Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

Subdivisions

Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown

Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone
Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone
Subdivisions
-- Rush, Subdivisions (1982)

I never really understood the trendy American hipster terror of suburbia: you have to live *somewhere*, and anywhere seems as good as anywhere else. Hating on the middle class McMansion seemed like a kind of snobby elitism. I preferred Steven Spielberg's suburban magical-realism, of the suburbs as a place of light, where the weird glow from a window might be just the TV or it might be aliens come to visit; and the two might actually be one and the same, technology as spirituality.

But I wandered today through a subdivision site near what used to be the Sunnyside mental hospital in Addington, and something of that emptiness, the dark side of suburbia, came over me.

Linden Grove, the ornamented gate proclaimed. A park-like setting! And it is. I walked past trees, a river. Birdsong all around and the quiet of grass and small insects. From a distance, I could see the Southern Alps: a rare sight at ground level here in the city. Usually the houses block the mountains.

But as I approached, I could see the fences. The lots, around two hundred of them, have already been assigned, carved up. Access cul-de-sacs and footpaths are laid in asphalt. The tiny patches of dirt are raked and covered with lawnseed. Clusters of utility feeds emerge from the ground like fruiting bodies of a vast fungus: telephone, electricity, presumably water and sewerage there somewhere. Real estate billboards. There are still no houses built to block the view of the majestic mountains, but once they're up it will be just a chunk of expensive residential street like any other.

And the cars will come, and the patio furniture, and the mortgages, and the financial crashes, and the foreclosures, and another layer of toxic human unreality will settle over the sweet green truth of soil and grass and birdsong that really makes the world run.

We read Robert Frost's Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening in high school. Our teacher suggested it was about the temptation to suicide. I disagreed then and still do, because I think I know the emotion that poem relates. I think that poem is not about the wish to end life but the intense desire to join it mixed with the frustration that we can't, yet. It's about the sort of melancholy I felt there in that subdivision today, an ache as deep as life: the sense that as a human, I really don't belong in the world of arbitrary business and schedules that we make for ourselves; but neither do I fit in that world of quiet green things that know how to cope. I am not an animal; I have rules and a mind and heart and obligations and can't just go back to the woods and live there. I have been ejected from Eden but have yet to find a way into Paradise.

I want to go home, is the thought. I don't want to be here. I want to leave a world where the need to survive and make homes for ourselves -- a need that's not wrong in itself -- makes us trample on beauty in order to fit our petty little schemes. One plus one equals two but the answer is wrong. I want to be where everything glows with light that doesn't just attract bugs and zap them.

If we are to take some of the mystics seriously, God is really and literally at the heart of everything: consider the lilies how they grow might be not just a sentimental phrase but a description of how living things somehow are tuned in enough to take their life energy -- their patterning, their fractal organisation, their unfolding -- from an infinite data/energy source which is a Person. If I walk in a grove of trees and can see mountains I can feel something different, a lightness about the air, a sense of space and structure. Invisible frequencies modulating the very nature of shape around me. Reminding me that there is a home that we come from which is not this confusing world we find ourselves in, there is a bright centre to the universe, there is a way of living that makes all of life unify and make sense. Even if I can't presently see it.

When I take a photograph at dusk with my digital camera, and I bring the image into Photoshop and play with the contrast setting, it is amazing how much light I can find. Scenes which are dark to my natural eyes show as bright as day to the camera.

If a mere mechanical device can so amplify ordinary light as to reveal that what we think of as 'night' as just a lack of our own vision -- what might that mean to the other kind of light, the light which comes from God and carries that information, that patterning, that quiet patient joy which the plants and animals seem to be able to tune into and use to structure their DNA? Might we not see it flowing all around us, making our world actually as bright right now as we sometimes dare to dream it might one day become?

How can we learn to see that light, and no longer fear the dark, the casual cruelty of the world, our own casual and blundering trampling of beauty and order? The closer we look, the more it seems like the source of darkness is woven deep inside us; but if like the camera, God can turn the brightness up to infinity and see only his Light -- what might those eyes show to us?

