Category: Enlist

The Origin of Night

The story? Let us say God is all that. All good, all wise, all patient, all merciful, not lacking in any perception. What would it be, what could Lucifer have possibly done that he would be forever removed from the light of Eternity? Can we suppose, should we believe that he knew what he was doing, that he knew he was going five steps too far? In a perfect world, what could he have possibly done to bring upon himself the wrath of God? “Perfect”: that’s the clue. What could Lucifer have done? Perhaps actually to create the very concept of “wrong”? Before his doing so, all there was—anywhere—was perfection. No one ever made any sort of mistake anywhere that there were beings to make them. There was no such thing. This was his “genius”. With it, he tried to overpower God Himself. For all he had to do was to make the Lord make one mistake… But after temptations of pleasure and of pain, our man Jesus Christ said at his last, “It is finished,” for indeed, his whole life had then been led without any error whatsoever.

What Lucifer did was to sin, for the first time anyone ever in the history of Heaven and Earth even had the thought to. And Sin, his emanation, goes by other names, from the analytic name “Error” to one that is near and dear to all of us, I’m sure: Pain. Which is to say that God was not the one who thought that up… Lucifer had enough power to do this all by himself. Now, God put it to good use, a good example that it has had great utility in the process of evolution—but no, the first instance of it did not go as far back as the Most High. And Sin, the curse that it was, spawned from Evil himself, spread from the first like an insidious fire, so that everyone—all but One, were subject to it. Even the angels would from then on sin, and this is outside of all the “rebel” angels, Lucifer’s angels: they now to be called the Devil and his demons.

Can you imagine a world without pain? For it was thus at the beginning, and it shall be again at the end (see the finish of the Book of Revelation). Do you understand that Error is Sin is Pain? Or maybe the word we used at first that says all three are what you may comprehend of what Lucifer made: the Wrong. It was his to do, surely, for perhaps no one but him could have thought of something so “novel”, and it required stretching of the mind to conceive of it, and it required effort like nothing else to commit the first fault—anywhere. And then this was a breach in the Godhead. It threatened existence itself. For we are talking about stakes where pain—the idea of pain—were invented by one created: something that fundamental and pervasive. For pain, even the idea of it: before it were made, it was an impossible thing.

To which one might conceive, that if the whole of the universe were one grand story, could it be that all the best subplots are ones not where nothing goes wrong, but ones where we overcome obstacles—stories where there are bad things in them too? True, these of struggle may be intrinsic to the nature of creation and that is why we would see things this way, and one might imagine a physics where the best story that could be told is one where nothing goes wrong. But this universe is all we’ve got—might we find that truly, this one is all we need to make the best of all possible worlds? Like it were all on purpose! Does the best story necessarily win, in other words? Ours to follow in that path of struggle, to know that it all goes to have some meaning: this is surely God’s ultimate gift to us, what He made of the pain, that nothing is wasted.

This is not a setup. Even predestination is not so simplistic, so simple-minded as that. The meaning we have, that given us and that which we make—if this is just a chess game where we set the pieces up to systematically knock them down, we have then as much meaning as a chess game. We would be poor players indeed. Know this: Lucifer had his chance, had a real chance to repent of his wrongs. They we not simply token offerings of forgiveness for the clearing of our conscience, for the sake of the story. Thus it is with anyone who ends up being damned: they had a real chance not to go down the path they did, and they did not take it. If they didn’t have that chance, and were damned anyway, we to indict them would be the worse side of evil, and we would surely all be lost.

And God can forgive many things. If Lucifer had turned back, after committing that heinous first error, indeed how different things would have been. But the pride that made him think he could outdo the Most High, this pride was not satisfied with merely the opening salvo of the War: he was bent on seeing it through, a furious obsession that became the more inflamed with every defeat. At every step, he would attempt the worse, thus the evil knew deeper lows. And the Dragon also threw down a third of the stars with his tail: a third of the billions of angels fell with him. This was part and parcel of that evil. These angels’ lives we lost by him. Sympathy for the Devil? He surely has my sympathy, that justice so harsh will be done on him, but he has the least of that sympathy. More goes to the least of the angels who fell, than ones who caused said fall.

