Wednesday, December 9, 2009

On the Nature of Sin: Consonance

Way out on the galactic rim, out where the stars are far apart and all is dark and cold, an order of supernatural agents fights, precisely as it has always fought, in the very emptiness of space. They are not beings precisely, because they are mostly what they are not. They are un-beings. They are barely even agents, because they do far less than they undo.

Oh, their weapons change the very structure and nature of the universe, alter the laws by which this present order operates. But because they choose to undo that order with these weapons, they are themselves already defeated. Victorious, they will have no arena in which to be or do. They will have remade the universe in their image, which is nothing. They are the Undone, held together by the superabundance of their undoing.

And they are fighting toward the center of the sphere of time. They are fighting toward the core of all temporality, which is not a moment or a bang. It is not a beginning, thought it may be the place where all beginnings end. No, the center of a time is no event. It is a choice. Perhaps it is the only choice; it certainly was and is and will be the most important choice. But the Undone do not know this, because it is nothing like them. They are defiance. The choice at the center of time is something like surrender, and so they cannot know it. They only know that it may be their undoing, and so they attack it with the weapons that are destruction.

And their path is leading them right toward the Earth. The choice at the center of time is here. It may or may not have something to do with you. The Undone certainly suspect it does. As they come they infect everything they touch with their un-choice, with their Undoing. And the infection spreads. You are a little bit like them. When you choose the untrue choice you choose defiance and you choose against the choice at the heart of all time. And the universe changes, just a little bit.

You probably don’t notice, that is part of the undoing, but your neighbor probably does. Perhaps you say something unkind, the specifics do not matter. But because of you, it is now just fractionally easier for everyone to choose undoing than it was a moment ago. And the Undone creep just a little bit closer. And the universe slips just a little more, becomes slightly more undoing. You might say that this must have been happening for a very long time all over the world and everything must all be very hopeless, and you would be in some ways correct.

The infection has gone beyond pandemic. The sphere that holds all time shows many cracks. The Undone are soaring toward the core. It is nearly impossible to choose anything but them, to opt for anything but defiance. Their victory and the defeat of all the universe seems very much at hand.

But this, precisely, is the crux of the dilemma.

The sphere of time is and was and always will be much more affected by the occurrence of choices than by their duration, which is negligible. To put it another way, if you are particularly imaginative, you might be able to say that you undo because your ancestors undid, and this is partially correct. But it is much more true to say that your ancestors defied a thousand years ago because you defy today. And you are very much closer to the truth when you begin to understand that you are undoing today together, and that already you are conspiring in the undoing of tomorrow. Your choice undoes the way the universe is, was, and always will be.

The hope, of course, cannot be that you will somehow choose the choice at the center of time, that you will surrender to surrender. No, the hope is precisely that all these things are already concluded. The hope is that the surrender of time was and is and will be not to the Undone, which everyone sees, but to you, which no one could foretell. The hope is that the choice at the heart of time is the choice for you.

And because you would be thus be allied with and by and for the choice at the core of the sphere of time, and because the occurrence of events matters more than their duration, we hope that the cure will also be transmissible. The choice of surrender may already be spreading, and fast. After all, the sphere of time, unlike the Undone, is held together not the superabundance of its undoing, but by the overwhelming possibility of its becoming. Let us begin.

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