A Heavenly Appointment

In my last post, we looked at how New Zealand can bypass toxic, imported culture wars by returning to the original frequency of our ancestors. I shared how anchoring our communities in whakapapa, manaakitanga, and hauora helps us see people as part of our collective whānau rather than numbers in a state system. To understand how this works in a spiritual sense, we can look at a powerful meeting recorded in the Book of Acts. It is a story about breaking down human barriers, showing how a person who did not fit into typical societal categories was fully embraced into the family of God, in fact, the first non-Jew to be baptised.

This encounter shows us that divine inclusion does not wait for a centralised government to sign a piece of paper.

Erasing the Colonial Imprint

The Ethiopian eunuch was a high-ranking official who ran the treasury for the Queen of the Ethiopians, yet because of his physical differences, he sat outside the traditional boundaries of religious and social structures of that era. (The Jewish and Roman cultures of that time both subscribed to binary gender roles, with non-binary people being marginalised.)

Experts of the Spirit

In the traditions of Te Tai Tokerau, the word "tohunga" carries a weight that is often lost in modern translations. Rev. Māori Marsden, who was himself a trained tohunga, taught that this role was about much more than just knowing rituals or being a specialist in a craft. He saw the tohunga as a navigator of what he called the "Deep Spirit" of the field. These were the experts who could look past the surface of the world we see and interact with the invisible layers of information that hold the Woven Universe together.

The High Fidelity Code

Through the lineage of the great navigator Nukutawhiti, Marsden understood that the tohunga were the human interfaces for a giant library of information. He viewed this as the "Archive" of our ancestors and the Creator. Their main job was to protect the "high fidelity code" of our whakapapa. This meant ensuring that the connection between the Source and our daily lives remained clear and uncorrupted by outside noise. They were the ones who kept the spiritual signal strong so that the people could thrive in abundance.