embers of a dream, and firelight
the years slouch on, the world becomes shorter as we age
from the ground lifted, forgetting our yesterday’s weight
(did we even exist in that ambiguous time?)
faith in my inmost inmost fires
home to a thousand unnamed words, a vocabulary of silence
compelled by the illusion of time to accelerate my wondering
(imagine time, wrapped around itself: a rose)
we live our lives shrouded in sound
darkness slips from our grasping; we hold nothing at all
the transience of the dream, glances off our perceptions
(on the shores of nowhere, the moment blooms)

> From this.

Be of simple substance. It is said that God is the simplest of all substance, and truly, this is the nature of love. Do not within yourself think things other than what you show to the world, for such duplicity will not stand in the world to come. It is a hard teaching, but worth it. Be of thought, honor and honesty, and let your words and actions reflect what is inside you, that you may be a child of light. For this is how we are meant to be, of one substance, and not a fractured mess of questionable motives. Be not but love. Do not but love. This is the lesson of the saints, and we follow the example of our Lord.

Be he or she that counts not on any darkness to be the true version of themselves. Try not to gossip. Try not to lie. And the point, here, should be emphasized: it is not just that we should not and do not speak ill of others, let us not even think such things, not of anyone. You do not know what is going on inside them, so until you absolutely cannot grant them any more slack, give them the benefit of the doubt. God does similarly for you — remember this. He comprehends your motives, right and wrong, and lets the sun shine upon you in any wise, whether you be of light or dark. See then if you can pass the true test: when you discover that their bent is wrong, can you love them still?

> From this.

This is not the end. The world is not dying. We are not at the waning of civilization. Things are not worse than they’ve always been. What have you been smoking? The Antichrist is not alive on earth, Satan is not close to creating a dystopia of the ruins we are making of things. Nuclear confrontation is not imminent. It’s only been two thousand years, as of this writing, since Christ graced the earth. I have it on good authority that the death and resurrection of the Lord was to usher in an Age of Gold, from an Age of Iron: the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. This age should last from 30-50 thousand years. Why is the Age not obviously here? Don’t look for a conspiracy, for as the Lord was in the earth 2 days, it is 2,000 years in the coming. A thousand years like a day to God. Which means it’s on the brink of beginning, right now.

I know, I know, the New Testament makes it seem like His returning is right around the corner, and every generation since then has believed that they are the last generation. I know, I know, He said He would come like a thief in the night, at any time, and to be expectant. That was part of the plan. You don’t know how well the higher ups handle misinterpretation of the data. God knows what you’ll be thinking when you read the scripture. It was intended to be as it is, warts and all. (For instance, there was a study that showed crime was not as rampant where the country believed in an eternal Hell.) But the time for such fake-outs is over. Time to grow up, face the truth, and take responsibility for the freedom given us. I have high hopes. This is going to be awesome.

> From this.

Miracles are a clue. You don’t even have to invest yourself in supernatural ones: as David Ben-Gurion put it, “In order to be a realist, one must believe in miracles.” Now that we agree that miracles happen, we can argue one of two things, as a source of them: luck or providence. My argument, however, is clearly one-sided at that point. When you call something luck, if you don’t realize, it is just a clever way of giving up trying to find the real answer. Why did something extraordinary happen? This and that just happened to coincide in a most favorable conjunction. You know, a confluence of forces joined in an uncanny orchestration, just because. There is no reason, for any of it. It just happened to happen. That’s luck.

OK, maybe there’s something more, right? You have enough cases, enough situations where miracles are possible, then you’re liable to have a miracle happen. Like if enough people play the lottery, you’re bound to have a winner. That’s luck then, not really a miracle there. So someone’s going to generalize it to maybe there’s umpteen bazillion universes out there, and we just happened to be in the universe that can support life. We won the lottery, nothing to see here. We’re just lucky, and it didn’t need God to make it happen. This would be an atheist argument for the existence of the whole shmegegge.

But who or what made the condition for winning? Why is it possible to win? Why is it possible at all that things can work, at all? What makes the possibility of not just a miracle, but just anything, conceivable? In other words, even if we posit an infinite number of universes, there does not necessarily need to exist one that supports life like us.

