christians

Black's Law Dictionary

On a small planet circling a minor star in an insignificant galaxy

Michael lay on his back starring up into the blackness of the mountain sky.  From the position of Orion he knew it was past midnight and a tap on the dial of his watch confirmed in a ghostly glow that it was closer to 2:00 am.  Beside him, his son, Joshua made a small sound, the collapsing thud of escaping air as he turned over in his sleep. But for the minute crinkling of nylon from the thick down sleeping bags, the world was silent.

His eyes were completely adjusted to the darkness and as he looked into the clear night sky, it occurred to him that he was seeing as many stars as it is possible for a human to see at one time. He remembered reading somewhere that this number was closer to six thousand rather than the, "millions of stars," poets and storytellers were so fond of claiming. Six thousand out of the billions that comprise the universe he thought, marveling at the weakness of human perception.

He and Josh were on the fourth night of a six-day hike in the Sierras. They’d driven up from Independence  to the trailhead at Onion Valley and were walking south to Mount Whitney where they’d climb the summit, on Easter Sunday. In the afternoon they'd descend to Lone Pine and hitch a ride back to their car. It had been a good trip so far, long days of easy hiking and comfortable talk. Their relationship was at that sweet spot where he, as a father, had imparted all that he was capable of to a receptive son and they were getting used to each other as friends and equals. It was a transition that had gone remarkably smoothly and they both were settling into their new roles happily.

Michael felt a newfound freedom lately. The responsibilities of parenthood were slipping behind him at the same time as money and work became less of a daily concern. He was increasingly aware of his age though, mostly in annoying confrontations with limitations that had probably been creeping up on him for years but which were suddenly inescapable. He blinked again at the stars and wrinkled his eyes in an ironic grimace, if six thousand stars was the best anyone could do, he was probably only seeing a thousand or so.

He groaned slightly at the thought, appalled at his own limitations. That idea immediately led to another, more galling yet. If he were lucky, he might live another fifty years, and in the entirety of his life he would have only experienced a minute fraction of a percentage of the span of time that represented human existence. And that figurative blink of an eye was the sum and substance of all he had to work with in constructing his life.

It seemed so insignificant, and yet it represented all that he could ever know. Somehow the immensity of the space above him was comforting, a tangible confirmation of the disconnect between human scaled events and the crushing brutal vastness of the universe. The miraculous arrogance of human intelligence was its courage in facing that gap and attempting to make any sense of it all. How can the human mind even begin to develop an intuitive feeling for the infinite?

Easter was approaching in a few days. They planned to camp at Guitar Lake on the back side of Mount Whitney the night before and race to the summit for the sunrise on Easter morning. Neither he nor Josh was religious in any meaningful sense. Vanessa had bullied them into attending a Presbyterian service at Christmas or Easter on some years, but as a family, they’d more or less ignored the topic and the practice of religion over the years. When he thought about it at all, Michael supposed that he believed in God, as the original and eternal creator of all life out of chaos.  The paradox of life itself was a miracle enough and the notion of a strict God who peered into our hearts and kept a ledger of our thoughts and deeds struck him as unlikely.

He had a single prayer to offer to God and that was the word, "thanks." Anything more seemed pretentious. He didn’t believe that anyone really talked to God.  Not the Pope, not any of the Imams, or the Rabbis or the Wiccans or whatever. He didn’t doubt their sincerity but, at best, he felt that they were talking to themselves, listening to echoes of their own minds reflecting back answers to their prayers in a comforting voice that sounded suspiciously familiar. "Thank you for this life," that just felt right.

The part that galled him most about the whole program was the arrogance implicit in laying claim to God’s voice on Earth. Without exception, their answer to the obvious question of, "How could this be," was the most maddeningly unhelpful one: "faith, you’ve just got to believe." He’d been reading a few pages of Dante’s epic poem each night before they went to bed and the notion of organized rings and levels of Hell, laid out like suburban blocks in an exclusive gated community was at once oppressive and oddly comforting. The most haunting scene of all was the very first circle of Hell, Limbo, that is reserved for those whose fate was sealed simply because they were born in the wrong time or place and so, hadn’t had the opportunity to be baptized.

