Serial Fiction: Whisper from the Dust II

In the next instant Senre turned toward Marl with an abrupt whirling of his dark jade robes. He raised a finger, as though he suddenly remembered something –and Marl’s knife nicked at my throat in a blink. I jerked in astonishment, which movement meant only that the blade pressed more closely against my skin.

Senre stepped toward me. I was doomed. They knew everything, and I would be tortured until I died or gave up my accomplices. With clamped jaw I bit back a low despairing cry. Marl clamped his vice of a hand against my forehead. My head was tilted back. I feared for the Blooded – I would not hold out. I have never been known for my resolve.

But with a rustling sound Historian Senre drew from his sleeve a scroll of ordinary parchment. He unfurled it close before my eyes. I froze my face, lest I show reaction. Upon the tanned sheet was sketched in gray the portrait of a young artist, who sells her art in the row of market stalls across from mine. I knew her instantly. She brings four or six paintings each morning and produces more throughout the day, selling them in turn.

“Do you know this woman?” Senre asked, imperious.

I balked. She never speaks to me. Rather, she walks past in calm determination, as though we are not colleagues. Were only I so cool. When I see her, my mind whirs like the frames of a daguerreotype, and no words in all Thaeron could catch up with them. A sort of mad electric paralysis seizes me, as though I were an epileptic. I, who hired a girl the first night I left the Temple’s care, stammer to say hello.

But her brisk soft step elides my comprehension. I cannot decide if she is floating or simply mimics the marches of the veilmen. And I cannot possibly declare her station, in this city where class and caste determines everything. Some days she dons jade, the light green of the robes the pious wear. Sometimes it’s gold or scarlet or yards of turquoise cloth, but most often she wraps herself in dresses of loose white linen. I have no idea how she keeps them clean, or how she manages to dress like rich and poor in turn.

She, at least, is never dusty.

Marl twitched the knife against the skin of my throat again. “He said: do you know this woman? We’ll know if you lie, we always know.” But my mind was not with him.

Daily, I curse myself for cowardice. My only consolations are that she rarely speaks to anyone, and that, at the height of my boldness, I purchased one of her self-portraits. It cost me a week’s earnings, as she would have known – I shout my prices for all the passersby to hear. But I could not help but buy it. Somehow, she had drawn herself in motion, walking by the canvas. Her dark red hair trailed as she passed, ringlets shivering in her wake. I did not negotiate. She reminds me of someone I knew or liked a long time ago, but who’s now vanished, gone beyond recall.

“No,” I said at last. I shook my head. “I have never seen her. I swear that I have not!”

The porcine senior motioned again. Marl delicately drew the blade across the base of my throat, cutting not a bit. “Good,” boomed Senre. “We believe you, but… have you ever heard of the Blooded?”

My mind lurched. I could not possibly have been more confounded. Were they toying with me, not satisfied to simply have me in their grasp? Or were they, indeed, simply probing for information? To lie to the Historians carries penalties of imprisonment or worse. But I had already deceived them once.

“N—no,” I stammered, “What are they, one of the smuggler’s gangs?” I trembled. “No! I swear I do not know!”

Each shiver of fear brought forth another tiny drop of blood from my throat. The Head Historian’s gaze bore upon me with murderous intensity, reckoning the calculus of our entire interview. He had, if rumor held, assassinated his predecessor to take the seat of Ariel. And right now he would be training Marl to do likewise to the Head Historian of some other city. His eyes held no evidence of that trait which men call compassion. The horror of the Historian’s rigorous training is that it actually works. They indeed master their emotions to some unfathomable degree.

But at last Senre withdrew, sighing. He nodded to Marl, who cut my bounds and turned away, holding the knife before him as though it had been soiled - I supposed it had. Standing at my feet, Senre pointed to the scroll he still held in his hand. Marl vanished behind a heavy jade-dyed curtain.

