The Five Balloons

One time, when I was doing a multi-part community development project on a Reserve, I phoned a "Perceiver" friend of mine with a question about a strange pattern I was picking up at work.

I said, "There seems to be five themes that keep showing up in our project over and over again Whenever we start with one theme we end up involved with one of the others, so they seem to all be related somehow but I can't see how. I was wondering if you could see it. I picture five balloons, each with a word on it, but I can't see how to arrange the balloons so that they illustrate the relationship between them. The five themes are:

He replied, "I notice God is not in your diagram".
I said "ok, go ahead".
He said, "Take one balloon , the one called 'Religion' and put two other balloons inside it, the 'Money' and the 'Power' balloons. Then put the 'Media' balloon next to the 'Religion' balloon and the 'Culture' balloon next to the 'Media' one".
"Why would I do that?"
"Because for most people their religion is money and power. We can only have one person on the throne of our lives, either it is God, or anything except God. Most people put themselves on the throne of their own life.

"There are two things which God has that man does not have, money and power. So if man is gong to play god he must draw in money and power from those around him so he can throw his weight around, and be generous so he can look like God.

In order to draw in money and power man uses media of some form or other to control culture in order to get the people to give him money and power.

If you take money and power out of the religion balloon, and replace it with God, things fall into their proper lace and life starts to work. God has power and resource and is out-flowing and generous with it, and intends us to be conduits of it to others so as to enable and equip the lives of others around us. Life is built to flow outwards not inwards, and works best when it is conducted that way. 'Money' and 'Power' flow out from God by our 'Religious' connection with him, flowing out through 'Culture'. The 'Media' is used by the 'Culture' to express theeir gratitude to God for his bountiful provision, and for turning things around in such a way that life started to work for them at last."

On thinking about it, I saw the Mediaeval Cathedrals in a totally new light. Mediaeval people had a lot of things mixed up, but they had this one right. Cathedrals were the Mediaeval Culture's 'Media' expressing gratitude to God for his bounty and Grace.