At  the time of Origenism in the east and Montanism in the west, “thought had not yet caught up with faith, and words were helpless to express experience.  Faith comes before theology, and only for that reason may we speak of theological development as the gradual acceptance, discovery, and refinement of faith, which has been complete from the start…It was difficult to find words to express the faith, and centuries would be required to remake thought itself in the spirit of Christianity.” (p 74)

(P 98)     Christianity adopted and assimilated many forms of pagan religion, not only because they were the external forms of religion in general, but also because the intention of Christianity itself was not to replace all forms in this world by new ones, but fill them with new and true meaning.  With Constantine, the Christian Church emerged into full view and ceased to be a place of semi-secret meetings, so that gradually it became the center of religious life in the city.  In the Church building, man’s whole life received a religious sanction.  The Church gatherings in it gradually came to coincide with gatherings of citizens.  The martyr who had suffered in this city was naturally distinguished from the throng of martyrs as its own saint, the spiritual patron of the city.  “For all and in behalf of all” naturally came to include their daily needs and embraced man’s whole life; government, social, or economic.  The idea itself was admittedly borrowed from paganism…BUT by responding to all the needs of this world and assuming the function previously performed by paganism, the Church united everything from within with the Good News, and placed the Image of Christ [read: example of Christ] in the center of life.  The cult of the saints provided the Church with the same signposts to Truth as Hindu polytheism provides towards an Atman.  The difference is that when citizens follow saints they are led towards eternal and immutable words about the Savior crucified for our sins – about the perfect love God has shown us – and the goal for each individual as a living being.  The sins of the Saints retain their personal application; their prayers live on not as some universal application to a truth into which we dissolve post-mortem, but instead to a call for each human being to recognize their individuality, not only as a sinner falling short of their potential thru-Christ, but more importantly as an individual with gifts he or she is failing to provide for a common stranger on the roadway.

            A delicate balance exists between the appearance of our veneration to those lacking initiation / illumination and the significance of venation to the inner Spirit of an Orthodox participant.  “Any divergence between form and content, or the emergence of form as value and goal in itself, is paganism.”  (p186)

My position may have been the most pronounced and obvious in the entire Battalion:  fifty feet in front of me was a pavilion, the only authorized smoking area on the block.  Soldiers, Airmen, and Marines, male and female, wandered from the sidewalk at my feet to the smoke shack and back to their respective barracks.  Three vertical walls with three floors of rooming in each could look down contemptuously from their sentry posts along the sidewalk between me and the smoking pavilion.  I sat there, reading at the shoulder of a gravel shortcut for two buildings, as obvious as a forehead of zits on the first date.

            By heart didn’t hammer, but feelings of foolishness flared.  In eleven years of experience with military culture I’ve learned that few soldiers, if any, sit alone.  We act in terms of teamwork, “battle buddied” for safety in numbers, someone to talk to, camaraderie to kill the boredom.  Soldiers are as social as high school queens.  If a soldier sits alone, they do so backed against the corner of a building with a cigarette held in their lips or a cell phone pressed to their ear.  From the first day of Basic Training you learn to blend in; doing something that stands out makes one a target or an opportunity, assigned extra responsibility for your proven capabilities or revoked a pass for the most minor infraction: walking atop the grass.

            If any soldier stopped to ask what I was doing or why, I didn’t know what I’d say.  “Enjoying this sunset, this breeze, those clouds, this evening.  Reading ancient history of the Church, happy for the silence, lack of biting insects, and abundance of life all around me.”  Perhaps I’d tell them, “Next time you interrupt me, and you’d better follow it with ‘Staff Sergeant.’”  More likely, I would look them right in the eye and follow with, “What are you doing, and why?” just to get that flustered look mixed with wonder that proceeds most people laughing and informing me that I’m strange.  I concur, we laugh, and the discomfort they feel passes.

            Nobody stops to ask.  Fellow members of 1^st platoon call out and continue to walk by.

            In truth, I have to will myself not to feel foolish tonight as I enjoy the sunset, this breeze, that cloud, this abundance of life and the absence of noise or biting insects.  I don’t allow my soul enough spring evenings like this, before the heat of summer begins a curtain of perpetual sweat that attracts the biting insects.  Freed from any paranoia and the foolish thought that people have nothing better to do than gossip about the geek sitting cross-legged on the green, the silence allows me to appreciate the clover, the sun setting behind pines and XXXXXXXs.  As the experience is appreciated I am filled with warmth, gratitude for the chance to sit and breathe.  I’m overwhelemed.