"Sore grief assail’d my heart at hearing this, for well I knew suspended in that Limbo many a soul of mighty worth." 

- Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, Canto IV

Michael shook his head slowly at the thought and rubbed his eyes. How could a God who was at once so magnificent and powerful as to create this vast and beautiful universe, also be bothered to record the pettiest of human foibles with a relentless efficiency that would make an IRS auditor jealous? There were so many ways to go to Hell that Michael concluded we’d all end up there one way or the other.

And worst of all, you had to swallow the thing whole or not at all. Faith, the ultimate retort for believers. It all comes down to faith, and if you don’t have it, then you are to be pitied by the congregation, but held outside the dialog. If you don’t have the faith, then there must be a defect in your soul and, literally, God help you because we can’t.

Michael found Easter to be a spooky holiday. The juxtaposition of chocolate bunnies, plastic grass, colored eggs and the crucifixion, had always felt vaguely macabre, much worse somehow then even the grubby commercialism surrounding Christmas. The sadness and brutality of the Easter story overwhelmed him and the joy and hope that he was supposed to find in the Resurrection hinged on believing that there was a resurrection and he didn’t. If Jesus Christ was the literal son of God, and he died for our sins, and the only way into heaven was to accept him as your personal savior, then Dante was right and most of the humans who had ever, or would ever live were going straight to Hell. How could anyone actually believe that?

In the language of mathematics, Jesus would be a Singularity, an event so immense in scale that it literally affects all matter in the Universe. The Big Bang in other words. And how likely was it really, that a human being who lived for less than thirty years on this tiny dust speck of a planet on the edge of a minor galaxy in a corner of the Universe was the singularity?

Michael remembered once walking down a long spiraling ramp at the Rose Planetarium in New York.  The ramp was constructed to depict the scale of astronomical time. The very top of the ramp represented the Big Bang, about 14 billion years ago, and as you walked down, the events leading to the present day were noted along the hand railing. After the big bang, nothing at all happens for a depressingly long time, then galaxies begin to form, suns fire up and planets start their spinning orbits. In the last couple of feet, at the bottom of the ramp, life appears on Earth. In a tiny slice, the thickness of a human hair, at the bottom end of the walkway, humanity begins.

The odds against Jesus, or Muhammad, or Joseph Smith or any other religious prophet being a singularity are infinitesimally small. Consider the short lifetime of one person divided by the 14 billion years since the universe began. You get pretty much the same answer for the probability that this one life was utterly unique among the many billions of other human beings who have ever lived. It gets worse yet when you consider our tiny planet as the home town of the singularity rather than the uncountable other prospects out there in the vastness of space. These are probabilities that are orders of magnitude too small to have a name. 

It’s difficult to imagine that a singularity has occurred at all considering how essentially little has really changed about humanity throughout our history. You’d expect a huge discontinuity, a Cretaceous comet wipeout or something.  Instead, despite the Internet and Armani Suits and a few trips to the Moon,  we're still pretty much the same basic contentious territorial hominid we've always been.

Perhaps it’s true Michael thought, blinking his eyes as a shooting star streaked across the sky. If it was, he didn’t feel it, not intellectually, or spiritually. He didn’t even think that he wanted it to be true emotionally. It would seem like such a betrayal to all the people and places that would never be touched by it. Despite the continued outpouring of missionary zeal, Dante’s first circle of Hell would be pretty damned crowded by the end of time.

Joshua began to snore softly, like an irritated rebuke to Michael’s thoughts, and Michael felt his eyes growing heavy against the cool mountain air. Tomorrow they’d walk and as the sun rose on Easter morning, they’d stand on top of the mountain and share in the grandeur for a moment before starting down again.

