Way Back in The Long Ago
ONE:
Way back in the long ago, the maker spoke, and light exploded across the darkness. Energy radiated across the nothing.
Time and space and order appeared from the nothing of the long ago.
Bits of energy shot like shrapnel from a bomb into the grid that was created by the ordering of the nothing. Bits of energy bonded with other bits to become great lumps that went spinning across the grid.
Their spinning caused these lumps to become spherical.
Some of the spheres were made of gasses; ice giants and dwarfs, gas giants and dwarfs, and suns of every size and temperature were created by the energy within them.
Others of those spheres became great rocks.
Oxygen bonded to hydrogen so that water splashed in the hollows of those rocks.
The maker smiled.
Algae and moss and grass and trees emerged, and the maker smiled again.
Winged creatures darted through the air and swimming creatures darted through the sea, and the maker smiled again.
And then creatures appeared on the rock itself. Creatures appeared on the land.
TWO:
The maker looked at us and decided to make us into little makers with the power to choose whatever we would choose. We were given the authority to say “yes,” and the authority to say “no,” as we stared into the eyes of the maker.
Our maker gave us the freedom to be guided by our choices, rather than remain the captives of our instincts.
The maker is not held captive by time and space. The maker created time and space.
It is only we – you and me – who measure time and space.
Seven billion of us are crammed onto a rock that circles an 11,000-degree fireball as it shoots through a limitless vacuum at 52 times the speed of a rifle bullet.
We are passengers on a world spinning out of control.
Having wrongly been taught that the maker is in control, we blame the maker for every sadness.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.1
1 (Arthur C. Clarke)
THREE:
You are the motherfather of what you say. Your word goes out from you. It reveals you.
This is because you are an echo of the maker.
Way back in the long ago, the maker spoke worlds into existence.
We can do it, too.
We speak worlds into existence every time we tell a story.
People tell stories with words and music and photographs and paintings and sculptures and drawings and cartoons and movies and every type of social media.
You create worlds in the hearts and minds of the people into whose lives you speak.
Into whose lives are you speaking?
Who are you allowing to speak into your life?
Let us return now to that day in the long ago,
when the maker gave us the freedom to be
guided by our choices rather than remain
the captives of our instincts.
FOUR:
Way back in the long ago, a man killed another man with a rock.
The dead man’s name was Austral.
Austral’s brother-man killed him with a rock just as a person might kill an animal with a rock.
Animals were everywhere and rocks were everywhere. Killing animals was easy. The hard part was biting through the fur, the feathers, and the tough skin to get to the meat inside.
# # # #
On a different day in the long ago, a snake raised its head to show a man its fangs. The man threw a rock onto the head of the snake. That man’s name was Habilis.
A rockflake split off from the rock as it crushed the snake on the rocks below.
The rockflake was smaller than the hand of Habilis.
When Habilis picked up the rockflake, it sliced his finger.
He looked at his finger, then he looked at the flake.
Grasping the flat sides of the rockflake between his thumb and bloody finger, Habilis sliced open the snake, pulled the skin away from the meat, then flung the entrails to some birds that had been watching from a distance.
When Habilis returned to the group with the snakeskin tied around his forehead and the sharp rockflake held between his bloody fingers, the people treated him with respect.
FIVE:
In the not-so-very long ago – only about three-and-a-half millennia behind us – the maker chose a man with whom to make a contract.
The maker remembered giving the littlemakers the rock they lived upon.
He remembered giving them the authority to rule their rock however they chose.2
When the littlemakers made bad choices, the maker was trapped on the outside, looking in.
The maker had a plan, but it required a partner who had been born on the rock.
If the maker’s manpartner fulfilled his end of the contract, the maker would be free to rescue all the littlemakers from their rock that was spinning out of control.
There were a thousand ways the maker’s plan could go wrong.
The manpartner chosen by the maker was Aba Gvoha.
The maker said to him, “I will give you what you need from me, if you will give me what I need from you.”
Aba Gvoha agreed, then he sealed the contract by slicing himself with a rockflake in the last place that a man would ever want to be sliced.
Or so he thought at the time.
For in the years to come, the maker would ask Aba Gvoha to make a cut that would plunge his personal world into pitchblack darkness.
2 [list of references]
SIX:
Aba Gvoha was old, and his wife was old. So he said to the maker, “My wife and I have no child. A stranger will inherit everything that we own.”
The maker said, “A son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir. Aba Gvoha, look upwards into the darkness and count the stars, if you can count them. This will be the number of your children’s children.”
Aba Gvoha believed what the maker told him.
This is what made him special.
SEVEN:
When the son of Aba Gvoha had become a young man, the maker said to his friend, “Take your only son, the son that you love, and kill him on a mountain that I will show you.”
Early the next morning, Aba Gvoha loaded his donkey in the darkness, then woke his son and told him that the maker required that he slay an innocent lamb on a mountain, and that their journey would take three days.
At the end of the third day, Aba Gvoha saw the mountain. His son saw also the mountain and asked, “Where is the lamb that we will slay on the mountain?”
Aba Gvoha answered, “The maker will provide the sacrifice,” but he did not understand the three levels of truth that he was speaking. Being a captive of time, Aba Gvoha could not hear the 3-part harmony of the past, the present, and the future as they sang together.
When they had come to the appointed place and the kairos moment, Aba Gvoha’s knife began its downward journey like a flash of lightning.
But the maker’s shout outran the lightning. “Aba Gvoha!”
The knife refused to move any further. The love of the maker had stopped it.
A few moments after Aba Gvoah fell to the ground and began to sob, the knife fell to the ground beside him.
The maker proclaimed, “Because you have done this thing, all the people in the world will receive a great gift.”
EIGHT:
The maker looked into the storm of pitchblack despair that raged in the heart of Aba Gvoha and in a flash of lightning saw their contract fulfilled.
The maker is not a captive of time. The maker stopped the knife with a shout and said to Aba Gvoah, “Because you have done this thing, all the people in the world will receive a great gift.”
The maker promised his friend, “All the people in the world will receive a great gift.”
Aba Gvoha gave the maker a key that day. And that key was made of lightning.
When Aba Gvoha passed his key of authority to the maker, it revealed a ram whose horns had been caught in a thicket.
Aba Gvoha and his son took the ram and killed it there on the mountain.
NINE:
Aba Gvoha spoke three levels of truth that day but he did not hear their 3-part harmony.
- When Aba Gvoha said, “The maker will provide his own sacrifice,” he was speaking the truth of the past. The maker had provided him a son, and the maker needed that son to die.
- When Aba Gvoha saw the ram in the thicket, he understood that his words, “The maker will provide his own sacrifice,” had proven to be true in a second way. A wonderful way.
- But it would be the third truth – the truth Aba Gvoah had seen in the lightning – that would become the most staggering truth of all.
“I will give you what you need from me, if you will give me what I need from you.”
TEN: