The Temple Pattern in Life
Last March 15, 2026 we held the Sacrament of Ordination for our dear friend Marc Delannoy, who is now the first French Canadian priest ordained in the Christian Community. Amid the bustle of preparing for the ordination, we, the first year students of the seminary, were also preparing for our final presentations.
We were each invited to work with one aspect of how Jesus Christ works as the new High Priest through the lens of one of the synoptic gospels; and I was assigned the topic of the Temple in the Gospel of Luke. I would like to share some thoughts with you that became clear during my contemplations, meditations and research.
I discovered, among many things, that the patterning of the temple that was revealed on Mt. Sinai by God to Moses is in fact found throughout human creations and in nature. I have put together some examples for you to consider, in the hopes that your hearts are filled with reverence, as mine has been.
The pattern itself is simple: three progressively smaller areas, nested within each other— the outer area, the holy place, and the Holy of Holies. Each area is progressively more sacred than the one it is nested in. For simplicity, you could think of three concentric circles with the center circle being the most sacred. Within this most sacred area is a place in which divinity descends and communicates with people.
This pattern: a three-folded nest with a center that invites a blessing from across the veil between heaven and earth can be seen in many human constructions. Take a modern store as an example. You arrive in a parking lot, enter a store, and proceed to the altar of the check out counter, where you change paper into goods. We also build homes, within which we have a bedroom containing a bed-altar upon which we die to the sensible world each evening.
Looking into the eyes of a friend, we see white outside, the sclera. Embedded in the white is the iris, and then the mysterious dark pupil, behind which resides something which we sense to mediate between the invisible world of thought and the sense world taken in through the temple of the eye. Incredibly, the human eye is the only one in the natural world in which the white can be seen.
A final example of the temple pattern is our densest, deadest aspect– the bone.
The bone has a solid outer part, an inner spongy part, and inside all this mineral substance is something dark that produces blood. Out of the center of our least alive aspect springs forth a living mobile substance that is the mediating substance needed to build up our bodies. This moves me deeply when I consider the Christian Sacrament of Communion, in which we are gifted God’s blood, which is meant to build up an eternal body for each of us.
I hope that this inspires you to look for the temple pattern in others, in every culture, in nature, and in yourself. When you find it, you will surely discover something living and sacred, something that will bring the beautiful sense of reverence and awe that is so necessary for bringing peace into our midst.
You can find my cover art below, which focuses on the Bull, an animal intimately associated with the gospel writer, Luke.
With warm gratitude,
Jared
GoFundMe: help support my education and community work
Jared Coady, 47, is a Knowing Christ student residing onsite at the Christian Community Seminary in North America. He resides in Norman, Oklahoma, USA, where he enjoys gardening, householding, and community building.
- This is a blog entry by The Seminary of the Christian Community in North America. These are posted weekly by the student blog team of Athena Masilungan, Nicole Reinhart, and Lincoln Earle-Centers. For more information about our seminary, see the website: www.christiancommunityseminary.ca and for more video/audio content check out the Seminary’s Patreon page: www.patreon.com/ccseminary/posts.
The views expressed in this blog entry are the views of its author, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Seminary, its directors, or the Christian Community.