The Semiotics of the Cross, pt3

watch the sun, as it crawls across a final time
and it feels like, like it was a friend
it is watching us, and the world we set on fire
do you wonder if it feels the same?

and the sky is filled with light, can you see it?
all the black is really white, if you believe it
as your time is running out, let me take away your doubt
you can find a better place in this twilight

-- Trent Reznor (In This Twilight, Year Zero, 2007)

He has not left us comfortless. He has come to us, humbling Himself and making known His love to us through the love of man. Therefore the next step of our prayer, the step by which we translate the divine love into human terms, is for those of us who know Him to think of that most loving Son of Man, our Friend. He stands before us when we think of Him, forever receiving the eternal life of God and forever transmitting that life to us through love. He has given us His name to use, as a human friend might give us his name to use when we approach a man more great than he. Let us then comfort our hearts by thinking of His human tenderness and love. Uniting our hearts with His heart (by loving Him), let us ask in His name that the life of God may be increased in us.

-- Agnes Sanford (The Healing Light, 1947)

And lo, the voices of the Earth
Cried out and sounded discord
'Mid the heaven-song of Him.
And He a-walked Him from the sea's calm shore
And through the vale, the bittered cup to sup.

Methinks that there within the garden place
I see me of His holied self a-stripped.
No brother of the flesh might know of Him,
For God be God and man doth fear to know.
And Earth doth stand it, still a-crying out
Against this song of love.
And yet, I do to see Him sit,
Calm eyes unto the sea
And wisdomed past the tell.

-- Patience Worth (quoted by Mrs John H Curran, The Sorry Tale, 1917)

What does the Cross mean?

The Cross is a terrifying thing to me: the symbol of everything that is broken, twisted, and wrong in the human heart, human society, and the universe in which we live. It is a human thing, the product of one specific culture, but the message it sends is universal. It is a made thing, a social construction, but it relies for its power on built-in weaknesses in the human body: our mortality, thrown up in our own face. This is the way the world is. It breaks you.

The Cross is the symbol of violent death. There is no way to make this pretty or attractive or healthy or life-giving. It would be like dressing a swastika up in roses. Crucifixion is a thing people used to do to one another in order to bring the roughest kind of 'justice' to the earth, and we still do much the same thing only with different methods.

Christ's command to 'take up your cross and follow me' also terrifies me. How can I face what I fear most? How can someone who is supposed to be love incarnate ask me to do this? Where is the healing? Where is the grace? Where is my escape? I ask for salvation, and I get... this?

And I face this symbol, this event, this... thing... every week at the Eucharist. And at Easter it comes home to me even more forcefully. I cannot escape the Cross, even in my mind. It is everywhere.

I look at the world and I see a Cross writ large. I see a storm everywhere on the horizon. I see war rising again. I see religion tearing communities apart. I see economic globalisation sweeping like a manic machine out of control, enforcing random discipline on markets long since decoupled from reality. I see a roll call of species brought to extinction by human activity. I see melting icebergs. I see the spectre of new plagues and old plagues returning. I see resource wars over water, oil, food.

What is there left to hope for? I could hope that none of this happens, that climate change, peak oil, water scarcity, financial crash do not touch us. That the Four Horsemen stay safely locked up. And perhaps a great global crash can still be avoided. But for many millions today, either urban poor or in warzones, it seems that the Horsemen are already riding, as they have been for centuries. If the smallest part of the worst has already happened, and we were too late to avert it, can we escape the greater part?

The Cross gives me nothing but fear. The shadow of the future is dark. I do not know how to see beyond disaster, or somehow beside disaster to another brighter option.

Worst of all, I have no assurance that a huge global disaster would not somehow be the best possible outcome at this point. Have we gone so far down a dark path that we need something of that magnitude to wake us up?

