:

“We live in Aelfrice, and for whole days we are children again, as we were the first time I came. Children, we run and shout among the groves and grottoes of an endless wood more beautiful than any you will ever see. Children, we go to the sea I love, to splash in the shallows and play with kelpies. She has given me a new dog, a white puppy with red ears. I call him Farvan; and at night we speak to him of the play now past and the play to come and he tells us puppy things.

But we are not always children, and sometimes we lie upon our backs in fine green grass to watch the world above where time runs swift. There we saw Marder knight Wistan and Bold Berthold slay Schildstarr. Soon time will ripen, and we will come again.

Michael has found me at last, and that is why I have written this for you, Ben. He tells us of a great lord in need of a knight. I have told Michael that I will be this lord’s champion if I may bring my lady. He says it will be permitted.

We go soon. You will see this, Ben, for Michael has found a way. Do not worry about me. I am fine.

All best, Art
(Arthur Ormsby)”

I suspect that this is exactly where Wolfe wanted to land the plane. A “great lord” is likely the closest thing we’ll get to a tip from Wolfe, a strong Catholic. This is none other than Michael the Archangel being sent by Christ to call Able, the baby-turned-knight, into the beatific vision.

My wife and I miscarried three times. I suspect Wolfe wanted to speculate what it would be like for our children to enter limbo. What does Christ do with infants who won’t be able to live a full life? Here, my theory is that Wolfe wanted to do some imaginative theology: he allows them to experience an earth-like fantastical adventure where their souls can truly grow up and be formed into noble souls.

So while the book reads on the surface like a colorful fantasy novel, it seems more like a meditation on what it means for a baby to grow up and become an ideal. And I absolutely adore the idea. I trust that the great Lord cares for all the unborn children who won’t make it, and that he’s going to fully form them into grown knights fit for his service. This is an ending I can consider just, one that I can accept with great peace.

The Engine of the Eschaton: Jesus, Time, and the Power of the Future

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Throughout the Gospels, we encounter moments when Jesus heals the sick, restores the blind, raises the dead, and calms the storm. These events feel like cracks in the fabric of reality where the rules of the world give way to something more profound. But beneath these miracles lies a process—one that stretches across time and space, where the future breaks into the present, where the life of the new creation seeps into a world still marred by decay and death.

What if these moments weren’t just divine actions within the here and now but were tied to a much larger unfolding of God’s future kingdom? A process where Jesus was drawing power from the future—the same future the prophets glimpsed in their visions of the enthroned Lord and the restored creation.

In the visions of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, we see God revealed in his glory, reigning over a reality where all things have been made new. These prophets were given a glimpse of the future Christ, seated in glory, reigning over the completed new creation. It was not just a symbolic vision—it was a window into the future, a reality already secured in Christ, stretching across time to reveal itself to them.

The Prophets’ Vision of the Future

Isaiah saw the Lord seated on a throne, his robe filling the temple, surrounded by seraphim who cried, “Holy, holy, holy.” Ezekiel witnessed the throne of God carried by living creatures, with wheels full of eyes, a vision so overwhelming that he fell facedown. Daniel, too, saw a vision of the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven, brought before the Ancient of Days to be given an everlasting dominion.

What if these prophets, separated by time and circumstance, were all granted visions of the same reality? What they saw was not a vision of their present but of the glorified Christ, reigning in the future. Their vantage points were different, but their vision was unified—they saw the same Lord, the same throne, the same kingdom, already established.

This future reality wasn’t some distant hope for them. It existed beyond time, and they were given access to it through their visions. In those moments, they weren’t just predicting what was to come; they were gazing into a future that was fully present in God. The power they witnessed is the same power that would later work through Jesus during his ministry. The new creation they saw was already alive, waiting to be revealed, waiting to break through into the world.

Jesus Drawing from the Future

In his ministry, Jesus wasn’t just working miracles within the boundaries of the present world. He was reaching into that same future the prophets had seen—the perfected creation, the resurrection life—and bringing it forward into the present. When Jesus healed the blind, restored life to the dead, and multiplied loaves, he was pulling from the fullness of the new creation, allowing it to touch the brokenness of the current world.

