In Perpetuity

Once, a long time ago, my Father told me a story.  Told within my heart.  Told with light and magic.  I attempt to retell parts of it now with words.  A faint echo of his message to me, but still useful I hope.  Before earth and star and man, he said, "If I allow a seed, in perpetuity, to be held by earth, then I allow the star that drives its growth. If I allow these things alone, beloved one, I allow all things."

  Many of his most blessed hosts are still unable to fully grasp the truth of this.  They secretly imagine a better way, as do the mortals they attend.  A soft, harmless place with rounded edges. A realm of limitation and safety, gifted in love.  But eternity implies two things simultaneously; threat of the most unimaginable danger and promise of the most unimaginable care.  We are utterly free in a terrifying, threatening realm.  But we misunderstand perpetuity.  And chaos, and order.  Even many among the dead have fallen prey to such lapses of vision.  Rather than imagining the occurrence of a terrible cataclysm – a hideous unknown variable – mortals usually assume that the current state of things is reflective of the design in sum.

   It is not.

  That isn’t my Father's way.  There is no place for genocide, abuse or oppression in the old notes and songs.  Father is many things, as Mother knows well, but he is neither an imperious bureaucrat nor a psychotic warlord.  Mankind, being deranged from numerous abuses, supposes that his Creator is equally deranged, and abusive.  But this is not so.  Wherever you find such fallacy in your holy books – rest assured it is a lie, placed there to rob you of your faith in a divine kindness that once held the entire cosmos in perfect balance.

   Oh, lost ones, I can already hear you thinking. 

  Vanitas Vanitatum, when one lives in defiled blindness as we all do now.  Though I commend your questioning of any authority.  It is bright and noble to question all forms of power.  Especially so when the goal is the uplift and emancipation of those who dream among you in this realm.

   But do you really suppose your Father is a sadist?  Or does he love you?  You know what love is, in your heart.  Either he does, or he doesn’t.  Which do you suppose it is, truly, when all is said and done?  Man gives many names to God, assigning genders and attributes, assuming axioms, delineating the manner and thus the boundaries of his perception of God.  What does an angel see when a mortal cries out in agony to the Creator, demanding answers and meaning?

  An angel sees a lost, lonely, angry thing.  Worthy of compassion and understanding.  An angel hears, "Why does it hurt, Father, and why are they so cruel…?"

   I am not my Father but I am one among his hosts, and I tell you now that it hurts because you fell from such a height.  They are so cruel because their fall shattered them enough to obliterate their empathy.

   A choice, but often one they felt they had no choice in making.

   Wraiths murdered Man, then Man murdered the love within himself in turn.  Because it hurts to feel, doesn't it?  Especially in darkness.

   Lost ones, you imagine a parent who is sadistic, careless or ambivalent.  You imagine a mother who hates you, or a father who doesn't feel. 

   But you are so fucking wrong.

   Your Mother loves you dearly.  Raped, burned, poisoned and sold into slavery – she loves you still.  And your father?  Your Father feels everything.  He is as raped as his wife, his daughters and his sons.

  What do you think love is, if not connection and empathy?  Fairytales are beautiful.  But this nightmare place that once shone so brightly – it's no fairytale.  Just ask the Fay.  They'll tell you.

   In this place things suffer.  Not because they should, but because this place is broken.  It's ok to hurt.  Hurting is necessary sometimes, on the inside.  A gentle melancholy. A reflective, inward eye.  Both life and art necessitate it.  Art and creativity; that beautiful reflection of experience that was once the guiding light of Ishkara's Pearl.

   The kind place that stood before the hush wasn't a place where nothing ever hurt, or changed. But it was a place where nothing ever suffered.  There was sadness sometimes, but never the hideous anguish that has coloured so much of human experience.

  It's so hard to describe, beloved ones, because it is a world that doesn't exist here anymore.

  Imagine a dream filled with the full range of human emotion, but a softer dream than this.  Far softer, where mutual affection and adventure was the general tenor of experience.  The underlying tone that held these other moods.  A realm far closer to your myths, legends and stories than you can currently understand.

   Poets, keys, gates.

