by Joe Derkacht
Episode Three
Not so long ago, I had discovered what I thought a meteor must feel like, as Leanhar and I streaked through the glory-filled skies of the Heavenly City. Now I was a cold dead rock plummeting through the eternal, infinite stretches of night. Could rock feel darkness crushing its chest like I did, even as the sensation of plunging downwards grew with terrible speed?
A creature of light who had known nothing but the universe of light since my arrival in heaven, I began to doubt the very existence of light. Was I predestined for this terrible fall? Was this my true end, my true destiny? Had God rejected me, cruelly allowed me into His heaven in order to torture me with the knowledge of my eternal loss? A poor soul slipping down a dark and rainy mountainside or falling from a foggy sea cliff would have felt more hope.
Little by little, moment by moment, the clock turned back and with it what I knew of God’s unimpeachable goodness and of the resurrection life and its powers. Already peeled away were gifts and talents never dreamed of in the earth life. Even memory of those things was fading. Could the seed dream of the flower, or the flower of the fruit? Instead, memories sunken in the graveyard of a dead universe began flashing across my vision, those things I had put behind me long ages ago, the waking nightmares that were often my life while still clothed in an unredeemed body. 10,000 years ago I had forgotten the former terrors. Now I began to remember them again, as the glories of heaven and its life failed.
Somewhere below was a sea vent, warm against the surrounding cold, nourishing with molten nutrients. Would I find it? Would I, as sightless as a sea slug, recognize it once again? Or could I rise, swimming with mighty flukes, to rediscover the world of light and heave with the relief of that first breath as I breached the ocean swells?
Where was Leanhar? Where was the Holy Spirit? Where was the Son of God? Despair caught me with its claws. Raked me. Left me bloody.
Why have you abandoned me, O my God? Why? Why? Why?
You have the Word of God.
Yes, I thought, reaching out as if for a lifeline. You remember me! I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me. Almost instantly despair loosed its terrible grip. My eyes discerned something in the darkness— a rope woven of light itself. I didn’t have to reach out; my hands already encircled it, light that stretched far above me and just as far below.
I have the Word of God— I said to myself. The prophetic word made more sure—
No sooner had I thought that, than a faint golden blur, perhaps no more than the size of a silver dollar, appeared in the nether distance beneath my feet. Was I falling toward it—or it toward me? Whichever it was the blur grew steadily, until it resolved into a broad, flattened disk. An apparition, perhaps? Apparition or not, it seemed to be my destination, for the rope of light centered upon it like an arrow for a bull’s-eye.
Impossibly slowly the disk grew, taking on greater and greater definition, with an outer boundary of darkness. Just as clearly, the blur of light became individual, countless sparks of light. After a long while, the disk shrank unaccountably to perhaps half its size, with the rope in my hands whipping against me like a bowstring losing its tautness. My sense of momentum vanished. I hung between darkness and light. To remain here forever? Like a stuck elevator car?
At a sudden jerking motion, the disk expanded beneath me, exceeding its former size by perhaps a quarter. The rope tightened. I fell again, faster than before. Six more times I saw the strange disk shrink and expand, the rope of light affected in the same way as the first. By the time the bright disk nearly filled my entire field of vision, I could discern discrete bands of light exploding outward from a center of light, with bands of darkness between. I was still on target.
In the blink of an eye, I emerged into the universe of old and dying galaxies. At long last I had crossed the dark abyss forever fixed between past and present, an abyss I thought more fixed than the one which existed between Heaven and hell.
My rope of light seemed anchored in the long-buried cosmos—or was its anchor somewhere above me, beyond the terrible abyss, stretching toward the infinity that is the New Heavens and New Earth, but especially the Eternal City, even the throne of the Holy Place? Hidden from my sight, did they still exist? Would I ever see them again?
Somewhere beneath me lay the blue-green marble of my first birth, and on that marble, spinning in the heavens, also the place of my second birth. Travel at the speed of light would have taken billions of years to cross the universe to my first home. Traveling by the same means I had first left earth those many ages ago—by the spirit—I would surely cross the cosmos as quickly as I had in leaving it for the shores of light. This time, though, no angelic companions escorted me like the soul bound for Heaven. In their place I had only the lifeline in my hands, perhaps the soul’s umbilical cord anchored in Heaven since the new birth.
A dozen lights popped into view ahead of me. My first impression was of headlights racing in my direction: then, as I moved closer, that I was seeing a bizarre juxtaposition of shiny Christmas globes flying through the blackness of space. We shot past each other like cannon shells aimed at opposing targets. An afterimage of stern joy registered in my brain, of fierce angelic visages stamped by victory over dark forces, and of song and music equally triumphant. Their destination was the Heavenly City: mine was the battlefield.
“Holy angels!”
My salutation went unheeded. I may as well have been a ghost passing unnoticed through a crowd of blind men. Among them had been a soul naked except for a simple white robe. They were escorting a trophy of spiritual battle. Someone I had known—or rather knew from the heavenly life? Whoever it was, my own soul had called out in recognition as surely as I’d called out to the angels themselves.
The stars slowed down, again floated lazily in space. I had entered the solar system of my birth, a solar system broken but slated for redemption, a redemption I had enjoyed now for over 10,000 years. Ahead of me, I was gaining upon another cluster of angels, these headed toward earth. I passed through them unseen, too, just as invisible as before, and felt a sudden pang of recognition.