            I’m indeed reading a book on Orthodox history, and had just begun a subsection on Monastic Theology, “a continuation of the original trend of theological speculation:  the disclosure of the content of faith in the experience of life.”  (p232)  St. Simeon the New Theologian left behind hymns, letters, and treaties “dedicated wholly to the description of illumination and mystical contemplation – to that ‘communion with the Divine Light’ which had been the purpose of monastic asceticism from the start.  … Grace appears with all possible stillness and joy, and this light is the preparation for the Eternal Light, the radiance of eternal bliss.  The mind plugs into it, is clarified, is itself made light, and unites completely with the Source of light Himself.”

            In the 10^th century, on Mt. Athos, St. Gregory Palamas practiced the act of “gathering the mind,” or Hesychasm.  “In the image of the God-Man in Christ and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Christianity is revealed as a vision of the fullness of God in the essence of man, and in this fullness, of the “communion with God” of everything in the world.”  Hesychasm was regarded as heresy until the Constantinople councils of 1351 and 1368 confirmed Palamism as a true expression of faith of the Church.

            Bring things back to the meditation here.

            A common practice of Hesychasm is to repeat that which is known as “The Jesus Prayer,” a mantra of sorts said to slip into an everlasting fountain of prayer.  I can attest, at least, to the ease of which it refocuses my mental sins:  if I catch myself considering slander, gossiping, judging or condescending, I almost roll my eyes and whisper, “Oh Lord Jesus Christ Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.”  The rolling of the eyes is not out of the lightness of my sins; rather, when one observes the frequency in which their Ego passes judgment, speaks falsely, avoids connecting in depth with professionals by filling silence with idle talk, ignores the needy, complains about anything, etc., one will reach a sublime exhaustion in chastising the Ego.  It is at this point the Jesus Prayer becomes a quite powerful reminder.  “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.”

            DAWN – Particle/waves of energy creep across a planet-sized horizon, exciting a swath of cells into transforming glee.  A biosphere as big as a continental plate reacts.  Each deci-atom strip spiraled round itself evaluates what’s been done and what’s left undone, marshalling the energy towards processes that require the fuel.

            Gaia burns, sweats, toils in unions mor microscopic than XXXXXX skin pores.  Can you almost picture it?  DNA molecules, millions of miles in length, bundled atop each other, their activity increasing cell-by-cell in every organism on the planet.  Life awakening, a continental-plate long stadium wave twelve to eighteen hours wide.

DNA is only 10 atoms wide, yet the length of DNA in the human body can reach the moon and back 80,000 times, given the best estimate, within a few million miles.  In the individual cell we find that DNA is not a blueprint.  Rather , it is a data processor.  It is this data which, when marshaled into order, counters the “inevitability of entropy” in the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

If you could see life’s seizure with the power of a microscope, you would see that trees no longer have leaves but solar panels. 

The human eye is more sophisticated than any camera of a similar size.  The cells on the outer layer of the retina can absorb a single photon and amplify its energy at least 1 million times before transferring it through a nervous signal to the back of the brain.  The iris, which functions as the diaphragm, is automatically controlled.  The camera has just the right curvature.  The lens is focused by miniature muscles, which are also controlled automatically by feedback.  The final result of this visual system, still imperfectly understood in its entirety, is a clear, colored, 3-Dimesional image inside the brain that we perceive as external.  We never see reality, but an internal representation of it that our brain constructs continuously. 

What I find especially striking through this is that another human being can look at my page, upside down, comment on the beauty of my handwriting, and read back what I’ve written verbatim.  Perhaps an educated individual, this person can conceptualize the statement back to me, thereby demonstrating true understanding of mutually shared symbols wholly dependant on their 3-D virtual representation while recreated on a medium “In Reality,” “out there,” beyond my actual sight.

In Genesis, God breaths “the breath of life” into geology, a man formed from dust.  DNA is a data processor / feedback system devoted to growing the complexity of the chromosome and thereby its environment, the cell.  DNA all of 10 atoms wide and hundreds of millions of miles long, wrapped limitless around itself within every cell of the biosphere and acting as its capricious feedback loop, comes as close to a resemblance of “the breath of God” as our science has means of discovering!

