Easterly Thoughts

Christianity, the faith of God incarnated as a tortured sacrifice for the sins of humanity, seems a bizarre belief... eternal damnation and eternal paradise mixed in the hearts and lives of mortals, flawed people who sometimes wonder if they are buying salvation with their belief, with good deeds, perhaps with money in an offering plate.

It does seem odd... Why would a loving God, a being of glory and purity and joy and love, mix suffering and death and punishment in the mundane time and place of a criminal's death at a somewhat obscure backwater outpost of the Roman Empire?

Perhaps this is made strange because we are strange. ...Because we are looking at the whole thing from the wrong side of reality.

Consider this story of divine redemption from a different perspective.

Consider an existence not fueled by consuming food, of physical bodies functioning by a fight to make order out if disorder, driving our animated flesh from dissolving particles of plants and animals.

Consider an existence based on physics which are alien to us because they existed before the laws of physics which run this universe.

Consider what it may be like to live an existence that is not held to the standards of an outside perspective because there isn't any outside. There isn't (wasn't) sin, of doing wrong to others and having wrongs done to us, which is the result of individuals wanting what is not theirs, or doing what is not good for others.

Consider an existence which lies solely upon a perspective of what is, to us, an emotion. An "emotion" which is the foundation for existence itself. Consider the perspective of eternity, of a timeless forever which stretched beyond linear time, interrupted by the brief existence of our universe, which flows from the desire, the need to share the most intimate, ultimate part of ourselves: our "heart", our love.

From that perspective, the view of eternity longing to expand the embrace of Love, even to selfish beings of flesh... of, really, animals with minds, and souls which might sense a reality truer than one based on hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon.

From that perspective, Love became flesh to provide base beings, creatures who are more space, more nothing than matter (for there is far more to us that is empty than the solidity of the mass found within protons, neutrons, and electrons).

From that perspective Love became flesh as an example of pure selflessness so we might look past our own weaknesses, past our predilection to wanting what we want when we want it.

For Eternity to clothe itself (Himself) in base, vaporific matter, and to suffer the worst we can do, is the personification of Eternity in a fashion we might, just might, be able to understand.

Perhaps the events of Easter, of God made flesh, of that flesh suffering and dying, and God demonstrating He can overcome the simplistic nature of our universe's physical laws, isn't so strange from the perspective of Eternity.