Why Did Peter Sink?

After the last two inversions, things may seem a bit bleak. But the fall of one-third of the angels should not bring despair, despite the fact that God gives them leash to harass us - but just enough. (We should take note that they have been defeated already, yet the end must play out.)

The existence of spirits and angelic beings (even fallen ones) does nothing to change the fact that the radically transcendent God created wholly out of love. And how do we know this? Because God praises all of his creation as “good.” When God said “Fiat lux” he was pleased.

Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

Notice that he did not say, “Let there be dark,” for nothing is the darkness. But the light is good, and light is also true and beautiful. Seven times in the first chapter of Genesis we read “And God saw that it was good.” In the last mention, a strong adverb is added:

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.

Note that God says “it was good” even after creating humans, in our pre-fallen state. Note, also, that this declaration of humans being “good” is prior to the moment when he breathes a rational soul into humankind, but even after the Fall we are good, but compromised. We are bent but not broken. Even when our ejection from the Garden happens, the ground is cursed, not us. This is an important point to notice. Goodness in creation brings with it the language of hope, second chances, forgiveness, because all of us spiritually crippled and broken things are worth saving.

In Japan, an art form called Kintsugi takes broken pottery and mends it with a golden filler or powder so that the item becomes serviceable again while maintaining its scars. After the restoration, the pottery looks more beautiful and even becomes more valuable than the original pot. The original pot was good, but the healed pot is better. Shattered, it seemed destined for the garbage heap. However, with this art form, what was perceived as garbage or as a lost-cause is mended and brought back to life, in a resurrection of sorts. What was originally good is glorified in the restoration. That is the plan of salvation. Don’t let the Fall get you down, because the plan is greater than we understand.

And that brings us to the inversion regarding goodness: all that God made is good.

This is why sin is ridiculous. It destroys the good.

Yet the good remains and will be restored if we understand this inversion.

Cast out your cynicism and your glass-half-full thinking. Reject the notion that this world is intrinsically evil, for it was not made that way. By our sin, the pottery was shattered. Through the Paschal mystery we are repaired with golden seams. But in the meantime…

Because we have the reality of sin, we look for answers outside of the most obvious place. And this causes us to forget: that all matter and spirit created by God was good from the start. It is only by turning away that we crack up and need restoration. Yet there is much hope in that restoration, too, for in the healing, our wounds will remain but be more glorious.

Many errors about the goodness of creation has led both the Israelites and Christians and non-believers away from the right path. This often falls under an umbrella of “matter is bad” or “spirits are bad.” The error is simple. All of God’s creation exudes goodness. It is sin that is bad, because it deforms and disorders that goodness.

The one thing that God creates that he deems “not good” is when the man is alone, and therefore he creates woman. “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’”

Thus, the only thing that God created that was not good - human loneliness - was promptly addressed with the most wonderful creation of all: woman, and with her, he created another amazing gift called marriage. The Fall marred that relationship as well, for as we turned from God, we turned away from each other.

Since the Fall, we have been looking for something to blame for the state we are in, and the list of errors in what to blame grows long. If we don’t blame God, we blame something created. I would personally like to blame mosquitoes, but in the grand order of things, without mosquitoes many birds and bats would starve, and I like birds and bats. Even though mosquitoes ruin many summer evenings, they were created as good, because God said so.

Many stand-ins for mosquitoes have been tried. With Pandora’s Box the Greeks blamed the gods and woman for introducing evil. With the Manichaeans, matter was evil. In Christian history, there are thirty-one flavors of Gnostic heresies, with popular movements like Marcionism, Catharism, and Paulicianism. Most recently, the Woke movement of recent years has come up with a remarkably parallel set of doctrines to the Cathars, to the point that they seem somehow separated at birth despite being hundreds of years apart.

All of these gnostic groups die an ugly death, because they are errors and forget that God is good, and creation is good. With all untruth, it eventually turns on itself, killing off the host.

The “light versus dark” idea is not new. This mistake is ancient. The light/dark battle royale is called dualism, and here is the mistake: dualism declares that there are two equal forces in the universe in contention for power, and only those on the “right side of history” are the “good.” If you find Catholicism odd, look into the gnostic and dualist movements. You will find many strange ideas and no coherency, but a general theme of “matter is bad,” and that is not what God says. He says the opposite. He says matter is good, repeating it seven different times.

In much of the “light vs. dark” errors, there is a misconception of God and the “war in heaven” idea included God himself. But there is no competitor with God, who is the highest good and source of all that is good. Any war in heaven that happened among the angels occurred as part of God’s plan of salvation. Again, God is transcendent of all created things, even the angels. Thus, evil cannot touch God, because evil only happens in creation, which includes the created heavens. To use a metaphor, if an architect built a beautiful cathedral, and later a visitor entered the cathedral and spray painted the walls, that is not the architect’s work. The graffiti vandal represents disorder from the goodness of the creation, but the spray paint came from the creature who used creation unwisely.

Back to dualism: this idea often grows out of an imbalance in the world due to people causing disorder. We naturally fall into this state, and its called paganism. Paganism and modern political religion falls into this zero-sum game trap. The idea of competition comes from dualism, which is fundamentally a distrust in God and his plan for salvation.

Here is something we don’t like to admit: most Americans today are not Christians; they are gnostics and dualists without knowing it. We lionize competition and achievement, where failure is darkness. In other words, the Fall pushes us into continual competition, so that we do not cooperate with God’s grace or each other for the common good. After all, God created all things and saw that it was good. No, it was very good. We forget this every day. It’s good, yet something is off in creation, so we need to fix it. What could it be? What could be off? What is it that is un-good? That thing is called “me” but that’s hard to look at. Blaming something else is the path of least resistance, but wide is the way that leads to destruction and many are those who follow it.

This leads to a variety of conclusions about what is bad, or what went wrong, and so often the conclusion leads to something called “gnosis,” or secret knowledge. This secret knowledge tends to elevate the self over other people or groups. This secret knowledge pins the tail on a donkey to blame for all suffering. Gnosis behaves like a cancer cell, because gnosis takes many forms, and whatever group catches this disease always dies off in the end and becomes an obituary in history books. This is inevitable because the truth always bubbles up and continues on, like a cork in a stormy sea - no matter the weather or the waves, the truth cannot be sunk.

For some of these errors, the secret knowledge looks at matter as the source of evil, sometimes all matter. Leaps of logic are made, such as: Life is pain, ergo “bodies are bad.” An extension of that is “sex is bad” which was the cry of the Puritans and Cathars. (FYI: Puritanism is an error, as is all of Calvinism). Often specific matter or bodies are the target, like women or men, or black people or white people. Sound absurd? That’s because it is absurd. Sometimes there are specific groups, like Republicans or Democrats, capitalists or communists, that mark off the light versus dark and the group is responsible for all evil (depends on which side you are on). This blame and zero-sum game leads to a world lacking forgiveness. Conversely, the idea that all creation is good, but we are compromised, this leads to a world of forgiveness and redemptive suffering, which we’ll discuss in a later inversion.

When any cult of dualism arises - and it always does - there is an enemy that must be destroyed, for that is the root of darkness. Killing all the Jews and Catholic priests has been tried multiple times and didn’t solve the problem of evil. Caesar killed a million Gauls and that didn’t cure Rome. Currently, in the 21st century, one set of gnostic dualists say that the the enemies are whiteness, the patriarchy, pro-life groups, traditional Christians, and (the perennial pick) practicing Jews. Another set blames foreigners, economics, academic elites, and the progressive lobby.

Unsurprisingly, the enemy of the dualists never takes the name of “my personal sin” or “the Fall” because the source of all evil is elsewhere. For dualists and gnostics, the evil comes externally, not from the human heart that resides in each of us. We were created good, but like a broken pot, we are scattered into pieces. Yet there is a way to be mended, and it is by the savior that heals, the great Konsugi artist named Jesus.