Jesus didn’t merely heal bodies; he was bringing the life of the resurrection into those bodies. The blind man’s restored sight wasn’t just a repair—it was a foretaste of the future reality where blindness no longer exists. When Jesus called Lazarus from the tomb, it was more than a resuscitation—it was an echo of the resurrection power that would one day make all things new. Every miracle was part of a larger process, where the future reality of the new creation began to leak into the present, showing glimpses of what was to come.

And this wasn’t just a temporary phenomenon. The future kingdom was always alive in Jesus. As the God-man, he was fully connected to both the present world and the future new creation. The power he drew upon wasn’t a display of isolated divinity; it was the power of the future world, flowing through him. The prophets had seen it in their visions, and Jesus carried it in his very being, channeling it into the present through his actions.

The Spirit and the Flow of New Creation

The presence of the Holy Spirit was key to this process. The Spirit, who descended upon Jesus at his baptism, wasn’t simply there to mark him as the Messiah—it was through the Spirit that the life of the future flowed into him. The Spirit is the active agent connecting the future reality of the new creation to the present, making it possible for Jesus to draw from that future life and manifest it in the here and now.

The miracles of Jesus were not momentary disruptions in the natural order; they were moments where the natural order was touched by the new creation. The Spirit facilitated this connection, allowing the future to break through into the present. The power that the prophets saw in their visions of the future kingdom—the life and glory of the throne room—was the same power the Spirit made available to Jesus in his ministry. Through the Spirit, the life of the future became a present reality, even if only in glimpses.

Jesus’ Resurrected Body: A Glimpse of the Future Creation

After his resurrection, Jesus’ body took on a new nature. It wasn’t bound by the same limitations as before. He could appear in rooms behind locked doors, vanish from sight, and yet he was still physical—he could be touched, and he ate with his disciples. His body was not merely spiritual, nor was it purely physical as we understand it now. It was something more—a new creation body, fully integrated with the life of the future kingdom.

This resurrected body was a glimpse of what is to come. It operated within a different framework, where the laws of time and space no longer applied in the same way. Jesus’ resurrected body was not subject to decay or death. It was a body fully alive in the new creation, and through it, we see the future leaking into the present. This is the future that the prophets had seen, the future that Jesus carried with him and revealed through his life, death, and resurrection.

The New Creation and the Church

This process of the future breaking into the present didn’t end with Jesus. Through the Spirit, the Church is now connected to that same future reality. Paul speaks of the Spirit as a “deposit,” a guarantee of what is to come. The new creation is already alive in us because the Spirit is alive in us. We are fragile vessels, but the treasure we carry is the life of the future, the life of the resurrection that will one day transform the entire cosmos.

The Church is not just waiting for the kingdom to come; we are part of the process by which the kingdom is already breaking into the present. Through the Spirit, we are mediators of this future life, bearing the fruit of the new creation even in a world still marred by sin and death. As Jesus drew from the future to heal and restore, so too does the Spirit work in us to bring the life of the new creation into the world around us.

Speculation: The Process of New Creation Breaking Through

If we venture deeper into theological speculation, we might ask, what is the mechanism behind this process? How does the new creation “leak” into the present? The prophets saw visions of a reality beyond time, a future where God’s glory was fully revealed. Jesus, in his ministry, was already connected to that future, drawing from its life and power.

Could it be that the Spirit serves as the conduit through which this future life flows? The Spirit connects us to the reality of the new creation, allowing its life to touch the present world. The miracles of Jesus were not isolated events—they were part of a larger, ongoing process, a process that continues today through the Spirit. The new creation is leaking into the present, and we, through the Spirit, are participants in that process.

Through the Spirit, the life of the future kingdom is breaking through, one moment at a time, giving us glimpses of the world to come. The process that began with the prophets’ visions, that was embodied in Jesus, and that continues through the Church, is the unfolding of the new creation. It is a reality that is already established, already alive, and it is drawing the present world toward its ultimate renewal.

