Creation Science is dead.

Pugnacious "creation scientists" like to inform their evolution-defending opponents that the debate isn't about science, it's about God. And yet, they continue to hide behind the science moniker, calling their profession "Creation science" and themselves "Creation scientists."

A fair number of Evolution proponents actually admit that it's about God; or, they used to. Now, it's simply assumed that naturalistic evolution is true, and that God is a fairy tale, a quaint custom, or at worst a pernicious lie.

Let me be clear: I believe that God created the universe and everything in it without help of any kind, and I reject naturalistic evolution as a theory and as an ideology. But, I will not align myself with Creation scientists. They're charlatans when it comes to science, and confused when it comes to the Christian faith. (As for the ID crowd, they're the worst of the lot, but that's another post.)

Creation science (or CS as I like to call it, for reasons of my own) is supposedly the application of the scientific method to prove the hypothesis that God created the world in six literal days. They look at the fossil record, the geological evidence, etc., "proving" that God created and that Charlie Darwin was just an atheist and a fool. As true as the assessment of Chuck Darwin may be, the CS crowd fails to acknowledge that the issue they champion isn't open for debate.

(They also fail to acknowledge that the tactics the evolutionists use are the same ones they use; evolution can't be proved, they say, but they expect us to believe that biblical creation can.)

The point of Christianity isn't to prove any of its claims from purely empirical grounds. To attempt to do so is to give in to the empiricism from which evolutionary theory emerged. Neither God, nor His mighty works, can be proved through mere physical evidence. If creation could be proved, why do we have the Bible? If Thomas Aquinas was right and man can know God through nature, why do we need direct revelation in the form of God's Word? To suggest either is to assume that to be a Christian is simply to intellectually acknowledge the truth of the Gospel....which can presumably also be proved through careful marshalling of facts.

It's a weird junction of Christian fundamentalist dogmatism and Enlightenment-fueled empiricism that has led to the oxymoronic "Creation Science" that purports to defend biblical truth against the advances of atheistic rationalism. The Gospel of Christ is our primary concern as Christians, not proving that the miracles of the Bible actually took place, or that Jesus really rose from the dead, or that God actually created the world from nothing. The CSers get it backwards: if someone trusts Jesus for salvation from sin, they'll trust His Word, and if they don't trust Him all the evidence in the world won't convince them. God saves, and that's the end of the matter.

People who spend all their time talking about how badly the Theory of Evolution has corrupted society are ignorant. First of all, it's a West-centric attitude that fails to account for Eastern origins theories. Secondly, evolutionary theory is an old idea, as old as Greek philosophy at the very least; Darwin was merely a popularizer and codifier, not an originator. But, more importantly, CSers aim their artillery against a symptom of sin, rather than against sin itself. Evolutionary thinking is a result of man's rebellion, not a cause of it. To say otherwise is to reject the Gospel.

The Last Part

And just like that the trip was over.

Beyond the swamp was a grassy place with sunlight and warm earth. The hermit stepped onto it and immediately took off his shoes. He felt the green and brown on his soles, and his two legs were like trees newly but firmly rooted. He turned to the Boatman.

"Is this the end?" he asked.

"Yes," said the Boatman. "I just need my payment."

"What is it?"

"I think you know," and the Boatman almost smiled.

"Is it my soul?"

"It is."

Then the hermit became confused. "I have two," he said, and looked at the ground.

"No, you don't. Just your own."

The hermit looked at the Boatman. "I have carried another's with me all this way."

The Boatman shook his head. "No, you haven't. It was gone long ago."

"What do you mean? No one would take it from me. I couldn't lose it. I couldn't get it off. How do you mean, it was gone long ago?"

"Just what I say. You think giving his soul to you could save that young man? You think his soul was preserved through all he did? Souls aren't like that."

"Did he transgress much?"

"Yes," answered the Boatman. "But it was the senseless good he did that counted against him, that turned his soul to what it is now."

"What is it?"

The Boatman held up a sack filled with ashes and maggots. "This," he said. "It fell apart quite quickly, and then one day it was gone altogether. Surely you found it growing lighter?"

"Yes," said the hermit. "But I just thought I was getting used to it."

"It didn't belong with you. Another man's soul isn't something you can get used to. But nevermind about his soul anymore. Give me what I want and I'll leave you here in peace because I must."

The old man found the soul slipped lightly from his shoulders. He remembered trying to give away the other one he supposed he also carried, trying to cut it off the way sailors cut dead rigging from the mast during storms.

"Is it wisdom to give you my soul?" the old man asked.

"It's wisdom kept your soul intact," said the Boatman. "But not your own."

"I looked for wisdom and never found it."

"Who does? But you looked in the right places. That's all a man can do."

The hermit never found his wife and daughter; he didn't miss them anymore. He found a  mountain, but didn't climb it. He stayed in the valley where there were people, and everyone felt the warmth of God on their faces, and were filled with untranslatable joy forever until they could no longer remember what they had been like as mere people.

12th Part

From the mountain crest it had looked like the sea, or what he supposed the sea would look like. The blue-gray faded from horizon to horizon, capped in fog and undulating like a pregnant woman's belly in the midst of labor. He stared for a long time before making a descent.

