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CHAPTER 13

ALOFT and AWAY!

 Away and Beyond

There is in any adventure, any release in vacation that involves exploration, any sudden thrust from long and often tedious preliminaries into acute and present dynamic, a sense of exaltation. There is however one proviso which often applies: it is not always felt, this sense, when the game is unruly, when the players merely use guile or works in guilt to secure some release. It is the prodigious joy of release into reality which creates an exuberance in those who realise their project is good, their preliminaries are done and wonder beckons!

As to the Christian trio, this exaltation was not lacking in any of them: neither in Ralph in his manly, virtuous and virile faith, that did not proceed from his manliness, but helped to make it real; nor in Harry in his more flighty feelings and yet real capacity to be persuaded of what is best, and to share in the enthusiasm which eventually settled into assured faith in the work provided from the Lord; nor even in Margaret in her luminous mind and active spirit, with thoughts like shooting stars penetrating always, beyond and beyond.

To her, it seemed as if the space shuttle was a thought and the dark regions of yielding space which hurtled towards them, the venue for its arrival.

The other chaplain, the third, Claude whose task was more mundane, on the other hand, a man of this world who felt vaguely disconcerted at actually leaving it, if only for a time, was reflecting moodily at this lift into space, on the dismal side of things in his life. He was  engaged in a sort of reverie, considering how considerably unpleasant it would feel if the journey were not merely into broader spaces of geometrical kind, the very geometry of which was still subject to debate, but into a spiritual space where God Himself would be the destination. His seminary training, or mis-education, at this point gave him little comfort. Insulting God on earth is one thing; trying to do it when He is discernibly looking at you, that he found is another.

Imagine if this were the journey called death! to God! He reviewed it ... Why was he here ?

What sort of a Chaplain could be when in his heart he knew this, that he did not know God or even want to.

That was obviously the ground of his disfaith. Again, HOW on earth, or even on the moon could you tell someone about a personal being when you yourself did not know Him! Would it be like a history lesson when you spoke of what characters did, and did not know them personally ? Is that what people want! he queried his own mind.

While his sudden and unwelcome anti-disestablishment thoughts concerning God were thus challenging his normal views, and inclining him away from the pig's trough trash he had swallowed so readily at seminary in prospect of being a man of affairs in social circles oddly named church matters, he felt profoundly disturbed. In fact, to his mind came the scene from long ago, in the first century AD, when Paul was being examined by Herod, and became for his own part Herod's examiner! Claude almost felt, like Herod before Paul, as it really was in that famous mutual  interrogation, recorded  in Acts 25, and he ? he felt almost persuaded!

 Persuaded to do what ? he asked his roving mind.

Why persuaded to accept the obvious and believe: but as always in his heart, there came to this field of thought, a psychic counter. He WOULD not because he COULD not believe! There was somewhere buried in his psyche a pollution meter which insisted on a given measure of pre-occupation, mental dust, spiritual impurity, to LIVE! It was like a vitamin supplement to him, he found. IF he once yielded himself fully to the Lord, then he felt there would be a break-down of his spiritual digestive system, and he would die! Death to Claude ?

Crucified with Christ was Paul's term in Galatians 2:20! Not for Claude! Sure it was a figure, but the figure featured death to independence, even if it likewise conferred independence from death! The cost was too high. What on this earth would be the use of that ? Living for ever was not so marvellous if you lived for your Maker.

As he opined in this way within, a certain salubrious sorrow came trickling down the hill of his life, as in some well-watered mountain, sadly swathing the rock, as if to wash it. Yes, to live forever had its points, but not at the expense of having a derivative life! Autonomy was as sacred to Claude as murder to the Mafia! If HE, Claude could not control his own life, there was simply nothing in it for him. How could a man justify getting no gain, no reward, having no future for himself, but what someone else chose to appoint. Ridiculous! he inwardly smirked.

No, he resolved, artificiality is not as straight as sincerity, but it serves, it serves.

What and whom it served and in what way, these were questions that did not arise, for with an iron resolve, which with a flicker of internal amusement in his debased personality, he would follow what from youth he had desired. He knew what it was:  social contact, ecclesiastical executive status and power to push into the inward areas of other people's thoughts and lives. It gave him place, power and prestige; and he asked himself, what more does this little life of mine need, than that!

As space flicked by his viewing place, and the immensity of the majesty of the creation preached countless sermons to his soul, he interrupted each preachment before it was well under way, and forced his mind to survey the scene as dark, with impressive luminosities and colossal features on its face, and to discern it as merely a tunnel, a way to reach the moon.

Hu, meanwhile, way below,  was watching the progress of the craft rather differently. He was not plagued by doubts, for he had long since decided that even if for a little time he might wonder about some of his ways, they were as set as a super-highway and nothing, NOTHING would induce him to start digging up that beautiful pathway to power and fame, name and glory which he envisaged. What DID induce some thought was the remote possibility that the challenges of Margaret and the confrontational powers of Ralph would perhaps evaporate and lend themselves with suitable force into the arms of space. It was not exactly an explosion which he would have been glad to see, for his father's heart was only hard as lead, not yet comparable to stainless steel.

