Clearly, something that had to do with eternity took place here where the plane fell. Something ripped time for a brief moment, a split second. To "fall from the dark" is, I suppose, to wake up. Our narrator fell from the obscurant light of the stars--visible light, which by itself is darkness--and she found the truer light of knowledge. But knowledge of what? Of good and evil? Knowledge of pain? Does pain split illusion like the plane split the sky? The millstones of time and space are illusory, yet the pain of their churning is "undeniably real." But if it's true that "only the good is real," what then does that say of pain?
But there's more here. She writes, "The pain [...] is real, for our love [...] is real," and in so doing almost equates pain with love. Yet we detect the even greater depth of this equation's significance in the subsequent revelation that those seraphs who are "aflame with love for God" are higher than those who have "perfect knowledge of him." The love they possess consumes them again and again. And here we have a culmination of the paradox we felt coming.
The flames that issue from the throne of God are themselves the conduit through which the seraphs are transported to their world. Presumably, the flames are also the material from which these angels are made, as well as the substance that destroys and returns them again to their source. All is one is God. For you, O Lord, are a sun and shield--the sun that scorches; the shield that guards. From him we have both everything and nothing to fear. Love and hate commingle. You know, we could contract ourselves to a point running to and from him at the same time.
It would take immeasurable faith to believe in a favourable view of things, because God seems so absent from this illusory present. His love is manifest in his abandonment of humans to the shackling laws of time and space. And the pain of it seems so much more real than the love--which we're told are one and we are confused. He treats us with pain as with love, and we seek to love him back in kind. So our love is a forgetting and, of necessity, a misinterpretation of everything in the universe. For now that creation, as predicate, has been slashed "loose at base from any roots in the real," it is effectively divided from its subject, and all is gibberish. We shuffle objects to make sense of it all.
Faith would be, in short, that God has any willful connection with time whatsover, and with us. For I know it as given that God is all good. And I take it also as given that whatever he touches has meaning, if only in his mysterious terms, the which I readily grant. The question is, then, whether God touches anything.
In creating the laws of the universe and in requiring that they be kept, does God also restrict his own power? Well... without messing with his omnipotence, she describes this restriction as "a contraction of the scope of his will." If that's the case, then the separation is complete, for wouldn't his of all wills be the most unbending? Even Christ's advent might be seen as succumbing to the laws of gravity, as he descends to his suffering, to his death. And he might have conquered the material experience on earth, but he can't have liked it any better than we, for he left again--abandoning us twice. Yet she (as I) searches for a trail he must have left, some significance in the ceremony of his returning at all.
Is there no link at the base of things, some kernel or air deep in the matrix of matter from which the universe furls like a ribbon twined into time?
Yes he might have saved our souls, but what of all this matter? Is there nothing that extends this redemption to the temporal, to our breakable bones and decaying teeth?
1 comment:
Sacred, broken matter... It ultimately comes down to this, doesn't it? All matter was ever holy, and Incarnation only made it more so. Gnostic heresy purported that mind is all and that the physical is to be shunned as weak and lesser. But then we hear that this is what the Gospel of John was written to refute. In effect, God became dirt, reaffirming the holiness of dirt.
But yes--bones still break and teeth decay. So what does it all mean, really? Is redemption merely a matter of perspective? Perhaps. But then again, it is through perspective that we try to see things as they are. If we could truly see all as it really is, the pain would have its place--but we wouldn't feel we were losing all the time. Redemption as a process of remembering what we forget on a daily basis? More and more, I think so...
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