The Demonic Attack on Sister Dianna Ortiz

“Centeredness is a quality of individualization, in so far as the indivisible thing is the centered thing…the center is a point, and a point cannot be divided. A centered being can develop another being out of itself, or it can be deprived of some parts which belong to the whole: but the center as such cannot be divided—it can only be destroyed.” --(Paul Tillich. Systematic Theology Vol. III., pdf., p.32).

  

In 1989 Sister Dianna Ortiz was a member in the Catholic monastic order for women know as the Ursulie Order that dates back to 1435 A.D. in Brescia, Italy to teach girls how to care for the sick and poor.  Sister Ortiz was in Guatemala teaching Mayan school children how to read and write. On November 2, 1989 Sister Ortiz was at a religious retreat in Antigua. At this time Guatemala had been in numerous long American financed civil wars since the late 1950s during which death squads became common. Sister Ortiz had gone into the garden of Posada de Belen to pray and disappeared at about 8 a.m. Her friends and relatives immediately reporter her missing. That morning Ortiz had been blindfolded and kidnapped by Guatemalan police officers and taken to a clandestine prison at a police academy facility named “Antigua Escuela Politecnica” in Guatemala City. The police threatened to kill her colleagues at the convent if she refused to go with them.

Sister Ortiz was tortured by her captors at this police academy. It is important to understand that this was not random moronic cruelty unleashed unthinkingly on a human being, but rather, this attack is a systematic procedure based on empirical science—especially cognitive science, and psychology—to destroy the self-identity of the targeted person with repeated experiences of devastating dehumanization and fear. A tremendous amount of thought, long-term effort, and treasure was expended to formulate a universally efficient method to permanently destroy the self-identity of a person for control.

When the police arrived at the academy, she was told that no one knew where she was and no one would care. She was then physically beaten. The purpose of this first beating is to instill complete isolation, hopelessness, and despair. This message is repeatedly verbally stated as psychological reinforcement before and after each torture session technique.

Each phase of the torture process is more severe resulting in complete objectification and dehumanization, which is the tortures’ goal. Sister Ortiz was interrogated for the purposes of inflicting more pain and teach what psychologists call learned helplessness; to extract false confessions for arresting new persons for victimization; and to physically exhaust the interrogated person for the other phases of torture and dehumanization. Her captors told Sister Ortiz that she would be asked questions, and if they liked her answers, she could smoke a cigarette as a reward. The rules were only stated to demonstrate that there are no rules and nothing she could say would influence her brutal treatment thereby destroying any hope of rescue. After every question Sister Ortiz was asked, she was burned with a lit cigarette regardless of the answer. She received at least 111 second-degree burns on her back in addition to other burns on her body according to physicians. 

In the third phase of torture Ortiz was lowered into a pit that contained the partly rat eaten dead bodies of entire families, including children, some persons with decapitated, and some still alive. Ortiz promised to tell the world of their suffering. This torture was designed to terrify both Ortiz and the other captives to destroy any sense of hope that a greater community could save them by showing that the community itself is held captive by the torturers.

In the fourth phase of dehumanization is gang rape by three men. It is important to remember she is suffering severe burns on her back making it ineffective and painful to resist a sexual assault when pinned down to the floor, or other surfaces. The person is raped multiple times to reinforce hopelessness and despair. After one of the policemen raped Sister Ortiz he said, “Your God is dead.” Spirituality is another multi-dimensional target that the torturer seeks to destroy. To destroy the person’s moral sense of right and wrong is another goal of these physical attacks. Later, Sister Ortiz had an abortion as a result of the sexual assaults.

In the fifth phase of the dehumanization process the policemen’s hand is covering Sister Ortiz’s hand holding a knife and is forced to dehumanize another person. The torturer knows that human beings are essentially empathetic. This stage is videotaped to instill guilt and shame in the person to be used as blackmail later if necessary.

At this point in the torture process, an American named Alejandro showed up at the site in a panic and stopped the torture. Sister Ortiz’s friends and family had triggered a media alert that the North American nun was missing which most likely saved her life. There was a sixth phase of torture, which we will never know, but there was definitely a seventh phase that Sister Ortiz also experienced later.

While the American was driving Ortiz to another location he tried to blackmail her into keeping silent, but she escaped from his vehicle while stuck in traffic. The American may have been afraid that he himself would be killed as a witness to the abduction and fled, or was hidden by government officials. 