We all seem to know there was an Eden, a perfect state, a heavenly existence, and we want to return to it. We can feel that creation’s goodness is real without having ever been to the eternal paradise. Our confusion swirls around how to get back to the Garden. When we turn from God’s goodness, we tend to believe that it is us who will restore the Garden, and somehow by our efforts we will get past the cherubim and the spinning fiery sword that blocks the way. To do so, we need to remove the un-good ideas or people or material that blocks the path. This attempt to boost our own way to heaven is flammable and the devil loves watching it happen, since the father of lies caused the Fall in the first place. Socialism and capitalism claimed to have the way to paradise, and both have created versions of hell on earth.

The darkness in the human heart can be hard to admit, so we project it onto other created things, or the Creator himself if we have a poor understanding of God. St. Augustine and others did much battle to knock-down the Manichean dualist claim that all matter was bad. Many others throughout the centuries have had to defend God’s holy name against a variety of similar heresies. The gnostics and dualists always come back, always with bad ideas, slightly different than before, which again makes them much like a mutating cancer cell that winds through time.

However, this inversion is not about who is to blame. It is about goodness, truth, and light. First and foremost, we must understand that all matter and spirit was created good because it came from God’s love. Another way to say it is that creation is ordered. Creation has a wisdom of its own, far beyond ours. The Catechism states:

Because God creates through wisdom, his creation is ordered …Our human understanding, which shares in the light of the divine intellect, can understand what God tells us by means of his creation, though not without great effort and only in a spirit of humility and respect before the Creator and his work. Because creation comes forth from God's goodness, it shares in that goodness - "And God saw that it was good. . . very good”- for God willed creation as a gift addressed to man, an inheritance destined for and entrusted to him. On many occasions the Church has had to defend the goodness of creation, including that of the physical world. (CCC 299)

This should not come as a shock for anyone that has witnessed a sunset, or watched seeds grow, or watched puppies play, or observed a baby being born, or caught sight of a red fox in the winter snow, or watched a monarch caterpillar emerge from its cocoon as a monarch butterfly. This should not come as a shock to anyone who has pondered the mathematical miracle of a shell on a beach, or felt the might of ocean waves against their legs on shifting sands, or visited a glacier, or hiked a mountain. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has caught a fish, or harvested apples, or has felt the sting after being too late in slapping a mosquito before the bite.

There is order in creation. All modern science rests upon that assumption. Perhaps we’ve taken this for granted for too long. We need to recognize this wonder of intelligibility. Saint John Paul II said, “It is the one and the same God who establishes and guarantees the intelligibility and reasonableness of the natural order of things upon which scientists confidently depend.” (Fides et Ratio, 34)

God created the integers and the angels, as well as the basic Legos we call carbon and hydrogen and helium - and all of this was good. Why was it good? Because it is reasonable. It is order out of nothing, out of emptiness, out of chaos. The watery void or the Big Empty is uninteresting, whereas the music of the spheres in the heavens makes sense. The soil cycle and weather cycle and Krebs cycle and tricycle: all of these make sense. As Einstein said, “The eternal mystery of the universe is its comprehensibility. The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”

In other words, nature is ordered by a wisdom far greater than our own, yet we can study it. Better still, because we are part of that good creation. God is the only thing not part of creation, because he is the sheer act of Being Itself. Thus, we should never worship creation or anything in it, because creatures are not the Creator. That means we should not worship the earth or the stars or celebrities or mascots or nations or corporations or ideas.

On this ordered “goodness” the first universities were founded, as all truth leads to God, who created all things. The foundation of order in the universe coming from the Unmoved Mover provides the bedrock for all inquiry, and we are free to arrive at our own conclusions. In the Catholic manner of thinking, inquiry into the truth is right and just, and is based on the observed order of God’s good work.

The Catholic intellectual tradition and the contemporary university share two underlying convictions: that to be human is to desire to discover truth, and that the quest for truth is sparked by the expectation that the universe is intelligible. In the Catholic view, these convictions arise from belief in the union of the divine and human in Jesus Christ and the unity of all things in God. From this theological perspective, the Catholic intellectual tradition is based on two fundamental principles: first, that the search for truth in all aspects of life extends to the ultimate search for truth that animates faith; and, second, that faith is a catalyst for inquiry, as faith seeks to understand itself and its relationship to every dimension of life. Thus, the most probing questions in every discipline are never deemed to be in opposition to faith but are welcomed into the conversation on the conviction that ongoing discovery of the intelligibility of the universe will reveal more of the truth about God. The Catholic intellectual tradition can thrive only with the participation of all who seek the truth, including those whose inquiry leads them to question whether the search reveals purpose, meaning, or God, or to conclude that it does not. (from The Catholic Intellectual Tradition: A Conversation at Boston College)

The ultimate truth is God, so all honest inquiry leads back to God. Hence, if we are to truly, honestly “follow the science,” it will lead us to God. But much of modern science leads away from God and every thirty years those erroneous papers are scuttled, because “the science” was actually disguised ideology, often with motives not unlike the gnostics and dualists. St. Paul tells us that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” which explains the confusion. Drawn to artificial light, we stray from the true God. This happens in our own moral behavior, in our pursuit of happiness, and even across entire nations.

The intelligibility of creation, which is good, comes from God, who is love. He created out of love, not because he had to, or needed to.

God does not compete with anything in creation, as he is the Creator. Just as Shakespeare cannot compete with Macbeth, God has no competitor that can even approach or fathom his glory. The closest beings to him, as handed down by tradition, are the Seraphim, the angels of the highest order (or choir), and yet there is zero chance of them overtaking God. In our much lower place, we can conclude that we know better than God, and that we can make his creation operate properly, when it is exactly our sin that disorders creation. This is the opposite of humility.

Pope Francis wrote Laudato Si, or Care for our Common Home, which delved into details about the goodness of creation, rejecting all dualism and gnosticism, and putting it into terms of how the creation in Genesis and the Gospels clearly dovetail, particularly in the life of Jesus. Closing out this inversion, here are six paragraphs from Laudato Si.

84. Our insistence that each human being is an image of God should not make us overlook the fact that each creature has its own purpose. None is superfluous. The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God. The history of our friendship with God is always linked to particular places which take on an intensely personal meaning; we all remember places, and revisiting those memories does us much good. Anyone who has grown up in the hills or used to sit by the spring to drink, or played outdoors in the neighbourhood square; going back to these places is a chance to recover something of their true selves.

85. God has written a precious book, “whose letters are the multitude of created things present in the universe”.[54] The Canadian bishops rightly pointed out that no creature is excluded from this manifestation of God: “From panoramic vistas to the tiniest living form, nature is a constant source of wonder and awe. It is also a continuing revelation of the divine”.[55] The bishops of Japan, for their part, made a thought-provoking observation: “To sense each creature singing the hymn of its existence is to live joyfully in God’s love and hope”.[56] This contemplation of creation allows us to discover in each thing a teaching which God wishes to hand on to us, since “for the believer, to contemplate creation is to hear a message, to listen to a paradoxical and silent voice”.[57] We can say that “alongside revelation properly so-called, contained in sacred Scripture, there is a divine manifestation in the blaze of the sun and the fall of night”.[58] Paying attention to this manifestation, we learn to see ourselves in relation to all other creatures: “I express myself in expressing the world; in my effort to decipher the sacredness of the world, I explore my own”.[59]

86. The universe as a whole, in all its manifold relationships, shows forth the inexhaustible riches of God. Saint Thomas Aquinas wisely noted that multiplicity and variety “come from the intention of the first agent” who willed that “what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another”,[60] inasmuch as God’s goodness “could not be represented fittingly by any one creature”.[61] Hence we need to grasp the variety of things in their multiple relationships.[62] We understand better the importance and meaning of each creature if we contemplate it within the entirety of God’s plan. As the Catechism teaches: “God wills the interdependence of creatures. The sun and the moon, the cedar and the little flower, the eagle and the sparrow: the spectacle of their countless diversities and inequalities tells us that no creature is self-sufficient. Creatures exist only in dependence on each other, to complete each other, in the service of each other”.[63]