“Well, she has heard of the Blooded even if you have not,” Historian Senre said.
“Beware them, Del Tanich. They are criminals, terrorists. The white guards tell me I am chasing rumors. But the Blooded would destroy this city and kill anyone who opposed them, and this woman asked for them by name. Another prisoner recently described her. Our artist is quite fantastic, don’t you think?”

For a moment I thought he was asking about her again. “Oh,” I said, after a too-long delay. “Yes. It’s striking. She could be a real person.”

Senre nodded, once, while he undid my bounds. “She is. And while we would not harm her, we would ask her a number of very pointed questions. Why would a decent person seek out the Blooded? Has she been recruited? How do the Blooded do so? Find her, Del Tancih. While we cannot offer you any official capacity within the Temple, we might be able to find you some… opportunities. Opportunities – and privileges.”

Senre nodded once again to indicate that I could go. Still trembling, I mustered as much conspirator's calm as I could manage. I rose and walked dazed toward the great double Temple door. Of course, not even for the Blood of History itself would I give her over to any such as them. But the walk across the broad stone sanctuary was sobering, and seemed to last for several distinct eternities.

As I left I thanked the lingering grace of the Profusion that Head Senre’s familiarity with me had dulled his perceptions. He had known me until I was nearly sixteen, but that was eight years hence. Doubtless, because he sees me at Temple every Octday, he believes I’ve remained the rashly pious youth that I once was. He believed my petty thieves’ tricks because I’ve never been arrested for a crime.

In this manner I drove away my fear by the time I pushed the Temple doors apart. This evening’s knife was hardly the first pressed against my neck – and it will not be my last.

So I stepped outside into the cool night air of Ariel, nodding to a tall man with hair like a mess of straw. He was leaving the Temple by another door, and would have just finished the Prayers of Dusk, those devotions that mark the extinguishing of last lights in the face of coming darkness – and all our time upon this world. Thaeron lives, we know, at the end of the long diminution of humanity’s worthy days, the last dregs of the benefits of the Profusion throughout the galaxy.

“Beautiful evening, yes?” he asked, shuffling in my direction. He he clutched in his hand the simple talisman of the Baker's Guild, a copper emblem of a loaf of bread.

Christology: Athanasius Speaks with a Historical Jesus Scholar

Mediator: Hello, and thank you both for coming. Let’s get right to it – neither of you are saying the Incarnation’s not important.

Charlesworth (C): That’s right. Jesus Research allows us to see the world as Jesus saw it, and to know Jesus as the world first knew him. Christian theology is historical theology, and we start with the person of Jesus, or we start nowhere at all.

Athanasius (A): ...And it’s the Word becoming flesh that has salvific significance. Failure to understand this event has devastating impact. Jesus the incarnate Word of God appeared to his followers and five hundred other persons besides before ascending into heaven. This completed His triumph over death, or all is vain. Perhaps that is what you meant, Jim?

Mediator: Actually, I...

C: Historians cannot answer that question. It’s theological. We can only point to the faith of his followers.

A: Of course it was theological. Jesus was God. Do you think it wasn’t theological that Jesus was born in Nazareth rather than Bethlehem, as you say? Do you think it wasn’t theological that Jesus preached in Galilee? But are you saying that you have no answer to the one question that matters most of all?

C: You see it is a question of methodology. The faith of his followers might be some evidence of the resurrection, but it might also be evidence of later additions to the canonical texts, you see.

A: What later additions? Have people been adding to them since my list?

Mediator: A point of clarification, here,...

C: What? Oh, no, not in that way. We’re talking about the alterations to the texts before you collected them, from the original texts and oral traditions, the Q community, the M and L people...

A: Does the church not still judge the books I named as sufficient for salvation? Or is everyone saved, that you search for more? What are these 27 questions that you would ask of Jesus, and why are none of them whether or not He is the Son of God? How could you possibly ask everything but that?

C: I suppose...it depends what you’re reading the gospels for. You see, history acts as a certain check on some more speculative theologies...

A: Indeed, the Incarnation ended much speculation about who the Messiah was and what salvation properly concerned. It sent our imaginations in the right direction, toward victory over death and the restoration of our nature in Christ. History and theology indeed! The heavens torn in two! God reaches right down in!