Sister Ortiz was able to get back to the US and reported her capture and torture. Of course the then former head of the CIA and U.S. President, G. H. W Bush through his administration and the Guatemalan government at first denied the event even occurred. The Guatemala defense minister at the time, Gen. Hector Gramajo and CIA operative publicly said the U.S embassy believed her injuries was the result of a “lesbian love tryst.” Then-ambassador Thomas F. Stroock reported to Washington D.C. he did not believe Ortiz’s account that an American was involved. The embassy’s Human Rights Officer, Lewis Amselem, was the source of the lesbian love tryst rumor. Reverend Joseph Nangle of the Assis Community reported he heard Amselem give a vulgar rant in his presence with others about Ortiz and all the religious volunteers working with the indigenous groups. Amselem was attempting to intimidate the volunteers from cooperating with any investigation. U.S. Ambassador, Thomas F. Stroock and his employee, Amselem, worked hard to hinder any investigation of this crime.

In 2007 Sister Dianna Ortiz went to New Zealand to share her story - here is part one.

And there is the seventh phase of torture which all the other phases of work cumulate for re-victimizing the tortured person: discredit the tortured person’s testimony by exploiting all the post-traumatic psychological injuries such as memory loss, aphasia, confusion, depression, loss of concentration, hopelessness, loneliness, guilt, and despair. This new shift of torturers do not have to get blood on their hands, but only derive sadistic pleasure in publicly expressing doubt of the tortured person’s experience and pain.

Journalist Cokie Roberts contributed to the smear campaign by interviewing Ortiz and implying the entire event never happened. Cokie Roberts worked hard to keep the American/Contra Inquisition of Guatemala and Latin America a secret from the American people. It was later discovered that Cokie Roberts’ brother, Tom Boggs, and his law firm Patton Boggs was paid by the Guatemalan government to improve the country’s media image while internationally known as a human rights abuser. The lobbying firm of Patton, Boggs, & Blow received a $220,000 payment from the Guatemalan government in 1991. Those who reported facts of the mass murders in Guatemala were immediately killed such Bishop Gerardi in 1998. Bishop Gerardi was murdered the day after he published a report that 200,000 Guatemalans were tortured and murdered by the Guatemalan army. Because of Cokie Roberts' role as a propagandist, the American media heaped journalistic awards upon her to mask her immoral character and inhuman actions.

The god that the Guatemalan rapist police officer proclaimed dead is not the God of New Testament Christian monotheism, but rather the rotting corpse of American Christendom lying beside the rotting murdered corpse of American Democracy while the entire world is choking from the putrid stench. The Nation abandoned the God of History--of Time--to fully embrace the pagan occult spirits of Space in which greed is the dynamic engine for accumulating power for its own absolute domain.

Sister Ortiz is recovering.

…to continue “Tillich on the Demonic,” with “The Struggle of the Olympic gods of Space with The God of Infinite Time.”

“This leads to the ultimate point in the struggle between time and space. Prophetic monotheism is the monotheism of justice…God is one God because justice is one.”—Tillich, Theology of Culture, p. 37.

Paul Tillich on The Demonic (δαίμων)

“11. A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside. 12. The demons begged Jesus, “Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.” 13. He gave them permission, and the impure spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.”--Mark 5:1-20 (NIV): Jesus Restores a Demon-Possessed Man

“You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons.”
--1 Corinthians 10:21

  

People in the Ancient world believed in spirits and demons. The meaning of “demon,” δαίμων, (daimon) has changed  through the centuries when the concept did not originally have a negative connotation, but instead meant “a divine power," or “spirit.” The German word “Geist” means “spirit,” or “mind.” Plato wrote that it was a daimon that gave Socrates divine inspiration. It was commonly believed in Palestine that if the name of a demon could be known, one would have some power over the demon. Demons, or spirits were thought to live in unclean isolated places like tombs, caves, or away from water since water could destroy a demon. These spirits were active during the day and a danger to night travelers. Male demons were called “shedim.” Female demons “lilin," were thought to be especially dangerous to children, which is why children had guardian angels in Hebraic ontology (Matthew 18:10). In biblical times people believed that demons where the spirits of evil persons who had died and are still active in the world to carry out their evil plans. Genesis 6: 1-8, tells the story of deviant angels that seduced human women and whose children are demons. All diseases whether known or unknown, mental illness or somatic illness were attributed to demon possession. In the Gospel of Mark and Luke the manuscripts recorded the name of the town of Jesus encountering the possessed man as “Gerasenes” (Mark 5:1 and Luke 8:26) (AKJV); however, Matthew’s account (Matthew 8:28)(AKJV) has “Gergesenes” as the town’s name. It was most likely the town of Gadara which is only six miles southeast of the Sea of Galilee where the disciples likely landed. This spot on the shoreline had a large grazing area for animals and was near an ancient cemetery. The Alexandrian scholar Origen thought the town was Gergesa of which he personally knew about, but no one can be certain of the historical place. The discrepancy is most likely due to manuscript errors by persons not familiar with the geographical region. [1]