…

98. Jesus lived in full harmony with creation, and others were amazed: “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” (Mt 8:27). His appearance was not that of an ascetic set apart from the world, nor of an enemy to the pleasant things of life. Of himself he said: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard!’” (Mt 11:19). He was far removed from philosophies which despised the body, matter and the things of the world. Such unhealthy dualisms, nonetheless, left a mark on certain Christian thinkers in the course of history and disfigured the Gospel. Jesus worked with his hands, in daily contact with the matter created by God, to which he gave form by his craftsmanship. It is striking that most of his life was dedicated to this task in a simple life which awakened no admiration at all: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mk 6:3). In this way he sanctified human labour and endowed it with a special significance for our development. As Saint John Paul II taught, “by enduring the toil of work in union with Christ crucified for us, man in a way collaborates with the Son of God for the redemption of humanity”.[79]

99. In the Christian understanding of the world, the destiny of all creation is bound up with the mystery of Christ, present from the beginning: “All things have been created though him and for him” (Col 1:16).[80] The prologue of the Gospel of John (1:1-18) reveals Christ’s creative work as the Divine Word (Logos). But then, unexpectedly, the prologue goes on to say that this same Word “became flesh” (Jn 1:14). One Person of the Trinity entered into the created cosmos, throwing in his lot with it, even to the cross. From the beginning of the world, but particularly through the incarnation, the mystery of Christ is at work in a hidden manner in the natural world as a whole, without thereby impinging on its autonomy.

100. The New Testament does not only tell us of the earthly Jesus and his tangible and loving relationship with the world. It also shows him risen and glorious, present throughout creation by his universal Lordship: “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col 1:19-20). This leads us to direct our gaze to the end of time, when the Son will deliver all things to the Father, so that “God may be everything to every one” (1 Cor 15:28). Thus, the creatures of this world no longer appear to us under merely natural guise because the risen One is mysteriously holding them to himself and directing them towards fullness as their end. The very flowers of the field and the birds which his human eyes contemplated and admired are now imbued with his radiant presence.

And that includes the mosquitoes. Hard as it is for me to say, God bless the mosquito.

Further reading:

Why death and violence in God’s good creation?

Why God creates

UCCSB’s Care for Creation

Pope Francis: Laudato Si (Care for Our Common Home)

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Building off the prior inversion, to declare that the “heavens” are real does not imply superstitious beliefs. Rather, it implies something exists beyond just clouds, stars, feelings, minds, integers, and imagination. “Heaven” implies something unseen, yet knowable in a strange way. We have knowledge of integers, yet no human has ever seen one, and no human ever will. No matter how powerful a microscope or how clever the experiment, an integer will never pop out at us. Yet integers exist. Likewise with angelic beings, we know of them without sensing them. The “third heaven” of a previous inversion is where these immaterial beings live, while mysteriously interacting with us here. Genesis declares this upper floor of this great house called Creation to be real - very real. And angels somehow occupy this house; so too demons, also known as fallen angels.

The word angel means messenger, and if you pay attention during your day, you will notice messages that come from something other than your phone. This inversion is about thoughts, which lead to actions. We should consider each thought, wondering where it comes from, and what to do about it.

Throughout each day, perhaps you will notice that some messages are good, and some are not. When you think, “I’d like to see some nudes on my phone,” that is a message, which is a very different message from the message, “I should call my mother.” I’ll leave it to you to ponder which type of spirit delivers those two different messages.

But it is not the demon who places the thoughts, from what I understand, as Jesus himself says in Matthew 15 that “…what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.” Because of this, we cannot blame our thoughts on the demons, nor our actions. We must cooperate with God, not the accuser or tempter. This makes sin our personal responsibility, which is why we must own up to it in Confession for healing.

St. Paul says to “put on the mind of Christ” and to “pray constantly.” There is solid reason for this, because when your mind is full of God and good things, there is not space for demons. But if you do not believe in the idea of heaven or God, you will be opening messages without even knowing it, and a moving truck of demons may have arrived long ago. Anyone who has dealt with squatters’ rights knows: it’s hard to get unwanted guests to depart. Even in real-estate court, sometimes it takes a miracle.

Since these beings have no bodies, they can move like mathematical points on a graph - that is to say, they move instantly. Thus, when Jesus drives out thousands of demons from one man, and the demons rush into the pigs that drown themselves in the sea, this is not surprising. Like points on a graph, bodiless spirits can be set to the same coordinates, and if those coordinates happen to be your head and heart, then you could be teeming with a legion of spirits as well.

If you ever took Algebra II, this concept should be familiar, as a point in space can be moved with the negation or multiplication of a number. Students learn about translation, reflection, and rotation as ways to move points on a graph. Numbers are not physical, they are immaterial. As Stephen Hawking said, “God created the integers,” and like the integers, spirits have no bodies. Without the weight of matter holding them in space and time, spirits can reflect, translate, and rotate their position from one place to another, a million miles away, without so much as a bus pass.

Perhaps you thought Algebra II would never come in handy, but for understanding how angels and demons can “move” it helps for illustration. Pure intellect can move instantaneously, just like the math concepts of translation, rotation, and reflection can move a point in space any distance with the toggling of a number. Consider this the next time your guard is down and temptation arises. You need only a nudge, and plenty of spirits are waiting for the gap in your spiritual defenses to drop in and say “Hello.” A spirit can - and does - translate to your location to offer a nudge. No airfare needed, it is immediate. In the St. Michael the Archangel prayer, a warning is mentioned about these spirits who seek your destruction: “…the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.” Because they can arrive instantly, you must pray constantly. The good news is that your guardian angel, St. Michael, and others are there to help. Spiritual combat is real. In any war, successful attacks come swift and unannounced. Like a cyberattack faster than fiber optic speeds, you will be overtaken if unprepared. You are always being watched and studied, steered into moments of temptation. If you are reading this, they are reading it with you and observing your reaction. Demons will translate, rotate, and reflect into your location to suggest doubt in God. Prayer is the weapon, humility is the tactic.

This is something to consider the next time you make a decision quickly without discernment. Even as I make progress toward God, sometimes impulsive decisions occur, after which I wonder how it happened. The suggestions to take an action come in an instant, and this is often alarming. It’s almost like someone or something is guiding me, or waiting to suggest something at exactly the right moment.

This means that when the notion comes to scroll a certain website or tell a lie, a demon is pleased to nudge the temptation forward. It cannot force you, but it can suggest things. In fact, you should start considering where your thoughts come from altogether, because no one can “make” a thought. Thoughts will appear before your left brain has time to reason with your right brain that this was a bad idea. After all, demons are smarter than us, and move even more efficiently than the crow flies. They are like a really good TV lawyer, like Columbo or CSI investigators or Sherlock Holmes, always one step ahead. Surely, many brilliant people are in hell for believing in the delusion that they knew more than spirits. Human brilliance is like a dog thinking it knows more than a human, or a toddler playing hide and seek with a teenager. In a battle of wits with angels and demons, you lose. Spirits are pure intellect and it is folly to think we can outwit them.

Prayer and the Sacraments are what you need to know for the spiritual combat. It’s not terribly complicated or dramatic. Mostly the warfare means knowing when to kneel and pray. Literally, wherever you are when the temptation arises, you must kneel and ask for help. That is the only way to “win”. Surrender in spiritual matters brings aid. Prayer summons the heroes you need. It is knowing who, when, and how to ask for help, so that the right messenger, your guardian angel, appears and gets rid of the other spirit, the demon. This is why the Surrender Novena prayer is becoming widespread in usage again today, as people realize that spiritual combat means surrendering to God.