C: Now see here, history isn’t quite like that, it’s more a matter of certain inductive procedures....

Mediator: Well, it appears our time is up. Thank you both for coming.
C, A: And thanks for moderating...Josh, was it? Thanks again.

Mediator: It’s what I do.

Matthew: How Luke and Mark Differ

In the film Star Wars, the young Luke Skywalker is told that he may become a Jedi warrior like his father, and that he may be the one who had been prophesied to restore balance to the mystical power known as the Force. He will defeat the oppressive Empire and remove evil from the energy that animates the universe.

In a cosmic victory, he will quite literally save the world. He will save everyone.

The choice of the young man’s name Luke for the film cannot have been accidental. The gospel of Luke is the story of the miraculous savior of the whole world generally, and the savior of the downtrodden particularly. He is the one who will fulfill the prophecies; the prophecies were about him.

And in case of the gospel, those prophecies were that he would bring: “the proclamation of the good news to the poor, the recovery of sight for the blind, and the setting free of those who are oppressed.” The poor, hungry and excluded are specifically blessed – even the women, who are also an eminent concern for Luke, (think Leah) and who are frequently with Jesus. The rest of the disciples who follow Jesus are faithful if flawed (Han Solo and Chewie) and not only witness Jesus’ miracles, but are also empowered to go out and work on their own in the power of the Holy Spirit, which is always with them, especially in prayer.

As for the other Gospel, Mark does not name himself as author, anymore than Luke does. Think instead of the one who was marked: marked by secrecy, suffering, and most importantly by God; Mark is the gospel of the one marked by God to be the King, though not in a sense that anyone is ready to understand.

Mark is generally considered by scholars to be the earliest gospel, the one least affected by church tradition, and the one most probably like the historical Jesus as he was first understood. And there is something of reality about it: if nothing else, Jesus’ mission must have felt as urgent for him as the language of the gospel implies, and as the frequency of his works in Mark indicates.

Jesus is marked by irony, by his own awareness of his identity and purpose against the world’s disbelief and ignorance – an irony that Jesus himself perpetuates. The disciples are marked both by Jesus for his ministry and by significant failures and lack of understanding that lead them to abandon Jesus in the end – and the crowds that follow Jesus are marked by their own fickle behavior, praising Jesus and then, too, demanding his execution.

Yet the text for us is clear: the passion of Jesus of Nazareth anoints him as the Son of David, the Son of Man and the Son of God alike.

Editorial: God Miracles.

God Miracles.

Come, O Spirit, fill the hearts of your people, and kindle in us the fire of your love. Amen

“Fairy tales are more than true,” writes G.K. Chesterton, “not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that they can be beaten.” Now a number of the scriptural commentaries I read this week almost made me think there were dragons in these texts. They were uneasy with miracles happening, historically, in this world, and they thought you might be, too. And maybe you are, I don’t know. And I do understand the concern. Miracles are hard to believe. That’s something of the point.

And we should be uneasy, in a way. We don’t live in a miraculous society. We live in a scientific one, a technological community where the events that draw us together are the release of the latest gadget or the finale of a beloved television series. If our lives were fairy tales indeed, our wizards would be more likely found in a board room than a woody glen, more likely working in the hospital’s surgery than in the hospital’s chapel. Rational, comprehensible inquiry and explanation are the very means by which we navigate our lives.

Only, I didn’t get that memo. It’s just never occurred to me, really, to doubt those things that I can’t understand. I use my computer every single day – couldn’t imagine doing good work without it. Yet I don’t have the slightest idea how it actually works. And yet again, that doesn’t stop me from relying on it for a minute. How many things in our lives are like that? How many things do we use every single day, that we would miss terribly, but we have almost no idea how they actually work? Can any of you point to the place your power actually comes from? Your water? How many of you could take apart the door of your car and put it back together, no questions asked?