I do not want to wake up to a world in mass starvation, constant war, and screaming chaos. Even if half of the world seems already to be there. Is it selfish of me to want the First World not to fall? The Anglo-American Empire not to crumble, as other empires have?

And yet.

Somehow, when I participate in the Eucharist, that fear is gone (and I am not making this up; this happened today). There is a literal presence, somehow real, that gives me at least a temporary solace. How? Where? What is going on?

How can the Cross, a thing of death, bring salvation?

I think the only way I can start to come to understand this is to think this: Christ is not the Cross. In fact He is the Cross's polar opposite. He is the enemy and devourer of all that destroys. He is the life that is untouched by pain and the love that is unbroken by death. He is pictured for us on the Cross only because that is where we need to find Him, because that is where we are.

There is something that looks from the outside like a paradox here, but it is not really a contradiction. When the Apostles looked back (after the Resurrection) at Christ on the Cross, they saw something entirely different from what they saw on that Friday which was not at the time Good.

There is a great truth, I think, in the old saying: 'by His stripes we are healed'. It is even literally true, I suspect. I think what it means is something like this: we can only touch others with the experiences we have. And our spirits seek their own level, like water. Even God, the source of all good, cannot reach us if we choose at some deep inner level not to be reached; though He can send intermediaries, and use all the other channels available to Him. (And if God has infinite resources and infinite patience, then I have no doubt that He will ultimately succeed, even 'has succeeded' from His point of view, even if from ours it is 'not everywhere, not yet').

To be a 'saint', I think, is to somehow be a sort of channel for God; a way for the Light to reach out across universes to connect to others. If some of the strange stories of the psychics and contemplatives is true, then saints continue in this mission even after death, channelling grace to the world. But if we can only reach those with whom we have some resonance, or sympathy (in the physical sense), some set of shared experiences, then in order to channel grace, those chosen (or who choose) to be saints must suffer: they must take on somehow some of the darkness in order to have it transmuted into light.

What Jesus is, I think, is the 'saint of saints' - the 'capstone of the arch' - the one channel who can be always available. And to fill that role, He had to suffer.

I think the point is that Jesus did not necessarily want to suffer (that would make him sado-masochistic), but that accepting that suffering was in the world, He wanted to be present in the world in order to be present in our lives as a counterforce to that suffering. Which is a role He continues in today.

And somehow thinking of this - which is to say, thinking of us - was an antidote to the fear.

It is not the Cross that I want to embrace. It is the opposite of the Cross.

I am afraid to say yes, and I am afraid to say no (to what? I am glad I do not even know what the question is), but somehow in the middle of it all I have to do is breathe.

I was crying over you
I am smiling I think of you
Where your garden have no walls
Breathe in the air if you care, you compare, don't say farewell
Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear your love's for me
Nothing can compare
To when you roll the dice and swear your love's for me

-- Finlay Quaye (Dice, Much More Than Much Love, 2004)

Fiction: An Imaginary Conversation

1. 'That was how they could control us, you see. Because we wanted things. Anything you let yourself really care about, they could find that out and take it away. And that was how they got in. Once they knew you wanted something, even the smallest tiny thing, it was over. They bent your mind until it cracked and you were gone. Hope - that was the weakness.'

'So you decided - '

'So I decided I had to be stronger than that, so they couldn't break me. I had to stop wanting anything. Not even to live, or to die.'

'And did you?'

'I couldn't completely, no. But I tried hard. Harder than most, I think. I tried to make myself invisible. An empty box. I'd see them coming, and I'd just blank my mind. Not look away - they'd notice that - but look right back at them, through them, knowing they couldn't see inside my mind and making myself forget that there was anything inside there to see. There but not there at the same time. And - they'd move on. Looking for the next one.'

'It must have been hard.'

'It was, but that was the easy part. After - that was when it got hard.'

'How was that?'

'Because I'd built myself this invisible box, you see. I had to learn to hope again.'

'And to fear?'