The road down the mountains was poorly kept but smooth as if from many feet. The hermit was tired, and wondered how far he'd fall should his feet slip, but he didn't loose footing and made it all the way to the bottom without hurting himself. Then he drank a little water and ate some dried meat, and walked toward the water without looking backward.

He sensed before he saw that it wasn't a sea. It was too cold on the surface, and too many tendrils of steam or fog or mere odor grew from the surface like unhealthy and insubstantial plants. A pang of worry stabbed his legs and his guts, but he walked in a straight line and kept his eyes lifted and straight ahead.

The man with the boat appeared to be waiting for him. He stood cloaked, the mist wrapping him in weird arms, and was silent till the hermit stood before him.

"Hello, old man," he said.

"Who are you?" asked the hermit. "What do you want?"

"I'm the Boatman. I'm here to take you across."

Then the hermit knew why the cottagers had looked at him as though at a ghost, why they'd feared he was a soul come to take their child away from earthly things. He'd heard of the Boatman, and met him in books. It was odd that the Boatman should be here before him, plying his trade. It made the stories at once more terrifying and more absurd. He reached in his pocket for a few coins.

"What are those?" the Boatman asked, not taking the pennies. "Why are you giving me money?"

"I thought—" but the old man stopped, because he didn't know what he thought.

"You thought I required payment. I do. But not that, and not till we get to the other side."

"Should I leave my things here?"

"Do what you want."

"Will I need them?"

"Do you think you'll need them?"

The hermit left his pack in the mud and climbed aboard the vessel. It rocked in the waves, but he had no fear the boat would capsize, not with the Boatman at the helm. He sat on the bench and folded his arms with his hands beneath his armpits to keep them warm, but it didn't work. The mist was stronger than the heat of his own body.

"Am I dead yet?" asked the hermit.

"Not yet," said the Boatman. "But almost."

The hermit resolved to keep his mouth shut for the duration of the trip. He looked ahead, but he could see nothing. The way was altogether hidden. He supposed he'd expected nothing less, and wondered how his wife and daughter had felt, huddled on this small boat with such a taciturn guide, going who knew where and completely at the Boatman's mercy. If it is mercy, the hermit thought, and wondered what price the Boatman would ask of him, on the other side of all this darkness.

11th Part

The hermit remembered his second burden on the way to the mountains. He'd begun to lose focus, to think only of finding the sea, but the little girl reminded him of his daughter, which reminded him of the mountain, which reminded him again of the young man with his strange request.

It became very important to the old man that he get rid of the second soul. There were fewer people on the road now, and fewer houses to the left or right, but whenever he met anyone he tried to cajole them or bribe them or beg them to take the weight off him.

"I can't go to the sea with this other soul on my back!" he'd cry, clinging to the strangers' shirts. Most of them looked concerned, but no one offered to help. It was his own damn fault, they thought, for taking such a heavy burden in the first place.

He began building fires at night, hoping indefinitely that they would bring help. Perhaps he expected ghosts to emerge, and like moths dance around his small blazes, offering to take what he could no longer carry, offering to relieve him of his unhallowed bundle. But no ghosts came, and no one would take the soul off his shoulders.

One night he tried to remove it himself. He took out his knife, and pared away at his shoulders until he was too tired and sore to keep at it. Eventually he had to bandage himself up and forget about losing the soul, abandon the project as a lost cause. It made him very sad, and very afraid, and yet there was nothing he could do about it.

So the mountains got bigger, and the man's hope of ridding himself of the soul became smaller, until he found himself climbing the mountain like a mountain goat in trousers whose sadness is that of two men, and whose head is full of fears and doubts and trouble.

He climbed and climbed and climbed, and eventually the sea filled his thoughts again, but he couldn't forget the young man's soul altogether as he'd done before. He could only hope the sea was strong enough to bear it and him toward another shore.

10th Part

It was a little child, he saw, not a goat as he'd first believed. The bleating was crying, and what looked like horns were strands of hair twisted among branches. Thorns scraped the clear young skin so the red stood out like street maps. The hermit wondered vaguely what kind of city would have maps like that, its streets marked in pain, and then remembered that every city was that city.

He approached the bush with his arms at his sides. The child's eyes rolled around to meet the hermit's, and they were blue in the middle and red at the edges. It was a little girl. She stopped struggling as soon as she saw the hermit, and shut her mouth.

"Well, child," he said. "You're stuck."

She looked at him with swollen lips turned down at both sides. Her hair was the color of a new penny, straight near the scalp but wavy further down. There were welts and scrapes all over her.

"Don't scream," the hermit said simply, and wrenched some of her hair from the thorns.

The child didn't scream. Tears stood in her eyes then fell, the salty drops falling into her open wounds, and she opened her mouth as if to scream, but closed it tight instead. She closed her eyes as if not to see what else had to be done to set her free.

Remembering pain, the hermit worked quickly. He wanted her out of the plants and home with her mama and daddy as quickly as possible, not because he was afraid of her screaming, but because he could see the pain she was in. Her little white tummy was visible through a tear in her dress, and on it were raised lines like whipmarks. The thorn bush was a cruel captor, much worse than most humans, and it worked its chains deeper even as the hermit tried to pry them off the little girl.

