The eternal three-in-one Godhead has as its human reflection the Holy Family, and when the two are juxtaposed the result is two interlocking equilateral triangles - a top-pointing one comprised of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit joined to a bottom-pointing one comprised of the Virgin Mary, the Lord Jesus Christ, and St. Joseph - which form the Star of David; additionally, the very center of both triangles is the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which is a consuming holocaust of complete and utter abandonment of the Divine Essence to Itself in the depths of the soul of the Virgin Mother of God.
Accordingly, the symbolic representation of this is the above flag of the State of Israel with the addition of a Nazi swastika at the center of the Star of David; the top and bottom blue stripes represent the waters above and the waters below - i.e. the waters of the heavens and the waters of earth as initially mentioned in the Book of Genesis - and this is itself a reflection of the death-to-life and life-through-death duality of holy baptism. Taken together with the interlocking triangles, one facing up and the other down, this composite symbol is also a visualization of the binary nature of Jacob's ladder: ascent and descent between heaven and earth with the eternal burnt offering of the holocaust as the fulcrum upon which the bidirectional transition repeats itself in an endless, infinite loop.
I was at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception this evening for a general consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary for the Fatima centenary (by Cardinal Donald Wuerl) when I determined that I should commit this theological surmising to writing today; in particular, what moved me was my recollection of my earlier attendance of noon Mass at Georgetown University's Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart (famous for being in the classic horror movie The Exorcist; in fact I went to the chapel and returned via the "exorcist steps" off the Potomac river).
Receiving the Precious Blood of Christ during communion, I fell into one of those disorderly operations brought about by mental distraction, causing me to take a smaller, merely token sip of the consecrated wine than I was subconsciously intending to; this triggered my scrupulous retracing of everything that could (and in my mind, should) have gone better according to my will, which consumed me for the following hour and a half almost as I walked back to work and struggled to start my afternoon tasks once in the office again. I tried to cling desperately to the Real Presence I sensed in the wine I had just taken, and then afterwards I clutched at straws to recollect the Real Presence in the bread I had eaten as well (since I'd totally forgotten about that to exclusively focus on the wine); but truly it could only have been Jesus clinging on to me for this whole time as I was unable to cling to him with my unruly mental passion of perfectionism.
This was my day's holocaust, I later ascertained at the Shrine during the Fatima centenary ceremony...a consuming fire of purification by God's love - by the Most Holy Trinity - which I increasingly sense must become my daily experience of self-immolation in my heart and soul.
For like Jacob - whom God renamed Israel as a result of that inaugural encounter - I have no will whatsoever to submit to the will of God, and my resistance causes me great suffering and even a hell itself (after all, willful resistance to the will of God is the very definition of hell); but also like Jacob, I come to realize that in fighting with God, I prevail because God can only prevail in the end over me.
He is God and I am not; he will ultimately wear down even my strongest resistance, because that is as a mere nothing in the face of his Divine Providence. I will be consumed in my very nature of being by him whether I like it or not - I will be a burnt offering in his perfect love's purging flames whether I like it or not. May the holocaust become my daily, even constant reality of immersion in his unfathomably pure and indescribably purifying mercy. Amen.
(A more detailed technical explanation of the symbology I've introduced in this post will come later.)
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