Because these beings of pure intellect can move about instantly, they can be around us constantly or whenever they like. They move at the speed of thought, far faster than the speed of light. As pure intellect, they are smarter than we are, by a thousand times, because while we are the highest animal, we are the lowest spirit. A brilliant person is a cute case of delusion to angels and demons, like a third grade basketball player who believes he could beat Lebron James in a one-on-one game. This is where “smart” people stumble and the religious “fools” succeed: because the pride of worldly knowledge hoodwinks us. While angels will warn us to back away from that error, demons will stoke the engine of pride, vanity, and sensuality with continuous fuel. Worth noting: knowledge does not equal wisdom. Piles of data do not produce humility; rather, data tends to produce unwarranted pride and a sense of control. We are but one giant solar flare from every data center in the world being formatted to a blank state, thus whatever expertise and security we have today must be received with gratitude instead of hubris.

There are higher spiritual beings than our own rational souls, and we cannot sense these beings. We cannot see them but they can see us. On occasion they are visible, such as what we know from the scripture regarding Abraham and Mary. They may appear to us. They very likely do. We walk among them unaware at times and even interact with them. Hence, “love others” is wise at all times.

There are also lower vegetative souls in plants, and sensitive souls in animals. Consider how we feel superior in our ability to outwit a mindless flower or fish. Yet this is how angels and demons feel about us. We are like a flower or fish to them - certainly simple, perhaps silly…perhaps beautiful. The best scriptural example of this is at the battle of Jericho when Joshua and his army are prepping to fight and the angel of the Lord appears. I get the feeling that the angel is looking at Joshua like I look at my dog.

…when Joshua was by Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing before him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?”

He replied, “Neither.” (Joshua 5:13-15)

Whether this is an angel or God himself, this angelic being in Joshua’s vision seems somewhat uninterested in Joshua and his question. He is there as commander of the Lord’s army, and Joshua appears to be suddenly demoted.

This is important for understanding our place in the spiritual order, in the whole order of creation, and should encourage humility, as Joshua learned in that moment.

We are not that high on the ladder, but we could be in the end. Jesus, who was fully human, is the second person of the Trinity. St. Athanasius famously said that “God became man that we might become God.” That is powerful stuff. Consider as well that Mary is the queen of heaven. She is above all angelic beings, which is quite remarkable, and it is said that this really bothers the demons, who consider humans to be lowly worms.

This inversion is like the others. It is not for trivia night or light conversation: it is for your mental health. Reality includes spirits, which means angels and demons. You have a soul. Your soul has a body. You have a guardian angel. Demons may be allowed to bother you, by God, to draw you closer to God. There is a cherub with a flaming sword guarding the way back to Eden, and we can only return there by persevering in these tests.

Heaven is the place of the the unseen, the invisible, the enchanted world. Even in our imagination we park many things in other dimensions kind of like heaven, like ideas or Platonic forms or fairies. The end-game is Eden, heaven, and the tests that we experience here have supernatural interactions. In our daily lives, we are engaged in supernatural events, which is a reality that we have deadened under the influence of illusory power and knowledge.

A fun historical fact is that in the ancient world, stars were often seen as gods. Even in the Bible, angels and stars go together. A star led the Magi to a little town of Bethlehem, and the star was not Alpha Centauri - it moved to sit right over the place where Christ was born. In other words, this star was an angel, a messenger. If this seems too abstract, then on the next Christmas tree you see, look to see what is on top of it: it will be either a star or an angel. Stars and angels have been used together for a long time. In the ancient world, stars were seen as living beings. They can symbolically be angelic beings, because we need stories to understand the supernatural. Angels are messengers of the one true God. They are not matter, as stars are. They do not twinkle, and they are not magical astrological superstitious objects for use in New Age incantations. But the use of metaphor can help us articulate the supernatural, but we must stop in wonder and not name the stars as angels.

Your soul has a purpose. That purpose is to return to God. The angels will help you get there. The demons, not so much…but they will be granted enough leash to trouble you, giving the exact trials you need to find your way home. All trials are a gift. This is hard to accept. If you wonder why God might do such a thing, find a quiet place and look to the crucifix for the answer.

Some have said these angelic beings cannot know our most inner thoughts, but that they can observe all that we see and hear. Others have suggested that our thoughts are placed into us by angels, or demons. Whichever is the case, the answer to it is that every thought must be captured to Christ. If we “put on the mind of Christ” then Jesus filters and corrects every thought. Thus when we loathe our enemy and have evil thoughts, that is precisely when the thought must be captured and handed over to Christ, or sent to the foot of the cross.

The power of suggestion and placing thoughts into our heads via whispers in our ears, is exactly what the devil does in the Garden to Eve. He suggests that God is lying. “Did God really say that?” He places doubt. “You will become like gods,” he lies. The error of Adam and Eve is to cooperate with the serpent’s lies. These whispers we all hear in our mind and heart is the result of the fall. Thus, influence can come from outside, which is usually called the world, the flesh, and the devil. But we can never just say “The devil made me do it,” as if we have no agency, free-will, or personal responsibility. Jesus states rather plainly: “…what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.”

Because of these influences, we must stand like archers on the walls of the castle, shooting down that which may not enter, otherwise we will be overcome, and it takes much work to eject the enemies that have already taken occupation inside the castle. This is why every thought must be captured to Christ. Thinking is where much of the battleground happens between light and dark, because it precedes the act of the will. The Spiritual Combat by Dom Lorenzo Scupoli is a book to be read and re-read in our age of materialism, because we have been inverted into a worldview where angels and demons do not exist, which is the exact goal of the demons: to be laughed off as unreal. The Screwtape Letters is another fine source to help understand what is happening when we doubt that angels and demons exist. But they most certainly do, and we would do well to meditate on the Fall in the Garden, Jesus’ temptations in the desert, and Jesus’ endurance through prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, for all three have answers regarding how spiritual beings can influence us and how to respond. The word angel means “messenger,” and this is the whisper. We need our mailbox open to receive the good angel’s messages, and the demons’ mail should go directly to the spam folder.

Again, this should scare you, but should also give hope, for the way to win is by trusting in God. This is the inversion of what we tend toward since the Fall, which is to trust in the self. That was the error in the Garden of Eden, and Jesus in the Garden on the night before his death does the opposite. Like his mother at the Annunciation, he says “Thy will be done.” He trusts in God.

As for us, capturing every thought to Christ is critical. Alone with our own imagination is a dangerous place to loiter, and while we may consider that we generate all our own thoughts, an inversion of this modern way of thinking is to consider that the world, the flesh, and the devil all play a part. Go to God, and talk often to other people who are striving for salvation, and you will discern which messages are worth keeping and which messengers should be put on the “cease and desist” and “do not call” list. Keep in mind the shape of the cross, which has a vertical and horizontal beam. Vertically we must speak and look up to God for help, and horizontally on the ground here we must speak to others. Getting out of our head opens up the heart to God and others.

Further reading:

How does a guardian angel work?

Can demons put thoughts in our minds?

Can the devil read your thoughts? (start at 22:14)

Can The Devil Know Our Thoughts And Hear What We Say

Guardian Angels in Catholic Theology (video, Jimmy Akin)

Do a consecration to your guardian angel (and the theology of such a thing)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

The mention of “heavens” carries a massive piece of luggage with it labelled Spirits, and not the liquor variety. The idea of spirits may not have shocked ancient readers, but modern readers may laugh and shrug at the idea of immaterial beings, yet are still afraid to descend the stairs into a dark basement. Ancient people believed in spirits, but today we feel that we know better. “The age of magic is over,” we say, and then spend millions on New Age crystals and cards. “The age of superstition is dead,” we say, and then we proceed to ask for help from AI software treating it like the oracle at Delphi. “Prayers are useless” we say and then pray for the field goal to clear the uprights. Today, the “spiritual but not religious” crowd grows in numbers, without any understanding exactly which spirits they have opened themselves up to. The spirits are real and ever eager to locate the indifferent.

