Before we follow the family down through all the long generations, we have to know what the dragon did when he failed to devour the child — because it explains everything that comes after, and it hands us a work to do that almost no one remembers is ours.
When the dragon could not stop the birth, he did not surrender. He went to war. The old vision calls it the war in heaven: Michael and his angels on one side, the dragon and his on the other. But do not picture swords and armies. Michael's name is not a weapon — it is a question. It means who is like God? And that question is the whole battle. The angels who remembered that they were like God — made in his image, children of his love — simply stood in that truth. And the dragon could not bear to be near it. Heaven is made of love, and a being who has chosen fear and accusation cannot breathe there. He falls of his own weight, the same way the proud will later hide in the rocks from the face of the Lamb, because love itself has become unbearable to them. No one threw the dragon out of heaven. He could not stay in it. He cast himself down.
And hear what heaven cried when he fell: now comes the kingdom of our God — for the accuser of our family has been thrown down, the one who accused them day and night. That is his name, and it is the only weapon he has ever owned: the accuser. The voice that says you are guilty, you are not enough, you do not belong, you should be ashamed — day and night, that voice. It is cast out of heaven forever. But — and this is the hard part — it is cast down, to the earth, and the vision says he comes down in great fury, because he knows his time is short. He has lost the high ground. So now he works the low ground, and he works it hardest on the part of the family least able to fight back.
Because the dragon, thrown down, turns his war on the spirits — on the disembodied. On the vast multitude of all who have lived and died: the fathers and the mothers and the grandmothers of every line, everyone who has laid down a body and gone on ahead of us. And here is the thing you must understand. It is harder to remember who you are without a body. Remembering was never only a thing of the mind. It is done through the body — through touch and tears, through making and forgiving and embracing, through the long, embodied labor of healing a wound by living it differently. The dead cannot do that anymore. They cannot pick the work back up with their own hands. And so the accuser presses in on them in their forgetting, whispering the old lies to those who can no longer act to answer him.
But they are not abandoned — because the dragon also goes to make war on the rest of the woman's children, the ones still here who keep the testimony. That is us. The living. And we are not only the dragon's targets. We are the dead's deliverers.
Here is how. The wounds of our ancestors did not die with them. They live on — in us. In our bodies. In the fears we inherited and never chose, in the patterns that run down a family like a current down a river, in the very code written into our cells, in the griefs and angers and shames passed down through the generations that we carry without even knowing where they came from. The parts of them that still ache are the parts of them that are still alive — in us. And that is not a curse. That is the doorway. Because we have bodies. We can do the embodied work they no longer can. When we take an inherited wound — a fear handed down a family line, a violence repeated for generations, a shame worn like a second skin — and we heal it in ourselves, with love, by remembering who we truly are, we are not only healing ourselves. We are reaching back up the line and healing them. We are doing, with our living hands and our living hearts, the remembering they cannot do alone. We turn our hearts to the fathers and the mothers, and in the turning, we set them free.
There is an ancient promise about this very turning, and it was renewed, plainly, in these last days, because the world had very nearly forgotten it. The promise is this: that before the great day of the Lord, God would plant in the hearts of the children the promises he once made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children would turn to their fathers — and that if this did not happen, if the generations stayed cut off from one another, the whole earth would be wasted at his coming. Read that slowly, because it tells you what the great day truly hinges on. The single thing that keeps the day of the Lord from being a desolation — the thing that makes it a homecoming instead — is exactly this: the children remembering the promises made to their fathers, and turning back toward them in love. The whole repair of the world depends on the generations reaching across the divide and taking hold of one another again.
And this turning is what the old word really means by the restoring of the priesthood. Not an office. Not a rank. Not a handful of people with titles standing over everyone else — that was always the beast's counterfeit of it. The priesthood, stripped back to what it actually is, is simply the power that comes from knowing the promises of God to his family: knowing who you are, knowing what was promised to those who walked the road before you, and carrying that knowledge with enough love to heal both the living and the dead. It is the power of the knowledge of the promises of God to his whole family. And it can never be owned by a few, because it belongs to all the children. The day that knowing comes alive again in the hearts of the children — when the whole family understands, at last, what their Father promised them — that is the day the priesthood stands restored upon the earth, because the power of God was never anything other than his family finally remembering who they are and what they were promised.
This is why honoring our ancestors is holy — and it is holy in every land and every people on the earth. Every culture that ever lit a candle for its dead, spoke the names of its grandparents, kept the old stories, tended the graves, prayed for the departed — every one of them was reaching across that same divide, doing this same sacred work, whether they had words for it or not. The reverence for ancestors woven through the religions of the whole world is not superstition to be swept away. It is the family, living and dead, refusing to let go of one another. And it means the gathering this whole book is moving toward — the gathering of all into one — was never going to be a gathering of the living only. It is the gathering of the whole family: across every age, across every nation, and across the line of death itself. The living healing the dead. The dead waiting on the living. All of us bound together into one single household that not even the grave can divide.
And the accuser cannot win this, because the vision tells us exactly how he is overcome — and it is the whole gospel in a single line. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives unto death. Three things — and they are the three things we carry back to our ancestors. The blood of the Lamb: love already poured out, the debt already paid, so the accuser's whole case collapses, because there is nothing left to accuse where love has already covered everything. The word of testimony: remembering, and saying out loud, who we are and whose we are. And loving not our lives unto death: willing to lay down the frightened, grasping false self — the very thing the accuser feeds on. Love already given, truth spoken aloud, and the false self surrendered: that is what casts the accuser out of a human heart, living or dead. And we can carry all three of them back up our family line, on behalf of every one who can no longer carry them alone.
So before we walk down through the long line of the family — and we are about to, all the way back to the very beginning — know that we do not walk it as strangers, and we do not walk it only to learn. We walk it as their children, sent to heal what they could not, carrying love back to every one of them. And we walk it to receive something, too. Because each father and mother we are about to meet was given a promise — a promise from God that was never meant only for them, but was always meant to be planted, one day, in the hearts of their children. Seven families lie ahead of us, and with them, seven promises made to the fathers: to the first parents, the promise that they could become as God; to the city that remembered early, the promise of Zion; to the man who built the boat, the promise of preservation; to the friend of God, the promise of a family as countless as the stars; to the king who opened his heart, the promise of an everlasting house; to the witnesses who saw him alive, the promise of resurrection; and to us, the harvest, the promise of the gathering and the tree of life. Walk through them slowly, and receive each promise as your own — because it is yours. And as the seven promises take root in you, your heart will turn to the fathers and mothers who first received them, and theirs will turn to you across the divide, and the priesthood — the living knowledge of all that God has promised his family — will stand restored upon the earth, and the great day, the day he comes home to us and we to him, will be very near. So we go back for all of them, beginning where the family itself began: with the very first father and the very first mother, learning in the dark the first thing every child of God must learn.