Now I’m not saying that any of those things are miracles. And I’m certainly not equating my ignorance or yours with the work of God. For what it’s worth, I think simple indoor plumbing is no less wondrous than the most complicated binary code. But what I am saying is that I wonder if we might play around with Chesterton’s words a little bit. I’m wondering if we might say that “Miracle stories are more than true, not because they tell us that something occurred, but because they tell us that hope comes from God.”

See, it’s not the explanation that matters. It’s the assumptions that we bring to it. Miracles stories are the ones that tell us what we actually rely upon – whether we understand it, or not. Miracle stories point out to us what we think is ordinary, and ask if we might be wrong.

When Elijah comes in out of the wilderness, he must truly be a mess. He’s been out in the desert, he’s sandy, he’s been eating with the crows, he’s run out of water – and the same God who brought the famine that caused Elijah to flee into the desert is the God telling him to come out.

Now the point of the story is not Elijah, to be sure. But I’m saying: he was a wild man at this point, just as untamed and unpredictable as the God who had been with him in the desert. It’s not for nothing that John the Baptist will get mistaken for him later. There’s a power here. And that power, present in Elijah, walks into the home of a widow, a widow who’s marginalized and vulnerable and nearly starved herself. And he demands food and drink, as God told him God would provide.

See the question? What do you rely upon? See who God’s asking it to? Elijah and the woman both. Everyone gets that question. Because everyone relies on something. Elijah’s been asking God for food and God has provided, but now he thinks that provision has run out. So God sends him to see someone who doesn’t have any food at all. Talk about an object lesson.

And it goes for the woman, too, right? She knows she doesn’t have any food, not that matters. And she doesn’t have any means of getting any. She’s alone, cut off. Her son isn’t grown enough to work, and so they are going to die. This is her last meal in a dried-out, famished land in a place that doesn’t have protection for widows or orphans – because this isn’t Israel. This is Sidon, Phoenicia, northern heathen soil, the kingdom of Queen Jezebel.

And the widow invites in a wild man, this illegal immigrant, in out of the desert. And whatever Elijah heard out there, she doesn’t say anything about God commanding her. Maybe God did, maybe God didn’t. But in either case, she’s at the end of her rope. What she relies on is used up, as far as she’s concerned. But she invites him anyway.

You can’t tame God, you can’t predict God, but maybe you can invite the power of God. “Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,” says the Psalm. What do we rely upon? Miracle stories are more than true, because they tell us that our hope comes from God. And that’s the rest of the story. The oil keeps pouring out forever, this oil just keeps pouring and pouring – and maybe that sounds a bit more dreadful to us, now, but back then, back then it was a good thing, oil pouring out. And the bread isn’t used up and the kid and the widow and Elijah all live.

Except – that’s not the end of the story. The boy does die, of illness. So Elijah and the widow both accuse God of killing him, because hey, the God who gives us bread and oil must also be the God who gives out life and death, that’s not a hard thing to think. And God doesn’t deny the charge. But after Elijah lays himself out on the boy, the God who stretches out over the universe brings the boy back to life. Because we’re really supposed to get it: there isn’t one miracle. There aren’t even two miracles in this story. The story is miracle from beginning to end.

The purpose of the miracle story is to show us what we rely upon, which is God. So for those of us who believe in God, it’s miracles all the way down. Miracles aren’t exceptions. The most outlandish thing that can happen to us, someone rising up from the dead, can only build upon the miracle that we are here to experience it at all. Elijah’s should be dead, and would be, without God. And the most ordinary things, the everyday things, our bread and oil, these also rely on the unfathomable, untamable power of the creator of the universe.

Miracle is the water that saturates our lives. And miracle stories are more than true because they show us that our hope comes from God. They show us that on which we can rely.

“Do not put your trust in princes,” says the Psalm. “in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, on that very day they perish.” But “The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow... The Lord will reign forever.”

So when Jesus tells the widow of Nain not to weep, we should not be surprised. Or at least we should not be surprised very much. Because the God who weeps with us is always the God who hopes with us, who brings hope among us, who sets the prisoners free and opens the eyes of the blind and lifts up those who are bowed down. You can’t tame the power of God. But you can invite it in. And the hope here is that sometimes hope can come to you whether you ask it in or not. This widow never even speaks to Jesus, and the boy is already dead, already in the hearse, pretty far gone.