The inversion here is the one that may scare you. Really, it should produce awe and wonder. Like a healthy fear of swimming in the ocean, this can keep panic at bay and thereby help you breathe.

The culture’s suppression of supernatural things has smothered the unseen realm. Images of cartoon devils in tights, wall-art of chubby baby cherubs smoking cigarettes, platitudes at funerals about uncle Joe getting his wings, and the reduction of all demons to psychological issues - all of this misdirection has had a blinding impact on us to what is real.

But angels exist, and they are present now. They are reading or listening to this with you. Over your shoulder, whispering messages, they are present.

If we accept the inversion that angels are real, we should spend some time considering what they are, while not obsessing over it, because we must be aware of this reality, without seeking to fly too close to the sun.

What are angels then? Let’s use a list of 12 things to know on angels from Peter Kreeft:

* They really exist. Not just in our minds, or our myths, or our symbols, or our culture. They are as real as your dog, or your sister, or electricity.

* They’re present, right here, right now, right next to you, reading these words with you.

* They’re not cute, cuddly, comfortable, chummy, or “cool”. They are fearsome and formidable. They are huge. They are warriors.

* They are the real “extra-terrestrials”, the real “Super-men”, the ultimate aliens. Their powers are far beyond those of all fictional creatures.

* They are more brilliant minds than Einstein.

* They can literally move the heavens and the earth if God permits them.

* There are also evil angels, fallen angels, demons, or devils. These too are not myths. Demon possessions, and exorcisms, are real.

* Angels are aware of you, even though you can’t usually see or hear them. But you can communicate with them. You can talk to them without even speaking.

* You really do have your very own “guardian angel”. Everybody does.

* Angels often come disguised. “Do not neglect hospitality, for some have entertained angels unawares”—that’s a warning from life’s oldest and best instruction manual.

* We are on a protected part of a great battlefield between angels and devils, extending to eternity.

* Angels are sentinels standing at the crossroads where life meets death. They work especially at moments of crisis, at the brink of disaster—for bodies, for souls, and for nations.

Accepting they are real may require a willingness that is difficult, yet it is essential to this inversion, to see the world right-side-up instead of upside down. One stumbling block comes from the Bible itself, because they are not explicitly mentioned as being created in the six days.

The lack of mention about the creation of angels and demons stands out in Genesis. Did Moses just forget to write that down in the Torah? Where are the ghosts, Moses? On which day were the watchers, archangels, and guardians created? If the writers of sacred scripture were inspired by God, or literary geniuses, how could they possibly have missed mentioning the timing of the creation of angels and the fall of the demons?

This seems a gaping hole in the creation story. Surely it seems impossible that this could be missed…unless it is omitted on purpose or for quiet reasons. There is much here to consider. This omission is one of the great conversation starters about the opening book of the Bible, because we often talk so much about what is there, but in this case we must discuss what is not there.

The standard answer is that when God created the heavens, he created the angels, and a third of the angels fell with Satan when they turned their will against God. This is alluded to in places, particularly in the last book of the Bible, in Revelation, and in Daniel.

In terms of timing on when they were created, we have a short answer from the Catechism stating that angels were created before human beings.

The profession of faith of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) affirms that God "from the beginning of time made at once (simul) out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly, and then (deinde) the human creature, who as it were shares in both orders, being composed of spirit and body." (CCC 327)

Now, if you are Catholic, like I am, this answer to “when were angels created” is sufficient. ‘Tis enough. The faith provides an answer, which satisfies my curiosity and saves me from tilting at windmills in long thought-quests of “which came first, the spirits or the atoms?” The spirits and the stuff were created at once, out of nothing, and we came after. Was it a day, an age, an eon, a billion years? It really doesn’t matter. But truly, even in light of modern science, this is hardly a shocking concept, as even our scientific models has all matter and energy there at the beginning, and we come long afterward. Angels and demons are created, therefore God created them, and it happened before he breathed a soul into Adam. The details are not terribly important for my wrestling with faith on how to live for God and others today. In fact, thinking about such things too much detracts from exactly those two commandments of Christ, to love God and to love others. He didn’t command us to spend a lifetime contemplating the exact construction of time, space, matter, and angels. Accepting the mystery of this is liberating.

As for the fall of the angels, or how they became demons, we know it happened. How do we know that? Because Jesus said he witnessed “Satan fall like lightning.” If you have a first principle of believing that Jesus is the second person of the Holy Trinity, and that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life…then it follows that all that he says is true. Then he means exactly what he said: “I saw Satan fall like lightning.”

Conversely, if you don’t believe that Jesus was fully human and fully divine, then nothing that he says would matter anyway, because he would then be lying. This is why the first principles of belief matter so much, as every line of the Apostles’ Creed then forms the foundation of all that you do, say, and believe.

So if you believe in Jesus as the only begotten Son of God, this is a statement from Jesus that should make our jaw hit the floor, because if Jesus saw “Satan fall like lightning” then he can only be declaring himself to be the Creator, a.k.a. God. This also means he has always existed, before all ages, and that through him all things were created.

This declaration of seeing Satan’s fall is as wild and radical as when Jesus forgives the paralytic’s sins, because only God can do that. (No wonder his contemporaries hated him. Imagine a neighbor making such a claim. But then your neighbor can’t walk on water or multiply bread, so it’s a bit different.)

This fall of Satan seems to happen instantly, abruptly, and all at once, without any kind of grand battle. Lightning is instant, perhaps the most instant thing we can imagine as humans, as anything beyond the speed of light becomes difficult to fathom. Thus, it seems that upon creation, Satan fell immediately in rejecting God, and it doesn’t sound glamorous or valorous, it sounds kind of pathetic, like he got drunk and drove off a cliff after closing time at the local bar. Angels are said to be locked into their choice without the ability to repent, thus upon creation perhaps he fell immediately. But we don’t know that, nor do we need to know. The whole idea of “when” only makes sense to us living in time, whereas God is eternal, and the concept of time in aeveternity (angel time) is a mystery beyond our understanding.

So we know that Satan fell, and hard. He goes by other names, such as the ancient dragon, the serpent, Lucifer, the Devil, et al. But whatever the name he began as an angel. He fell and then we fell because he planted the temptation to question God in our first parents. We fell for it. One fall leads to another.

In that fall of the angels, we have much speculation on how and why it happened. Unfortunately, we have John Milton’s Paradise Lost which skews the fall of Satan and paints the devil as a mafia boss. Milton made an error, it seems, in his Puritan gnosticism of light versus dark. It seems that Milton started us on the path to this cartoon devil idea that we have today, and while the poem might be interesting, it misleads.

We are better off with Dante and the medieval view, which has sadly been replaced by so much Protestant shedding of sacraments, angels, and saints, and more recently from the Enlightenment and scientific materialism. In Dante’s Inferno, the devil is miserable and encased in ice at the bottom of hell. His existence truly blows - literally, it blows because he’s flapping his wings in angry desperation forever, causing the very ice that forms around his torso.

Cold, isolated, miserable, alone. That’s hell.

Neither of these books are considered sacred scripture, but Dante’s worldview makes far more sense than Milton’s, for if you reject the Highest Good, which is God, the result is a miserable hell. And hell is not a good time where any ruling happens, it’s a lonely place of death in the abyss. After the death on the cross, Jesus descended into hell and not all souls were brought out of it, only some. Yet the devil remains. Why?

Why didn’t the paschal mystery of the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension finish off the devil and fallen angels once and for all?

This too is a mystery. The cliffhanger continues until the Second Coming. In the meantime, the devil is permitted by God to operate in the world to guide men toward salvation and to carry salvation history forward. But the fallen ones are not in any sense enjoying the experience. Jesus showed the way to life; it is through trials that we find it, and trials come in the form of crosses, but if we carry them, they become gifts. This is a hard thing to accept. Yet we must.