"Is your house nearby?" the old man asked at length, just to keep her occuppied some other way.

She nodded. One arm was free, and she pointed across her shoulder. He could see a small stone cottage with smoke coming from the chimney like the breath of hell's inhabitants. There was no one outside it that he could see.

"Your parents live there?"

A nod.

"They nice folks?"

Another nod, and "Yes. Very."

"Good," said the hermit. "I'll get you back to them in no time."

The girl accepted this forlornly. Once he'd freed her entirely, he picked her up and carried her to the house she'd pointed to. As he approached, her father came running out, a pipe bursting from his lips like a dead flower. He was wide-eyed.

"Where'd you find her?" he asked.

"Over there," said the hermit. "In the thorns."

"Come in, have some dinner," the man said. His wife came running to join them. She looked like the little girl, except womanly. "We've got plenty."

"No," said the old man. "I'm on my way."

"Where to? Surely you can come inside?"

"I'm for the sea," and he pointed across the last range of mountains. The whole family stopped and stared, white-faced and white-eyed. "Got to keep moving."

"That's not the sea over there," the man said. "You better move along, mister."

The man gathered his family back into the house, and closed and bolted the door. The hermit wondered what the farmer was talking about, but decided it didn't make much difference, and anyway he wasn't getting a meal now for sure, so he walked back to the road and continued straight on to the mountains. The salt breeze was stronger now, and he thought he could hear waves, and maybe even the wail of seabirds.

9th Part

Even the bravest and most stalwart of us can't pursue a thankless task without end. The old man realized this, and one day he spent the last of his money on food and beer, and walked out of the city forever.

He did not return to his mountain. He went the opposite direction, toward a farther land with water and open fields, a place where wheat grew as tall as houses and the sun was brighter even though the nights were darker. It was like the mountain, but smelled of salt and clouds and growing things.

Was he looking for the young man still? He couldn't say. It seemed he was, but it also seemed there was something else to find now, something more important. He walked without direction, but he kept walking, afraid to stop but also not wanting to.

One night he paid for a room in an inn. The proprietor was kind, and gave him a good bed and fed him hot food fresh from the kitchen. Before going upstairs, the wanderer talked to a farmer who'd never traveled. He grew beets and barley and a few onions. Together they drank wine and talked.

"Where are you going?" asked the farmer. It seemed to the wandering hermit that no answer would surprise this man of the soil. The farmer smiled faintly and gulped his wine.

"I don't know," said the hermit. "The sea, maybe."

"What's at the sea?"

"Nothing that I know of. I've been walking too long to stop, and I've never seen the sea. I think I'm looking for something, but I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the sea."

"Did you know what you were looking for once?" the farmer asked. He knew the answer, but asked anyway.

"Yes." There was no hesitation. "I was looking for a young man. He tendered his soul to me some years ago while he went in search of Wisdom. I couldn't find him, so I gave up."

The farmer stretched his legs. "Well, you didn't give up. You're still looking."

"I don't know. Maybe." The hermit tapped the bottle with his finger. "I was looking for Wisdom, once. I killed my wife and daughter trying to find it."

"Me too," said the farmer. He stopped smiling. "Only it was a son I had, not a daughter. Dead, nonetheless. It was my pride. Or maybe death is the only real wisdom. Anyway, doesn't everyone look for wisdom? No one finds it, and they become frustrated so they stop. Isn't that the way?"

The hermit took a drink. "No," he said. "Not everyone. Many have never even heard of it. Those who look diligently and in the right places find it, I think. That's the wisdom of it: knowing where to look. If you have that, you have wisdom."

Then he sipped the last of his wine and told the farmer good night and went upstairs to his bed. He didn't sleep until early morning, when he'd determined to leave. All night, his only thought was, Where should I look? and, Will I like what I find when I finally look in the right place? It didn't matter, he knew, whether he liked it or not. But the fear of finding what you've never had is sometimes stronger than the desire to find it.

He woke at noon and left the inn, walking a little slower than before, watching his feet rather than the road ahead, smelling always that salt smell that he presumed was the sea, lying against the land like God's hand about to smite. The sea, the sea, the cold calm sea....it was a ghost before him and that was fine, because he knew something about ghosts. He carried them all with him, and now he was ready for one that could carry him. He determined not to rest until he'd reached the sea.

8th Part

The living are hard enough to find—how much more difficult to find the dead? The hermit wandered many places, but the young man was in none of them. When he asked, people were reticent, or had no memory, or simply ignored an old man they took for a beggar. He was often denied lodging, and once or twice he was even denied food he had every intention of paying for, but people couldn't be bothered to accept his cash beforehand; he was just a dirty vagrant with nothing to do but suck fresh blood into his stale and putrid veins.

Children ran from him as from a ghost. It wasn't so much his appearance, though he had grown wild in the forest, as his deep eyes, so much deeper than the shallow pools in everyone else's head. There were many lives in those eyes, and to look in them seemed to many to be the same as looking into insanity, or eternity. In the end insanity and eternity are equally terrifying, so you couldn't really blame them for looking away, but there was no cause for the unkindnesses heaped on him in addition.

