Dispatch 002: ORTHOGONAL TO ETERNITY
Minutes pass for hours as I await the years to come. Await the war-torn desert below. Await the fertile land that bore no fruit. Await as the military aircraft banks a hard right in descent. A disquiet builds within as I sit, strapped into the red net seating, air thick with jet fuel, sweat, and nerves. The turboprops drown out the man across from me. No windows to disrupt the mind or to align my soul with the hell below. The pilot levels off long enough for my thoughts to settle into the moment before another forced hard bank in descent. We look around to see who will be sick.
The roar from the engines never ceases, the war below comes alive within the fuselage. A spiral descent into a land retracing itself in a constant Exodus. My mind moves to the people. The jihadists, Al-Qaeda, ISIS. To the people north of here, from a time in a distant past. The Assyrians.
My boots step onto the black tar of the runway. The sun overhead reminds me of the eyes of the devil, as the dust blows, giving way to the ash from which I came and to which I will return. A land that has been ravaged since the beginning, never seeking that eternal rest. Four thousand years pass as I stand in that eternal time.
The day on which I stand is but a single day, not measured in eternity, but measured for the eternity which I will embrace. What do I make of time? I remember the clay tablets of the Assyrians, how they wrote only of their commerce, their business transactions, and accounting. How "lapis lazuli was traded for 8,000 years from eastern Afghanistan to western Asia and Egypt", writes historian Eckart Frahm. Hundreds of cuneiform tablets without thoughts or ideas or declarations to their gods or to the God. As if the well-being of their bodies was deemed more important than that of their souls.
That, amid the rubble marking the Assyrian people's economic activities, the tale of a hero was found. The Epic of Gilgamesh. A hero formed from the disheartened life in a world of uncertainties disseminated about. A hero who raised the cornerstone questions of mortality, friendship, and eternity, before the concept of the infinite had come to fruition. But it was not until death that he could set aside the lost opportunities of wasted hopes in human ambition, that we understand that our fulfillment is found within the ancient rituals of God. The library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh held the tale but chose the secular.
Four thousand years have passed. Have I grown from these ancient people? Could I walk alongside them, speaking in Aramaic, clarifying the perfected state we strive for? Would I recognize the difference from today to when civilization began? The same sins are ever present. I gaze into the distance in a contemplative state, seeking to understand the constant past we fail to move on from. But as Fr. Wilfrid Stinissen writes, "time continues regardless of our own state. Though it leads nowhere, without development, without a goal, without an end." Time is.
Without eternity, living within a nihilistic perspective takes hold of the traveler, leading them to fail to realize that the thousands of years between us were fruitless. Perhaps the God that lives within recognizes these years are but a day in eternity. An infinite beyond what we can envision; the story of salvation. To see the impact of the good that I produce. But it is within those moments that are not recorded in time that our works produce fruit.
It is not that history repeats itself, but that I have failed to employ the experience afforded. Eternity judges how I am living now. Every moment in life reflects the infinite found.
I can do everything in my time, but if none of that contributed to living a richer, more genuine life, then all was in vain. All must lead to goodness, to the warmth of the light, to that eternal time that has become a continuous present. A present in which everything has been accounted for, everything has been found, all is known, and I no longer seek. A peace that rests deep within but is felt as a fleeting passing of time.
At that moment, the mortar fire from the rebels is heard, exploding to destroy any good that I held. I become the rebel seeking death on his entire lineage. Erasing all of his time for the walk through the desert to continue for all.
Still, we go beyond, employing psychological warfare, believing we are more humane than the Assyrians who flayed rulers before execution. Returning to the besieged cities, they draped their skins across the walls to serve as a warning. Conquering through destruction, ravaging, and burning all. Blinding and mutilating enemies.
For the Prophet of Nahum wrote for today, "Your shepherds are asleep, O king of Assyria, your nobles slumber. Your people are scattered on the mountains with none to gather them. There is no assuaging your hurt; your wound is grievous. All who hear the news of you clap their hands over you. For upon whom has not come your unceasing evil?"
Satisfied with the lies, I can no longer gather the energy to focus on understanding. The black and white of life drown out the gray, yet I live within that gray state, unable to break free from the lies, as my shallowness never reaches the depth of a more genuine life. For the lies of evil are touched with truths that cannot be untangled from the pull of gravity they hold.
Seeking that eternal goodness but failing to grasp beyond the finite. How could the suffering of today be an eternal joy? How happiness flees into an eternal damnation. Seeing only the now but forgoing the past, which brought me here, or the future to which I strive.
Those lies rip into the soul, disrupting the quiet, as time continues to absorb the nihilistic despair, prohibiting my vision of purpose. If time does not end, then my actions are irrelevant. It is here a notion within the soul stirs, opens to receive what cannot be heard or seen but felt within.
Time is orthogonal to eternity.
Without time, I can never enter eternity, avoiding it as the scars that cover my soul create a singularity that clouds the goodness before me. No matter how far I push that singularity back in time, I cannot remove it. How I pray those scars were healed, never to be felt, never to be remembered, so that the weeping never returns.
A restlessness sits within, scattering the fall leaves with the wind. I return to where I began with experience ingrained and my sins reconciled in the sacrament. For life is a constant rebirth, though I have been given one. Reincarnation has not been afforded.
I live, falter, and suffer toward the perfected union with God. I understand how each joy, each suffering, each passing was within Providence. I understand the lessons taught and how, without each of them, I would be floating above the trees, waiting.
