The Invasion

Despair can be prayer. Anything can be prayer, really.

This morning I woke up after a very rough weekend, and got into my car to go to work. My youngest son sent me off with his usual sun-shiney cheeriness, flapping his little hand with all his might. I am convinced that, if that doesn't get your spirits up and give you the perfect day, you are in desperate trouble. Love of such purity I'd argue (passionately) is next to impossible to get anywhere else, comparable to Anthony the Great's begging the sun to stay down so he could keep seeing the Uncreated Light of God. The love of a child for a parent is far more powerful than they'll ever know and cannot be experienced by a celibate.

I did not respond today to my son today. I mean, yes, I smiled at how cute he was and waved back as I threaded my way through the wet lawn, but his small goodbyes echoed in my ears only, going nowhere near my wretched heart.

And as I sat in my car I knew that I could not pray. I'd no business doing so, for this morning I could practically smell the sulfur in my nostrils. My own interior voice was so mutated that trying to use it was a form of self-harm. So I put on Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe, said out loud "God, I'm here, whatever the hell that means. All I can give you is the fact that I exist.", and then I listened to Severian being seduced by a demonic being who looked like a pretty girl. She didn't succeed. And that gave me some hope.

I got into work and somehow got my Bible open. Don't ask me how, it just occurred to me that I really should read it. So I cracked it open:

"So Jesus went about the whole of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and curing every kind of disease and infirmity among the people; so that his fame spread throughout the whole of Syria, and they brought to him all those who were in affliction, distressed with pain and sickness of every sort, the possessed, the lunatics, the palsied; and he healed them. And a great multitude followed him, from Galilee and Decapolis, Jerusalem and Judaea, and the country beyond Jordan." -Matthew 4:23-25

Later on Christ promises that the gates of Hell will never prevail. I don't know why, but this particular time I could feel it. The pounding on the gates. The drums outside, the shouts, the promises of rescue. The Gospel refers to the gates of Hell; Hades is not on the attack, Christ is breaking in. It is a siege to rescue hearts and souls. I may be trapped, but I am not alone. Christ and the hosts are on the other side, and they are coming. I may have put myself here, however accidentally, but they do not care. One should not be in Hell, no matter what one has done. What I did to put myself here is irrelevant, only that I am here. It is enough for them.

And so I sit and wait. 

Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not. 

I am definitely in Hell. I feel the anguish, I smell the sulfur, I hear the screams of pain. I cannot open these wretchedly heavy gates. 

But I can sit by these awful things, hear the poundings and smile. It is the smile of someone who knows that a great reckoning is coming, a smile that puts fear into the hearts of captors. And all of a sudden Hell isn't a prison. It's an arena, a slaughter field.

I just got front-row seats to an ass-whooping the likes of which the Pelennor Fields would be jealous. A pity, I forgot popcorn.