Dearest Rachel –
Far be it from me to tell the all-knowing God His own business; He obviously know why He chooses to do as He does, and that His choices are correct. But since He hasn’t let me in on the ‘why’ in most cases, I can’t help but wonder from time to time what His purposes are in withholding that from me – and by extension, the rest of humanity.
·God is honored for what he keeps secret [L It is the glory of God to hide a matter/things; Deut. 29:29]. ·Kings are honored for what they can discover [L It is the glory of kings to examine them].
Proverbs 25:2, Expanded Bible
I suppose that He is glorified when we as humanity accept that we have no idea how this or that item or aspect of creation works, let alone how it comes into existence; “isn’t God the Creator something,” we would conclude, “for having put all this together!” But in our enlightened day and age, we have kings (or rather, ‘wise’ men) who spend their lives making those discoveries described in the second half of this verse, only to seemingly try to explain God out of the picture in the process. Perhaps, if we as humanity had less to discover, we would still be honoring God that much more, relative to ourselves (even though, theoretically, by having less hidden, we would have less reason for us to honor Him…? And given that He deserves infinite honor anyway, what, really, would be the result of this subtraction?)
It sometimes seems that the withholding of information (and maybe this is a result of living in the age that I am; the credo of the internet age, in particular during its infancy, has been “information wants to be free.” Now perhaps in a different era, I wouldn’t think like this, or it wouldn’t even so much as cross my mind, but this is where we are) results in so many negative outcomes. When we don’t know the whole truth about a matter, we fill in the gaps with our imagination, only to get things so much more wrong than if we had simply left those gaps alone. Our individual (and worse, our collective, since many minds can come up with so much more than just one can) imagination basically opens a haberdashery specializing in tinfoil, based on how we try to bridge the spaces between the things we know. If only the whole were known from the start, this wouldn’t be an issue.
Of course, this is not a ‘flaw’ (although, again, clearly there’s something about this situation I don’t understand, since God in His infinite wisdom allowed this to happen, and He has no flaws, by definition) that’s unique to God. He may have told Adam that he “would surely die” if he ate from that one particular tree (out of all the trees throughout Eden!), and the fact that he (and Eve; it’s possible he was persuaded to eat by the mere fact that she hadn’t dropped dead) didn’t – at least, not “on that day” – made God look like He was withholding information, or misrepresenting the situation, but we continue to do the same thing within humanity – to much greater peril, seeing as those that claim to have some great secret wisdom may well be utterly mistaken, or worse, lying through their teeth. Since time immemorial, there have been secret societies, claiming to know the truth about this or that, but only revealing it to certain select people; this, unsurprisingly, leads to them being viewed with suspicion by the rest of the populace, sometimes to unfortunate and even violent ends. It leaves one wondering why a person (or a group of people) would do that? How can they be so sure of themselves that they would allow this to happen?
It’s one of the great arguments for Christianity that our mentor would offer, back when we would study with him early in our marriage. He said that the most convincing thing was how this group of twelve (well, okay… eleven) cowardly men suddenly began speaking about their ‘late’ Master Jesus in public, without the slightest bit of fear. Had He not risen, why would they die for what they all knew was a lie?
But that’s the exception to the rule – or not; I wouldn’t know. It’s not as if I belong to the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, or any of those other societies (or religions, for that matter– I pass by the Mormon temple on my way back from walking with Lars, and still remember when the place was built, and how Mom and I think Jen and maybe you got to pad through the place with paper booties on for that one and only time before it was closed to anybody but the members of the LDS church), so I don’t know what secrets they’re concealing, let alone if those secrets are true or not. What I do know is that it’s that kind of secrecy that breeds suspicion and even hatred, and it’s not as safe to be part of those groups unless they really do have some Important Truth – but you would think that it would so much better for all concerned if that Truth were made public, so as to be implemented for the betterment of all mankind.
And so, with all that having been said, we come to last night’s dream – yes, that was a lot of prologue for what amounts to a particularly small and insignificant scene. These are the questions raised by the implications of it, though.
In it, I found myself as a friend and confidant of one John Ratzinger. You might recognize the name, or not; his professional title, Benedict XVI, might be more familiar. Obviously, not true in real life, given that I’m Protestant, but you understand by now… dream logic and all that. Instead of dying, he merely availed himself of one of the secrets hidden within the Vatican – water from the Fountain of Youth, as discovered by Ponce de Leon back during the Age of Exploration – and, thus disguised as an eight-to-twelve-year-old, went into hiding within a community of German Catholics somewhere in northern Wisconsin. And somehow, throughout all of this, I was helping facilitate his escape from Rome and relocation to the wilds of the Dairy State.
The reason behind it was the same as the one behind his decision to resign the papacy in the first place; he had learned things in his office about the Catholic system that, if revealed, could all but destroy it. However, by leaving them unspoken, he would be facilitating the deception of destruction of millions of souls (literally) throughout the world who were following this organization, and planned to release it all before the powers-that-be forced him out, in favor of Jorge Bergoglio. So, he went on the run, with plans to somehow get the word out over time, as the world become ready to hear it.
All thoroughly fanciful, although nothing in comparison to some conspiracy theories I’ve heard (and Daniel, among so many others, may even believe) about the Vatican. But they’re known to have so much secretly held in their vaults and libraries that speculation runs wild about what they might be hiding. Most likely, it’s generally pretty innocuous stuff, but by keeping those things secret, I can’t see as to how they’re bringing glory to themselves. All it does it to fuel various theories, few of them good, as to what’s hidden, and why. If it’s all good things, beneficial to mankind, keeping them secret is holding mankind back from progress; this is information we as civilization could build that much further upon. If the material being held is something evil, dark and sinister, why is the Church holding onto it? Either destroy it, or expose it for the evil it is (although, granted, it seems we as humans are increasingly unable to tell good from evil these days – maybe the effect of the fruit is starting to wear off?)
Anyway, how was your morning, honey?
Letters to Rachel 