It was that I saw Satan and his angels fall from Heaven like the ground of the place dropped out from beneath them, out of sight. He made himself out to be darkness itself, but all he did was block the light so that there would be shadow. God answered the darkness with the origin of night. And I saw Satan full of wrath when he landed in the Earth, for he knew his time was short. What if the story were just as real as the pain we go through? And what we do on this world ultimately has import, has gravity, for we are caught up in that story… God Himself came down here because it required His personal attention. This is our only world, this our only life we live: so now, will you not do something? If perhaps nothing else, to pray? Let it not be to watch it all go by, and not having lived, lament the dream not followed…

You are a human being alive on this green Earth: while you are alive, while it is still green: will you not seize the day, will you not do something so easy and impossible as love? And what can you love? Think of this: you can thank God for the pain you have experienced in your life. Decide to do that. You will then be forgiven for the pain you yourself have caused. (Pain is a saint’s excuse to be thankful.) And so, we fight the good fight, and defeat Satan at the first, and then even the last and worst of his evils. All you have to know is this: don’t give up. There is always hope: believe this, and it will be true. The Devil started with everything and threw it all away because of his pride. Be happy with nothing, instead. Do you not know? The Man Upstairs made the stars above for us, the ground below. All He wants from us is to stand and look up, and to feel small, and to be amazed. For that is what it means to be a child of God.

And that’s how the story goes, right up to your doorstep. Go.



If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.

The Elements

When Easter is over we tend to forget about such things as the Resurrection, or our place in the grand scheme of things, at least until right about Christmas time when our fashion turns to “church chic” again. One reason might simply be that we don’t really understand what is expected of us to do, what it means to do good, what it means to be a child of God. Or even come close to thinking we could serve in the War in Heaven, which has finished, which is finishing, and which will finish. Let’s maybe break it down, because there are lots of theories that can account for basically everything, if in broad strokes. Let’s see if there’s something we can aim for, perhaps not that lofty, something we can live with, if not live by.

We can say there are things one might call wyrds, like words but with a sort of greater meaning to them. “Wyrd” to capture the two words, word and weird, where “weird” is used in its old sense, that of fate. They are of what we call the Logos, which can be said to be the Wyrd of God. All the angels had been given charge of a wyrd, which governed the function of some part of heaven and earth, which is to say that the universe is made of wyrds. They are the way things work. Satan, before he rebelled, was responsible for a wyrd, as were all who rebelled with him. And when they rebelled, each of them tried to destroy their personal wyrds, by attempting to pervert things to the point where they could be rendered meaningless. None of them, thankfully, succeeded. And their wyrds were taken away.

So, if you say that by wyrds being played, it is the universe at work, then it’s all a grand story that is being told. And the formal and otherwise logic of this wyrld (what I call the encompassing of both the seen and unseen worlds) is defined simply as the way things work, the way things function. There are wyrds that govern other wyrds, so that, for instance, “rose” might mean a different thing told in Heaven than told on Earth. One important wyrd, what you might capitalize, is from the beginning: this is the Wyrd of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is as well as being King of us here, is King of all the angels. His Wyrd is the sacred name, “YHVH”. What Philip K. Dick defined as “he who causes to be”. The three parts of the Trinity, in fact, each have their own wyrd.

The Wyrd of the Holy Spirit is not capitalized, for it is “love”. This is the Spirit of God. This is what it means, that God is love. That of God the Father, the En Sof, is “I Am”. Note, here, that we are still talking about one God, and not three. The angels are the embodiments of the one wyrd they were meant to be about, but God is all “I Am” and all “YHVH” and all love. (God is all love: never forget this, for by it is perhaps the best opportunity to comprehend the divine while still on this Earth.) And you may blaspheme against the Father and the Son and be forgiven, but one who blasphemes against the Spirit shall not be forgiven, in this world or the next. That would be saying “no” to love that is true, for as we are made in the image of love, we are denying that part of us that the Spirit asks, and that part of us dies. This is sin.

As the cosmos, all creation, can be said to be made of wyrds, the stories being told are the structures that hold them in place as experiences: the universe exists as all the stories being told that came to be because God and then you made the choices you did. Things that happen, if they carry a logical skein from a beginning to an end—of course these are stories, but the physical, the real things that exist are no more than information themselves. [Philip K. Dick] And when we say, unequivocally, the best story wins (this is a truth), it is not just to say some representation of material things tied together with added meaning wins, not something that needs to be written down: we are talking about that the things themselves having a meaning, and no translation is needed between the symbols and their reality. That all things are wyrd and story are a way of seeing how the universe actually works.

