Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Reflections on the Devil and Time

[ Please note that these are just ramblings of an uneducated man and should not in any way be taken to represent official teachings of the Catholic Church. These are merely my reflections. ]


It is, I believe, the voice of the counter influence that tried to tempt Christ away from His path in Gethsemanie, as he had tried in the desert. It was at that point, the point of the anticipation, before Christ's own betrayal, pain, humiliation and death that the case of the opposing side could make it's strongest case to the human God. We believe that Christ was fully human and fully God and both have the ability to choose, yet it is His human side that can be given to fear or taken by passion, or can agonize in a Garden.
The other side of light is cunning, the antithesis not of God but of perhaps the strongest of the angels, Michael to make the metaphor. He has the knowledge and abilities of the angels at his command, just as the archangel "commands" the "armies" of Heaven on God's behalf. He, the darkened angel, lacks however the ultimate knowledge of God, which does not make him as stupid or obvious as he would have us believe.
The "war" has been fought and is already over, in one sense... God won, Christ died. The "gates" of heaven are opened and His "kingdom" is being realized. The moves have been made the board is set, what is undetermined is who fights on what side... Since time "unfolds" we must play out the game and choose up sides. I am not speaking of choosing a religion, there is either movement towards God's will or against it. If we are voluntarily conformed to God's will then we fit and we can "find" our "way" to Gods "kingdom", because "shaped" in the way God's will is "shaped" it is like us and we are like it.
Consider for a moment the goal of the other side... Their goal is a mystery to me. We have to assume that seeing the "face" of God they have some comprehension of God's might, how could they conceivably hope to stand against it. Obviously they could not. If, however, the "dispute" was over God becoming man, and on one side were those who believed in God's will, which includes love of man and those opposed to the idea of God lowering himself and thereby being opposed to God's will then one starts to get a picture of perhaps a purpose...
Suppose time is like a sheet of paper, running from one side to the other. Now suppose you place a dot in the exact center of the paper and fold the paper ( like a flower holding the dot in the center ). All points on the page would now be seen to run towards that one point. Consider too that both factions are not literally, or should I say, linearly bound to time itself. Say that focal point was Christ then all sides would work at the paper as a whole. Then the ideology of the opposing side starts to make sense, the less man conforms to God's will, universally speaking, the harder it becomes on Christ to make it through Gethsemanie. Assuming that Christ had even a glimpse of what the future would hold, he knowingly makes the decision each time the course of events is played out... Say if the multiple universes theory was true and that every decision that could be played out was in all dimensions except that in that one moment Christ in all the universes never once turns aside. Such an event, even if it were only a nanosecond long would be a "hitch" in all things, it would quite literally be the focal point of the universe... And given the relative nature of time what if there is other life and all the other planets are visited by Christ in one form or another at that same relative time, then all histories would be shaped by that same event.
God must pass the trial as material form every time, taking on all the burdens of all the weaknesses of all creation and each of the million billion times, because God must be unchanging, must make the sacrifice each time willingly knowing the shape of history of the rest of the universe, one might conceive that an angel or two might actually believe enough that out of one of those times Christ could be swayed from the ultimate act of altruism that His death was. Especially considering because of God's infinite nature, all of space time itself, would be available to use against Christ in the garden, and the knowledge that He must endure it not once, but on every world in every reality. Then the moral philosophy of the Devil makes some sense. I think about that idea, and the phrase as was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, and I think, what if Christ is in the garden of Gethsemanie for all of existence ( and of course outside of it because He is God eternal as well ).
Of course it is entirely possible that I am too science fiction fantasy minded to really make interesting theological argument.

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