In the city, young men mocked him, shopkeepers boarded their doors against him, and old men said rude things to him in the street. He asked everyone if they'd seen the young man, but no one wanted to talk to a crazy bearded fellow. They'd rather spit at him, or tell him to go away, or ask him where the birds were.

"What birds?" he asked once.

"The birds that nest in your beard!" was the answer, a stupid answer that its speaker nonetheless found witty and comedic. His friends laughed, too. The old man ignored them and walked on.

"Hey, greybeard!" they called behind him. "Looking for something?"

"Nothing you can help me find," he said. "You wouldn't know about Wisdom or those who seek it."

"Wisdom?!" they cried, but the hermit turned a corner and heard no more. He slept that night in the street, huddled beneath a spare coat, with no pillow and unprotected from robbers. In actuality, it was the rain that got him.

But he never gave up. Having determined to find the young man, he would do so, and nothing could turn him aside. It wasn't an obsession, it was simply a task that he meant to accomplish. No stupid teenager and no sarcastic old man could keep him from it, or even dishearten him. If the mountain was a teacher in nothing else, he'd learned from it to keep his own counsel, to remain steadfast, and never to change except slowly.

Even so, he soon grew tired of the city. It was loud, and smelled badly, and the horses there were sallow and clumsy. Women were always tempting you with their bodies, and bakers advertised unhealthy food you didn't need, and when you paid for a bed to sleep in you always got less than you expected or were promised. The hermit walked with his eyes to the ground, eating only what he had to for survival, and sleeping as often as not on the pavement or beneath trees. Once a policeman told him not to loiter, but the hermit found even the guardians of the law could be corrupted, and that money bought more than possessions.

Other men might have grown more bitter, would have retreated into cold misanthropy and glared at everyone, thinking unbrotherly thoughts. The hermit, on the other hand, knew the depths of human nature and was surprised by nothing. Why wouldn't people behave badly? The real question was why they would ever behave well.

People began to recognize him on sight, and he realized he'd been circling the streets now for a long time, looking for this young man he'd seen once, three years ago. Was he in the country? or another city, perhaps? Was he even still alive? If he was to be found, the hermit was sure he'd be found here, in this city, so it was in this city that he looked. But the young man never showed up, and the old man started to wonder whether the whole thing wasn't a dream, or a manufactured memory. He wondered if the young man had ever existed. And yet, he never stopped looking, not even when the winter came on, leaving autumn's wreckage buried under a pale blanket that looked like death, only colder.

7th Part

Far away and up on his mountain the hermit found his burden gradually lighten, then rapidly become less, and finally to disappear altogether.

"It's because I've been carrying this extra soul so long," he said. "I don't even feel it anymore."

He went about his work, talking to himself, checking the calendar at the end of each day. Even though it was no longer so heavy, he was anxious to be rid of the second soul, to have nothing but his own to worry about. The day came closer and closer, and he became more and more expectant.

Then the day came when the young man was supposed to arrive, and he never did. "Well," the hermit reasoned. "I was simply mistaken in my timekeeping. He'll be here tomorrow."

The young man didn't show up the next day, either. He didn't show up the week after that, or the following week, or even a month later, and slowly it dawned on the old man that the kid who'd abandoned his soul here had never meant to return. He expected to be angry, but he wasn't angry. He was mostly just sad, and his sadness was mostly expended on the young man. It must be a bad conscience, he thought, that could do such a thing.

"Maybe it's better that I have his soul," he said aloud. "At least I'll take care of it."

Nearly a year passed, and still no wanderer came back for his soul. The hermit almost forgot about him for awhile. He went about his old routines, but he began talking less, and never whistled or sang anymore. Eventually he stopped talking, too.

"I wonder if he found wisdom?" he asked an alder tree one day, breaking long silence.

The tree said nothing.

"Is he sitting on top of a mountain like mine, dispensing wisdom?"

The tree waggled in the breeze, but said nothing.

"Maybe I should find him, and give what is his back to him."

This time the tree opened its mouth, and said, "That's the wisest thing you've said in a long time."

So the old man packed some things in a rucksack and prepared to go in search of the younger man, not knowing where to look and forgetting how far away the city was.

It would be hard to leave the mountain, he knew. His wife and daughter were part of it, now, and staying with them was all he wanted. But if the young man was injured, or lost, or chained up somewhere, unable at any rate to return to the hermit on time, it was the old man's duty to find the Wisdom-seeker and return his soul to him, intact. He spent one last afternoon beside the graves.

"I'm leaving, finally," he told his family who lay underground. "I wish I could have left with you, but I was obstinate and foolish. I'm sorry. If I never return, know that I love you. I'll try to come back, but the world is full of teeth and flames, and few are left unchewed and without burns. I know I'm doing the right thing. Remember me, wherever you've gone to."

Then he stood up, and shouldered his pack, and walked on down the mountain for the first time in far too long.

6th Part

The young man was in prison for a long time. During the course of his sentence he turned from his destructive path and evidenced, first true repentence, then genuine humility and goodness. He was perpetually kind to the guards and his fellow prisoners, accepted his punishment as his due, and assumed an attitude of prayer whether anyone was watching or not. After a year it was decided his sentence should be shortened, and the former profligate released to do good in the world.