'And to let myself fear, yes.'

2. 'Where was God for you in all this?'

'God was something very small, fragile, very precious. Like a glow-star in the darkness. I had to hide it, couldn't let it break. I felt like I was much bigger than God. Carrying Him.'

'And now?'

'I'm... not sure. Part of me is still there. Part of me never quite escaped.'

'Are you angry at God?'

'I don't think I dare be angry, yet.'

'Because He might strike you down?'

'Because He might break.'

3. 'If you could change one thing about the world - anything - what would it be?'

'I don't think I can answer that question.'

'Do you need time?'

'No, that won't help... see, if I change anything, everything breaks. Is gone. Is no more. Like it never existed.'

'You'd not change anything about your time inside?'

'How can I? It happened. I happened. It's me. Can you unhappen?'

'Hmm.'

'I'd change it, of course, yes. If that were an option. But it's not, is it? Unless you have a time machine.'

'We're not necessarily talking about what is possible.'

'No, but we're talking about what's thinkable. Some things just aren't.'

'A world without - what you experienced is unthinkable? Some would say the opposite.'

'And yet they can say that, which means they're at least able to think about it. Me - take away my past, what's left?'

'Something you're running away from.'

4. 'And now?'

'And now I have to create my life, I guess. Whatever that is.'

'Why would you not know what your life is?'

'Because it's something that can destroy me.'

'I don't follow.'

'To be alive - to really be aware of who you are and what your purpose and mission is in this world - is to have a dream. To have something you really, really want more than anything else.'

'Ah. And that can be taken from you.'

'Not can. Will.'

The Semiotics of the Cross pt 2

1. Of course the Cross as a symbol was itself a deliberate repurposing by the Early Church, an ironic giving of a completely opposite meaning to a symbol of ruthless Imperial Roman torture and death.

Or ruthless Imperial Roman lawgiving, sacrificing the well-being of a few rebels for the creation of a safer world.

Do you think Jesus believes that his death was worthwhile because the execution and torture of violent rebels helped create a safer Roman world - a high-technology, slave-owning Pax Romana?

Or was he looking forward to a Pax Judaica, when the Jewish Sanhedrins would take their rightful place as lawgivers, handing down Sharia-type judgements against adulterers and blasphemers?

Or a Pax Christiana, millennia in waiting, when finally he'd be the one to violently execute rebels who refused to take His name?

Or was he thinking of a different kind of Pax entirely?

2. Would you attend religious services in a cult centre that had as its symbol a noose and gallows?

Or an electric chair?
Or a guillotine?
Or a Taser?
Or an image of a dismembered human body, dying in pain, from the Vietnam war, or Iraq today?
Or a boot standing on a human face?
Or the 'Death' card from Tarot?

3. But that is what the Cross is.

Why do you use that symbol?
What do you *think* it means?

Do you think everyone who sees it will react the same way?

What do you think they will think you are saying, when you thrust a symbol of slow, gruesome, death before their faces and say 'believe in this and be saved'?

4. Saved from what?
What could possibly be worse than slow gruesome death?

5. Saved by what?
By slow gruesome death?
Or something else?
But the process as a whole involves slow gruesome death, yes?

6. Saved for what?
For making other people die slowly and gruesomely?
Why not, if it is how they are saved?

7. Do not think that you already know those three answers, for evidently the world is not already saved.
a. If you had really known, you would have conveyed the message clearly to everyone.
b. If you had conveyed the message clearly to everyone, everyone would have heard and understood the message clearly.
c. If everyone had heard and understood clearly a message that is the most wonderfully good news ever since the founding of the Earth, they would have had no choice but to answer 'yes'.
d. If everyone on Earth had answered 'yes' to the most wonderfully good news ever since the founding of the Earth, the Earth would by now be transformed, and there would be no war, crime, sickness, or death.
e. But perhaps all those people, and there are billions of them, who have heard the message of the Christian Gospel and not responded 'yes' are so absolutely evil and depraved that they would answer 'no' to the most wonderfully good news on the planet anyway, just out of spite, on principle, knowing full well that it would damn them to Hell eternally, forever. Because they're just that nasty. Bad, rotten, no-good folks who'd eat kittens for breakfast and spit out the bones.
f. Look me in the eyes and say that you really think your neighbours are that nasty, and that you think Jesus is okay with you thinking that.