The book of Job is the graduate level class on the idea that God allows suffering to bring about a greater good. In Egypt, Joseph states the answer of why evil is allowed by God: “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” One verse that has stood up on the page for me is the moment that God sends an evil spirit to put Saul into a state of depression and self-loathing. God seems to push it onto Saul. Read this verse slowly:

“Now the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him.” (1 Samuel 16:14)

To me, this is another jaw-dropping moment, because the good spirit leaves and God sends an evil one to Saul. This is God sending the evil spirit to Saul, the first king of the chosen people.

What does this mean? Does this mean that God is evil? No, it means that God uses the evil spirits to bring about salvation history. He uses all of creation to bring about his will. This is why we must wrestle with God, like Jacob. This is why he wrestles with us, each of us. God is teaching us with life, with trials, and hopefully we realize, like Jacob, that the angel of the Lord is stronger and we eventually must submit (but like Jacob we should also ask for his blessing once our hip socket gives out and we accept surrender).

If this sending of an evil spirit happened to Saul, there is no reason to think we may not also be given this kind of treatment. But the difference is how we respond to it. Do we react like Job, or like Joseph in Genesis, accepting our struggle? Or do we act like Saul, and seek out the witch of Endor? Do we try to take control by other means, or do we surrender to his will?

Obviously the ultimate instance of the trial is described in Jesus’ fasting in the desert, where after his baptism he goes into the wilderness for forty days. At the end, at his weakest moment, the devil tempts him. This of all things should help us see that we are in for a test, or multiple tests, as the fully human and fully divine Jesus showed us how to suffer and serve. It is this full dying to self that we see in Christ’s life.

After all, hell is choosing the self over God, the ego over the Creator. Thus, the fallen demons are lost, wailing and gnashing their teeth forever in the nothingness and “fires” of hell. This “fire” of hell may be a freezing place, where fire is so hot that it feels like ice. Anyone who has had to jumpstart a car in a Minnesota winter, fiddling with battery posts and cables at minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, knows well how cold can feel like burning fire. Whatever the fire, the takeaway here must be only this: that it is awful. Thus, the idea that Milton’s Satan said, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” is absurd, because he is in hell. There is no enjoyment there. It is a constant jumpstarting of a car in a poorly lit parking lot at minus 35 five degrees Fahrenheit during a blizzard - but much worse.

Reading the Gospel without acknowledging the glaring fact that Jesus considers demons and angels to be real will make for a disappointing read. Worse, dismissing angels and demons without serious reflection will make for a disappointing eternity. Yet the intro of Genesis lacks this seemingly all-important element.

But why?

We first meet the serpent in Genesis 3, and the cherubim with the flaming sword who guards eden comes shortly after that. So the angels are mentioned early on, but the details are light. How can this be? There’s no mention of the creation of the serpent-demon, but suddenly he’s there. God created all “out of nothing” so clearly the serpent-demon was created. It seems this is not mentioned so as not to lead us astray.

There are several inversions needed here to get us focused on what is important.

First, there are books that are not in the Bible that go into the fall of the angels, such as the book of Enoch, and much ado is made of that online today. Many strange religions have a fixation on the book of Enoch, and the book of Enoch is truly fascinating. Yet it was not selected by the Israelites as part of sacred scripture. It is not in the Septuagint, the first Greek version of the canon. Genesis would have been the most logical place to write about the creation of angelic beings, yet it was left out, or covered under the umbrella of “God created the heavens…” which includes all things that exist in the heavens. Allusions to the book of Enoch appear in a few places, so why wasn’t it included? We are not forbidden to read it, but it is clearly not critical for our salvation, otherwise it would have been included in the canon.

Sacred scripture provides only what we need for salvation, not all the gory and exciting details we would like to know. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine listed good reasons why the creation of angels is not covered in detail. Resting in the mystery is one answer, but perhaps this angelic creation story was not made clear to Moses and therefore was not written. But Aquinas’ most convincing argument is that when humans focus too much on angelic beings, they are prone to falling into worshipping them, a.k.a. idolatry. In fact, Hollywood has little interest in Abraham or David or the Eucharist or the Mass, but throws gobs of money at making movies about demons. This alone is telling. Those who spend too much time thinking about angels and demons forget the purpose of sacred scripture, which is to help us live as humans, not anywhere above our place in the hierarchy of created beings. This would be like a rabbit attempting to ponder Plato instead of foraging.

Thomas Aquinas, also known as the angelic doctor, has this sensible reason as to why Genesis begins the way it does.

Although Thomas believes that angels, like everything else in creation, actually do contribute to the greater glorification of God, he does recognize some dangers. In Ia 61, 1 ad 1 he responds to the objection that, because angels are not mentioned in the Biblical account of creation, God did not create them. He says God created everything that exists, and the fact that angels are not mentioned in Genesis 1 is no indication that God did not create them. Aquinas attributes their omission to the danger posed by knowing about them and too much attention being paid to them. Indeed, it seems as though the Israelites in the Old Testament were in constant danger of worshiping something other than God as God. So rather than mention them, Aquinas says that Moses sought to remove an occasion of idolatry from the people. This shows that there is a danger in focusing too much on angels as opposed to God without whom they would not exist, and without whom their existence is unintelligible. Angels are, after all, messengers, and one ought not attend too much to the messenger while neglecting the message, which is God’s Word. (Dr. Joseph Magee, from AquinasOnline.com)

We must not become too focused on angels and demons, lest we take our eyes off of God. St. Paul said in Colossians, “Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you. Such a person also goes into great detail about what they have seen; they are puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind.”

What an interesting comment. Paul says that to be interested in angels to the point of worship is to be unspiritual. This feels like an indictment on Hollywood and the YouTubers obsessed with exorcisms. As it turns out, the spiritual combat is really a steady prayer life, keeping the commandments, wrestling with God and then surrendering your will and intellect to Jesus and his established visible Church, and putting all your trust in God. What are we not to do? Obsess over angels and demons. The Divine Mercy quote of “Jesus, I trust in you” kind of sums it up.

More than a few people become obsessed with the messengers, the angels, instead of the Trinity. Entire denominations go astray and conflate angels with God or Jesus (Jehovah’s Witnesses, LDS, a thousand New Age cults). The “worship of angels” is fool’s gold. Thus, consider only Michael, Gabriel, and Rafael, the sainted archangels of scripture, who are highest in rank for our concern, that is, of human concern. Praying the “St. Michael the Archangel” prayer is far more important than the Pledge of Allegiance, as the nation will pass away but God will not, nor will his Church, the new Israel.

As for your personal concern, the guardian angel assigned to you is enough, but do not name the guardian, just let it be “my guardian angel.” The Angel of God prayer can and should be said daily as a basic devotion. This is like brushing your teeth. It’s for your health, too, your eternal health.

Focusing too much on angels and demons instead of God leads to irrational fears and concerns, to the point that you have more of a relationship with the demons than if you didn’t believe in them in the first place. The atheist living by “reason alone” is shielded against errors like this one (even while making the worst possible error, which is the total rejection of God).

But they are real.

To comfort our modern sense of security, we assume all that old chatter about demons was mere superstition and mental illness. Right? But it scares us to think of it. When we feel scared, we have our coping strategies. Perhaps we sign in to our 401K account to check the balance and sigh in relief. Or we check our security system and insurance policy. Another reaction to the terror of angelic beings is to start cleaning the house, or to scold someone online, or to scroll porn and news, or space out on a video game. We find some worldly thing to control (like writing/pontificating on a blog, as I do, or judging others, as I do).

What we should do is kneel to pray and invoke the name of Jesus and the Trinity, and pray for the intercession of the saints and angels, trusting in God’s will in humility. Call to mind our own sins and recognize our weaknesses and need for a Savior. The most important prayer that we do, of all prayers, is the one we do without even knowing it’s a prayer: that prayer is called The Sign of the Cross.