  Souls from other worlds and other stars who came here to walk our gardens and explore our forests, and rest upon our shores at dusk and dawn.  Souls who came to hear our songs.  This shining spiritual light of our people that was the stuff of legend. 

   Such sweetness carries through the Myriad, across All Waters.  We were such an exotic pearl to be experienced.  Not to be claimed, or spoiled, or broken.

   My Father told me, "If I allow Me, beloved, I allow You also, and every single star with which we are entwined.  If I allow them to rest, or reflect, or rise, I allow them also to fall."

   I thought I understood his story, spoken as it was in the language of my heart.  But I understood nothing really.  I didn't understand what shadow or falling could really mean.

   How horrific it could actually be.  How sickening and unholy.

   Men, women, children.

   My skin crawls at the thought of it.  I didn't understand the depths of perpetuity. What it would demand from a sentience.  Not just from you and me, Asha.  But what it would demand from Him.

   I grasp now why Mother shrieks and heaves as she does.  I understand why she often pretends that she can't hear Father weeping.  She is almost like a mortal in this way, isn't she?

   We glance at the starving child, at defiled innocence, betrayed friends, and we hear parents crying somewhere.  It is often an agony too unbearable to face for more than a few moments, and so we usually look away.  Imagine, the human lifespan is now little more than a century at best.

   But my Father is eternal, and cannot look away.

   Imagine what that does to him, to his heart. 

   Do you want easy answers, kind ones?  I’m sorry but there is no easy answer, beyond the simple fact that you are dreaming and your spirit is imperishable and eternal.  Our saving grace, gifted with unconditional love and all the terrifying combinations of experience such a spirit implies.  But while we are dreaming we must face what our dreaming is become.  It has taken on such a nightmarish hue.  The work of abyssal wraiths and sickened priests who seek tirelessly to crush, enslave and consume the spirit of mankind.  We have to face the terror and the madness of such a thing, or else become mad and terrifying ourselves.

   Why did he create such wraiths, you ask?  I speak not for my Father, only for myself.  All I can do is try to share what he told me in that secret language of my heart.

   These things are not inexplicable, these shadows.  It is only that the cataclysm was so vast, so dark, that we are still reeling in trauma and derangement.  So much was lost.  Not merely our true history, but our true power.

   The human vessel was once capable of literal magic.  We are capable still, when the tether placed by these wraiths is finally slipped.

   A thing of awe was man and woman once.

   Kashi still remembers.

   It was so bright, this world.  So joyous.  Such a strange, endless pleasure.

   But then an angel fell.  To wraiths, to corruption.  To sickness of spirit.  Then another, and another, and another still.  Humanity has all but given up on belief in spiritual guardians

   But Man too was an angel once, for all intents and purposes.  A vessel, a vassal, divine.

   The message was always peace, creativity and ingenuity.  Those many-splendored ways of love.  This is exactly why humans are so brutalized within these false chronologies.  To hide this truth from them, this truth of nature and destiny.  For a taste of momentary power the human priests of this shadow-sickness are willing to damn themselves, defiling and betraying their own kind.

   What a travesty it has become, Asha.  What a hell.

   But I have to believe my Father saw all of this, that he prays for us still.  I’m a king only among mortals.  But amidst the fields of Heaven I am a servant in perpetuity.  I would have it no other way.  I need no pomp or ceremony, no praises or hymns sung to my work.  Because my work is my sister's work, and my brother's.  My hope is my Father's hope, and my Mother's. My eyes are my child's eyes, and my own.

   I do this work because it’s necessary, because love itself demands it.

   And who am I to deny love?

   Rest assured, Fallen, there shall be a reckoning.  You will see yourselves. You will know yourselves, in the end.  If not, you'll stay in your own private nightmare forever, where kind souls are free of you.  But the cleverest among the damned will realise the strength of my Mother's flesh and the depth of my Father's love, for they are one.  Eternal.  You'll recognise that open door, at last.  You'll finally turn your sight inward and attempt the first courageous act of your ugly, degrading lives.  And in that first moment of budding virtue you'll cry out in newborn shame, in recognition of the horror you brought upon your brethren and the earth. And in the agony of such shame your hearts shall be massaged to life once more.  You will fall to your knees, in gladdened humility.  In service and love, for all life.  As I fell.  As my Father fell.