Is there something wrong with my logic?

Or is the Earth already saved and transformed and healed?

How would you know?

Would anything be different?
What would be different?
Is it different?

8. Did God the Father create us?
Does he love us absolutely?
Does he love everyone the same?
Does he already love us entirely, more than we can imagine, as much as we can possibly ever be loved in the entire universe?

Does he love us absolutely and entirely and forever, BUT, only so long as we perform a certain ritual in space and time expressing belief in a certain person born some 2,008 years ago (modulo calendar conversions) called Jesus?

Does he love only those who believe in Jesus?
Does he hate the rest?

Does the infinite God get *better* if he decides to love us, after all, rather than hate us and abandon us to hell forever?

Does he love everyone and desire their company intensely and wish absolutely no harm to come to them, yet consign the unbelievers to eternal torment without end, forever - thus causing Himself eternal, unending grief and incompleteness?

What manner of expression must we use to dedicate our lives to Jesus, and what power must it have such that it changes the very eternal nature of the Father God Himself - He who cannot be changed and from whom we receive our being?

If this ritual of salvation is so very, very powerful that it changes the nature of God Himself, must we also be very, very careful about how we perform it, lest it go horribly wrong - and the Father God (who knows the track of every atom and the whisper of our every thought) misunderstand us entirely?

9. Does God perhaps love *everybody*, even those who have not performed whichever mysterious and awesome ritual it is that expresses saving faith in Jesus and puts sinners on the path to salvation?

Did perhaps God love everybody equally and infinitely *before* Jesus was born?
Does the notion of 'before' and 'after' have any meaning to a God Who lives outside time and creates it?

Did sinners pray 'the prayer of salvation' before Jesus was born?
What words or symbols did they use to do this?
Did they use words or symbols at all?

Do sinners pray 'the prayer of salvation' in words and symbols that do not directly reference Jesus - or something entirely other than words or symbols - after Jesus was born?

10. If God the Father already loves everybody more than they can possibly be loved, and His love cannot be diverted away from its course by anything we could ever say, think or do, and His love creates and populates the infinite heavens and the most intimate secrets of our as yet unspoken hearts:

Why did Jesus die?

The Semiotics of the Cross, pt 1

1. In the newly redeveloped Sol Square / Lichfield Lanes entertainment complex in inner Christchurch City stands a puzzling sight. A new bar has been built named only The Yellow Cross. Its signpost, the huge illuminated yellow cross itself, was taken from the decommissioned Assemblies of God church hall in Lichfield Street, now a derelict shell, which itself was formerly a cinema.

The Yellow Cross Bar is homely inside, branded and with Macs Beer (or Monteiths? one of the new trendy niche brands) and decorated in faux farming chic: old peeling wallpaper, bare brick walls, rough and ready sawhorse tables. The urinals in the men's room are fashioned from old washtubs and there is a pull-cord to flush. It exudes a welcoming, good-on-ya-mate, down-home Kiwi aesthetic - a thin skin of branding over a state-of-the-art, purpose-built, hospitality and merchandising operation. It is a machine designed to sell yuppie drinks and fake ideals of camaraderie, but it does so superbly, and provides a warm, safe and functional shelter out of the rain to listen to live music and meet strangers. There are worse things to sell, after all.

But. The question nags at my mind: what does the Cross mean in this context?