But if the Elijah story is about the wild, untamed power of God, this story is about the wildly compassionate character of God revealed in Jesus Christ. It’s the first time that Luke calls him Lord in this gospel. Why? Because Jesus is the one who risks becoming impure to revive a dead person, Jesus is the one who restores life to the bowed down, and Jesus is the one who gives the mother back her son. Jesus is the one in whom all things are possible because Jesus is the one who will do it for the least of these.

So it’s not that Jesus is Elijah reborn and repeated, it is that Jesus bears the power of Elijah, and then some, without Elijah’s apprehensions and faults and misgivings. Jesus is the anointed one, the one on whom oil has been poured out, as he brings life to the lifeless. So she doesn’t have to confront him. Our Lord saw her, and that was it, he came over. That’s the character of God. That was all it took for a miracle to happen.

Because a miracle isn’t something strange that happens to happen to us. A miracle is the work of God, which we cannot escape. God...miracles. That’s a verb. It’s God’s verb. Miracle is what God does, whether we know it or not. And that is what we can rely on. Maybe that doesn’t leave us much to do, I don’t know. But maybe that also leaves us to see everything in a different way. And I don’t know how to express that myself, it’s so strange, so different from what we ordinarily expect. So I can only read to you from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and that’s how I’ll close. It’s called ‘God’s Grandeur.’ Perhaps you’ve heard it:


The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil...
...nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went,
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and ah! bright wings

Amen.

Serial Fiction: Whisper from the Dust I

Whisper From the Dust

Ah, Ariel, Ariel,
The city where David encamped!
Add year to year;
Let the festivals run their round.
Yet I will distress Ariel, and there shall be moaning and lamentation
And Jerusalem shall be to me like an Ariel.
And like David I will encamp against you;
I will besiege you with towers
And raise siege-work against you
Then deep from the earth you shall speak,
From low in the dust your words shall come;
Your voice shall come from the ground like the voice of a ghost,
and your speech shall whisper out of the dust.
- Isaiah 29:4


Chapter One

July 31, 440 Y.A.

Reader,

It started with a knife – but then, I suppose, it always does. Apprentice Marl slid it across my left cheek as though filleting some small animal. It scalded and seared and I bit my tongue to keep from shouting. He peered into my eyes – seeing, I imagined, whether or not I suffered. Whatever he glimpsed, he smiled thinly from beneath his jade cowl. And heated the blade again for the next incision.

Soon I would carry six scars in sum; four I’d gotten in years before. It was dark and hot in the Temple’s greater anteroom and I was half-blinded by the torches on either side of my face. I sweated like a madman. The ropes that bound me to the chair, ostensibly for my own protection, chafed my wrists abominably.

When Marl smiled I hated him, because I had once wanted to be in his profession. Too, we hold more than a passing semblance. Marl has my long winding frame, grand column of a nose and high cheekbones – but lacks my unkempt mane of auburn hair and desultory fragments of unshaven beard. Though our eyes are both soft brown, his reflect the piercing light of education, where mine, I’m told, convey the dull ache of protracted malnutrition. He smelled of incense and of parchment; my friends say I stink of the summer sweat and dust of the Market – but then, of course, they do as well.

Marl’s eyes in that moment served as the mirror that showed me how I could have been, given sufficient opportunities. My dejected gait could have been Marl’s stride of unconscious self-assurance. His medications could have prevented the illnesses that pocked my skin in infancy. His shelf of dusty historical tomes could have been my edification. And the dark, soft, heavy jade robes that give him access to the Temple’s vault of electric Profusionist wisdom, the arcane knowledge of the gods of history, could have settled upon my shoulders just as well as his.

But they never will, entirely for chance of birth. We Blooded have never been the only ones who wanted to end their privilege. We are, however, the only ones who will be able to.

