ALIVE: Chapter 88, The Plan
/The sky was created as a new home for the spirits to reside. From the dark void the spirits suddenly felt themselves to be in fresh light-filled intensely humid air. It was an awakening, a liberation from blindness. Only one God, unique and powerful, brilliant and the source of brilliance, intelligent and the source of intelligence, creative and the source of all creativity, could, from the depths of Himself, in and of darkness, ejaculate light with His word (λόγος) which was His intellect, and then project this light like a floodlight onto the darkness, to fill the void and thus transform His own world. Not by committee was the cosmos created, but by One, the Source, hence the Father. This light that spit forth from God was good. Yet darkness remained and was separated from the light forevermore. How did this occur since light and darkness cannot coexist? They alternated to create a day. God withdrew His light and spoke it forth again. Luminous day followed dark night.
On this Second Day of Creation, when the light supplanted darkness again, the spirits flew throughout the new sky with joy unspeakable, unimaginable for a human mind. Perhaps a flash of that sensation appears in the psyche of a person, who after hours of climbing, finally reaches the summit. As that one surveys the airy world around, (s)he can perceive a glimpse, a flash of the angelic thrill of flying through the Second Day sky.
God watched this spectacle of spirits in their new playground with His own sensation of delight. Some were flying in circles and figure eights, while another gaggle of spirits merrily sped through this new experience called light and sight and space. The thrills lasted and lasted through light into darkness and back again. There was no boundary either in space or in time to bump into. Spirits floating through luminous air suddenly seemed knowable as when feeling becomes seeing, as when fleeting thoughts give birth to knowledge.
Water-saturated air sparkled. Spirits blossomed and delighted in the sky and the light. But not all of them.
As God continued with His Great Opus, to give birth to matter, the spirits were given assignments. Adoring spirits served God well and were rewarded with increasingly important roles according to their attitudes and their performances. After the heavens were made, God gathered all the water that had been floating around the atmosphere and He inserted it within a large ball of earth, the firmament, which was a coagulation of ions of minerals to generate Matter. Rich soil, sandy soil, Mother Earth ready to receive her seeds made valleys of room for water. Those valleys became known as oceans and seas, rivers and lakes. The waters on and surrounding the firmament gave life to seeds that the spirits had caste out upon the earth. And the seeds slowly generated great trees and vegetation of a vast multitude of colors and textures, of shapes and sizes. Matter was found not to be one thing, but rather a million things. The explosion of creativity was at the same time chaotic and unified on this one dynamic globe.
God, in His infinite creativity fashioned tiny seeds, nuclei of a million varieties of plants and shrubs, fruit trees, mighty hardwoods, softwoods and deciduous trees and flowers of a plethora of colors and shapes and textures. Each tree, shrub and plant produced its own reproductive seeds. Before God created creatures of all kinds, and animals and mankind, He created their food.
On the fourth day, when God withdrew His light and the familiar darkness returned, the most understated and overwhelming event occurred, to be witnessed only by the enthusiastic spirits and the angry and offended spirits alike.
On what He called the fourth day, whether or not from His own inner light, God made an enormous ball of fire and set it in the sky to nourish and warm the earth and the seeds there on. On that day God’s first light withdrew into the core of the Creator to be reserved only for special occasions. The earth and heavens shook with a mighty quake as the magnificent fiery sun appeared in the black sky, to make a new day, and a moon and stars to illuminate the dark night.
As light was to darkness, the new fire was to the omnipresent water.
To illuminate the familiar darkness, the great light of the sun and the small lights of the moon and stars focused all their energy and purpose upon the new earth. The sun became the center of the universe. The planet earth spun around this luminous ball of Fire in a holy dance, to appear and then withdraw so that both light and darkness could each in its turn bless the earth, and in doing so, God created something new and mysterious to the spirits, a regular repetitive orbital dance of the sun and the moon around the earth to give birth to Time, a new brief “Day”. Like a seed of Time, the tiny day became a new standard of measure created by the dance of the Sun and the Earth. The spirits that hovered above the earth grew dizzy over the speed of changes between darkness and light. Not since the first creation of light did darkness return so frequently. Suddenly, the thing God called Day was a flash of time as was the thing He called Night.
Some spirits despised the fiery light. They despised the sun as they despised the first light. Because of that, they despised God for forcing His Creation on them. And so God in His infinite wisdom, to pacify the angry spirits, made the spirits ruler over the world when He took back His light from whence it came deep inside Him and replaced it with a fiery sun.
The new light of the world, the sun, like the world, was a material light. The angry spirits liked that. They liked the destructive element of the sun, its power to evaporate water, and its magnificent strength. Nothing, except God, had ever before exhibited such force. The angry spirits felt satisfied that such automated power could exist.
With the advent of the Sun, and the rotation of the earth around it and the moon around the earth with its magnetic band that played with the oceans, in the vastness of the new universe, darkness could once again predominate, except for in a narrow band of light from the sun that, like a flashlight in the darkness focused on the amazing new living planet Earth.
