At the Bottom

Ever the Lord schools my tongue to utterance that shall refresh the weary; awakes my dull ears, morning after morning, their Master’s bidding to heed.

An attentive ear the Lord has given me; not mine to withstand him; not mine to shrink from the task.

I offered my body defenceless to the men who would smite me, my cheeks to all who plucked at my beard; I did not turn away my face when they reviled me and spat upon me.

The Lord God is my helper; and that help cannot play me false; meet them I will, and with a face unmoved as flint; not mine to suffer the shame of defeat;

here is One stands by to see right done me. Come, who pleads? Meet me, and try the issue; let him come forward who will, and accuse me.

Here is the Lord God ready to aid me; who dares pass sentence on me now? One and all they shall be brought to nothing, like garment the moth has eaten!

Who is here that fears the Lord, listens to his servant’s message? Who would make his way through dark places, with no glimmer of light? Let him trust in the name of the Lord, and lean upon his God.

For you others, with brand at girdle, that your own fire would make, with fire your own brands have kindled light the path if you can; this is all the gift I have for you, a bed of anguish.

Isaiah 50:4-11

Let's get something straight: the idea that progression doesn't lead to death is a peculiarity of our modern age. You can try to conserve your momentum into the great beyond, but the actual end point is always the same. This is true for all things, from single-cell organisms to planets and beyond. No, you cannot avoid it: you will die. So will your society, along with the thoughts that went into making it; can you imagine what future civilizations will think of our society a hundred years from now? No? Get started, it changes how you approach life now, and for the better. Oh, and this applies to your own psychology as well, with your body moving in its own up and down rhythms. Anything before Christianity acknowledged this reality, with "afterlifes" either not existing or being so wretched that nobody in the modern era would want it, finding that the reality presented in pre-modern religions to be something out of a horror film.

Sorry folks, it's not a horror film, that's reality.

Christianity does not deny this reality. It does not deny that progress is disintegration, death, and that the best you can do is try to slow down the process as much as you can before control is lost. Oh no, Christianity does not deny the cycle. It calls it what it is: the Fall. This existential change was not intended by God, we did this and cannot get out of it.

No, progressives, you neo-Christian heretics, you cannot defeat it, or even slow it down for all that long.

Christ did not get rid of death and its cyclical loop. Christ changed the loop itself. By dying and going into Hades, where He rescued those who wanted to leave, whom we know as the righteous dead. But they had to choose to leave.

Today in the Orthodox Church we celebrate the beginning of this cycle, of Christ giving us the choice to change the loop in our souls, in our minds. Today is the day that God, instead of annihilating His creation and starting over like a child with his toys made our creation, the cycle of death, His.

For those of you wanting to know why God couldn't just yank us out of creation and put us in a new world... think that request through. You are not a soul in a body, you are a body-soul hybrid, you are not one or the other. You are both. You are you because of your body and soul. If you hate so much that you're willing to nuke your own self and everyone and everything else so that way you're no longer in pain... just sit with that idea and really think it through. And I mean really, actually, think it through.

God. Loves. You. And that means the world you're in. Not what you want the world to be. Not what you want yourself to be. But you as you are, whether your be drugged to avoid the pain, just taking that pain out on other people, or denying it with sheer force of will and wearing yourself out. God loves you, so much so that  He took on your reality, becoming man so that He could feel the disintegration, feel the pain that is the normal human experience not to mention when things go wrong. And the normal way involves you collapsing under the weight of your own existence, suffocating under all the little paper cuts to your psyche as the years wear on and your body begins to fold under the stress of your mind and its inability to fully process everything it's faced.

Hey look, crucifixion is death by horrific suffocation!

Huh.

Now, this leaves us all with an uncomfortable choice, doesn't it? We can either fight the process and hurt all those around us by doing so and still fail, or we can trust that God's Crucifixion means He sits right there, behind the pain, all the way down that inner chute to Hell so many have found, and that if you look for Him, and scream with Him "MY GOD MY GOD WHY HAVE YOU ABANDONED MED?" you will find Him!

That's a big ask. The biggest.

But I've done it. Y'know, once or twice, if I can summon the courage. I've looked on the way down, following the notes left behind by those who did it. That's literally part of the point of this blog. And God is there. He is not there in the way I expected Him to be. But He is, and when He opens His mouth, it is to ask to join in. It is not what I thought I wanted, but you cannot do another cycle than the one humanity already picked: the collapse is always going to come. And there's very little I can do to slow it down, or anyone. Christ does not tell me that my experience is wrong, He asks to ride the elevator to Hell with me.

Every time I've told Him yes something has changed within me. I don't know how else to put it, but my experiences have proven to me that this two thousand year process, of finding Christ in that elevator on the way down is the true way to survive and thrive in this world.

Today is the day Christ goes down. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to try and find the courage to let Him take the trip with me. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God, after all.