I do not mean to deadline the awesome power of God into that which we humans can now perceive, small and labeled insignificant due to its size.  Rather, I wish a reader to comprehend the immeasurably of information processed at a cellular level.  You cannot wrap your mind around the DNA molecule or as-to-yet-unresearched “swarm tendencies’ at the cellular level of the biosphere, an envelope for the geosphere.

            The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum observation theorizes that the energy which condenses into matter exists probabilistically until it is observed, the best concept science can come up with to define non-substance.  It is the act of observation (measurement) through which particles become manifest.  Some unsettling and interesting tests have been conducted to prove this.

            As we appreciate beauty it manifests within us.  A sunset is a stream of photons.  We’re biologically capable of seeing the particles sway with a particular frequency.  Our envelope of nitrogen and oxygen acts as a prism; the cells in my eye drink photons that spill through cumulus-nimbus eruptions.  From my perspective, the prism paints the clouds. Interesting images of indigo intercede along the horizon as reflections of red rally in pursuit.

            Captured within the windows of the mind, a reality observed, recorded, and appreciated anticipates the miracle:  I’m lucky to exist as a sentient organism capable of seeing this splendor!

            As the attitude of appreciation becomes habit, life radiates with boundless beauty, even from within the heart of tragedy.  As the Self’s perspective encompasses greater distances, one can almost dissolve into the role of detached observer. 

In interacting with others, a desire sparks to be as beautiful an experience for him or her as possible.  We who love beauty become that which enlivens other perspectives.  We cherish the perspective our neighbor experiences more than our own.  We love our neighbor as our Self.

            As the attitude of appreciation is manifested by my individual will, it transfigures the limits of individual human experience.  I’ve been given the opportunity to enliven the lives of those souls with whom I interact.  I’ve been allotted 2.52461^9 seconds if I’ve been allotted eighty years, 1.57788^9 matured beyond the anomaly of a searching adolescent.  I cannot wrap my mind around this number of opportunities I’ve been given to share triumphs and tragedies with other transients, passed perspectives magnifying our communal appreciation of this moment of now. 

            The specificity of whom I am becoming is required for this transfiguration to take place; in this aspect, the Brahma/ Atman theories in Eastern religions fall short.  God created each of us as “strange loops” of feedback, which develop distinct characteristics we conceptualize as personalities.  A universe which has bloomed 6.6 billion unique feedback loops will somehow retain these even after biological functioning within an individual node ceases. 

As the steward of my node, it is my charge to transfigure every aspect of experience into a memory of lasting beauty.  In manifesting passed moments through memory, are those which I cherish despite stinging regret for my behaviors any less precious than those I cherish for their erupting joy?  Is either, in its unique essence, filled with any less beauty?

This command comes through Moses at a time when a newly liberated Semitic peoples are fleeing from the Egyptian cosmology they’d been raised within for generations.  The people, led by Moses, must re-establish a theology.

I have read scholarship convincing enough to believe Moses’s murder of an Egyptian and the plunder of Egypt as retribution for enslavement, is an oral tradition written during the Babylonian captivity.  It skews an alternate possibility, one which is more historically probable: the Hyskos Kings ended Egyptian rites of king-making through the murder of three endowed with its secret.  They had to flee; they’d stolen the lynchpin holding together the heavens and a civilization modeled as a mirror of those heavens.

Hyskos scribes could not cast off responsibility of tilting imbalance within the only cosmology they’d known, a terrifying guilt for any people to accept.  Exodus, in its pre-captivity oral tradition, is a ray of hope, a theological bulkhead shoring up cultural guilt for imbalance within the cosmological framework.

The Lamb is their delicacy, the tender tasty meat at a time when starvation is a very plausible possibility.  Firstborn beings were seen as blessed, that by which lineages and inheritance would be passed onward.

Moses’ Israelites needed mobility out of Egypt for themselves and their.  The donkeys of which Moses speaks multiply these basic needs for his peoples.  The blood of the lamb is to be exchanged for faith in strength and longevity.

In Christ’s example, the blood of the Lamb is sacrificed for strength and longevity of a non-zero sum message:  “Love one another as I have loved you…”  “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”  Lenten preparation for Pascha echoes the post-Passover message to the Israelites:  Let’s have faith in the communication of our message through the sacrifice of delicacies we most desire.