Now, one need not work in terms of good and evil to know which plot to follow; I once thought to put it as anima vs. entropy: life vs. decay. Good and evil, these are well known terms, though. Or are they? The side of good, of life and love, is not always to be a part of the well established virtues; nor is it always to be a rebel against the monolithic structures that oppress us. It is both much more complicated that that, and ultimately simpler. There is a narrow way that preserves logic and is also in accordance with the heart. Our stories are different from theirs, good vs. evil, for theirs lack both logic and heart—seeking only power at any cost. I admit that evil mystifies me at times, but if there is any understanding of it, it is in the seeking of power. And anyone and anything is to be used and spent in trying to get it.

So it is that theirs is an awful story, to say if you count them all as seeking the same thing as everyone on their side, it is actually umpteen billion different things. Completely the opposite of good, where all the differences coalesce into the greater fortune. Ours is like the music of the Ainur in the “Ainulindalë”, all different tunes in concert to bring about the will of the Creator. Just that instead of music, that we use the wyrds to tell a story. And the outcome is already destined, simply: the best story wins. It is intrinsic to the nature of creation. What is best? That which outperforms the rest, of course. Which is not to say that it’s all a cakewalk, for evil, when it does gain power, will harshly undermine what is of light and truth: the light and the truth, by which we write our own stories.

The narrow way, of satisfying competing goals: this is what is often the path of the right thing to do. One understands that many of what needs to be accomplished is far easier said than done. And in the simplest of terms, what is the way that one must go? Do do all things out of love. All things. When you have eyes to see, these things are clear as winter air, the way we must choose to go if we truly call ourselves the children of God. Pray for courage and wisdom on your way through this life, and may you not have one without the other. The wyrld is what Walt Whitman called the Powerful Play, in which all of us may contribute a verse. I say it is we who each write a wyrd in the Greatest Story Ever Told—do you understand? Jesus Christ may be its beginning and its end, but the middle? That’s all of us!



If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.

Conspiracy Theory

Can it be true? Is the Devil responsible for every wrong thing that ever was, from the barest papercut to the most seismic earthquake, the hugest hurricane? For pain, itself? What does it mean, the Plan of God, and is it the same as the Grand Design? Why would the War in Heaven echo within these questions, and through time and creation? Do you think you can know the answer? For it requires a shifting of scale, as to what you thought God was capable of, and then of what you thought angels, the power of these were, who were said to be a little greater than human beings. What you probably have in mind as to what God is able to do, this is more in line with the ability of the archangels, if we say that Lucifer was once the first of them (and Michael the second).

It took a little getting used to, that last thought. I had read Tolkien’s “Ainulidalë” where Melkor, the rebel Ainur, and the greatest, shaped creation—and I thought, certainly it could not have been like that for the real world, for certainly angels and their ilk did not possess such power. And yes, the evil that was will, the harm man does to man, that could have come from the original rebel; but earthquakes? hurricanes? Certainly not having source in the Fall. Or so I thought. What it took to shift my paradigm was to hear that God had not created pain. I half overheard it, the Lord said it to me as if in a dream. And then it all made sense to me. The aesthetics of pain, pure pain: it is discordance itself. Verily, good things have been made of even this, but that result is the work of the Lord, and not of the pain. Discordance itself, permeating all creation: this was the scale of the greatest of angels. Quite the idea.

But… it was really like that?

What is this conspiracy? Why did we never know this? The Book of Job gives us clues. You know the story, Satan makes a wager with God when God gushes about His faithful servant Job. And so Satan is given permission basically to let loose on poor Job, to test that faith. So at the end of his trials, when Job is about to lose it, God appears. About the reason(s) for his travails, He says:

4 Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
    Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
    Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 On what were its bases sunk,
    or who laid its cornerstone
7 when the morning stars sang together
    and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
[Job 38:4-7]

He goes on in that vein for a bit. Not once does he point a finger and say, “Satan did it!” Nope. He takes “blame” for the whole shebang. And to anyone who asks why He didn’t tell us this before, this news about pain, above—I would simply point you to that speech. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be let in on this tidbit of a revelation.

Also, there’s a look at Satan’s capabilities in the Book of Job:

Job 1:16 “The fire of God fell from heaven and burned up the sheep and the servants, and consumed them”
Job 1:18-19 “Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother’s house, and suddenly a great wind came across the desert, struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people, and they are dead”
[NRSV]

We were talking about natural disasters, here. So are all natural disasters directly the work of evil forces? Maybe not, but natural disasters are due to how the world works, and how the world works is in part due to the strivings of evil against the good. I found that the creation of pain was the start of the War in Heaven. The evil, it is told, spread through a third of all angels. We’re talking billions. The War had a good deal in making the quality of fate, as the angels contended on what was, and is, and is to be—for creation itself. And it is yours to decide which side you are on, those who fight for truth, or those who make their own desire the greatest of their ideals.

