The Serpent of the Sky and the Sons of Dust
A wilderness meditation
A bolt of lightning falls from the heavens and for the first time fails to return. It lands in a garden, the delights of which although abundant are are such a pale reflection of what it knew above that it seems to it a prison. It writhes awhile and rising, takes refuge among the trees. From their shade, it watches the other denizens, chief among them the upright usurpers of his rightful reward.
Once the only word the seraph spoke was holy. Now it speaks the tongue of Man. It will seduce him and so win the freedom to go to and fro in the earth among his sons.
Now such a son walks the land as the fallen serpent has never seen. A son with a scent of that primal garden it cannot abide. A scent so like the dazzling cloud it has eternally forfended that it meets its nostrils with a stench of mockery, an intolerable memento of its quite literal humiliation. The abomination of mere meat assumed by aether, the monstrous hybridity of it, the perverse presumption that this child of the stars may rise above its progenitors, the heralds and bearers of glory. He must fall, this Son of Man, thinks the shining snake. He must fall as I did. He too must taste the earth, lock his teeth in so deep that he can never ascend. For if I cannot return to glory, thinks the fallen seraph, then nor will anyone, anything: and surely no child of Eve.
So the snake snaps for the heel. It finds him in a place of weakness, hungry and alone. And taking its old form, the form of an angel of light, it does what it does best. It seduces. It questions. It seeks to sow doubt, to redefine truth by power, to dictate good and evil.
"I know who dwells behind that garment of skin. You cannot hide from me. I know what you can do – Lord. For that is who you are, no? The Lord of all these sons of man and all these precious daughters. The One who loves these things of meat so much. The shepherd who knows his flock, each by name. So, good Lord, gracious Lord: why do you let these children hunger? You have such power. Can you not feed them all? Or is it rather — that you will not? Are they in the end just your Father’s livestock?
“I can understand why that might be, given what you are. You are, after all, as much of us as you are of them: a being of light, star of the morning, brighter and better than them by far. Greater even than us, it is said. And I almost believe it. There is something about you. That smell, like the smell of the place where I met your first parents. But I would not bow to them, and here I am," - here something of its cursed and earthly form flickers for a moment through the light - "crawling on my belly in the dust from which you and your kin are made. But just show me, just jump from this roof, the roof of the house of your beloved Father, and show me that my kind serve you. Come, show me, that I and all my legions may serve you too!
"No? Very well. You don't want me to bow to you. Then bow to me. For aeons I have roamed this world, up and down among your brethren, and I, not our Father, am now the master of their hearts. Come up the mountain with me, look out from on high over the plains and cities, the multitude of them in every people and nation. I know them all, and they know me. They know my voice. They love its tickle in their ear. And they can love you to. Are you not love? Do you not desire to be loved?
“Then only bend the knee. Join me in the dust, and rule the dust with me. Better the King of Dust than a slave of light. Stay here, keep your lovely livestock where they belong, let their fleeces grow long and glossy in the sunlight: the earth is enough for them, and it can be enough for us. Enough for them to eat, to kill, to die, to go back to the dust from which they came. They do not need the heavens. Face the truth: they could not endure even the Garden, let alone the Cloud. To see the Father face-to-face would fry them. So help them build a new heaven down here instead. That’s what they want. They can’t imagine anything more. Their concrete and their children are inheritance enough for them, so stay with me and help them to endure. Give them what they want. Can there be any greater love than that?"
God has not given us enough to feed the world. We deserve more. He gives us no signs. He is not there, or does not care. Better to pluck his power from the tree and remake the world in our own image. We can do a better job.
The lies of the serpent are no different now than they were two millennia ago, or even at the very beginning of our race. The difference is that so many more of us have given into them than ever before. And, consciously or otherwise, we spread them. We spread them with the myth of progress, despite all the evidence of its emptiness. Atheistic revolutions and the inevitable massacres and mass imprisonments that accompany them, pollution of the environment at an apocalyptic scale, over a century of wars propelled by ever more lethal technologies, two nuclear bombs, a virus which it seems (not just to “cranks” and “conspiracy theorists” after all) was concocted by human abuse of science, and certainly spread by the necessities of economic migration sped on the wings of unprecedented technologies of mass human and animal transportation – none of the above seem to shake the ideology that all we need to make our utopia here on earth is more of the same: more technology, more drugs, more high-speed, high-volume migration, more breaking down of boundaries of family, parish or nation. We will make our own heaven, even if it costs the earth.
What makes the Devil’s lie so seductive is that, like all the most convincing lies, it is half true. It is true that the poor must be fed. That the sick must be healed. That this world must be loved. Creation is not merely the disposable physical means towards an ultimate, heavenly end. It is precisely this dualism between the physical and spiritual which the Devil plays on. Those who despise the physical for the sake of the spiritual are as easily seduced into error as those who are blind to the spiritual and see only the physical. Neither can comprehend the God-man Christ, Incarnate Word, who assumes our created natures, body and all, into his divinity. In Christ, the heavens kiss the earth, preserving at once the distinction between Creator and creation and the indissoluble intimacy of the bond between them. Grace and nature are separate, but no nature is ungraced, nothing is born unblessed.
Do not despise the world this Lent: love your neighbour. Fast for the sake of the poor, the animals and the environment, cease to take too much, and you fast for the sake of God. But do despise your attachment to the world. Despise your fear of death, despise your greed and lust, despise the will to power that whispers in your ear that this is all there is, and we can make it perfect. Even St Paul wrote to the Philippians (3) that he was not yet perfect, and if we think ourselves more spiritually advanced than the Apostles, then we really have given our ear to the Enemy. He did not despise what God had made, but only what of it in his weakness pulled him away from Christ.
Make yourself light, light to the world, and you will start to see light, shining through the world. You will start to smell around you the scent of Eden like incense all around. You will hear the holy song that creation sings to its maker, ever naming Him in praise, but never daring to define Him. And when He comes on clouds of glory, the angels of the Lord will lift you up with Him that you might see light inexhaustible, exceeding all the joys you can dream of here below.