Tillich believed that his best-written works were those on the demonic, ‘Rechtfertigung und Zweifel’, (Faith and Justification), and his most popular book, The Courage to Be, (1952, pdf.). In Tillich’s semiotics the person and symbol participates in the Unconditional; however, the symbol itself is conditional. Mythological language is a symbolic language that allows the expression of the Unconditional that “designate the boundary line at which the symbolic and non-symbolic coincide” (Systematic Theology, Vol. II, pdf., p. 9). The Unconditional is the total, the infinite, “meaning itself” and  “the constitution of the sphere of meaning.”(“Tillich on God,” by Martin Leiner, in “The Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich,” ed. by Russell Re Manning, pdf., p. 49). Tillich believed that symbols give consciousness the ability to experience other levels of reality by transcending—only a spatial metaphor is meant here--the ordinary rules of language to say the inexpressible. “The limit of my language is the limit of my world,” as Wittgenstein wrote. This other fuller dimension of reality is not another world above this world, but this world experienced with a greater depth of meaning.

There are multiple forms of the demonic in the realization of life. One demonic force, and the most important in Tillich’s theology, is that of ideological objectification that transforms people into objects, and things—that is the essence of dehumanization. There are “demonic structures,” or “structures of evil” that can determine our consciousness and decision-making. Tillich calls the demonic the “pseudo-Unconditional”(Ibid., p. 53). Demonization is essentially the exaltation of anything finite to the Unconditional, and identifies any symbol of the holy, for example, “with the holy itself”(Ibid., p. 104). In the New Testament demonic powers are the conflicts of power in history, and the “structure of destruction in personal and communal life”(Ibid., p. 53). Human power has periodic demonic upsurges that threaten all life on earth by affirming “a finite as infinite in the name of the holy.” Fanatical religious fundamentalism is the natural union of the religious with the demonic that threatens human life with “promises of supernatural rewards” (Ibid., p. 174). Religion, culture, and politics can all become demonic when put in place of the Unconditional. These demonic-destructive forces can even appear in the Church itself with sacramental activities, “in all holy objects, holy books, holy doctrines, holy rites”(Theology of Culture, Paul Tillich, pdf., p. 69). Tillich argued that the Church is to be the vigilant guardian that reveals these structures of self-sustaining dynamically generating creative evil in society in order to weaken its power.

The Demonic Possession of Roy Cohn

Unclean spirit come out! What is your name? “My name is Roy Cohn.” In the name of Jesus the Christ leave us so the American people can live! –A prayer.

Roy Marcus Cohn (1927-1986) was born into a Jewish family in New York City. Roy Cohn’s father, Judge Albert C. Cohn (1885-1959), was involved in Democratic politics and the father’s great-uncle was the founder of the Lionel Corporation toy train manufacturer. Roy Cohn was born into great wealth from both his parents and raised in an environment of opulence with unlimited educational resources at birth. Cohn was to become a new member of a mostly invisible American judicial oligarchy. At only fifteen years old Cohn was fixing traffic tickets for his teachers and illegally selling post office stations. Cohn was also a rabid anti-Semite.  Incredibly, Cohn was able to graduate from the Columbia Law School at the age of 20, and had to wait a year to pass the bar exam. This rabid fanatical anti-Communist believed that there was no right or wrong. With all the educational resources Cohn was born into he could not get beyond nihilism. With access to experienced lawyers in his father’s social oligarchic circles and Ivy league academic legal training, Cohn was able to damage and destroy untold numbers of American lives for many decades, and we are still feeling the effects of his actions to this very day. 