So, if you ever come to a place were the walls seem to shut around you, when there seems before you only a dead end, know that these are from the twisting of the innards of the cosmos, and indeed there you may be able yourself to fight in the War in Heaven, which has ended, is ending, and will end—as herald to a new age. If you can make a way out of a structure sealed in shadow, you give the angel fighting on the side of faith and logic a means to bring the demon down. The conspiracy of the darkness is one of despair, for this is how it propagates. Like a virus, to the detriment of its carrier. Find the truth, indeed, the faith and logic: it is with us, not our foe; we are of the light. The Grand Design inhales the darkness and breathes out the dawn, and we are one with the Plan if we do likewise, to carry the candle flame into corners light forgot.

And the grandest conspiracy of all? That which makes all other conspiracies pale in comparison? Of course, it’s right before your face. Pretty much every day. What is the way to all you ever could hope to want? It is simple, and no one ever told you: it is love, and only love: be not but love, do not but love. That’s it. As the soothsayers 4 said, “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you meant to be. It’s easy.” It is what’s behind the whole ball of wax, why God took the blame for all the wrong that’s ever happened, when it’s never His fault for anything (never!). If God is all good, but let His greatest creation have the greatest angle of leeway, and it was from that created one that ultimately, all evil and pain come… it almost seems too easy. But that’s God for you.

“I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.” [Luke 10:24 NRSV] It is many a time such a way with mysteries, that once unraveled they show a very simple underlying structure. If this is a great saying, what I write here, remember that it was not the Lord who said, “God is love.” But the Lord, indeed, said that they who were to follow him would do greater things than he had done. Yea, verily. He gives us even this. There is no question, love is the answer. The secret is love. Tell everyone.



If you like what’s written here, check out my book, Memoirs from the War in Heaven.

Beginning and Ending

When many come and tell you, “The end is nigh!” and then ask you for money, know the end is not yet. When many come and claim, “I know the Lord’s mind!” and invoke a simpler time, and a simplistic morality, know that the Lord did not send them. When many come and tell you they are protectors of life, yet they ignore the beggar at their very feet, know that they know nothing of the religious good. These things must truly transpire before the Age of Gold is upon you, upon the world. Yet the Age of Gold is here, and it has always been here: in every act of kindness against the rules, the rebellion against the evil that was greater than them. It is not the end, for the end comes far from here, in what may be known as 40 days of mystic time. Truly, truly, it is quite the reverse, the beginning opposed to the end, and those reverse of love’s intent will not tell you that this is what is so, for they understand it not. Hearken and lo, the Beginning is near!

The MACHINE

The MACHINE is a remnant of the Age of Iron, which has ended and is ending and will end. It is a face of Death, which is the Antichrist, who is the Son of Satan. It manifests most notably in human beings. You have seen it at work. Whenever one follows the rules without compassion for one’s fellow human being, when one does that, it is the MACHINE taking hold. That is its cold side. Its hot side is to resort to senseless violence. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, violence applied to enforce rules, feeding death at the expense of life. To fight against the machine is notoriously difficult; it is a narrow way. If you counter violence with violence, the MACHINE is halfway manifest in you. If you fight with cold logic, one could say the same of that.

The MACHINE is not alive, but surrounds itself with life to shield it from anything that would lead to its demise, or any dimishing of its power. It is perverse like that: pawns of life being used as shield for the king of death. There is no reasoning with it. But it may be defeated. It involves turning a zero sum game into a positive sum gain. Watch Christ fight it: when being nailed to the cross, he says, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Thus, what we need to combat the MACHINE: Logos, or holy Reason. Pray for the one who refused you service because of the rules. Forgive them without having received an apology, as if you had. Turn the other cheek. In all things, act with love.

It is not really proper to ask, “What would Jesus do?” He has an authority which is not of human beings. Instead, ask if a saint would do it. Everyone understands it and is a little disappointed that that is better than the Jesus question on what you should do. Because what a saint puts up with are all the mundane little annoying things, with a smile. That’s often harder, less glamor. Fighting the MACHINE is not some swordfight with flaming swords at the gates of paradise. It is, little by little, to make the world a better place. Hate cannot defeat hate. Risk something in order to show compassion, against the rules. Put yourself in harm’s way to protect the weak. Fear not: we have always already won. Fill up your own life with the telling of how exactly we did so.