He took this news as one not convinced that his sins were wholly atoned for, but also as one happy to receive his freedom. It was time, after all, to return to the hermit on the mountain and reclaim his soul. It occurred to the young man briefly that the old man might not give it back, but he dismissed this thought as unlikely. Anyway, he reckoned, he could always retrieve it by force.

The guards took him outside the gates and escorted him within the city. He looked with rekindled interest at the stone walls of the houses, the puddles in the streets, the big horses attached to thick peasant wagons, the people everywhere talking and doing business. When the guards left him, the young man stood in the road for a long time, smelling and remembering and watching and thinking and hearing. He was in the way but he didn't move, not for any obtuseness acquired in jail, but simply because it had been so long since he'd seen anything that he was paralyzed by the sight of everything.

With no clear direction, he wandered from avenue to street to boulevard to alley, reclaiming the city through his dormant senses, awakening both memory and new hope. He proposed to himself to find food and a place to sleep, and accepting the proposition, went questing for them. A small restaurant advertised meat pies, so he ordered one stuffed with roast eel and another filled with pork, and ate them with a bottle of beer. Then he tried to find an inn.

He hadn't counted on being recognized by anyone. He'd made plenty of enemies during his final days of carousing, but how could anyone remember his face? In jail, it had turned pale, and his hair was much shorter. His skin clung tight to his bones, and though he was still strong, he walked with a sidelong gate come of long days edging from one end of a cell to another.

Still, someone recognized him. They took time to assemble reinforcements, then cornered him in a city square, blocking off every escape route and holding axes, hammers, and knives in their mighty peasant fists. The young man stood in the center, caught between fear and a lurking memory of cavalier humor, between a desire for self-preservation and a carelessness toward pain. He dropped the half-eaten pie in his hand and its insides fell from the crust into the street.

"You're out early," one of the leaders said. "What happened? Did you find God in prison? Were you freed on account of good behavior?"

"I was let free by the warden. It was his good pleasure." The young man smiled awkwardly, not sure whether to be open, or merely humble, or full of bravado. "He told me I could go because I'd made remarkable improvements."

"Remarkable improvements?" said another peasant. "Easy to do in jail; not so easy when you're on the loose. Where were you going, anyway?"

"Just to find a room for the night."

"The whorehouses are that way," shouted the first man. "You're in the wrong neighborhood."

"I don't want to sleep in a house of ill repute," said the young man. "I want to sleep alone in a warm bed."

"'House of ill repute'? Since when did you speak in euphemisms? There aren't any sluts here to warm your bed, I assure you, just this!"

No one knew who spoke the last words, or from what part of the crowd the shot was fired. The young man fell dead beside his dropped meat pie like a sack of sticks. He almost clattered against the cobblestones. The killing seemed to stop everyone short, to drain their excitement and replace bold emotions with sobriety and darkness. Everyone went his own way. The young man was left in the street to be disposed of by someone else. First the ravens pecked his eyes out, then the garbagemen carried him to the incinerator and threw bones and flesh into the fire. He was forgotten by everyone in the city before the last of him turned to ash.

5th Part

The hermit started talking to himself as a reminder that he was just one man, with one soul to call his own. They were never long conversations, and they happened only once or twice a day, but once begun they were never overlooked.

At first he only spoke of the old days, when his wife and daughter were with him. The initial time on the mountain was the best he'd known, working in the forest by day and sitting on the grass in the evening, listening to his wife talk or play music, watching his daughter laugh and chase rabbbits. It was the kind of life you never got to lead long, because something always interrupts pleasure, whether it's evil or simply another kind of pleasure.

Then he talked about earlier days, when he was a child or a young man, how he'd tried to learn all there was to know through books and listening to lectures at the University. He sneaked in because he was underage and had no money, but it was worth it because he learned so much. He'd go home after each lecture and write down everything he'd heard word-for-word in a journal.

Marriage stopped his search for knowledge temporarily. He learned to sit without reading, and to enjoy the presence of his wife. But eventually he was back to haunting libraries, and spending too much money in bookshops. The floors and walls of their house were lined with books, the spines worn and the pages underlined with dark ink.

When the family finally left for the wilderness, his attitude had shifted. He no longer sought mere knowledge; now he was looking for Wisdom, and he felt that only in contemplation, far from the demands of the city, would he find it. Everyday, he woke long before his wife and went outside to absorb the cold air and to think. He worked hard all day to give him more time for thinking, and at night he stayed awake long past dark to be alone with his thoughts.

It wasn't a long biography by any means. He was able to rush through the salient events of his meager existence in a few minutes, even recalling details and bits of conversation in that time. But it was good for him to revisit everything, though he never reminisced about the deaths of his wife and daughter because that hurt him too much.

He waited patiently for the wanderer's return, talking to himself, and living for nothing so much as the privilege of watching the calendar with something just a little more than resignation.

4th Part

The wanderer stepped off the mountain like a secular Moses whose law was scratched out and left behind. He could no longer see the hermit's cabin from down in the valley, or smoke from the chimney, or anything else. All that remained of their encounter was far away and invisible.