It was rather just the sense that somehow, now at last, they might become incorporated in some other realm which he neither knew nor cared about.

Cleo on the other hand, who had come by privileged permission to the space centre, was watching with a sense of destiny, that her children should work on the American Street in the moon! It was of course really rather a colony, but that was how her ready mind conceived it.

Smoothly the shuttle sent its signals, as gloriously it went on and on, to its appointed destination. Two on the moon! she thought, but tears refused to come. One thing she had well learnt from years of living with Hu was this, that if ANYONE got in his way, though many and varied were the ways of removing the obstruction, in the end that person or that object or power would have to GO! Her own children, she sighed mentally, they were far safer in space than in this world! At least there, a sense of pure Americanism seemed to surround the US colony more than it did even on the mainland US in this earth! More eyes were fastened on its every move in more ways, so that here was an outpost,  indeed a space for safety.

How had she ever married such a man as Hu! Yet in his youth, he had been charming and if a touch too princely, yet he had a certain courtliness and way about him suggestive of competence and knowledgeability, and a certain drama of suppressed excitement. She had mistaken its nature and now bitterly regretted her inchoate Christianity as it had been at this time; for she herself had no more known God personally at that time, than did Hu now!

In fact, it was a sense of  polarity which had helped her. He was so obviously starkly evil, now, that it jolted any sense of complacency or mere social religion. The cross of Christ had now become to her as glorious as any scent or perfume, as any purely earthly beauty, and far more than this, for here the dynamics met, here in simplicity the spiritual riddle of man was solved, tensions resolved, and beauty was displayed beyond the grotesque. It was not really paradoxical, she mused, for what greater beauty than suffering deformity and death for love, and doing so in the way of redemption, as if someone not merely PAID for the liberation of some slave, but paid by BECOMING ONE HIMSELF!

Splendid as that would be, she pondered, it was nothing compared with removing slavery by becoming a slave and dying as a slave, but not a slave merely: rather as Master of all that induced and produced slavery.

Nor was this all. He, the very Lord, was in this way paying, in that one act, for all who sought and received such liberation. Monumental, simple, profound, pure, perfected suffering securing its target, it presented a spiritual beauty so intense that it gave a profound awe to her worship. This, it was not only fitting, it was a sublime opportunity to respond!

How lovely the thing was in result, too.  It was democratic in that any might come; sovereign in that God knew His own and regenerated them; gracious in that God yearned for all and received those whom violence did not induce, but God Himself; glorious in that it restored to man to his proper place as creation in God's image. Stark in success, this divine action added this new surging dimension of adoption by payment to secure the wanderer astray, back to the place of light in the Lord.

The cross of Christ, this and not the cross-purposes of man, the only other alternative: this was her glory; and there was strength here and composure. Why worry ? God knew all. Why fret ? God could and often DID anything beyond one's very conception until ... one actually saw it done! She had seen Him at work in so many ways, that she felt like a branch on a vine, sometimes seeing fertiliser applied, sometimes weeds dug up (and that hurt!), sometimes being watered with spiritual refreshment!

But Hu! He was like a giant weed, eating up fertilser, drunkenly seeking to drain water anywhere near, and becoming a stout little thrust of botanical wonder into the sky: in fact able to be snapped when the moment came, like a vast milk thistle. Though he loved his little misplaced life, nothing could give it dignity.

If he could seek to become a god in his own right, the best, the uttermost, then this was idolatry of a sensationally grotesque kind, in appearance like some of those gargoyles which look down ferociously from old buildings where they may adorn water spouts. What, she asked herself, was the spout on Hu conveying ? Only misplaced passion, pre-eminent desire for prestige and calculated risks for displacing God in the minds of people by subtle shifts, until they naturally should accept his own man-as -master concept.

Of course, it would be overlaid with due mystery, paraded with power, but in the end was as empty as a giant pipe, stuck uselessly where the arid land knew nothing of water.

Hu's philosophy parade, his religious cavalry, it was always surrounded with suitable spiritual mysticism. He never went so far as to deny God, preferring merely to seek to subvert His reality, overtake His power and undertake his own mission in God's name. Many were his phrases, his paraphrases for God: he would refer to the spiritual destiny or heritage of man, the divine calling of the race, the need for passion to realise the heights to which man's spirit could go, the communal wonder of the race, the imposing splendour of the wisdom accorded man, without quite saying there was nowhere for it to come from, or go to, while yet hinting that a spectacular future beckoned man.

After all, if there was nowhere for it to come from, how could it be here ? and if there were no truth to be known, how did he know! These perplexities were unfitting to the august presence, which looked for levers of his fancy, not the Lord of all truth.

Logically, his methodology, it had nothing but bluster. Psychologically it had appeal for every proud soul, every barren landscape that sat in formerly alive souls, without a house or homeland for truth. It drew  with indescribable angst-sating illusion,  every desperado intent on power and being at the top, as every sullen sinner to whom virtually anything but God was acceptable, seeking in the mist of mysticism and the blight of spiritual incontinence, to live amid the debris that sat in the human heart.