In this perspective, socialism is nothing but a mandate for the redistribution of wealth.  Charity becomes a legal obligation.

 Nonzero Sum interaction is that which mutually benefits both parties.  It occurs through communication and trust and is the singular method by which entropy is overcome within organisms and civilizations.           Nonzero Sum relationships develop when one party follows Christ’s commandment:  “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Life’s pattern, it seems, is to marshal energy towards something greater, built from a pattern previously in place.  Evolution is directional, a magnificent triumph erupting from the vacuum of slow, inevitable decay. 

Darwinian math proves sacrifice-that-another-may-live increases the chances of your message to pass on.  “Love one another as [Christ loved his disciples.]”

            “It is the function of information to guide the marshalling [of matter and energy],” Robert Wright claims in his book Nonzero:  The Logic of Human Destiny.  “Energy is marshaled in a way that sustains and protects structure, both within the organism and society.”  Proteins recognize shapes and through this discriminative faculty form chains of patterns.  The same is true of information processing systems that govern the construction of huts and temples and skyscrapers and the maintainance of corporations and armies.  People are genetically endowed with the proclivity to think about building things and orchestrating social enterprises and to communicate about these processes.  Viewed against the backdrop of all life then culture was in one sense nothing new, just another data processing system…to marshal energy and matter in ways that preserve DNA.  But it was the first of these systems that began to take on a life of its own, inaugurating a whole new kind of evolution.  Natural selection, after inventing brainier and brainier forms of DNA, long ago invented brains, and then finally, in our own species, invented a particularly impressive brain, a brain that could sponsor a whole new kind of natural selection.”

            The point of life is to experience and then become, Ehyaw the Uncreated Essence gradually tasting its own potential.  Live does this through cognitive organization of life’s foundations:  energy and the material bundles through which it burns. 

Christ’s message of living sacrifice for one another creates nonzero sum relationships.  Roman control allowed the logistics for the message to spread throughout a common culture.  Greek thought fertilized the vine.  After as many years as it took Christ’s example to blossom from the submissive faith of Abraham, humanity lives satiated with information and submerged in potential communication, more capable of loving our neighbor than ever before.  Christianity enables the person in relation to their community, nurturing these nonzero sum relationships between members of the body of Christ.

            We are the only organism currently mapping the now-marshaled matter, from micro to macro.  We are the only organism currently transcribing experience, from the mundane through the extreme.  “Love thy neighbor as thyself” motivates us to share these things with one another.  It is for the benefit of my neighbor that my thoughts or ideas may be confessed, that this vast cata-blog of information may be picked through by 6.6 billion different feedback loops, each of which marshals the organization of energy and the material bundles through which it burns, all fo the next phase of cultural unity.

Christ is the historical figure to fulfill the definition of his people’s mythos regarding a savior.  Through the example of Christ, Judah becomes the spiritual body by which the Gentiles are fed.  The Jewish faith rituals become foundational practices for a conceptually individualized purity.  Eastern philosophy calls for liberation through the transcendence of this world.  Christ calls us to transfigure our individual lives through the liberty of selflessness. 

If you view non-zero summation as the method by which life overcomes entropy, you’ll se that Christ’s message is one which allows us to reach a more unified non-zero-sum interaction.  Christ was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit as an example to be emulated.  This awaited “new event” occurred at the historical period in which it could be jettisoned throughout the Roman world.  Individually we are slaves to entropy but collectively, the body of the Church is like Ezekiel’s valley of dried bones, awaiting the renewing breath of the Holy Spirit.

            The Glory of Christ is a model by which I am held accountable.  When I truly consider the impact I could be for the life of every stranger I meet (if I am ever as brave, outspoken, and selfless as Christ) I gape in awe at my own potential.  This is the potential God sees in me; this is the potential for which God has let allotted me a portion of life.  In order for this true potential to be reconciled with God, loving and gracious enough to grant my freedom above the joy brought on by submission, Christ must have been fully man.  The anointed one had the choice to collapse under temptation in the desert as he did beneath the weight of a wooden crossbeam.  Christ begs to be relieved of the responsibility the evening between establishing a visceral covenant with the twelve and the betrayal by the favored one, not present at the feast.  I believed Christ a disheartened revolutionary due to his final cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” until Orthodox liturgy allowed me to be illumined:  even with his final phase, Christ calls to heed his fulfillment of Jewish scripture, Psalm ##.