God called the familiar darkness night as a period of rest for life on earth, and day as a period of renewal. With day and night, like life and death, God created the concept of beginning and ending. The constant continual dependable repetition of beginning and ending at the same time refreshing and didactic taught that just as there would be a beginning, there would also be an ending. A small beginning for each of a zillion lives, plant life, the earth itself, and the heavens, and also an ending for each, until the end of time when there will be a return of timelessness, when the constant first light returns.
That fourth day was the day that Time was created for the earth. The spirits had no sense of what time meant to them. In fact, time meant nothing to them, neither the beginning of it, nor the unceasing repetition of it. By then, the spirits had grown accustom to God’s affinity for repetition with multiplication of cells. It was a consistent theme, the sameness and the difference of all matter in equal measure. Of things that generate rapidly like buds and flowers and of things that grow slowly like rocks or don’t regenerate at all.
It wasn’t until the fifth day when the spirits presumed everything was compete when the most alarming shock came to them. A shock that blanketed the entire population of spirits; a shock that was as shocking as the first day of light, and as perplexing.
The day after the creation of the sun, moon and stars, God made birds and fish. Birds and fish were entertainment for some of the spirits. Suddenly they shared the skies with little winged beings of many sizes and colors. Matter imposed itself on their air! It flew, but it always landed too.
These first living beings had to eat. That too was new. It wasn’t enough for the light and water to continuously feed the trees and vegetation, the creatures needed nourishment that only the earth could provide, and that they had do forage for themselves. Birds swooped down and ate the fish, the fish ate each other, and they both ate of plants and worms and whatever they could find. Eating was born on the fifth day when the fish and birds were created. When millennia later Christ offered His own body as food for immortality, it was not an accident that this offer of self as life-giving food for humankind is celebrated on the fifth day. On this day God created the Dove, to represent His Holy Spirit, the Spirit above all spirits, and the fish. ΙΧΘΥΣ. (Greek word meaning fish, whose letters are an anagram for Jesus Christ God´s Son Saves.)
The following day, in yet another major burst of creativity God made animals. Fur, skin, faces, arms and legs. The spirits were particularly amazed by eyes. Eyes of crocodiles and lizards, eyes of horses and giraffe all looked like pools of wisdom, with the reflective quality of a still lake, and at the same time eyes contained the concentric circles of the universe. Even the hostile spirits were stunned by the creation of fish, birds and animals.
Later on the sixth day, while the earth was teaming with life, God generated out of the depths of Himself, as He had generated the first light, a being who in every way of appearance was an animal, albeit a smooth skinned two legged variety with shots of hair in various spots making him look somewhat comical. But it wasn’t the form of the man that astounded the spirits, it was his intelligence and his creativity. He spoke to God! God spoke to him! Not since the clarion call for Light to come had the word been so powerful and shocking to the spirits.
God had duplicated His own energies, His intellect. He made a human being in His image and likeness!
The spirits were astounded, at first they were mesmerized. Both good spirits and jealous, hostile and angry spirits were mesmerized alike. It was not just the form and features of man that astonished the spirits, it was a unique and mysterious sensation. God loved humankind as its mother with a mother’s all encompassing love. God fathered the earth and skies, the sun and moon and stars, but with the creation of humankind God was both Father and Mother. Love was born.
The good spirits wept at the beauty of it all. But not all of them. Some of the spirits were furious. With what audacity did God duplicate Himself in the form like that of an animal? This was an insult to all spirit-kind.
The spirits by this time had grown accustomed to the sun, to the skies, to the earth and seas and plant life and trees, and birds and fish, both small fish and whales and sharks. In all of Creation the spirits observed a kind of organization and hierarchy, like the spirits had an organization and hierarchy in their own ranks. When mankind came along, the spirits were confounded. Some of them were angrier, the anger of jealousy, and they became angrier with God for this. Others, the more humble among the spirits were amused by the angry spirits because they also saw the limitations of man that the jealous angels regarded as nothing. The hateful spirits were so outraged that they immediately planned how to foil this particular species.
A mischievous spirit entered a serpent to rob the humans of their likeness and the power over God’s creation, and over them. Evil appeared. Yet, evil had no autonomy whatsoever. It was a parasite. It needed to feed off of its target to exist. The angry spirits came to be known by man as demons, while the good spirits which protected and guided man, and gave man good news from God became known as angels.
The evil spirits rejoiced when the man was punished so severely. While other spirits who trusted God, smiled. Those were the spirits that knew God had a plan that allowed the man to doubt Him and rebel. This rebellion caused a great fissure in the similarity, but the expulsion also sent mankind out into the world to exercise his own intelligence and creativity.
And so it happened that as the sun and earth danced around and around each other that millions of years went by, and indeed the humans entertained God and impressed the spirits with their language, and shelters and magnificent inventions, and they created artistic expressions for no utilitarian purpose but to speak to each other and to grow each other, much like seeds grow into sweet smelling roses. Men of learning rejoiced in everything. The earth became as much of a playground for men as the heavens were for the spirits.
Both the spirits and the men had to deal with the rebellious ones among them, both the hostile men and the hostile spirits. Wise spirits and wise men knew the value of the hostility and anger, as horrible as it was, as tragic, as violent. On earth as it was in the skies, an invisible war raged. It was a conflict that God in His Wisdom anticipated. God in His power and glory stood above this conflict that He could have easily vanquished. But He had a plan.