"Thanks," Michael whispered to the stars, "Thanks God."

===================&===================

My family was stationed at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines (a heavily Catholic country) for two years in the mid-1970s. Each year as Easter approached the local television stations would air brief public service announcements reminding people what day of Holy Week it was. Today is Black Saturday the announcer would say as the screen showed a black and white drawing of (if memory serves) a hillside with a boulder blocking a cave, and a cross in the background. I was nine at the time, and this announcement always gave me the shivers. It would probably give me the shivers now, actually.

The designation of the day before Easter Sunday as "Black Saturday" appears to be a tradition within Filipino Catholicism, and various folk practices accompany it. In the morning, children leap into the air as church bells ring in hopes of growing tall. The Spanish custom of not bathing on Good Friday is widely observed, so many bathe in rivers and in the ocean on Black Saturday. During the night, dummies of Judas stuffed with firecrackers are exploded in church plazas, a tradition reminiscent of Guy Fawkes'Day in the U.K. Children are woken before midnight Mass and fed meat dishes (meat being forbidden on Good Friday) lest they become deaf.

By the way, I have to say right now that "The Exploding Judases" would make an excellent band name.

I always wonder on this day what it was like for Jesus' followers. A couple of days ago things were going great. Jesus was in the thick of things, confronting the unjust and hypocritical, stirring up the crowds in the Holy City itself. It was probably the most exciting time to be a disciple of this man since the beginning of his ministry. Then Thursday night he was suddenly arrested and dragged away. Those few who remained and followed after him heard bits and pieces of his many trials, the furious accusations, the beatings, Jesus' maddening refusal to say anything that might set him free. Then Friday morning, Jesus is put into the hands of the Romans. He is tortured to death and buried.

I have not had a close friend or family member die on me yet. My maternal grandmother passed away when I was eight, too young to really understand what had happened. I've felt grief and loss, though, so I have an inkling of what it might have been like for his friends, his students, his family. One day, he was there. The next, he was in the ground. At the end of the day the sun went down the way it did every other day, heedless of the tragedy that had occurred. They ate, they slept, they got up, and maybe for a brief moment they didn't remember he was gone; they looked over at the space where he always slept expecting him to be there, and it was empty. The gospels say that his followers rested on the Sabbath as obedient Jews should. On any other day they might have done something to take their minds off their loss, but today they could do nothing. They might have sat together in their rented room, silent, each wrapped in his own dark thoughts. Sometimes the silence would be broken by the sound of someone crying.

The hours passed. There were things to think about and duties to be performed. Tomorrow, they would have said bleakly, someone has to go to the tomb and prepare his body. Who'll go? Mary Magdalene volunteered. She's the only one named in all four gospels as one of those who went to the tomb on Easter morning. Her strength must have been something to see. Maybe she was the one who kept everyone going when all they wanted to do was lie down and die, and so she was specially remembered.

Night fell over Jerusalem. There was talk in the street about the criminal Jesus, the blasphemer who claimed to be the Son of God and was executed. Also talk about how his followers were still in the city and it was only a matter of time before they got what was coming to them. There was no future for them, no hope. At any moment the authorities could be pounding on the door.

Depression makes you exhausted. Maybe they slept like rocks tonight. Or maybe they slept fitfully, bone-weary but starting awake at every sound outside.

I think about these things on this day. They were followers of Jesus, y'see, and I'm a follower of Jesus too. Tonight, two thousand years ago, my master, my friend, my teacher and savior is dead in a cave, cold, his corpse growing stiff. Easter morning is only a few hours away, but tonight it seems like it will never come.

But the great joke is that it does. There's a surprise in store for all of us, an amazing plan that has already gone off just the way it was meant to. We still think all's been lost but the truth is that what we believed to be total defeat was really victory.

God has a weird sense of humor sometimes. You gotta love him for it.

http://www.tribo.org/history/good.html
http://www.filipinoheritage.com/religious/Black_Saturday.htm