The idea of demons has been made comical by horror films and Halloween costumes, which is what the devil would like us to believe. As for angels, they have been wall art and figurines for so long that we assume at everyone’s funeral that a human turns into an angel at death, automatically. This universal salvation is mentioned nowhere by Jesus, nor is there any mention of giving of angel wings to humans. Humans are embodied souls, without wings. Both angels and demons have become cartoons to us. But the meaning of the word “angel” is messenger.

Your mailbox might receive a message sometime in the night, in the small hours, when the eyes open and the radar of conscience pings a spiritual presence. We can ignore or acknowledge it. Truly, it should terrify you a bit because if you are not on the right side of the battle, you will ultimately lose. The great trick of spirits is to guide your actions with suggestion and misdirection, and if you live unaware of their influence, you are a sitting duck. Rather, you are already on the side of demons if you don’t think they exist. But to know they exist is one thing, and to think about them is another. Keep your mind clean by turning your thoughts to God, always back to one of the persons of the Trinity. Your guardian angel is always ready to help. For many, the person most accessible is the person of Jesus, which makes sense, because like us he was fully human, and unlike us, he was fully divine.

The assertion of scripture, tradition, and the teaching of the Church is that spirits matter for your life, death, and judgment. Spirits are real. What is not real (or healthy or useful) is the denial of spirits. Worse yet is obsessing over them. New Age religions dabbling in spirit invitations is directly problematic, because summoning, channeling, manifesting, and opening ourselves to spirits comes with consequences. Plenty of spirits are happy to join in, and they will devour you.

Spirits will indeed take you up on an invitation to enter you, but it won’t work out the way you expected. If a demon enters you, perhaps you will perceive a benefit, similar to how taking supplements allows you greater gains in the weight room. But whatever “gain” you receive, the fallout of possibly dying in a state of mortal sin far outweighs the trifling, short-term benefit you gain here.

This is serious business, not a game. You are a low-ranking participant in the spiritual war, not a captain or admiral. To assume a higher rank is to fly too close to the sun, and much of life is discovering where you fit in this world and the next (Hint: for a kickstart, start discerning like St. Therese of Lisieux).

Any spirit you invite into your life will be real, so it’s extremely important to consider what you are engaging in when dallying around with the unseen realm. In fact, the only spirit you should ever ask into your life is the Holy Spirit, and you do so with a three-word prayer. “Come Holy Spirit.” Say it now. Say it three times, but just say it. There is no magic in it. This is simply the one spirit that you need to align your will with God’s will, because the Holy Spirit is God Most High. Actions matter. Speaking matters. Prayer matters. Doing a thing with your body and soul is a natural and supernatural interaction. So if you channel demons on a Ouija board, you have done an action invoking demons with your body and soul. If you say, “Come Holy Spirit” you are turned toward God. Turning is repenting. Turning to God is what all of the inversions are about, and belief in the Holy Spirit and the angels of heaven is part of submitting your will and intellect to the maker of all things.

Further reading:

Peter Kreeft on Angels

St. John Damascene’s De Fide Orthadoxa, book II. (An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith)

St Thomas Aquinas and Angels

Aquinas 101: Angels and Demons

Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraphs 325-336, 390-395

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

The six days of creation provide a unique inversion to us today, because initially the order of the objects doesn’t appear to make sense. After all, the sun appears on the fourth day, after the land and oceans were created. Every middle schooler who reaches the fourth day of creation can see a problem here, because the sun surely preceded the earth in terms of formation. Did we not just read in the opening verse of the Bible that “God created the heavens and the earth”? Is Genesis already switching the order and putting the sun, which is part of the “heavens,” after the earth? Did we just go from “Heavens First” to “Earth First”?

This is where we apply our modern science to the book of Genesis, and in doing so we lose the wonder. But it’s ok, there is an inversion waiting for us here, too.

The sacred writer of Genesis did not know that the earth was round. Or maybe he did know. Or perhaps he thought it was shaped like a sausage. The point here is that it doesn’t matter. I realize that saying “The shape of the universe doesn’t matter” is blasphemy to a materialist who thinks that truth can only come through scientific proof. But this is the reason why materialists tend to get nothing out of the Bible, particularly the creation story.

The spiritual reading is lost entirely unless you are willing to believe in spiritual things. And the first thing that you must be willing to believe in…is God. If this first principle is not in place, the Bible will be a strange read throughout and you will be sneering the entire time. If you approach it with doubt, you will get nothing from it. If you approach it with the eyes of faith, you will get the whole universe and the heavens, too.

The key piece of being “willing” does not mean abandoning reason. Rather, it means using reason with faith, because they go together. One of the greatest documents from a Pope ever written is about Faith and Reason (in Latin, Fides et Ratio). It begins like this:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

Thus, if you approach the Bible like a half-formed ghoul, with only reason, or only faith, or only your body, or only your soul, you will miss the point, to your detriment. If you come with only faith, you will be a Fundamentalist. If you come with only reason, you will be a cold atheist. Why be either one? Be whole. Be your whole self, as God intends us to be. (Hint: These inversions are really about becoming a whole person, body and soul, with faith and reason.)

When we express belief that the Bible is “inerrant” we mean in terms of faith and morals, not mathematical truths. But if you consider “reason” to only cover provable concepts and material things, then you will be a one-trick pony who has to play dumb when considering art and beauty. No scientific answers come for the great questions, or even basic ones like “Why is a sunset beautiful?” or “Why do children bring such tears and joy?” or “How did that song change my life?” or “Why do I feel the Presence of God in a silent adoration chapel?”

Beauty is a great lead-in to God, but Biblical inerrancy is a hard sell today. Thus, we should stop trying to sell it at all. I am tired of being sold. Who is not tired of being sold, when all we see is marketing from dusk ‘til dawn? I don’t want a product or an experience, I would like authenticity and truth, and there is not even an atheist that I know who doesn’t see both of those things in Jesus Christ. And if you don’t see the supernatural in Christ, then you cannot fully see His authentic truth, as He is the way, the life, and the truth. This requires no song and dance, just as Jesus did not dance for us.

We must remember the purpose of sacred scripture is not to give us the Pythagorean theorem, but rather to give us spiritual truths. When we read Genesis, at certain points we may be reading the “science” of the day when it was written, or we may not be. Just as the science of Ptolemy’s day put earth at the center of the universe (and was wrong), so was the science of the day of Moses wrong about the shape of the earth. Funny, then, that “the science” can change but God does not. This is why the phrase “Follow the science” is so slippery and fraught with missteps.

Truly, our model of the universe we have today will likely be quaint and silly in a century. The beauty of sacred scripture is that it opens a conversation, rather than delivering a hard answer, as we expect math to do. Here is where the idea of “mystery” bothers us modern people, but the mystery of scripture is directly caught up in the ultimate mystery of God, who created all things out of nothing, who is the “sheer act of being itself,” who formed us out of clay (or atoms if you like). What could be more fun than this escape room outside of the Garden, where at the end we can be with the God Most High, who transcends all? We love mysteries. Why shouldn’t we love the conversation with the greatest mystery of all? I urge you: set your Google-brain aside, and embrace the mystery.

And the first part of that mystery and conversation that gets us spun around and walking away is the six days of creation and the shape of the universe. However, this is exactly the place where if you come back to it with faith and reason, it can open up a story that transcends what happens in NASA’s images of outer space. The pictures of the Crab Nebula are beautiful, but there is another view of the universe beyond the stars.

The shape of things, as seen by Moses, in the spiritual view is like a house. There is an upper, middle, and lower section. You might call this the heavens, earth, and hell worldview. This is much like a house. But this is not to address anything related to science, it is about addressing the physical and spiritual reality that we occupy.