Tribute to My Father, Paul Kern (1972-2024)

~ Kern Family ~ Leave a comment

Rest in peace, Paul Alan Kern (1972-2024).

There’s a lot in this story. It will be difficult to capture the whole portrait of who he was, but I will do my best:

Audacious, proud, fiercely passionate, deeply emotional, reserved but charismatic. A rebel without a cause.

He drops out of school around junior high and gets involved in the gangs of LA in the 1980’s.

He falls in love, gets married in his teens, and fathers two sons. Things do not go well. Devastated by a divorce, he retreats back to his parents’ house with his two young boys.

Life as a single dad is unconventional. He gets the crazy idea to unschool the boys—he doesn’t like the system but doesn’t have an alternative. He can’t do beyond elementary math, so he does his best to print worksheets, collect books, and share his love of reading.

While on a walk, he discovers a kendo dojo and a Japanese community in the late 90’s and signs his boys up. It becomes an incubator, deeply forming the three. He paints helicopters, works on cars, and does manual labor on the side to scrape by.

Having had a good experience in the Japanese community, he signs his sons up to a Japanese baseball team, and somehow winds up as the head coach. He leads a ragtag team named the Samurais through a few leagues and across several years and is celebrated as a beloved coach.

He decides one day the boys need to at least attend middle school. So he finds a small private Lutheran school to enroll them in despite being strapped for cash. It’s hard to keep them out of trouble, especially the oldest.

The family has all sorts of adventures together. Life is good living in LA with the grandparents and the boys tucked into one small and cozy house.

Things slow down a bit as the boys get into public high school. Their grades are terrible, and sometimes it seems they might slide into his old ways.

But he was unaware of one thing. He left an old worn Bible on the shelf of the room they shared, the one his father recommended, the one he used to try to turn his life around. He didn’t know that one of his sons was wrestling with existential questions and finding his way into it, looking for answers. This son has a life-altering spiritual experience while reading the letters of St. Paul and commits himself to Christ. The two boys, transformed significantly, set out to forge their own path.

They scrap their way into community college, then into a small Christian college further out of the city, and then into jobs. It was time for them to leave home on their own adventures away from dad, bringing the glory days with his sons to an end. What was left for him to do?

He meanders for a bit, but finally musters up the will at 50 years old to get his GED and enroll in community college courses.

He’s brilliant and loved by students and professors. He excels at his studies and gets accepted into UCLA. He attends and has the time of his life studying his favorite subject, history, in the kind of environment he always longed for. He TA’s for a tenured professor and begins envisioning plans to teach abroad.

He studies in the day and spends his afternoons helping his mother caretake for his father, who passes away at a ripe old age. He dreams of new lands, a fresh start, and another chapter.

Sadly, he will never go on to finish his degree. Suddenly and quickly, he is overtaken by heart failure. He fights and rebels even in his last moments. He breathes his last in the company of his family and friends, the blazing path of a maverick at last snuffed out.

And so ends the earthly tale of Paul Kern.

There’s no way I can get to everything: the brotherhood he found in the gangs, the days spent speeding down California highways in our 70’s pickup truck, his acting career in Hollywood, his Jiu Jitsu training with the Gracie’s, his first drafts at an adventure novel, his struggle with being something of a Jon Snow (let the reader understand).

He nursed many wounds and traumas privately by himself. Yes, he was full of flaws, but it’s easy to say that. It’s much harder to understand the whole man, what he overcame, and ultimately what he accomplished, not only by himself but through the sons he staked everything on.

His life is a lesson that it’s never too late to write the second half of your tale, that God can slowly mend the pieces that shattered in you long ago, and that the love you pour into your children and those you influence will sprout like olive shoots, leafing and branching out across the flow of time, bearing good fruit for the earth and blessing descendants for thousands of years to come.

But I’ve waxed eloquent long enough. I really have a simple message to deliver: I loved my dad, and I’m forever grateful I got to be his son.

I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.