For Christ to have lived as an example, succeeding to such an extent that the bonds of death were trampled and the covenant between YHWH recast in a mold of utter humility, Jesus must be fully God.  He knows the hearts of man enough to foresee how his example would play out.  Christ’s total submission and faith in the will of The Father allowed the indescribable essence to be realized through a living example, born in a village from which temple sheep were sired.

My personal life remains so far from his example of the ideal that I weep in shame.  My sin is not some genetic disorder brought on ancestrally through an apple; my sin is as real as my own meekness, weakness, and lack of compassion.  To account us worthy is to sweep away the excuses until we stand, looking back at each moment we’ve failed to love and at each brief relationship in which we’ve cowered, rather than benefiting the soul of each fellow castaway.

The immensity of my failures leaves me weeping and gnashing my teeth, a deficit in the ledger to which I cannot compensate what I’ve cost the lives of others.

We like to believe the Anointed One loves to such an extent that our human failings are as easily forgiven as a parent forgives an adolescent.  But what if your child innocently or ignorantly caused the end of life for another’s?  I would weep for the loss another parent would feel for their own, anguished about the fact that my child could not conceive of the pain and loss they’ve caused in the life of another.  To what extent possible, I would sacrifice myself for the parent and I suppose, it is in this way Christ is called to judge our shortcomings, equally saddened by our failures as compassionate for those whom we’ve failed.  We are all God’s children; Christ is the example by which Yaweh consoles Its grief.

The failings of an adult are not as easily waived off as those of a toddler, for ignorance must be taken into account; likewise, we who have been ignited through the gift of the Holy Spirit are expected to display spiritual maturation.  The judgement we experience will be our own, for when we are reunited with the presence of God the joy causes us to examine our own failures for the lives of others.  What anguish will be felt to look among the crowd for one you loved but did not raise up, an individual you abandoned to the responsibility of another! 

In the words of Father Schmemann, “It is repentance coming not only from a recognition of broken commandments or from fear or worship of God, but from a human being who recognizes an ‘image of inexpressible glory’ within himself and is therefore able to measure the full depth of his downfall.”

“Well, what I’ve found most interesting so far is that, generally speaking, beliefs arise from an event or character that may or may not be authentic and rapidly evolve into social movements that are conditioned and shaped by the political, economic, and societal circumstances of the group that accepts them.  Are you still awake?”

“A large part of the mythology that develops around each of these doctrines, from its liturgy to its rules and taboos, comes from the bureaucracy generated as they develop and not from the supposed supernatural act that originated them.  Most of the simple, well-intentioned anecdotes are a mixture of common sense and folklore, and all the belligerent force they eventually develop comes from a subsequent interpretation of those principles, or even their distortion, at the hands of bureaucrats…Sooner or later, the word becomes flesh and the flesh bleeds.”

While maturing, as little as I had, I created a syncretism for myself, a cocktail of beliefs which left me comfortable and superior but did not challenge me to discipline my unique Self.  The impersonal perspective of god held by the Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and Evolutionist left me transcending responsibility to any Self that was my own.  Dharma eventually led me to Orthodoxy; I, the rebellious, feasted on fasting and hourly prayer much like Merton upon discovering the freedom of his Trappist monastery.

What I failed to understand before I was illuminated was a sort of sociological history lesson:  every Christian movement within the Petri-dish of Europe has evolved after the schism.  Five centuries later Luther lashed out against the licit interpretation of sin the Latin patriarchate wished to dispense.  It is often this legal application to morality Spiritualists like my former Self take issue with.

The Orthodox view of sin remains above the bounds of human legalisms, interwoven in each Christian’s inability to fulfill personal potential, fully realized only through Christ’s example.  http://saintignatiuschurch.org/timeline.html

The Fullness of the Faith becomes a matter of recognizing the grace by which an individual is granted a chance to refine his or her Self rather than a hereditary affliction one must atone for…or worse, a failure of the human condition for which God substituted that which he loved most, leaving every believer reeling with a sublime guilt complex.  Raised within a mindset of the latter misinterpretation, I put my Self through ten years of destructive behavior, assuming that by rejecting Christ’s cross I would not be laying my own shortcomings across the shoulders of the lamb.