It was a long way back to the city, and took many days. The young man never got tired. When he arrived, he found an inn to sleep in, took a bath, got a shave, and ate the tastiest food available—white pastries with honey, strong beer, some sausages, and fried potatoes. It wasn't dainty, but he felt full afterward, and it was all good inside his mouth. He spoke to no one.

How does one detail the easy path to shame? It's a short enough tale. The young man experienced no trouble finding what he sought, no shame and no pleasure too base for his wholehearted participation, nothing untasted, nothing unfelt. He dissolved in revelry.

There was no stability to his behavior. He was a river of flesh run rampant in the streets, flooding every place with self-worship and transgression. Those who'd known him before no longer recognized his flat eyes or pale cheeks lost in hair as long and straggled as seaweed washed ashore. Former friends took the far side of the street at his approach. Bums and lowlife students and worse were attracted to his gravitational maelstrom and orbited in admiration of a life without restraint.

In all things the young man was the soul of immoderation, except in this: he was niggardly and miserly with his laughter. If a joke was told, he glared; sex was joyless; he was an angry drunk, and got into brawls as easily as a child gets into the mud. But no one noticed—the onlookers were too afraid, and those nearest this prince of the earth were too abject and too absorbed in their own crippled revelry to notice their leader was without thrill or enjoyment.

One night he went to the opera, and instead of listening to the music he threw dirty jokes at the actresses, and actually hurled empty bottles at the stage. He exposed himself from the balcony, and poured wine onto those sitting below. The footmen ejected him, but not till he'd taken down a curtain rod to use as a staff, breaking it over the head of the first that tried to lay hands on him. They kicked him into the street, and in his drunkenness he tried to ram the door down with his head. Blood smeared his clothes and the doorframe, and he yelled and screamed until he fell exhausted against the wall.

It was a kind of beginning for him, and his exploits became quickly more destructive. People stopped running away from his onsets, and he made enemies. Fighting became less raucous and more in earnest, and more than one blade was drawn against him; twice, pistols were fired in his general direction, and the second one toppled the prostitute hanging on his arm.

A newspaper of dubious credibility interviewed him, and the incident became famous, but not for what was said. The talk soon turned to violence, and the reporter was drawn into what became a riot, ranging across the city in chaos and bloodshed. The army was called in by the mayor, and there was a firefight that ended in the young man's arrest. He went in shackles to the prison, unnatural colors spreading across his skin from the bruises and injuries.

The cell he was thrown in was windowless. He fell asleep at once, and lay without movement till the warden was sure he was dead. He thought of the hermit briefly, then all went black and he slept for a long time.

3rd Part

A man can scarcely carry the one soul he has. Even then, most fail—the stranger seemed not to care, or else there were other things he cared for more. When the hermit finally agreed to carry a second soul for the space of two years, the traveler gave it to him freely, and seemed happy to be rid of it.

Not happy, exactly. No, more like lightened, as though his body were no longer bound by gravity or other natural laws. His faint smile disappeared, however. He became solemn at once.

They took dinner just outside the cabin door because it was a fine night. The hermit prepared rabbit meat and fried corn, and brought a jar of red wine out of hiding. There was no need for elegance because they were little more than business partners, and less close than that even, but for the bond of souls. After awhile, the hermit spoke some unsolicited words.

"My wife and daughter lie out there in the dirt. They're two seeds that will never sprout, two beautiful flowers that are doomed to blossom only with worms. I took them here with me to find Wisdom because I couldn't bear to leave them, but I was a coward. They had no business here, and neither had I. I was not wise then, and I'm not now."

The stranger looked at the hermit as he spoke, but he had nothing to reply. Instead, he chewed the tasty meat and took a long draught of wine. A night breeze blew over them, like the breath of faint wings from a long way off.

"Remind me again how you intend to find Wisdom." The hermit watched the wind in the tops of the trees, and the darkness of night angling down from the East.

"I will do everything men can."

The hermit said nothing more. He let the wanderer sleep on his daughter's old bed, fixed breakfast for him in the morning, and watched him down the mountain. Then he cleaned the dishes, made the beds, and chopped some wood.

He wondered why the young man had asked him to carry his soul. Surely there were people in the city more pious? What made the traveler think an old hermit wouldn't lose it, or damage it, or sell it off to the highest bidder? Perhaps because he knew there would be no one around to give it to, or who would buy it. The hermit laughed, but it was a crackly laugh and unconvincing, having been put away for so long and forgotten.

The young man had said he'd return in two years to reclaim his soul. That wasn't much time to accomplish what he wanted, the hermit thought, but he wasn't about to bargain for more time. Two years was probably too much as it was. What if he died? He wondered if the other soul would simply become a ghost, or if it would find the young man, or if it would burn away like ash, or if he'd simply have to carry it throughout eternity.

In the end he decided it didn't bear much thought.

Sometimes at night he wondered where the young man was, but decided that didn't bear much thought, either. Best just to wait for his return and do what he had always done. Eventually the two souls became easier to bear, and he thought about the young man less, except sometimes to wonder if he really meant to come back for his soul at all. If he didn't it was no one's loss but his own, the hermit decided finally, and marked one day closer to the wanderer's return.

2nd Part

"Well, hermit, you really do exist," said the traveler. He was young, but not a boy, just on the cusp of middle age. He was handsome, and his expression intelligent. He wore quality boots and clothes.

