12. Wandering Through the Battlefield
/
All night long I hovered close to a window in the dome to catch the first ray of sunrise. In the night, the mosaics of seraphim encircling the enthroned Christ came alive. I saw them fluttering their wings and taking turns flying around the sanctuary and then filing neatly back into place. Christ smiled watching them. From time to time, He would stretched His legs by standing up and walking around the base perimeter of the dome. He looked like He was concentrating, or listening to something. I didn't dare speak to Him. By sunrise He was back in His mosaic ruling over heaven and earth from His throne.
At the break of day, I flew up to His face to ask permission to leave the Cathedral and to ask Him where I should go.
"Follow My Bride, the Church. Go to wherever She may be found in the world, however, do not go in a church building. Return here to celebrate the Feast of the Archangels. You will like that. Now begone!"
I looked around for Poppy to say good-bye, but she was nowhere to be found. What a strange little angel she is.
I had a deep desire to know what day of the week it was and looked around for someone to ask. The absence of any angels or spirits put me in a quandary. I felt that I could not leave until I had my bearings, and I could not know where I stood without first knowing which day of the Holy Week I was in. What had happened to me that Time could have become so important?
I had an idea; I went down to the priest's office. Luckily, he was there sitting at his great mahogany desk. Richly painted icons of saints decorated his walls. My plan was to wait and watch for him to schedule a meeting or a sacrament. It didn't take long. His calendar opened on the screen with a big red circle around the day. Ha! Wednesday, October 30th. The day when God looked away to create the sun and moon and stars, and when Jesus Christ was betrayed by His disciple. Okay, that helped. Now to seek the Bride away from Her church buildings.
Where would I find Her? If She is human, I thought, then She must be eating and drinking and working for pay. I would go to a restaurant! As I was flying around the busy city, it occurred to me that my mission would not be so easy. There were dozens of eating establishments. As I flew through one after another, no one looked dismayed by the betrayal, nor could I tell who was abstaining from any kind of desirable food. Hamburgers, chewy cheesy pizzas, wine and beer complemented mini-parties at every table. I decided that perhaps the restaurant was not the best place to find Her.
From the restaurant scene I flew into busy shopping malls, and into court rooms, and grocery stores, but I simply could not discern the Bride anywhere. I wanted desperately to go into a church, but I didn't dare disobey. Nearly in despair, I went to the river to think and pray.
Sitting on a small desolate island at the edge of the river, I prayed, "Lord, this world is full of human beings in all shapes and sizes and ages, but no one seems to be aware of Your Bride's Holy Week.
If Your Bride is out here at all, help me find Her, please! She who is Your Body, the flesh of Your Flesh and bone of Your Bones must exist in this Your creation. And yet, no one looks glum because of Your betrayal. What should I do?"
At that moment I spotted a fellow angel wearing the form of a tall muscular man jogging toward my island. I knew he was no ordinary man because he jogged on ground and water as if they were the same. I waited for his approach to see if he had the answer for me.
"Good day, my friend. Danielus is my name. You have not been on earth long I see."
I replied with my burning question, "Where can I find the little gods who are aware of the Bride's week?"
"Oh my friend!" He exclaimed with deep compassion. "The spirit of the Bride covers the Earth within a wide variety of humans. For the most part, these little gods are attached to the spiral of nature's time rather than walking around the timeless flat circle of the Bride's year.
The risk of living on the spiral instead of the circle is that the little god could fall off. Most of the Bride's beings, or little gods as you call them do not experience the betrayal on Wednesday, nor the crucifixion on Friday. They are too high and far away from the event. Being fixed in time they think the Bride's Holy Week occurred two thousands years ago, and is commemorated once a year, whereas these cataclysmic events are actually happening now. They are remembering because they are looking back instead of experiencing. The problem with remembering is that it is easy to forget. The Bride asks Her children to abstain from animal foods to keep them aware that major events in Christ's life are happening now."
"Then how can I find the Bride out here?"
Danielus replied, "The Bride is human and divine. She inhabits bodies and buildings. Rarely does one find those who are keenly aware of the mystical flat circle of the Bride's year. I encourage you to seek them out, but don't become discouraged, they are few. Most little gods cling to the spiral but nevertheless are flesh of Christ's flesh and bones of His bones.
How ironic! You pretend to disdain time and matter, and yet you look to them to find the lovely spirit of the Bride. Blind yourself so you may see Her. I must go now, I am on river patrol. I sense someone is in trouble. Farewell. When we meet again, you must be sure to tell me how you found Her out here."
And with that Danielus jogged away from me.
I sensed that he was right. I had to stop seeing in order to find the Spirit of the Bride away from the church building.
No one had bothered to tell me about Halloween. Back in the city streets I ran into goblins and ghosts everywhere! I even saw many of the devil's children walking around as unashamed as bats in the night. Lucifer was having a field day with it all. What had the world suddenly come to?
"God!" I screamed as loud as I could. "Come here at once and do something about this!!!"
A voice spoke to me and it said. Close your eyes!
I obeyed to find myself in a great swirl of quantum matter. There were fields and subatomic particles that formed webs upon webs of relationships with common purposes. Light and dark hues in a myriad of colors formed patterns from these relationships. The life force was feeding on streams of new information, of knowledge generated by God.
And then I saw the Bride in battle with the armies of Lucifer. The great divider was cutting through the fields and particles and the webs of relationships, even the Bride's networks, to cause canyons of hostility; explosions in the canyons erupted, raining hot caustic debris that fell and burned everything in the path of its descent.
The Bride was losing ground. Her system of order and reason was being challenged from every side. Her forces were strong and vibrant but disparate. They pulled from the past, and from the present but couldn't seem to gain ground. I thought that She would be completely consumed by the divider and by the burning debris until the weakness of the divider suddenly became apparent to me.
I don't know if I was on the spiral of time or on the flat circle of the mystical year, but I perceived the canyons of hostilities shrink. Voids created by death and destruction were filling with particles of luminous consciousness and I could see that the battle was unsustainable.
The webs of relationships that formed the armies of the Bride, even though they looked so small were stable and flat and strong; oh so strong. The spiral upon which Her wandering children had perched was collapsing. With the collapse, Her powerful flat circle grew thicker and thicker and wider and wider and stronger and stronger beginning and ending with Sunday.
When my sight returned to me, it brought with it the realization that Jesus Christ's resurrection on Easter Sunday created the mystical year of the Bride by repairing the road to immortality. Without death and without darkness time cannot exist as it does on earth, on the spiral of time.
The flat circle of the year begins to transform time to prepare the gods for that immortal life. Time was made on the Sunday of creation, and time was transformed on Easter Sunday, the beginning of the new creation.
I have heard it said that Christ conquered death by death, but I now saw how death included the Pharisees' fear of the Romans, like the fear of any soul of its secular government, and that death included the misunderstanding of Jewish Pharisees and Sadducees and priests of their God. The spirit of the law won and the angels rejoiced.
I saw every particle of faith in God radiate like the sun. I saw that His power to create and sustain life with incrementally expanding knowledge was a living particle, and that the goblins and demons of doubt, of undisciplined time-traveling, of doubting departure from the Bride became a vacuum, a sort of black hole into which death itself would fall until it existed no more anywhere in the universe.
The voice that told me to close my eyes said, "The divider will continue until he ultimately divides himself from himself and is no more."
If there is one foundational week, Creation week become Holy Week, echoed by the hundreds of thousands that have followed, then there is only one day of that week that rises heads above the other six. It is the first one in which time both began and ended, Sunday, the Lord's day. God keeps the light and tosses the darkness, and time is no more. Now we can all rest.