What were they thinking, when they built this bar? What was the intention behind salvaging the AoG's old fluorescent cross and hanging it up there - making it the centre and feature of a bar? What is the message that this Cross sends? What is the gospel it preaches?

a: "New Zealand is a Christian nation, we are all Christians here, and we wish to remind everyone in this shopping precinct forcibly of this. Jesus is your Lord, you will bow. Now. Buy our beer as a symbol of your belief."

b: "This is an outspokenly Christian bar in a nation where Christianity was once the dominant faith but has come under increasing criticism recently; come here to hear about Jesus while you drink, you might be surprised. The beer's not really important, but buy it if you want."

c: "Heck no, we're not Christians, in fact we're being deliberately in your face against you, repurposing the symbol of your failed faith in an ironic manner verging on blasphemy. We mount this cross here as a trophy: you lost, and religion-free capitalism won. Buy our beer, sucker."

d: "We're not Christians, this is just a bar, we don't do religion here, but we are aware that Christianity has been a big part of the cultural landscape in New Zealand and many people still have warm associations with it, as they do with farming. Neither are really important to us, it's just a kind of kitschy symbol, representing everything good in life, you know? It's all fake anyway, and you know that and we know that. But the beer's real. Buy our beer."

e: "It's obvious that Christianity (like all religion) is waning in an increasingly secular society, and frankly the sooner the better (those suicide bombers, honestly! and George Bush! Bombs and Texas and God are so bad for the planet!) and we want to make an ironic statement about bars being the new churches: hanging out and being buddies is the new religion, you come here for salvation. It's kind of edgy, but cute. Like Hell Pizza. Maybe some oldies will hate us, but the hip young folks will get it. Buy our beer."

f: "Religion is kinda in the news at the moment, mostly in a bad way, but there's no such thing as bad press, and now that New Zealand is a comfortably secular country where religion doesn't really mean much, it's safe to put up this symbol in a non-religious context. Also, it's kind of cool when you think about it. Christianity was one of those strange ideas from the past that sort of failed, like zeppelins and Communism, but is still fun to look at (from a safe distance) because it's so weird. Buy our beer."

g: "We're not really Christians, but actually when you think about it, New Zealand is or was a Christian nation, and at this point in history, it's sort of interesting to think about how nations have identities, and maybe it's not a bad thing to be associated with a religion after all, it certainly holds people together, so perhaps it's worth reinvestigating this whole religion thing. Shared values, cultural anchor, etc. Not that we're really serious about it, just want to sort of salvage something interesting and unique from our history that might be worth preserving. Oh, and buy our beer."

h: "Dude, it's just a symbol. The Yellow Cross. Absolutely meaningless. No semiotic content whatever. It's just a bunch of atoms aligned in a formation. We saw this thing, it looked pretty, we stuck it up there. Buy our beer and chill out and stop thinking so hard."

Is it some of these, any of these, none of these?

2. What does preaching the Gospel actually mean? Is the Gospel we preach in our churches any more clear than the Yellow Cross?

3. What did the Yellow Cross mean for the people who converted a movie theatre into the Assemblies of God church?

What did they mean by turning a theatre into a church? Did they see it as the power of God saving the lost? Was it just a convenient building? Did they bless the building when they commissioned it as a church? Did they picture demons of unrighteousness fleeing and angels standing guard? Did they picture smiling spirits from the glory of cinema filling their church with warm feelings, and welcome them in the name of Jesus?

What did other churches think of them for making a fluorescent cross? Did they see it as bringing the light of God to the inner city? Did they see it as cheapening a sacred historic symbol by making it a lurid illuminated sign?

What did the Assemblies of God people feel when the church had to close?
What did they feel when their cross was taken away and mounted on a bar? Was it a defeat and a blasphemy? Or was it a quiet victory, their symbol surviving after their building was condemned?

4. If you are a Christian reading this, and you have a dream of a glorious Christian urban revival of the future, do you wish for more movie theatres converted into churches, or more Yellow Cross Bars?

If you are a non-Christian reading this, do you have a nightmare of a glorious Christian urban revival crushing your soul under its God-blessed self-righteous jackbooted feet?