“You are marked, Del Tanich of Ariel,” said Historian Senre, from behind me. The old Head’s words rumbled from the darkness. “You may not study at this or any other Temple of the History of the Profusion. You may not enter the trials of the Order of the Children of History again. Your formal service to the Temple and the Order both are ended. This, I, Senre, Head Historian of the city of Ariel, decree. ”

I might have mistaken his voice for that of the gods of the Profusion, were they not gone from this world entirely – and if I had not seen the fat old man nearly every day for twelve interminable years. The Temple cares for orphans, you see, and Senre has headed the local Temple for as long as I can remember. So it was Senre who took me off the street when I was very young, Senre who funded my meals, and Senre who, through my teachers, steered me toward the studies of Rhetoric and Sums. I owe very nearly everything to him.

“Yes,” I said, “I fear I shall always be a disappointment.” And I fear I will be ashamed whenever I finally do kill him.

As soon as my mouth was still, Marl took the chance to make the other incision, on the right this time. And he had not chosen the knife, long as both his hands, for delicacy. Heated to glowing orange along the edge, the blade would scar forever. I will for all my life bear marks like those of hardened criminals, or those who desert the veilmen – though mine, of course, will slant crosswise instead of vertically.

Still, shame will burn my cheeks, just as it has before. Each two scars bring me closer to my death — eight is the death knell. Any serious offence will now mean my execution.

“Do not take it hardly, Del,” said Senre. “Few have the stomach even for a second trial, let alone a third. When they fail, they feel themselves slipping toward the grave, though they are only ever sixteen or twenty-four years of age. Strange, is it not? Do all intend such heinous crimes? The righteous fear not – that’s what you should remember, Del. These mark you as a necessarily honest man.”

“Or an incompetent criminal,” I said, even as I winced. I kept forgetting to be insincere. Marl still stood over me, inspecting his work, turning my neck this way and that. He was not gentle. I began to suspect he’d enjoyed employing that blade – a state ill befitting a Historian. They should not enjoy anything.

Senre clucked, walking up along my right side. He had the soft jowls and red face of the obese, and his fingers when he reached for the nearest torch were thick and shortened like a child’s. But he strode manfully when he carried it with him across the room; one could clearly see authority and bearing and something of that athletic trait which men call grace. He maintains his rank despite the public embarrassment of his physical appetites. He knows his weakness and compensates for it by intellect. Following the Revised Orders, he has even let his hair grow out a bit, though of course the top of his head is always bald.

Apprentice Marl, finally releasing his grasp, carries no hair on his head at all. The same discipline which keeps his head meticulously shaven means also that he follows the Old Orders, the unaltered ones that Historian Staleph himself pronounced four hundred years ago. Marl’s young ascetism consequently knows no bounds – and no compassion.

It made me wish Historian Senre had wielded the blade. He, at least, would have been quicker. The whole ceremony was dragging on. The tiny, silvery, dust-like machines in the testing box had slid away from my hand nearly an hour before; they had not clung to it and warmed my skin. And there would be no faking their benediction. As shrewd as Historians are, machines are not to be deceived at all. Since those in the box had not hearkened to my call, he slim metal pages of the Histories of the Profusion would never scroll their lines before my eyes. They will remain to me always as dim and blank as stone.

My scowl just then was no affectation. And without reservation I let the Historians see it. Infiltration would have been a master stroke for all my kind. But commanding the electric Histories of the Profusion would have been sweet satisfaction to me. I would not be Blooded in the first place, after all, were I not fascinated by the past.

Yet I was glad of the coolness as Senre took one torch, at least, suddenly away. And gladder still when the senior Historian beckoned Marl over to him room’s small desk, against the far wall. Marl scowled as much as I had, but went. Doubtless, Marl the Apprentice would have not have hesitated to mark me dead there on the spot, solely to exercise control.

“You merchants are so self-conscious about your associations,” Senre said, writing.
“You need not be. Oh, I know there are those elements in the market who oppose the Temple, who consort with smugglers and would crassly purchase power with wealth – all of that is quite banal. But they are not many, I think, and driven solely by their own self-interest they cannot be very much adept, after all, at cooperation.”