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was formed in 1938 to seek out Americans suspected of subversive activities and disloyalty, which included anyone who could be labeled socialists, communists, leftists, and liberals. Senator Joseph McCarthy and Cohn were not on the HUAC, but instead McCarthy chaired another committee called the Government Operations Committee and yet another subcommittee called the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the U.S. Senate. As always, these shell committees are designed partly as bureaucratic insulation of one committee from another in case of scandal. From these various committee investigations more than 300 artists throughout America were blacklisted such as Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and Yip Harburg who wrote song lyrics and parts of the movie script for “The Wizard of Oz.” Yip Harburg, possibility the greatest artist America ever had--who wrote, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and “It’s Only A Paper Moon,”-- was blacklisted by the American judicial oligarchic system. Cohn was involved in the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in which he committed numerous violations of judicial procedures which should not of led to their execution in 1953. From this public espionage trial the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, recommended Cohn as McCarthy’s chief counsel.

McCarthy, with Cohn as his chief counsel, began a series of sham investigations of the Army in 1953 that quickly led to their downfall. Evidently, McCarthy’s anti-Communist preaching became instead meddling in military affairs. The Army countered with an investigation of its own called the Army–McCarthy hearings which were about Cohn ordering Army officials to give preferential treatment to his gay lover, and oligarchic heir to the Schine hotel fortune, David Schine. This was a touchy issue. McCarthy was rumored to be gay. J. Edger Hoover was definitely gay and whose lover was his Associate Director of the FBI, Clyde Tolson. Political blackmail was their currency and power, but they were also protected. Both McCarthy and Cohn were disgraced by the hearings, but Cohn re-emerged to damage and destroy even more lives in the decades to follow.

The nihilist Roy Cohn would **** a corpse. In 1975 Cohn walked into the New York hospital room of the dying multi-millionaire Lewis Rosestiel who was comatose, put a pen into Rosestiel’s hand, and lifted a will to fake a signature making himself and Cathy Frank the beneficiaries. The stories are endless.

Many years later Cohn and his aide Roger Stone were key agents in swaying the 1980 Presidential election to a Reagan victory partly by Stone dropping off a suitcase full of money for liberal candidate John B. Anderson so to split Reagan’s political opposition in New York. Election manipulation was only one of Cohn’s activities. He was heavily involved in New York's Mafia scene and had numerous brushes with the law including professional misconduct, perjury, and witness tampering. And as if that was not bad enough, Cohn befriended the well-known New York mafia figure (at least well-known by law enforcement) Donald Trump who eagerly studied with religious passion Cohn’s criminal mind, illegal scams, intimidation tactics, defense strategies, and media management techniques.

There are two--but not mutually exclusive--ways to interpret the events surrounding Cohn’s life: the intentionalist view, and the structuralist view. The intentionalist view would interpret Cohn’s action as personal, psychological, and biographical. The focus would be on the subject’s character and psychology and this is certainly an important factor. On the other hand, this period of history could be viewed from a structuralist view that includes the political system, judicial system, social class, religious orthodoxy, and cultural norms of the time. The intentionalist point of view located on some hypothetical spectrum would tend to be “non-political” as it centers on the biographical factors behind these historical events. The structuralist view would be political since its focus is analyzing the socio-economic environment of the time. No single person could of possibly caused the wake of destruction that followed from Roy Cohn.

Maybe there can be a third theological interpretation of these events centered on the Geist of the age, or “Spirit” which can also mean the “Mind” of the age.

[1] See William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. I, Westminster Press Philadelphia, The Saint Andrew Press, Edinburgh, Scotland, First ed, 1956, p. 326). William Barclay describes demon mythology and gives a demythologized interpretation of Matthew’s account of Jesus and the possessed man. I am using Mark’s account because it is more detailed, but Barclay’s biblical commentary is more detailed in Matthew’s account.

…to continue Tillich on the Demonic with “The Demonic Attack on Sister Dianna Ortiz.”

Tillich on Chronos and Kairos Time Experience

“6.3611 We cannot compare any process with the “passage of time”—there is no such thing—but only with another process (say, with the movement of the chronometer).”--Wittgenstein

Chronological time, or Chronos, (the Ancient Greek word, Χρόνος,) is linear time, or objectively measured clock time of science contrasted with the other Greek word for time, kairos, (καιρός ) meaning right, proper, exact, critical time, or lived time. Chronos is quantitative mathematical time, but Kairos is qualitative time. Personal psychological lived time, or temporal existentiality, is just as valid as abstract scientifically measured time. Tillich finds the same distinction in Heideggerian phenomenology as Existential time and objective time:

“Most radical is Heidegger’s distinction between “Existential” and objective Time…In his analysis of Kant he indicates that for himself Time is defined by “selfaffection,”[Sic] grasping oneself or one’s Personal Existence. Temporality is Existentiality. In distinction from this qualitative Time, objective Time is the Time of the flight from our own Personal Existence, into the universal “one,” the “everyone,” the average human Existence, in which quantitative measurement is necessary and justified. But this universal Time is not eigentlich, or proper; it is Time objectified, and it must be interpreted in the light of Existential Time, Time as immediately experienced, and not vice versa” (Paul Tillich Philosophical Writings, Vol. 1, ed. Gunther Wenz, 1989, pdf, p. 368).

