Posts published by “centaur”

And so comes an end to Lent, and my Lenten series, with Easter. To Christians, Easter not just the commemoration of the Resurrection of Jesus on the third day after his Crucifixion, but an event happening in a very real sense right now, reverberating through time and space.

If the Crucifixion is when Jesus atoned for our sins, the Resurrection is when He brings the promise of eternal life to us, and begins his work moving the spirits of the people of the world towards the path of following Him into the Kingdom of God.

Forthcoming, at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, will take over that work; but now, we are in another time, not liminal, like Black Saturday, but celebratory, in which we give thanks for Jesus's Resurrection and worship with joy in the remembrance of it.

This was perhaps the hardest Lenten season I have ever undertaken: writing roughly 1,000 non-fiction words a day every day on top of all my other responsibilities was quite the challenge. But Jesus can resurrect anything, and He certainly resurrected my connection to the faith this Lent.

And now, on this day of rest, I close this Lenten series. I've much more to write on the "Jesus and Godel" thread, but I am going to take a break, and be grateful for the glory of the Resurrection, the promise of eternal life, and most importantly, for the Christian values that guide me towards Jesus.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a quick graphic of the opened tomb.

Black Saturday commemorates the day that Jesus lay in the tomb. If the Crucifixion is the great sacrifice, and the Resurrection is its great reward, the Tomb is the liminal space between, the moment between before and after, the place in time and space where Death reigns as supreme as it ever will.

Death is a funny thing, and does funny things to people's brains. Some people fear it; others welcome it, perhaps grudgingly. Some seek it; some try to move heaven and earth to avoid it. Strangest of all is what death does to otherwise rational people's perceptions of reality - of what is "ontologically possible."

Nicholas Meyer, director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, in which Spock - SPOILERS - dies, is said to have complained that Star Trek III: The Search for Spock wasn't realistic, because Spock - SPOILERS - comes back from the dead, along the lines: "It's a fantasy - people can't come back from the dead."

Yeah, well, people used to not fly in space either, Nick, but you still directed a movie about it, almost a decade and a half after humanity successfully landed on the moon. A friend of mine had a similar complaint about another movie because "coming back from the dead isn't possible."

Put bluntly, this isn't a rational analysis. This is treating death as Death with a capital 'D', elevating it into a permanent part of the City of Myth, like Neil Gaiman's Endless or Terry Pratchett's Four Horsemen. But Death isn't a perky, photogenic goth or a cloak-wrapped figure made wholly of bones.

We are three-dimensional patterns persisting through four-dimensional space-time, and, one day, those self-maintaining patterns may cease to maintain themselves and dissolve. Put simply, someday, everybody dies. But those patterns, one day, might be restored, by any number of methods.

Despite the cliche, neither death nor taxes are an unavoidable part of the structure of the universe, and that should be obvious if you engage in informed speculation about possible futures. Thinking of taxes alone, we might have a universal basic income in a robotically-powered post-scarcity utopia.

While the resurrection method in Star Trek III leaves a lot to be desired - it's beyond scientific speculation and fully in the realm of "treknobabble" - if you're already talking about starships traveling faster than light crewed by psychic space elves, please, don't start talking to me about the realism of Death.

Death doesn't deserve its capital letter. One day, we might scientifically conquer it - I wear a cryogenic suspension bracelet around my wrist for precisely this purpose - and, to Christians, Jesus has already conquered it, with His ministry providing the gateway of belief to His death and resurrection.

Black Saturday remembers this time. One day, death will reach us all - it is inevitable, even though it might be reversible - but the promise of Jesus's resurrection is the promise that one day we all may go beyond the dissolution of our physical patterns and into a new mode of existence that is eternal.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the eyebrows of Peter Capaldi, known for playing a man who knows something about coming back from the dead.

The Crucifixion puts everything into perspective. No matter what we face in life, no matter how bad things get, it’s hard to top an innocent man being tortured to death for telling the truth in a political kangaroo court - which, essentially, is the story of Jesus’s death.

This is a strange comfort for me when I think I’ve had a bad day. No matter what minor mishap has triggered my internal narrative and constant catastrophizing, it really never is as bad as what Jesus had to go through to protect us from the consequences of our own sins.

I feel strange even writing this. It seems like this is something that should be treated with heavy reverence - the Crucifixion is the most important event in Christian theology, and in that view, is the most important thing to ever happen in all of Creation itself.

But the reverence of a prayer to our God - as regurgitated performatively to other true believers, which is what all audible or written prayers are, performances - leads to language which is the opposite of clear explanation and honest sharing with people who do not yet believe.

Think of the exaggerated “JAY-zuss” you hear from televangelists. Jesus actually tells us not to pray in public: “When you pray, you shall not be as the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men.”

Or think of the constant praises that Muslims offer to Allah in religious contexts: Allah, may He be glorified and exalted”, “Muhammad, upon him be prayers and peace.” In a sense, this is a performance, something which reads the best to other believers.

But in another sense, these praises and exaggerations are not a performance. While I’m leery of taking much from any other faith into Christianity, especially Islam, which C. S. Lewis described as “Christianity’s greatest heresy,” one thing that I agree with Islam about is submission to God.

Islam means submission to God, and as part of that submission, Muslims believe in gratitude, which leads to thanks and praise to God, and Muslims believe in scripture, citing verses from the Qur’an as a reason to bestow on Muhammad all those honorifics.

Similarly, to a televangelist, belief in Jesus is the most important element of anyone’s life. He’s their guide, their Savior, their close personal friend, even if He is invisible, and every time they say His name, they want to emphasize His importance to them.

In Christian theology, Jesus is God, existing before and outside Creation; but Jesus is also human, making Him the most important part of Creation - and the Crucifixion, Death and Resurrection the most important event.

That’s why the Crucifixion looms so large: in a sense, it is both everywhere and at the center of things. The authors G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis both had a genius for metaphor when talking about the Risen Lord, often using the imagery of the Sun when they did so.

That’s appropriate. The Earth turns, and sometimes, its weight and bulk seems like it blots out the Sun. But the Sun is always there, still burning, shining its light into every part of the darkness, and it will be waiting for us when it turns around again.

The light of the Sun predates the formation of the Earth, which took its current shape after the Mars-sized planet Theia slammed into the proto-Earth (which in my novels I call Hyperion), and it will shine after the Earth is gone, consumed in the swelling of the Sun into a red giant.

This is one reason I’m not so worried about the discrepancies between the Bible and modern cosmology: the world wasn’t made in six days and it won’t end in seven trumpets, but echoes of those spiritual truths can be found over and over again, fractally, throughout the universe.

And the largest of those looming truths is that of the Son. Like the Sun, He was here before us, His light shaped us and helped us grow, and He will be here long after we’re gone, collecting the dust of the old world and refashioning it into a new one.

So today, the echoes of the Crucifixion wash over us; tomorrow, that of his Death; the day after, that of his Resurrection. And the lesson, even for our worst suffering and our darkest hours, is that suffering, followed by death, is a mere echo of a process that ends in Resurrection.

-the Centaur

Pictured: G. K. Chesterton. Dude had some hair.