Tag: beginning

The Prophet’s Brief (A Theory of Everything)

I, being a prophet of the Lord Jesus Christ, in the line of Philip K. Dick, present to you what I have pieced together as a theory of everything. In what it solves, it does in broad swaths, but how a God can be all good while there is pain and unjust suffering—I believe I have an answer. See if it makes sense to you, and better yet, more sense of the world around you. It is one of the central documents of the War in Heaven. Take it as you will.

  1. In the very beginning, before the universe, there was Eternity. No evil existed, there God and His angels lived in the light, with other heavenly beings.
  2. Lucifer said “no” to the Holy Spirit, that being the unforgivable blasphemy, from his pride becoming Evil. (God is love, and to say “no” to love is for that part to die.)
    • The “no” was the birth of Sin/Pain/Error (Daughter of Satan). Before, there had been none of these. No one had ever committed an error. No one had ever done wrong. And how great a wrong it was.
    • The entity known as Sin was to have been born into excruciating pain, through her very essence, so she was killed out of mercy before she was born (given the light of life). However, she still had a semblance of form (antiform), and this form had enough spirit (antispirit) in its essence to move the form as if it had life. Antiform and antispirit were the power rendered to darkness by Evil.
    • Lucifer (Evil) copulated with Sin and Death came to be (Son of Satan).
  3. Satan convinced 1/3 of the angels to commit sin and become evil. In committing Evil, (and bringing about Sin and Death), Satan and his angels ruined a part of Heaven, and this part was to become Hell when torn away from the main. For Heaven was so good that it could even accommodate such evil and its works.
  4. The body of Sin was cast into the outer darkness. This was the primordial chaos (formlessness of Genesis 1). Also known as Rahab.
    • The one about whom it is said, “She is dead and giving birth to monsters.”
    • Here was the environment wherein would form the material world, and this world—to use her body as the basis for its first stuff—this world is in part was a tribute to the one that was lost. For she was never given a chance.
    • That it was so difficult to work with, being formless, being of essence “error” itself, and from that it was made beautiful by God, in fitting ways, explains much of the character of this universe, that even the worst situations can bring forth wonder.
  5. Satan sought to kill and replace the Logos, who was God (see John 1). This was the beginning of the War in Heaven. Michael and his angels were dispatched to fight the Dragon (Satan) and his angels. For Satan desired power ultimate, unholy.
  6. The War in Heaven was combat between Logos and derangement, truth vs. lie, and to be on one side or the other was good vs. evil.
    • The battleground were the Godhead itself, the root controls of existence. So that all creation groaned under the War.
    • Every one of Michael’s angels (and of course Michael) won, so that derangement—none of it—it did not ultimately win anywhere. There was no crack in the edifice of creation, the pillars of its existence (there are four).
    • But that there was even a fight at all meant that the created world would have such things as natural disasters in it—just that laws of physics would not break—and there would be opportunity for the evil we now witness, to this day. That which was permissible in the matrix.
  7. They did kill God, this being called the Cross, but that concluded not with that death, but with His defeat of Death itself: the Resurrection. Being the Son of God means that he is God (this was the “blasphemy” that he had been charged with by the Sanhedrin). 
    • That Jesus Christ had to die for the world to be saved tells you how FUBAR things got, how powerful the forces of evil had become, that the will of God would be so forced. To hold to logic is sometimes finesse, often brute. At times one invoking the other. But there was no getting around it in this fight.
      • Having been sinless his whole life, in his death was the defeat of Sin.
      • This is how the God who is love defeats Evil: Jesus gave himself and was obedient to God with the whole of his own life, even to the death. The whole of his trust. To defeat Death not with any weapon but the nature of what love truly is. The light by which life moves, and is moved.



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

    oblivion

    the patron saint of oblivion
    twirled zero cigarettes on each fingertip
    with shadows scampering around the edge of existence
    there is a list of things i have not yet done
    wallowing in the limpid pool of lesser importance
    they sit there and stare at me, and wait
    growing more eyes as they brood
    time is not an illusion, for change is real
    distance i have dreamed makes me small like hope
    and sometimes i am the dream of myself
    like the smoke of prayer ascending to heaven
    i breathe fire in its imaginary state
    awaiting the Judgment in constant apology
    sometimes disgusted by how much i actually believe
    to light a candle and careful of its metaphor
    how could it all make such blinding sense?
    as ancient crimes still cry out from the earth
    what have i trapped behind these eyes?
    here i am, watching the crows make a murder
    here i am, diving into my head armed with sarcasm
    here i am, waking up as the dream slips away
    hell never thought someone could figure it out
    how to punch a hole into eternity
    and i follow, out of all dreaming
    where every action is a beginning
    the engines of heaven where light is forged
    i have given my soul to its proper owner
    and i burned in love till only love remained

    The Empyreal Question

    So it is, that something happens to you you don’t like, at least initially, then with a twist of fate, things go unexpectedly your way. You might say, as an appropriate response, that everything happens for a reason. Even agnostics may use this line. But do you really know what you’re saying? Is the meaning really there—reasons, reasons for the reasons, to search your idea of what seems likely until you are satisfied in its logic? Or indeed, is the reason for it all just a convincing illusion, which have no basis in what is concrete and steel, in whatever maybe called of the real? Perhaps we have sympathy for the Devil, for whom the light of such revelation is itself the enemy…