Before the unknowable God, the only approach possible is adoration in awesome silence.  Peter’s reaction to the Transfiguration of Christ is rendered nonsensical in Mathew 16:5, when the glory casts shadow over Peter, James, and John.  All study becomes useless before the ineffable mystery of God. 

But the divine energies of God penetrate and dwell within opaque matter in order to make of it a vessel of light.  Each human person, each unique, each irreplaceable, is granted a model of this in the Transfiguration of Christ.  We are called to transfigure the material rather than transcend it. 

As Father John Mack reminds us, commenting on St. John Climacos’s Ladder of Divine Ascent, no beholder can adequately judge a masterpiece while it is being created; my Self is a beholder who must withhold judgment and have faith that tomorrow’s challenges will be faced with renewed vigor and moral strength.  After all, today dawns the Age of Aquarius…

“Later in his Conjectures, Merton makes use of the term le point vierge, which he derived from Sufi (read:  Muslim mysticism) sources.  According to Mark the Monk, it is to this hidden “deep heart” that Christ is alluding when he states, “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21)  – Kallistos Ware, Paths to the Heart

I would like to theorize that the same Being which, in any given moment, experiences the All my feeble human form is too weak to interpret, all at once…that same Being is at the center of all bodies of mass within spacetime, being fed greater substance and energy by the structuring Dark Energy of which we interpretaries cannot fathom.  We cannot even fathom that which is within us!

First, there was the angst-ridden rebellion phase of young adulthood straining communication between my Evangelical parents and myself.  Then came my introduction to the world’s religions at an Arts and Sciences college in the state’s university.  Armed with an academia, I could no longer rationalize an understanding of the Holy Trinity from a dogma which declared truth in monotheism.

I had begun catechism classes last year when EnlighteNext magazine had a cover article titled A View from the Center of the Universe.  The article was an interview with cosmologists Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams, a married couple who’ve published a book by the same name.

These cosmologists claim humanity lives at a center point of the story of the universe, in that cosmic acceleration will stretch the space between galactic groups beyond light’s ability to reach us. They further claim humanity lives at the center point in the story of the earth, between formation and incineration.  Homo Sapiens can perceive the central size-scale between the largest and smallest observable area, biologically inheriting a brain/body ratio at the center of massive and minute organisms.  This generation holds the technological tools with which we can stretch the microcosm and condense the macrocosm, observing, measuring, and theorizing in a way humankind may never have again.  (And yet reality television is the information age’s main mental meal.)

The fabric of space-time itself is not uniform; rather, it has expanded much like a balloon whose membrane has been stretched at random, weakened and expanding faster than the rest.  Like Brownian Motion (but without particles in the medium to cause such irregularities), the underlying structure of the universe has expanded in a popcorn fashion rather than any uniform constant.  The density of spacetime is as irregular as the neurons of a brain.

Cosmology has observed the space between galaxies is expanding.  Matter is merely energy condensed into a slow vibration, as Bill Hicks used to say.  Congealing within the crevices of a denser space-time, clumps of matter condensed into atom-sized galaxies which blipped into their modern size during an acceleration period of the big-bang…or so the latest theory supposes.

During the next Sunday’s catechism, Father Don suggested we read The Orthodox Way by Bishop Kallistos Ware.  Within this slim volume is an elegant attempt at explaining how three distinct persons, each in perfect communion with the other two, could form one God.  The Orthodox do not unravel the fabric of life’s tapestry to study a thread; Hellenistic thought is very comfortable with paradox.  The mystery of the Trinity is something to be meditated upon, not rationally dissected.

God communicates to us by grace yet is, in essence, incommunicable and supra-nature.  Christ incarnate, clothed in the human condition, radiates through his humility and love, attributes reflecting the beauty of the Father, calling down the gift of uncreated grace that is the Holy Spirit to shine upon the world.

That afternoon, Cosmology provided me with a simile:  Humans look towards light and say “Star” or to a shape of light and say “Orion.”  What is it, specifically, we’re pointing towards?  Is it the composition of light, the nuclear fusion sending that light forth through the vacuum of its absence, or the structuring fabric which hugs energy until it has drawn together enough to ignite?

We point to three elements-in-one every night and, awestruck, muster “Star.”