For Kant, Time is essentially mathematical, linear, and spatial. A clock is a spatial metaphor (meaning to transfer) for time. The hands of the clock create a spatial pattern transferred from lived Time, but clock time is absolutely different than immediately experienced existential lived time. We can make the clock more accurate, change the spatial metaphor from non-digital to digital patterns, but existential temporality can never be reconstructed with observation and analysis of objectively measured time. Existence cannot be derived from essence. This argument is not based on the tautology of “my inner experience is my inner experience,” but that all knowledge assumes an ontological subject/object polarity.

The Ontology of Cognition

Tillich writes, “The unity of participation and separation in the cognitive situation will always remain a fundamental problem of philosophy”(PW., p. 338). This epistemological problem emerges from the “ontology of cognition”(p. 382). When we ask any question about existence the subject-object structure of reality is already presupposed a priori. Asking the question of Being, or the meaning of Life is “not mere subjective emotions with no ontological significance; they are half-symbolic, half-realistic indication of the structure of Reality itself”(PW., p. 365). Tillich critically reviews in his writings how various philosophers struggled with this assumption and the limits of human cognition. Tillich reminds us Schelling argued that the Principle of Identity in Thought is “valid only in the realm of essences, not of existence.” When Thought (Essence) and Being (Existence) are separated –not aligned, unsynchronized, not attuned--there is no correspondence to Truth. Truth is the state of thought being in agreement with, or attached to existence. The separation of subject and object logically implies the dialectical possibility of their polar unity. So knowledge as a possibility paradoxically depends on separation and detachment so that “There is no knowledge wither there is no separation”(PW., p. 383). Kant founded his metaphysics on the ontological separation between subject and object that characterize finite human reason. Heidegger believed that the Hegelian critique of Kant’s doctrine of the thing-in-itself (Ding-an-sich) was a denial of finite human knowledge. Tillich agrees with the Neo-Kantian critics of mystic ontology that any claim of a priori knowledge of Being is hubristic irrationalism, but “an ontology which restricts itself to the structure of finitude is possible.” Tillich believed--just as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Husserl believed--that the objective impersonal worldview of naturalistic science is swallowing the creative source of life like a “monstrous mechanism” (PW., p. 366).

Tillich’s philosophical historical survey continues focusing on the fundamental ontological division between essence (Idea) and existence (Nature). This ontological division of cognition is the foundation of existentialist philosophy and the key to a critique of all Hegelian holistic idealist systems that make truth impersonal. Existentialism is the philosophy of personal participatory experience from which all interest and decisions originate—there must be “interest” for actual negation and synthesis (Marx). Hegelianism lost the participatory subject in an impersonal objective dialectical process of a progressive teleological history (Kierkegaard). When Hegelianism claims that “A” is negated into a synthesis with “not-A,” “A” is simply being labeled as negated. This is because thinking (essence) is being taken as the same as existence, which is a common error of pure Idealism. Labeling here is just ideology so there is really no negation of “A.” Marx’s insight is the Idea will fail if personal participatory interest, passion, and decision-making is not involved.  Tillich applies this same criticism of confusing thought with existence to “every rational theory of progressive evolution, idealistic as well as naturalistic, including the later so-called “scientific Marxism.”(PW., p. 359). Marx famously said that philosophers have only interpreted existence as essences, but the point is to change existence. From these Schellingian, Hegelian, Marxist, Heideggerian critiques Tillich develops a systematic ethical and political theology of culture grounded in personal participatory temporal existential subjectivity, or Kairos experience. (Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, 1970, pdf.).

The Kairos Circle

 “Awareness of a Kairos is a matter of vision…. It is not a matter of detached observation but of involved experience.”—Tillich, “Systematic Theology, Vol. III, p. 370.