    One thing I found in researching metaphysics is that there are always patterns to be had—you just need to look for them. Not many of them are fruitful, even if they be non-trivial, another thing I learned. This pattern matching, I believe, is at least part of the explanation of the psychological phenomenon of “everything happens for a reason.” Because things seem to fit together so well, we imagine they were made to be so conformed. Destiny. But this is an astonishing world, even just talking about the noosphere, the mental spaces we explore. Sometimes the words we put together are poetry, sometimes it is just a mess of unimpressive metaphors. And one might say that a person often views one as the other. So it is with reasons why.

    Correctness—can we even talk about that when we talk about the patterns in the air? Is thinking what happened happened for a reason—how can we know that we have found the real reason? And what, exactly, would be meant by that: the real reason why things happen as they do? Here’s where religion seems to take a separate route than the agnostic. For we have it in the Bible where God Himself says He did such-and-such a thing or that such-and-such thing happened for a certain specific purpose. In this vein, there is the possibility that when you think you know why, you may actually be right. The agnostic may never be sure. Or be sure that there never is a “real” reason. In any case, we rarely go beyond if we are satisfied with the reason(s) we have discovered why something happened as it did.

    Now, it is quite the case that what and how we know things is far beneath what and how God knows things; for indeed, we of abstract things can rarely deal with absolutes concerning them—such is the province of the Most High only. Not even angels fly in such stratospherics. But if we could have a God-given rationale, would we then listen to the “real” reason, or shall we stubbornly cleave to our own logics, of which we were satisfied? For then, we come to this empyreal question: what did Lucifer see, when he rebelled? I have been told that angels are not like people, that they have perfect knowledge. Did he see in the darkness of evil a pattern he could not be talked down from, shadow of his pride?

    It was in the committing of his first sin (anyone’s first sin ever), that he broke his perfect knowledge. Lucifer had discovered something truly new… What is evil? Surely there is no mystery to it, now, is there? And in fact, Lucifer’s committing that first sin defines it quite succinctly: evil is the desire to do wrong. And perhaps throw in the desire to have one’s own way, which is the bad kind of pride. Some people say that in evil is the seed of its own destruction. Perhaps, but one acknowledges that Lucifer really had something when he discovered evil. It was indeed the “dark side of the Force”, that comes quickly and is applicable just everywhere. There are patterns in the evil, too, the schemes of every Bond villain just waiting to be conceived and made flesh. It is seductive, it is insidious, like the Watercourse Way—but to slip honorless through darkest deed, no enlightenment of love.

    He must have seen a pattern in the madness, called that mess of unimpressive metaphors poetry. Perhaps because of this misreading, he incorrectly perceived that it would be his victory that was to come, and such is part of the nature of evil. This was his pride, and its blindness. In breaking from the Logos, from holy reason/holy logic, he did not precisely perceive the ultimate conclusions of his actions. His own logic was a poor substitute, formidable as it was. He took his own vision as the world’s, and was doomed. Whatever is in the mind of evil to do, God has always been prepared for it. And one might think with such occurrences as the Holocaust that things are not completely in His control, but that is the test of faith. For the most horrendous things that happen to us—it will be slight in comparison to the glory that will revealed in us, by the king of glory.

    The fact is, great is the pain that some people suffer. Some of which certain persons survive, it seems to mine own self incomprehensible, unimaginable. If you told me that I would be the one to have to tell them, that their pain is nothing compared to how God will recompense them, I would tell you I am a coward and cowards say no such thing as that. But somewhere inside, there would yet in me be an unbreakable kernel that believes it to be true. Why did it have to happen? What possible reason could it have happened for? It would be in the opposite direction; the reason itself would have to be of light incomprehensible, purpose unimaginable. If we can, to make of things better than if the bad had never happened in the first place. (And thus, perhaps, is the kind of rationale we seek when we perceive the pattern of the reason why.)

    Can we hold as hope that we need only believe there is a reason, and the cause seems sufficient? For I imagine that some of the stories we have made of why—from the point of view of eternity, how wrong we will have been in the mundane myths we have made. But for here, and for now: if they help us to hold on, is it not enough? If we have faith in a reason for everything, and if things make sense to us somehow, then we have something the Devil lost when he decided his own logic was better than the ways of Eternity. He gave up all sense, all meaning. His is that there is no reason why, and that in his courses would he make the universal law.

    Even if we are wrong in our particulars, it is granted to us as courage to try and find the why. In seeing the duality of perceptible meaning, the polarity between good and evil is clear. It is why the afterlife is only divided in two, traditionally, for many fail to understand that it is so—one operates by light or darkness, and it is degrees by which we do so, but we truly carry our heart by a single song, that ultimately desires one or the other. In which you decide, at the end, of what you would make out of your life as a whole. All the reasons why: shall we commit light to the whole of it or bury the whole forever? Truth or nothing: that is the question. Truth or nothing: that is the choice.



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

    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.