"I am here," said the hermit.

"Have you found Wisdom?" It was framed as a question, but the tone was of a man resigned to the same answer he'd received from everyone else. There was so much wisdom, it seemed, but so few who'd apprehended any. "Are you wise?"

"What kind of a question is that? Would a wise man live on a mountain like this? Go away; now that you've seen me you can tell your friends I exist and win your wager." The hermit spoke almost tonelessly, without malice or warmth. "The ghost story is true."

"I'm not interested in ghosts," said the young man. "I want to know if you've found Wisdom."

"No." The hermit looked hard at the stranger. "I haven't."

"Well," said the traveler, "I am determined to."

"Then leave me alone and go find it." The hermit turned to go inside but the younger man held his arm.

"I need your help."

The older man laughed. "I told you I know nothing."

"It doesn't matter what you know, it matters what I know. But still, I need your help. They told me you could take what I needed to give you."

The hermit shook his arm free. "I don't want any of your snake oil, kid. Let me be." This time his voice was a growl, and he lowered his forehead over his eyes to look menacing.

"Can we go inside?" asked the younger man, unperturbed. "When I've given you the only important thing I own, I'll leave. You'll only see me once more, and that briefly. At least let me tell you what I intend to do, how I intend to find Wisdom. Also, I'm starving."

"You're mad, too." The hermit narrowed his eyes. "What is it you want to give me?"

"Just one thing. First, give me some food and water."

"Tell me what it is, and I'll think about it."

The younger man looked at the hermit, then looked away before he spoke. "I want you to take my soul."

1st Part

When travelers (who were few) approached, the old man would go inside, shutter the windows and bolt the door, and wait for them to move on. Sometimes they tried to break in, but the cabin was durable, and eventually even the most peristent went away. Afterward, he'd go outside to clean any mess left behind, then return inside and lock the door once again, in case the visitors came back. They never did.

It wasn't that he was inhospitable so much as that he no longer took interest in what went on beyond his mountain. The trees and the river and the sun and the cold were enough.

He was not a hermit of the ordinary kind. He had learning, and enjoyed music, and before he left the city was known as a conversationalist of wit and perception. His wife had been very beautiful, and his daughter likewise, both charming and healthy and happy. When he moved them to the remoter lands beyond the city everyone thought it would be short-lived, but when years passed and neither the man nor his family returned, they knew he would not come back.

What he wanted was wisdom, he said. Then he packed what couldn't be sold and was needed for life in the wild, and left for the mountains. People laughed; others contemplated and conjectured; a few cried. He was a good man, and well liked. His company, and that of his wife and daughter, would be misssed. But that was the way of the city: people came, and they left, and there was nothing permanent or altogether significant.

The girl died first. She contracted a fever, which turned her lungs bad, and by the end she was coughing up blood and unable to eat. The man walked to another city for medicine, but nothing worked and one night in February she sat up, coughed, and fell back as pale and as stiff as a spruce plank. She was buried under her favorite tree.

Mother and father grieved, naturally. They lost sleep, and they worked less, and evenings were often spent in silence staring at the floor. Neither wanted anything so much as to have their girl back; they were too apathetic even for suicide. Finally the woman ate so little that she died, and the man put her underground beside the bones of their daughter, two empty shells from which not enough life had been scraped. He didn't even weep at the second passing.

People no longer interested him after that. He was almost afraid of them, as though what appeared to be flesh and blood was actually the form of Death, or mere ghosts sent to haunt him. He developed a routine that involved neither music nor reading, two of his favorite things when times were good. He ate mechanically, slept without dreams, and never changed his expression from a flat, uncomplicated stare.

What made him wait for the solitary man walking up the path to him on a gentle June evening? Even he could never tell. But he stopped in the cabin yard until the man stood an armlength away, looking into the hermit's black eyes with a pair as lavender as the fading sky, smiling a little, seeming to have come a long distance just to see the lonely man.

an experiment

Beginning Monday, April 9, I will be serializing a short story in place of more standard blog posts. Hope y'all like it. I won't be posting again till then.

Ancient-Modern Time Theory and the Gospel

The difficulty of Christ's message is that it is without time. Of course, His life and work are firmly anchored in time, but the message is not only timeless, it's outside time. The inherent problems of chronology are resolved in the Gospel because they are wholly dispelled.

When did the ancient era end? when did the modern period begin? Historical philosophers will argue various points on the timeline, but none are conclusive. Still, the zeitgeist of each is indisputable. The ancients were naive; the moderns are cynical. The ancients saw time as cyclical; the modern, whatever his religion or personal philosophy, views it teleologically. Ancients took the world largely at face value; moderns are skeptical that anything is as it seems.

An ancient like Plato would shake his head at the modern weltanschauung, while a modern would simply smile condescendingly at most ancient ideas, whether they were scientific, philosophical, or religious in nature. Speaking to either (and there are plenty of ancients around still, despite the moniker) requires a measure of translation.

Unless one is presenting the Gospel. The message of Christ is consistently misunderstood because it is interpreted according to the dominant philosophy of a given era, but the Gospel is without era and without a controlling zeitgeist other than theocentrism. The Cross is universal and transcends chronological boundaries and distinctions. It is the same for everyone from Adam to the Last Men, whoever they may be.