Now, what is a miracle? When something meaningfully spectacular happens, correct? Not just winning a lottery? Then how can you believe in the miraculous and leave out God? Not that you’ll get right what the reason for any miracle might be, but to believe in meaning without the meaning would seem to me the flipside of the mental gymnastics that fundamentalists perform when they deny science, that the world is billions of years old, and we are not the center of the universe. True, along with the rare beauty, there is ugliness in the world, but as U2 put it, “Don’t believe the Devil / Don’t believe his book / But the truth is not the same / Without the lies he made up.” One can say that at least, in the contrast, we see beauty the clearer.

And when you see that miracles are a clue that hints at the presence of God, try and see that absolutely everything is a miracle. Or say it’s all just luck. Given enough time, it was bound to happen. And when you do that, you say nothing at all. It is true that science can go theorizing forever and not admit that God is behind it. That doesn’t stop you from seeing that God is, indeed, behind all the things there are.

> From this.

Why would a perfect God make an imperfect creation? For one, you can argue, so that those He makes may discover what perfection truly is. Remember about the fish who doesn’t know what water is? We who toil on earth, God’s footstool — if Heaven is a “perfect” version of earth, Heaven being God’s throne, how incredible it must be to do something like toast a piece of bread. If all had been made perfect on the earth, we most probably would never understand its value. It is just like how I learned to appreciate the everyday functioning of things when I was drowning in failure. Before He came and saved me. I never looked at anything the same ever again, after that. Work is magic.

In my theology, if we are found worthy enough, we will be granted perfection — for it will not be that we truly earn that gift, but one does understands that a certain standard is there to cross. Having only experienced the imperfect, we will understand perfection as it was meant: an infinite gift. Satan is the opposite of this course, for he and his angels were born into the privilege of Heaven and its perfection. And instead of appreciating that which was all around him, decided that even the best was not good enough, and wanted not just what God gave him, but everything, and power, too. Apparently he ruined a part of Heaven, which became what I call the “unfair Hell”. (There being a “fair Hell”, too. Not that there is any actual Hell, just convenient in naming are they.)

So the infinite gift of perfection: break it and it becomes finite, it would appear. And then, being finite, anything imperfect cannot by itself become infinite and perfect again; no such thing as perfect have we mortals ever experienced. Such would be why Jesus Christ had to stay perfect: else the infinite would have been permanently lost to the earth. So much was riding on that one life. And so is it even given to us: the promise never broken, throughout an entire lifetime: such is the approximation of the infinite, available even to we, the imperfects of mortals.

> From this.

It seems that the grand vision I had of SATAN being cast from HEAVEN was designed with a safeguard to make of it be real. Specifically, it was that I, being a living human being on earth, had a key role in that great event. They even gave me something of a medal for it, right now just an abstract concept: Chief Gunner in the War in Heaven. The point of it, though in my opinion I did little in the whole scheme of things, I did shoot out the last cord tying SATAN to HEAVEN.

So, it comes down to these brass tacks: if it was just a vision, what exactly was my place in it? What would it be representative of, if it were not really the thing itself? About things that were “just” visions; prophets who foresaw things in the future; or of things that were not, in fact, happening right in front of them — they did not participate in those visions. The may have reacted to what they saw, but they did not act in them. They were happening or to happen elsewhere and they caught only sight of it. I was there. I was the nexus that precipitated the FALL. I know it in my bones: what I saw must have been real. Things like that which I beheld one does not simply discount. Things like that… are more than augury.

> From this.

So, why does God need to test us, if He knows if we will succeed or fail? This is one of the main complaints of anyone under whatever duress. God does know, mind you, whether or not you will succeed in any trial, it is true. So why is it, then, necessary? Well, He knows what every building looks like before its foundations are even laid, so why do we bother in their construction? There is something after it’s been done, right? And so our character is built by trial. You can ask, why does God have us do anything, when He could do it all Himself? It’s the same question. And why do we bother to have a world at all, if we are not to do anything in its rise or fall? And remember that even if God knows what we will, we do not, until the action’s done.

You can go further in this line of questioning, and ask, why does God create those whom He knows will ultimately be thrown into the Lake of Fire? Why not create all those whom He knows are Heaven bound? Well, I would ask in return to that question, what kind of a cop out is that? And will you deny these the precious gift of life, even if it is brief? To fix things in this way would practically define the term “playing God”, with all the negative implications. We must find a way to understand why it is as it is. All of them have the chance. This is the price of freedom, we can gather, that some of those given life would rather choose death, and so become loss. If they never were, they would never have had that chance, and God telling you that that is how they would end up would never have given them that actual chance. We are given true freedom, all of us. And the consequences are real.