There it sought to explode God out of the way. What surrounded these hapless wanderers ? While it was not any actual debris of God, no not even in their own minds; but they had this invasive fear that it was, as it is, mere results of the collision of their unbelief with the reality of God. It  was spiritual space debris in their hearts. These particles of thought and hope, they were his own debris.

It was  not God who constituted this, but their own souls, disintegrated into power, comfort and pleasure lusts, alien from their Maker, like luxury vehicles after collision: not really cars any more, and yet having something of the shape of them. They were like crushed automotive objects,  reminiscent of transport, but with bits scattered about.

How some of them would have seized on any opportunity to be integrated again; but since they rejected the Designer, they could never find the design; for there is no alternative design for car parts after an accident, which want to become something ELSE! And for those who might want to be rebuilt, the panel-beating DOES hurt!

After all, taking up your cross and following Christ is not exactly a pleasant procedure, however much the dawn of beauty in the AIM, and the anointing of the meadows of the soul in the WALK, do in fact bring delight. Dying to one's own desires is a mortal business; and living to the will of God, though delightful and authentic, requires discipline.

Eternal life is a gift OF and IN and THROUGH grace, but one needs grace to walk in that glorious path, the path to glory. They reject it like those who refuse to be athletes, and in the process fail to realise the exuberant vitality which such spiritual living confers. Nor do they realise the sense of meaningless redundancy which separation from the Designer inevitably brings.

Hope animates some of them, as if logic could die, or God could arise in the mist; but in that mist there is nothing to be missed or found, except the abrasive flints underneath, to lacerate the journeying, and the dark light, to mislead the wanderers, except of course when on their introductory course, where they are given a species of illumination, to get them further into the depths, when even the semblance of light disappears.

Such thoughts as these sadly came to Cleo's mind; for she had really loved Hu, and to see this seedy superficiality disporting itself reminded her of some foolish moth, ever ready to be scorched, endlessly circling a light that was not adapted to its needs, seeking with an apparent fascination for the ruin the adventure must surely bring. Here he was, slowly scorching, and rejoicing in power, amidst the changing moods as his full Hu eclipse prepared for its hideous appearance.

Ralph and Harry, inseparables in the mission and friends of long custom from seminary, had almost grown up in their last stages like trees in a park, each relating a little differently to the light, but somehow a composition of art, together. There were few issues they had not discussed, few predicaments they had not shared. Life in all its lustre was alive in them, and they were like branches on one vine, robust in spiritual health, sometimes needing pruning; and they were ready to bear fruit.

That sense of blessed companionship, that fraternity which men now try to duplicate, and women, in devious ways, void of truth or reality, was theirs without any request needing to made. Spiritually given and received, it was natural, normal and supernatural in origin: like themselves. All men are supernatural products, and not byproducts of the natural; and naturally, when they forget it, there simply ARE NO SOLUTIONS, to their wild extravaganzas of philosophy, ethics, politics and society, body, mind and soul.

When you are IN the vine, however, the lateral branches are naturally at one. It is a spiritual unity which relates to a spiritual Father who made each one, and the oneness with which they may relate, whether as brothers, or family, or citizens. They watched as the beauty of the green-blue and brown earth gave its last lustrous blessings, as if aware of and alert to their mission to reach some of its inhabitants on the moon, as the rich texture of the abyss beyond winked here or there, and the radiant moon lost some of its lustre, as they moved towards their polar station. Slight was the light from the sun, just winking near the horizon, as if Arctic quiet were their mission.
 

Not so, however, was this in the psychic thrusts occurring at that time, on the moon; for here were the passions of an earth which had misspent its collective youth, and they threatened to become scoured into the very barrenness, with the lunar surface littered with blood.

Meanwhile, the shuttle hovered over its target, and the capsule commenced its descent to the lunar soil. How mixed was its load! Within it, were to be found the wanton, spiritually mutant seeds of man, merely degraded, there too the seed of his strength in the Lord; not missing were the seeds of his witlessness without God, of designs for flimsy glory and pursuit of the glory which needs no design, since it is there already, and needs rather to be worshipped.

Cleo felt a tiny rapture of heart as it landed safely, and soon through the station roof's cleverly constructed doors, the whole craft was swallowed. They were gone! They had arrived. She resolved to dine with Hu that night, and amidst a measure of enthusiasm for their arrival, to speak subtly of the immense watchfulness all would need to exert, in view of the confinement of the area of living, and the immensity of the perils, both from distant bombardment and from unexpected intruders held ready by the specious manipulators on earth.

She mused as she pondered her children. Perhaps some shimmer of unearthly power would be contrived to send shivering in desolation,  competitors for the moon: an emulous dynamic, desired by insistent lust, showing intemperately to others that they could depart undesired, whether from the moon, life or both!  Passion is easy enough to export. Though its source would be earthy enough, attack could come at any time from some new outbreak of insanity, deployed in advanced technology, sent from one of the other powers whose missions were not so very far from that of the US, on the moon.

Cleo prayed for her children. Hu however has rather different ideas.