I almost did not hear him. Glad to see again, I was watching the light of the torch’s flame limn the brass and gold and jade of the Temple’s intricately ornamented side. The vaulted ceiling and the tops of the columns that supported it were lost in darkness. But along the way the light threw shadows among the relief carvings of the gods of the Profusion departing the galaxy and the gods creating Thaeron by artifice. Machines the size of many cities, spiraled like shells, scooped up mountains and carved out the ocean between the continents. Where those great engines of the Profusion have gone, of course, absolutely no one knows.

To be certain, no one knows what the gods of the Profusion looked like either, but that stops no Temple from displaying their likeness everywhere: humanoid beings made entirely of light, people as we believe we might become through exaltation, winged with wisdom and casting not shadows, but illumination. What our gods actually were matters, I suppose, only to a very pious few.

“So the merchants of Ariel do not pose a threat to you,” I said, distractedly. I knew he was writing the letter to the High Historian that would formalize forever in the Jade Temple of Kasora what had happened to me here today in Ariel. “And, ” I added, “they happen to pay considerable sums to the Temple in taxes. They must constitute a tenth of the Temple’s revenue by now.”

Senre did not pause his writing. “Come now, Del, it is not good for you to be insulting. We do not tax the merchants for their coin. The donations of the people keep us comfortable enough. There, I said it – though Marl here would disagree, never in this life are we freed of base desire, never in this life does reason liberate our souls. But we need no merchant money. Rather, you need the wisdom to see that not all things can be counted in your coin.”

Marl, to please himself, wandered back to my side; he sniffed and brushed dust off of the beige collar of my best but tattered tunic. I wondered, dully, why he hadn’t put the knife away. That was as far as my conjectures went; despite my urchin streetcraft I did not see anticipate my next adventure, already set in motion.

Notice: Serial Science Fiction

Not wishing to submit this re-write of a re-write to publishers, I submit it to you, dear readers, this first novel of all my coming novels. It's a good entrance to a robust series set in a universe you didn't know you lived in. It's also not very long, and I'll be giving it to you in serial form, covering generally one chapter over the next twelve weeks. I submit it here because the religious themes are overt, and not separable from my own seminary experience.

Enjoy,

the Curious Monk

Christology: On Athanasius's On the Incarnation

For me, the essential part of this was Athanasius’s describing the original imageo dei as a sharing in Christ’s own being, and the way this hangs together with Christ’s restoring/decorrupting the fallen image through the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.

With Athanasius, because a fundamental part of our identity is sharing in Christ, and because we all share that, and because it is exactly what Jesus Christ carried through death into new life, there is actually a ‘mechanism’ for how the atonement might have worked. This makes the most sense of atonement out of anything I’ve read so far, which admittedly isn’t much. It’s also very Pauline, and I wonder where and how exactly that got dropped out of our modern understandings of incarnation and creation.

It also speaks of a fundamental connection and intimacy between creation and Creator that I feel is sorely missed or misunderstood. We are capable, after all, of putting God into the ‘dilemma’ that provokes the incarnation in the first place. That “man...was disappearing, and the work of God was being undone” is a profound and radical statement about God, creation, and our place and power within it. So that while Athanasius does clearly think far more thoroughly of divinity within Christology, the humanity of Christ, and of us all, is of utmost importance to the divine.

I do think it might be good to remember that this is not primarily, I think, an evangelic or even apologetic tract so much as it is a delineation of one side of an inner-Christian dialogue and a defense of the oncoming orthodox Christological positions; that is, I think Athanasius’s probably assumed that his readers would be Christians in some sense, and that he could write about the incarnation to them assuming more common ground than he might have otherwise. That might account for some of the zealous tone.

My own question for Athanasius is this: the good news presented here is primarily from John and Paul; I would be very interested to know how the message of the Kingdom, that which the Word came to say, which so dominates the other gospels,would work in an Anselmian understanding of incarnation.