It is even beyond the pale of Ancient-Modernism. The main theory behind my philosophy is that time is to be seen as a single fabric, a square yardage rather than a linear yardstick, and that the proper view of history is as a single unit. Yet, though I think this is nearest to the biblical concept, even such a holistic approach fails to account for the utter time-transcendence of the Gospel.

We hear increasing calls to "contextualize" the Gospel. I have no objection to contextualization on a cultural level, as in helping people understand biblical metaphors by using ones with which they're familiar. But to bring the Gospel to a postmodern society, or a modern, or pre-modern context, is simply to bring the Gospel. It requires no tailoring to the constraints of a specific era, because it is the only message truly universal and truly eternal.

Eternity isn't simply an interminable extension of time in both directions, it's a different plane altogether, one inhabited by God and His ultimacy. Each successive generation of Christians brings the Gospel to each successive generation, and the Gospel doesn't change. It requires no human alteration or adaptation because it doesn't come to us on our time, but in the fulness of time as decreed by God from the depths of eternity.

the Reality of Death and Resurrection

The language of Scripture is often jarring.

Our state before salvation is death, and Christ pulls us out of the grave of sin and death to new life. He reaches into our tombs, our graves, our coffins, and drags our rotted maggoty corpses into the light of day where He can begin the work of transformation.

It's a morbid metaphor, this journey out of death called redemption. The corollary idea, that we are born a second time, is no less grisly, but somehow less awful. Christ builds His Church from a pile of corpses, a pile of bodies incapable of their own rescue or animation, incapable of anything but to reek and bleed and decompose.

Imagine the hand of God, the divine grave-robber, reaching through the mud of cemetaries to pluck unclean bodies from where they lay. Now imagine all those recently recovered bodies staring at one another, not as on zombies or fiends, but as brothers and sisters washed in the blood and water and fire of baptism. We are those resurrected bodies, once full of worms, now full of the Holy Spirit who could only find us suitable habitations after Christ's purifying crucible made us so.

We seldom speak of our salvation in the proper terms. Our limpid words evoke happiness and cloudless skies, which surely are wonderful, but which devalue the magnitude of the change Christ's gift accomplishes in us. We go from fully dead to fully alive, from vile to redeemed.

This unwillingness (or inability) to be honest about our comparative states inhibits our ability to spread the Gospel as earnestly and forthrightly as we ought. If we truly understood salvation as a matter of literal life and death, would we be so reticent? would we not forget about telling people anything extraneous, and lead them persistently to the only true source of life?

Yet we avoid the strength of metaphor and in its place emphasize only the effects of redemption, and not the horror that necessitates it. Only a return to the language of God's Word can lead to a return of the preaching of the true Gospel, and we must not only not worry if people are horrified at times, we must expect and want them to be horrified, confronted as they will be by the hopelessness of their situation, by the grotesque and desperate death to which they're bound.

The Dark Side of Faith

Our pastor referred to the dark side of omniscience in his sermon yesterday. He was describing Christ's knowledge throughout His earthly life concerning the nature and time of His own death. There is another dark side of omniscience, too, and it involves us.

Without sin, darkness as a metaphor for ignorance and evil would make no sense. God created night and day, darkness and light, and both were good. Now, the darkness of sin obscures the light of righteousness and goodness. Man's nature before conversion is inherently dark. We are a dark race, hiding our deeds and the image of God in us with the filth of wickedness.

Whatever our deeds are or have been, God knows them. Surely this realization is cause for "the fear of God." Any interpretation of "fear" as simple respect or reverence fails to account for the dark side of omniscience, or the dark side of mankind. God is a righteous and wrathful judge, and we have done wrong; though the blood of Christ covers those who believe, God still knows what we've done.

If horror stories have the power to terrify, surely this knowledge should leave us stricken and gasping like fish in undiluted oxygen. It should not, however, debilitate anyone, except those who wilfully reject the Gospel. The fear of God, after all, is the beginning of wisdom.

We have distanced ourselves from this understanding of God and ourselves, less (I think) from desire to misrepresent the Gospel, and more from a shallow understanding of fear.

Fear is not simply weak knees or sweaty palms or hiding beneath the covers. True fear is astonishing, weakening, cathartic, and real. More importantly, it is catalytic. Fear causes us to act, or more usually to react, to do something about our condition or situation that will remove or mitigate the cause of our fear. Fear is the dark side of faith, but it leads out of darkness to the light of Christlikeness.

If we fear God, truly fear Him, that fear will lead to righteousness. The fear of God should scare the Hell out of us. Sin is representative of the Hell of personal autonomy and godlessness for which the damned are destined, the complete personal responsibility to which they are held. That is the dark side of eternity, but those in Christ should have no fear of the grave, only of Him able to throw us into it or pluck us out again.

Many people balk at the idea that God has a dark side, but there is a dark side to everything, and He has ordained that it be so. The dark side of salvation is damnation; the dark side of knowledge is death; and the dark side of faith is fear. We love God, but if we love and undestand Him, we are also afraid, and that holy terror makes us run hard for the light.