The time to ponder the strangeness of this second encounter passed like the strobing of a neutron star. I was hurtling much faster through space than they were, and while they were approaching Saturn, I was already within the orbital plane of Mars. Near Mars, I saw a spectacle I have never forgotten, one of the old demons in battle with a single angel who carried a human soul in his arms. Encompassed by light, the holy angel watched as though the opponent was a goldfish on the attack through an aquarium’s glass walls. The demon, who appeared to be pitted stone, shielded its eyes with one free hand and wheeled blindly about with a stone sword in each of its five other hands, completely oblivious to the crumbling of its swords at each stroke against the sphere of light. Shortly weaponless, and with arms crumbling alike, the demon fell away in retreat.
“The Most High is Love,” the angel spoke tenderly to the sleeping soul in his charge. “Against Him and His Light, in Whom we live, move, and have our being, the Dark Planet’s so-called gods are impotent.”
His words were far from new to me; the angel was Leanhar, and the human soul in his charge was my own. Clearly, I was returning to earth by the same way I had first come from it. Behind me a squad of angels was flying to meet us, the same squad I’d first seen returning to Heaven, escorting my own soul. That was the reason for my disjointed sense of recognition of them—not once but now three times—I had been allowed to intersect them at various points along my own personal timeline.
Still hungering for a reunion with my old companions, my fall through time resumed. Instantly, it seemed, earth’s blue disk loomed ahead, and in mute astonishment I saw thousands of those lights I had first mistaken for shiny Christmas ornaments, each of them an angel, and now each of them in individual combat, pursued by demons swarming from out of the mid-heavens—just as I had witnessed between
Leanhar and myself and the hideous demon.
Momentarily shocked, I remembered having seen many demons while on earth; one Asian art museum in particular had devoted an entire wing to statues of them, where the ignorant dutifully labeled them as gods. The rope tautened again, plunging me toward earth, past one battle and into another. Cohorts of holy, implacable angels appeared, binding evil spirits and carrying them off to judgment. Still falling, I saw clusters of demons tearing at the souls of men who worshipped dark spirits. This was followed by the vision of a dark plain where men wrestled and bludgeoned each other in a contest more vicious than Greece’s old pancratium, while monstrous scorpions crawled among them, biting and tearing friend and foe alike.
My senses were soon reeling. Visions fell across me like a kaleidoscopic hailstorm: I saw thrones where brutal, unholy powers sat, and one was unseated by a shockwave originating from the planet below; I saw numerous white-robed men and women turn their eyes toward some contest on earth and shout in triumph; I saw a seven-headed dragon, with one of its heads crushed, flying across the heavens, raking at the stars with its tail; I saw windows into other dimensions, from which sinless races seemed to be watching and pondering; I saw holy scribes escorted by fierce warriors as they walked or flew unmolested among men, angels, and demons, all the while taking notes upon tablets made of light; I saw fleets of what appeared to be flying saucers, manned by demons, streaming through a hole in the universe; I saw a throne ablaze with light being set up, and smaller thrones all around it; I saw a marble courtyard upon which stood ranks of transparent, freestanding pillars, each lit with glory, and each filled with a column of bearded human faces that stared back at me with fierce intelligence and even more avid curiosity; I saw a courtyard where two great pillars stood, morphing from shining bronze into two living olive trees dripping with oil...
The images in mid-heaven might have been infinite. Accompanying the noisy clamor of warfare were fragrances beautiful and stenches dreadful, in total a bewildering cacophony of sight, sound, and smell. One last scene stood out among the welter, that of two towering, mighty angels locked in desperate combat. One had weapons of light, the other of darkness. One was filled with stern wisdom and majesty, the other with lies and deception. One held open a narrow path, while the other guarded wide gates through which demons eagerly herded the damned.
The former was Michael, glorious and triumphant archangel, Protector of the Righteous. The latter was Discord, though perhaps that was his character and not his name, or after all these years I had simply forgotten what he should be called. But this and the previous images faded, quickly replaced by others, as I continued in freefall toward earth, the world men had once called a mere speck in the vast cosmos; a backward planet situated on a remote arm of an obscure galaxy; cesspool of the universe; sinkhole of creation; failing because of their spiritual blindness to see it as the battleground of demons and angels, nursery for the spirits of Adam’s race, who were to inherit eternal life and to be co-rulers of the universe with Yahshua HaMeshiach, the One who came to be known in the West as Jesus Christ.
The earth flattened out before my eyes and seemed to be unrolling, transforming itself into what I recognized as a sort of Mercator projection. Instead of the expected continents and their mountains and plains and lakes and rivers, the entire earth was under a haze of smoke, with continents morphing into scenes uncannily like animated cartoons. Below me America had become a marble and gold edifice, its foundations licked by fire, its spires struck by lightning; Europe a rococo graveyard; the Mideast a trampled, bloody field; Africa a raging river of floating bodies; Asia a vast desert with oases springing anew; Australia a prison with its doors beginning to swing wide; South America a dark village with streetlights ablaze. Combat raged in all of them, and amid fire and darkness solitary lights shone brilliantly, like the stars in the heavens.
All these things I saw in the spirit, and then I was suddenly blind, like after my first step into the dark pool, though this time I felt myself spinning head over heels—tumbled—rolled—one moment battered, the next thrust into a green flash of light, and then pushed from behind and sunk like a stone. The battering recommenced, and was interrupted by some force bent upon lifting me toward another flash of light. Helpless against these strange forces, I was carried inexorably along, as if I were a piece of ragged driftwood plunging beneath a raging tide. Space with its stars was gone, as were the continents and the spiritual map I’d glimpsed. The rope of light, if it ever really existed, had disappeared, perhaps lost in the tide.
Then I was arching my neck and raising my head above bitterly cold water for a gulp of air. For one instant I caught a glimpse of raging, foam-wreathed surf—before plunging again beneath the blue waves. Saltwater and liquefied sand filled my nose, eyes, mouth as I was rolled about like a stone in a lapidary’s drum.
