It's Just a Dream
A long, long time ago, God had come to the world. It could have been a great thing, a wonderful thing - the manifestation of God, undeniably, in the world, with no possibility for denial, but God had done something really terrible. It - I don't think God was mentioned by any gendered pronouns in the dream, and, since I suppose this was my God, or at least something that I had no trouble at all perceiving and conceptualizing of as my God, I ought to use the proper pronoun for my God - had eaten Its disciple, the faithful follower It had descended to - just eaten him. And that had kind of ruined the theophany - you just don't want God to eat you. Perhaps it might seem like a pleasant thing, to be engulfed fully by God, to become one with It, to abandon the secularity of the self for the holiness of the Other, but we dream of the impossible, we want to know God and yet remain ourselves, we do not wish to be subsumed. We want to stand alone, whole and complete as things in ourselves, and face God. And God had not permitted this, a long, long time ago.
Now, God was coming back. God was going to come back and make everything alright. It was going to be wonderful, because with this manifestation of God, all of the problems of the past could be redeemed and the future could be perfect on into eternity. Of course, God might eat his new disciple - this disciple's name was Daniel. He wasn't my colleague Daniel, but perhaps he was influenced by him. That might happen again, just as it had happened before, and then nothing would be okay, any more than it is now. But there was a risk even beyond that. The problem was, although God was coming to meet Daniel, God was going to manifest in front of this one other specific person - he also had a name, but I don't remember it, it was a weird, fantasy-novelish kind of name - wherever that person was, at the right time, and if God manifested anywhere except in this one specific place, It would be controlled by the enemy. The enemy had power and authority over everywhere in the world except for this one specific, sacred place, and even God would have to bow to that power. And so the hero was racing to the one specific place, desperate to get there in time so that God's manifestation could be free from corruption by the enemy.
I don't want you to get the wrong idea. The thing you have to understand, if you can, is that, no matter what happened, it was going to be okay. That was the promise of God's descent into the material plane, that everything would be alright, that perfection would reign, and it would happen no matter where God came. If God did end up being controlled by the enemy, that wouldn't actually mean that everything wouldn't be alright, much better than it is now. God's arrival would, intrinsically, be accompanied by a holy aura that would justify everything and make it all inarguably fine - unless, of course, he ate Daniel. So the hero was not racing to save the world, because nothing that the hero did would have any effect on whether or not the world would be saved. That was entirely up to God, and, if God refrained from eating Daniel, the world would be saved no matter what. The only thing was whether or not that saving would be defined by and in the terms of the enemy, or whether God Itself would be able to abide by the terms that had always been promised to us. Once God came, everything would be alright, and there would be an intrinsic moral truth and justice to whatever happened, because that was in the power of God, even if God was in the power of the enemy, even if that moral truth and justice was completely contrary to what we currently understand moral truth and justice to be. The hero's race, hence, did not matter, ultimately, was insignificant next to the immensity of the eternity to come, which would be fine. But the hero's race mattered now - in this time now, with truth and justice and morality and perfection being what we think them to be, it would have been anathema to permit God to fall into the hands of the enemy, even if it would not have been an error to have permitted it to have happened after the fact.
Hence, the hero was racing. He made it into the building where the sanctified ground was, Daniel following along behind more slowly, because even though God was coming to meet Daniel, he was coming to where the hero would be. He had this sense of intrinsic rightness because he knew that, even though God was coming quickly, he would be even quicker, he would make it to the holy place on time. And, sure enough, out of breath, stumbling, fuelled only by adrenaline and certainty and at the edge of his capabilities, he made it. He had barely arrived when the heavens parted and the light shone down and God, too, arrived. And God called out in a loud voice that was not like a sound but full of meaning and intent, "Daniel!" And Daniel walked down the hallway that the other had just been running down and came and stood before God. The world was fragile, then. The enemy, and this was something, had no more power, but the hero had never had any chance of saving the world from God. If God chose to eat Daniel, at this point, to once more initiate Its greedy quest to take everything back into Itself and leave nothing of the world standing, then even if God once again held back after tormenting only one person, everything would go to naught. But we had faith in God, that God had learned Its lesson last time and that the future would be a better and more correct thing than the past. And Daniel, whole and complete in himself looked God in the face, and God did not eat Daniel. This time, God chose not to eat his disciple, and so we could all pass into a better age, we could all reach, together, the loftiest star of heaven.
I wept.