5. Can we summon spiritual forces by making signs, positioning symbols, or speaking words?

When the Gospel is preached or the Bible is read, is God present in the preaching or the reading?
When the Cross is displayed on a church, is God present in the Cross?
When the Yellow Cross is displayed on a bar, is God present in the Cross?

If you have an Ouija board or Tarot cards in your home, are you attracting dark spiritual forces?
If you have a Cross or Bible in your home, are you attracting light spiritual forces?

If I say the word 'Jesus', is Jesus present in this word, or in the speaking or the hearing of it?
If I say your name, are you present in any way in the speaking or the hearing of it?

Is a religious symbol at all different from a non-religious symbol?
Is there a spirit or absolute meaning of any kind present in or attached to the dollar sign? The Golden Arches? The flag of a country?

Is the meaning of any symbol absolutely determined only by the person who writes, performs, or displays it?
Is the meaning of any symbol absolutely determined only by the person who reads, views, or observes it?
Is the meaning of any symbol determined at all by a third party (such as our ancestors, or our children, or Jesus, or angels, or God) not involved directly in this act of communication, but who might somehow have an emotional investment?
If all these different people attach different meanings to the same symbol, can those meanings ever touch?

6. Can any symbol, or any act, actually touch my true being, unless I give it permission to?
Does wearing a symbol on a T-shirt in an ironic manner make that symbol actually mean something different to what everyone else assumes it means?
If I say to a stranger, "you are an idiot", and then I punch him, and then I laugh and say "by 'idiot' of course I mean 'wonderful person', and that was an ironic punch", will he accept my unique meaning?
If I do the same thing to my brother, and he does it back to me, does it mean something different?

7. What is the Gospel that we are to preach? Has it in fact been preached everywhere the symbols of the Cross and the Bible have been prominently displayed and ordinances of public religion have been enacted? Or has something else been preached which is not quite the actual Gospel in the same way that the surface of the Earth is not quite the sky? Or have both been preached together, intertwined?

8. What does the death and resurrection of Jesus mean to you?
Does it mean the same thing to Jesus?

Darkness, pt 2: Above the Starry Canopy

Yes! Questions... Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates?
-- Batty, Blade Runner (1982)

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!
Brueder - ueber'm Sternenzelt
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.

Be embraced, millions!
This kiss to the entire world!
Brothers - above the starry canopy
A loving father must dwell.
-- An de Freude / Ode to Joy (Schiller, 1785)

1. I am angry almost all the time now.

Angry at the brokenness of the world.
Angry at the darkness, at the petty lies, the deliberate deceptions, the subtle Escher-like distortions that lead the wide and obvious path smoothly into its opposite without seeming to shift at all.
Angry at the necessary deaths, the unnecessary deaths, the futility of it all, how good and bad alike fall apart into nothingness.
Angry at the emptiness and shadow.
Angry at the Standard Model and its hammer-blow shout of THERE IS NOTHING BEYOND.

It is not good to be angry. It is neither right nor healthy.

Nevertheless, the anger remains. It has been building for a long time.

2. The Standard Model is a poor dumb thing to be angry at.

It is like being angry at television, at the stupidity of synchronous broadcast media, for missing a show you waited a month to watch, when it is neither the show nor the media that really annoys you but the temporality and finitude of life. It is like not crying at your mother's funeral and then bursting into tears a month later when you realise you missed Babylon 5 and, DVD or no DVD, the clock has ticked past a moment that may never come again.

But television *is* like a little death each time you miss a show. A permanent memento mori beamed direct from satellite into your living room.

Or perhaps it's the other way around, and life is like a little television?
Is a signal still out there, making its way to Vega?

Well of course there is.

3. What is my soul?

What is there about me that will survive the final meltdown?

It is easy to reject the idea of the crudely physical being all there is (even the Standard Model with its permanent lightspeed barrier claims that what we call 'physical' is a whole lattice of virtual waveforms and interactions that do not, at least in quite the ordinary way we think of the idea, exist) - but that's the easy part.

