The Place Where the Falling Angel Meets The Rising Ape
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.” (The Hogfather, Terry Pratchett). “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1). There is a reason that stories are so important to us. In the beginning was the Word, with a capital W. Before anything else existed, the Word existed, the Story existed. Christ is the word. He is the story of us all. “Knowest thou the condescension of God?” the angel asked Nephi. Christ is the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape. Christ came in the meridian of time. He came when humans had been working out for thousands of years how to live in a world in which not only they themselves were little gods, with the means and the motive and opportunity to have dominion over the whole earth, but also surrounded by millions of other little gods with the same means and motive and opportunity and just how exactly all of these little gods were going to treat one another without everything ending in utter annihilation. And the crazy thing is, barring a global flood here and there, the whole world hadn’t ended in utter annihilation before God Himself came down, a fallen angel who chose to dwell among the rising apes. God came down to be the Word, to be the Story we all could follow. He showed us that you can be born in the dirt, next to the animals, that your own government can attempt to murder you as a baby, that you can come from one of the worst regarded towns in one of the most backwater regions of the empire, that you can be denounced and condemned by religious figures, stabbed in the back by your friend, disowned by your brother, collapse in agony for the suffering of others, become public enemy number one, be tried and convicted as a cult leader and domestic terrorist, tortured and executed, and yet. If that was the end then stories would hold no power over us. We like stories that have conflict, and often the more pain the characters undergo, the more powerful the story. A story with no conflict isn’t a story at all so much as a recitation of uninteresting facts. But the conflict is only half of the reason we love stories, need stories. If the story has conflict but no triumph then we hate it even worse than the boring non-conflict. Christ’s power is not just in that He suffered for all of our sins, neither as a Redeemer nor as a story. Christ’s power comes from His triumph over the grave and Hell. If Christ only died then we would have forgotten His story. But Christ’s story echoes out through all of Creation, indeed, is the reason that Creation even exists. Christ came to Earth to descend below all things. And. And to rise again. To rise above all things. This is the story we love. That we can fall down, down, down, all the way to the bottom, and then for the bottom to collapse under us and we fall even further. And. And then rise again, rise higher than we started, higher than we imagined.We need this story because it can be a very long way to the bottom, and sometimes we forget to look up, or even which way is up, but the story is there. Every story worth remembering starts with a fall, and ends with a rise, and we need to remember that we must fall, and then we must rise again. Believing that we can rise again after we’ve fallen every damn day of our lives may seem foolish, willfully blind, even dishonest. But when we’ve risen again, we’ll realize that the real lie was thinking there was any power on Earth or Hell that could stop us from rising again. We talk of stories as being realistic, which is different from them being real. Realistic is actually more real than real. In stories, the colors are more vivid, the textures richer, the scents sharper. That’s because every story is an echo of The Story, The Word. Terry Pratchett may have been correct in saying that you can’t find one atom of justice or one molecule of mercy, but that’s because he was referring to the real world, which isn’t nearly as real as the World that we may yet rise to, thanks to the power of story, to the power of the Word.