Tillich develops Kairos into an existential theology of participation that is more of an “attitude of consciousness,” than a political party, or a popular cultural fashion. The word Kairos is used in the New Testament as meaning, “fulfillment of time,” or “God’s timing” referring to the churches experiencing the “self-transcending dynamics of history.” Kairos is the opportune time, the right time, or the harvest time of crops. Kairos is the occasion of an existential decision made in a concrete historical situation based on an analysis, and anticipation of something old passing and the new emerging, but calculation does not produce the Kairos-experience. Scientific-technical foresight of unknown forces working along with human decisions makes predicting the world historical process impossible.

In the Greek sense of the word, Kairos means “any practical purpose which a good occasion of some action is given”(Ibid., p. 369). Kairos is used in the New Testament when Jesus speaks of the “signs of the times,” or when Jesus said the time for his death had not come yet; John the Baptist and Jesus used it to announce the fulfillment of time for the Kingdom of God; or when the prophetic Spirit arises in the Pauline era. Paul uses it in speaking of Christ, the “great Kairos,” that can enter history at any time and is selected as the “center of history” which can be re-experienced again, and again (meaningful repetition of time, not mathematical linear time). But not every Kairos is of the same historical importance. Relative “kairoi” (plural meaning “the times”) describes when the Church reforms itself against a distorted age, or refuses to reform against heresy. 

The Kairos experience can describe a world-historical paradigm shift in an era of tyranny and domination that suffers from paradigm entropy by failing to provide a meaningful worldview resulting in collapse that makes way for a new paradigm, a new society—and a New Being-- to emerge in history. There is difficulty distinguishing a Kairos from a relative kairoi.  Kairoi can be demonically distorted and tragically wrong.

The term Kairos was used after WWI in central Europe to describe religious socialism, but it was also used “…by the nationalist movement, which, through the voice of nazism, attacked the great Kairos and everything for which it stands. The latter use was a demonically distorted experience of a Kairos and led to self-destruction. The Spirit nazism claimed was the spirit of the false prophets, prophets who spoke for an idolatrous nationalism and racialism. Against them the Cross of the Christ was and is the absolute criterion” (Ibid., p. 371).

Kairos is a normative concept, not just a description. The Kairos is the moment the archer decides to release his arrow aimed at a target.  Tillich tells us that no date foretold by Kairos has ever been correct. No situation foretold by Kairos ever came into being, but history has been changed. History does not progress in a steady predicable rhythm, but undergoes violence change, extreme creativity, extremely dormant periods, oppression, possibilities, cruelty, liberation, and expectation.

In 1919 Paul Tillich formed the “Kairos Circle” with Eduard Heimann, Carl Mennicke, Arnold Wolfers and others to ask the church to be open to socialism and social democracy, and a synthesis of Christianity with socialism. Tillich published the “Journal for Religious Socialism” between 1920-1927 for the group and later from 1930 published the “New Journal for Socialism.” Tillich declared that theology and ethics must “step forward in opposition to the capitalist and militarist order of society in which we find ourselves, and whose final consequences became obvious in the World War.” Tillich’s ultimate goal is for persons to “experience the divine in everything human, the eternal in everything temporal”(“Paul Tillich as a Systemic Theologian,” by Oswald Bayer in “The Cambridge Companion to Paul Tillich, Ed. by Russell Re Manning, Cambridge University Press, 2009, Pdf., p.19).

Peter Gabriel in Athens, Greece 

"Lay Your Hands On Me"

Sat in the corner of the Garden Grill, with plastic flowers

on the window sill

No more miracles, loaves and fishes, been so busy with the

washing of the dishes

Reaction level's much too high - I can do without the stimuli

I'm living way beyond my ways and means, living in the

zone of the in betweens

I can see the flashes on the frozen ocean, static charge of

the cold emotion

Watched on by the distant eyes - watched on by the silent

hidden spies

But still the warmth flows through me

And I sense you know me well

No luck, no golden chances

No mitigating circumstances now

It's only common sense

There are no accidents around here

I am willing - lay your hands on me

I am ready - lay your hands on me

I believe - lay your hands on me, over me

Working in gardens, thornless roses, fat men play with their

garden hoses

Poolside laughter has a cynical bite, sausage speared by the

cocktail satellite

I walk away from from light and sound, down stairways

leading underground

But still the warmth flows through me

And I sense you know me well

It's only common sense

There are no accidents around here

I am willing - lay your hands on me

I am ready - lay your hands on me

I believe - lay your hands on me, over me

over me