The question comes to Job (from the Book of Job, natch), “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? … when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?” (NRSV) So going back to the point where I overheard that Lucifer was the creator of pain: that would make none of our woe from God, at all, wouldn’t it? One has to think that though God is omnipotent, that His brightest angel would still have been a handful if he were to rebel and turn a third of the angels to his side. Angels have perfect knowledge, and so, in seeing where his actions led, Lucifer must have concluded that he was going to win when he undertook to become Evil. Else he would not have done so.
Suddenly you would have had heavenly (read: very powerful) beings without any rules, grabbing for whatever power they can get their hands on, wreaking as much havoc as havoc as they could along the way. It would be a BIG DEAL. Victory would lie on a razor’s edge, so faint it would have escaped Lucifer’s notice. And because God is not the type to wave His hand and magically make things right again, this was real and true danger to all that was, all that is, all that is to be. Remember, the Lord watched all 13.8 billion years pass before He came down to our sphere: this is not a hand waver. There is a certain magic to how He does everything (also we who serve Him), but it is the magic of work. God is love, not magic, and not luck. But know, as He knew, that we would win.
As I related before when talking about the concept of thinking in scale, the Kingdom of Heaven could be represented as a single yellow dot. And apparently, it was: what the secret society of Christians told me was that there was a yellow dot floating in the aethers that would be the live, active representation of the Kingdom, for real. And if spotted by the wrong entity, that would mean doom for us all. If Adolf Hitler were the one to have seen it first, all humanity would then have been the subject of darkness and horror for all eternity.
Fortunately, it was carried only in two physical places ever discovered, the first being from an English archeological expedition which uncovered only fragments, and apparently never translated into German, of the Gospel of Thomas. A much better manuscript was discovered again in 1945, and in the 77th saying, there it was. The yellow dot was chanced upon by one Philip K. Dick, of course, one of the good guys. There were three other dots, other than the yellow one (the Knowledge): the white dot, seen by John the Baptist in the Dove upon the baptism of the Lord, the Power; the black dot, seen by me in a dialogue with Albert Einstein, the Mystery; and the purple dot, seen by Joan of Arc in the cross when she was burned, the Certainty. Together we hold the contents of the new Heaven and the new Earth. The discovery of the yellow dot was arguably the most significant, being the fruition of the Age of Gold that Christ brought about with the Resurrection, ushering in the New Age — where all was light, from where comes the coded decree, “Walt Disney is God.” (Get it?) This was whispered to me when I myself was forever freed from the Black Iron Prison, Mother’s Day of 1991. Selah.
I’m not actually sure of how this all works, but I present to you the information that I have, some which I was told, some which I figured out. The Black Iron Prison (BIP), or Hell, was the abode of those who were damned, which would be everyone. It was more of a psychic prison than physical. (Philip K. was released upon the resignation of Nixon.) There, all knowledge was forbidden, lest someone come upon the Knowledge. Therefore, its inhabitants were kept in the Stone Age, technologically, where there was no written word, and nothing could free them (iron being proof against stone).
Jesus Christ was the one who set us free from the Law, which the BIP represented in its perverse and ultimate consequence of said Law. The apostle Paul talks to something about this, how by the Law we are damned, and only by the grace and truth of the Lord are we saved. We were all trapped, damned, before the Son of God broke through that iron, when He defeated death. The only one who could. And He left behind, therefore, the yellow dot in his wake. To those who know, the narrow way to salvation. And once this information is shared by more than one mind, especially through writing, the dots become a part of common reality. And so we are saved.
It was left until the advent of “Walt Disney is God” that a certain secret was to be revealed, what we started with in this document: Judas volunteered. This was of the Mystery, the black dot that I was privy to, and that there was a certain danger to the Mystery being seen before the Knowledge. (The black dot, I am told, was just a legend in the secret society of Christians, actually a terrifying concept in what it was thought to hold, and discounted by some as being just a myth.) Now, since Judas is innocent, we have a serious break from the main doctrine of the Church. But these are what is unlike anything former upon the world, something to which you can say, “Look, there is something new under the sun!”
If the secret were to have been seen before the Knowledge, it might in fact have been misinterpreted as the Knowledge. But understand that it is not the Gnosis. It speaks of the Mystery of that which is, that which was, and that which will surely come to pass. Glory to the Living God in Heaven and His Son, Jesus Christ, who is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. Blessed be the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life. Amen.
Once you trust the right things, you have got the key to what is true, and what is real. You trust that you exist, and it is right to do so, for reality works in no other way, as far as you can possibly tell. Yes, it is possible and conceivable to doubt your own existence, but it is generally of limited use. And this is what Descartes missed: if you can trust that you exist, when you can doubt that you exist, much follows from this leap of faith. For from there, you can tell that you exist in the body you must inhabit, for the sense that is your “I am” is very like of the same caliber as trusting your other senses. All your senses are the way you have learned that you yourself exist, in fact, as far back as your memory goes. (Even further, probably.) Then you may believe in the physical world, for such perception works in a way consistent with how you have observed yourself, and there have been things you learned about the world that is consistent with your sensations. So far so good.
Now we get to the hard part. You learn to trust in logic, you may even tie them to what your senses trust. Logic you know from your observations to be trustworthy, pretty much as much as you can trust your senses, perhaps even as far as trusting your own existence. Then you have come to reason. You can trust certain things, now, that you have only been told about, but because they are consistent with how you have observed things work, you can use information as an extension of your own senses. How about that? Now, we can jump tangentially: how about miracles? Because people say that they have seen the miraculous, so can you believe just one account of them: if so, do you then believe in miracles? Because then, we come back full circle: for I tell you that everything is a miracle, down to your own very existence. Trust that, and you’re ready for honest to goodness faith. Because now, you can believe in love.
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)
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?
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.
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.