What about my thoughts? My skills? My memories? Are they the essential me, or are they merely distractions, shadow-plays thrown by an unseen core within?

Are my friendships me?

Is the 'soul' that I should guard and protect and dedicate my life to, the sum total of my interactions with all the people I have known? Is that who I am? Or is there something more beyond even that?

What is left of me when all that I know, all that I do, all that I touch, all that I look on, all that I feel, are taken away?

Are there any things - small things, ordinary things, perhaps - which will not fade into that dark at the end of life's highway?

Or must I let it take everything I know and leave my soul - whatever it might be - naked with the Unknown?

4. When I look at the world I see darkness and shadow, insubstantial mist peopled with grey ghosts, dashed with tiny specks of reality, joy, and truth. I live for the rare moments when things click and I recognise a face, or I achieve some worthwhile task. In between is a dull blur of futility, pointlessness, contradiction. Petty crimes and tiny shrugs of defeat. The darkness.

But when God looks at the world, He sees only light.

How do I grow eyes like those?

How do I see the truth in everything?
How do I see Christ's face in everyone?

How do I stop being angry?
How do I stop being afraid?

5. To fear is first to believe that there can be a place or a thought or an action which can exist outside of an infinite and loving God's mind.

This is common sense which we learn as children. Touch this, do not touch that. Go here, do not go there. If you touch that or go there you will be shocked by electricity or burned by fire or run over by a car or eaten by a dog. There are choices to be made and many of those choices are irreversible, or appear so. The best will in the world cannot heal the scars of bad choices made accidentally, or accidents endured without any choice at all.

This is the first and hardest lesson of childhood: that there is no way back from some mistakes. No savegame, no DVD, no rewind.

That sometimes, when the show's over and the lights go out and you stumble back from the supermarket an hour too late with an eco-friendly bag full of Foolish Virgin Olive Oil and no TV dinner, that's it, you missed the big reveal, it's gone and now you'll never find out.

To live as an ordinary sane human is to be almost constantly afraid. It's what keeps us alive. It's also what kills us.

Can one learn not to be afraid - can one remember a child's lost belief in that infinite and loving God outside whose mind we can never for a moment step - without becoming completely and utterly mad?

6. What about Hitler, anyway? Surely even God hates *someone*? He'd be evil not to!

It is hard to imagine a Father of infinite forgiveness. That is, it is easy to imagine, because every child dreams that, but hard to picture. As we grow (in religion as in anything else) we learn to put away childish things, among them being kindness and mercy and love.

What's love got to do with faith, after all? You have faith in something solid you can kick, that doesn't give under you. Love... is something brittle, easily damaged, self-destructive even. It bleeds. It dies. Its rotting corpse stinks up the closet under the sink and eventually you have to hold your nose and throw it out.

It is easy to picture a God of infinite and efficient mechanical purity, who quietly and without remorse strips all trace of taint from His heaven. A kind of cosmic Terminator, taking out the garbage. Holy above all. Unvisited by sorrow.

It's easy because we already have a picture of that Father. The grave.

7. The Nazis sang Schiller's Ode to Joy on Hitler's birthday.

Sometimes you cannot judge a person, or a poem, by the company they keep.

Sometimes you cannot judge the company one keeps by the company that company keeps.

If you go on like that, soon you will judge nothing at all.

And then where would we be?

8. I have a choice.

I can believe that all hope of an acceptable world is forever lost, that all things are dust and quarks, a short journey from darkness to darkness through pain.

I can believe that all hope is forever present, here and now, that all things are forgiven and reconciled on this very earth, and that life and mind have never been and cannot ever be lost.

I can try to believe that hope is conditional: that eternal life is achievable by some adept juggling of perishable, self-contradictory short-term meanings.

That last is the only ordinary, sane option.

I do not think I can bring myself to believe it.