Now, here we must briefly pause for the Galileo affair, the most misunderstood event in modern history. If you have not read a history of what really happened with Galileo, I recommend you read Galileo Revisited: The Galileo Affair in Context, because a fascinating tale it truly is. The story you may have heard has been massaged by propaganda writers who really dislike the Church. In fact, one of the best summaries of the Galileo affair is from an episode of the History for Atheists podcast. We live in strange times. The God-deniers first stoked the myth of the Galileo story, and now various God-deniers are looking back and de-bunking the propaganda of God-deniers.

Let’s get to the point: the geocentric model of the universe was not devised by the Church. In fact, the model of Ptolemy came from the science of Egypt long ago. Long before that were other models, like the “Firmament” idea we find in Genesis, which many find funny today. Any beefs that we have with the shape of the physical universe is an academic discussion, not a spiritual one. Too much time and energy has been spent away from the spiritual life, and it seems that the model where the earth or humans are at the center is always a bad model. We think too highly of ourselves. (Note: we can think highly of ourselves as we are made in the image and likeness of God, but with humility in knowing that we are not God).

In Genesis, the model is simple. It is speaking to our human reality. As a human being, I can look up, I can look at eye-level, and I can look down. I know there is something higher and something beneath. Here on dry land, I live on the “main floor.” The spiritual upper and lower rooms have deeper meanings. I can’t go to those floors right now, but I know they are present. The error we can make is to think that our eye, on the main floor, is at the center of the universe. This is perhaps the ultimate error. The de-centering of mankind is essential to humility, and if anything, we should be grateful to science for doing just that. To be de-centered is humbling, and wonderful.

Thus the simple vertical world of up/heaven, middle/earth, and down/hell in Genesis should not cause us any alarm, because if we live long enough, we will get to see this same de-centering of our own settled science. It will be proven wrong. Yes, the science we are certain of today will be modified, perhaps wildly modified, by future findings. How do I know that? First, because scientists are nowhere near the full understanding God’s universe. Second, because science cannot test and verify spiritual things, as science cannot test for God. It’s a ludicrous idea, like 2 + 2 = 5.

Hopefully this does not shock you: our current model of the universe is wrong. Yes, it’s accurate enough to build houses and space stations, but wrong in ways we don’t know about yet. But that’s good: it gives graduate students something to do. If the puzzle were complete, we would become bored and go crazy (mainly because we fail to realize that boredom can actually lead to serenity, but a discussion on concupiscence will come later).

An inversion sits here in this space, because this is where our approach to scripture must step into the spotlight.

Now, I could say this inversion is about reading the Bible in the four senses of scripture, which is critical, because these ways will expand the text for believers and unbelievers. The literal, allegorical, moral, and “how it relates to Christ” readings are all important. But there is a more subtle inversion for us.

The inversion here is that we assume that all we know today is the same that we will know tomorrow, and many 19th-century Germans who thought themselves clever are beginning to look more foolish with each passing decade. The same is happening for 20th-century academics, such as those involved in the “Quest for the Historical Jesus,” as if they were Lancelot and Percival.

However, in this relentless dissecting of the Bible as a dead body, scholars took the historical-critical method to its logical end. Now we have some good data and a bit of useful information from that quest. Better yet, now we can use that data to further our understanding of God. The rest we can throw away. As St. Paul said, “Test everything; hold fast what is good.” This is great advice because all of the Bible scholars who tried to turn Jesus into a common teacher of ethics or tried to reduce Moses into a mere model of the will-to-power, are now gone and so are their anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic theories. We can keep what is useful, and toss out the rest. (Julius Wellhausen, Rudolf Bultmann, Bart Ehrmann, et al: goodnight, gentlemen - thank you for the data, as we can now use it to increase our faith.)

For a long time, Biblical scholars have been doing violence to the Bible because they see it as a work of literature rather than a sacred text. The era of “Comparative Religion” courses at universities is waning, as is the dogmatic absurdity of the “Q source” Gospel, a hypothetical document that does not exist. (And if anything it would be an early version of Matthew in Hebrew, written by the apostle named Matthew.)

In another twenty years, a vast swath Biblical scholarship will be swept aside and flung into oblivion, as artifacts of an era riddled with excess curiositas and too little humilitas. However, we are living in a long hangover from attacks on scripture, and need some fasting (not Taco Bell) to cure this hangover. The old German doubters’ and comparative literature professors’ ideas are still ringing in lecture halls, killing off one student’s faith at a time. “Welcome to college! Life is meaningless.”

Professors of Bible scholarship can’t get hired if they disagree with a secular dogma of a Bible that doesn’t believe in miracles, spirits, or even God. This begs many questions that we’ll avoid for now.

For the past two centuries, academics have been approaching the Word of God with “reason alone” and using suspicion as their interpretive key, but the key has worn out, or God has replaced the locks. When we hear that Jesus’ miracle of multiplying the loaves and fishes was just people sharing the bread that they had brought, we should laugh out loud. This miracle is one of the few that all four Gospel writers recorded. “Sharing” is not a miracle. Sharing is great, but it’s not mind-blowing or life-changing. The apostles did not get bludgeoned, burned, and buried to proclaim the good news of “sharing.” Sharing is nice, but we know all about sharing without God becoming incarnate and dying on a cross to defeat the world, the flesh, and the devil.

So we come to the inversion of how we should approach the Word of God. Even before you open the book, this approach decides what you will receive from the text. In the introduction to the Navarre Bible, a quote sums up the way we should approach the Bible, which inverts the way modern scholars read:

“…the interpretations of Scripture should never be approached as a research exercise dependent on the researcher’s technical skills. It is, rather, an encounter with the Word of God in the living Tradition of the Church…” (Pentateuch, p 16.)

For several centuries now, we have been poking at the Bible like a dead trout washed up on the riverbank. But the Bible is much more like a giant whale that cannot be caught…yes, like Moby Dick. We have stopped reading the Word as sacred and started reading it like a biology book, where nothing supernatural or exciting ever occurs. We need to read it like it has the answers to the Biggest Questions, because it does.

The death of many people’s faith began in the era of the Renaissance and Reformation, as we began to discover new places and models of the universe. I do believe that this was all part of God’s plan. Of course it was; everything is part of God’s plan. Likewise, God’s truth about the universe will lead to the death of our modern idols, too. It is inevitable.

In the thousands of years from the first Passover to the Paschal Mystery to today, many great saints lived alongside many sinners, and many saints started out as great sinners. This exit and return from God, back to God is indeed the road home, as the parable of the Prodigal Son said (and so say we all!). The parable of the weeds and wheat applies in history and today, and it applies within each one of us. And like King Josiah had to smash to the idolatrous “high places” in the book of 2 Kings, so must we, and today the main idol that is a stumbling block for faith is not a golden statue or stone pillar, but ideologies and the idol of the “self.” Idols always need smashing. We are in yet another era of strange idols, so let’s get to smashing (don’t smash yourself, just the false image of the “self” as idol.)

If you think God is not working to do the same things now to the idols of modernity as he did to past idols, your assumption of final knowledge will eventually come for you, or even burn you, just like it did to so many 19th century Germans’ grandchildren in the 20th century.

As for those who believed in such silly things as a flat earth and six day creation, those people were not as simple as we think. Rather, we too will seem simple in a hundred years, let alone a thousand, if the Lord does not return before then. Remember that Genesis is not teaching science or the shape of the universe - that is the task of the scientists and scribes of each age. What sacred scripture teaches is humility before God. If we approach scripture with humility, we will see the forest instead of the tree. If we approach the Word of God in wonder, we will choose the tree of life, rather than the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The tree of knowledge is the one that says, “I know better than God.”

In defense of those ancient scientists and scribes, let’s imagine for a minute what the world looked like to them:

When we live purely by the senses, without the aid of telescopes and books and knowledge handed down, the world does appear to be flat. While I am not a “flat earther,” most of the time the world is actually flat. Most of the time, I am not pondering the sphere I am standing on. I am getting groceries or walking the dog, and everywhere I go is flat in this Minnesota prairie land. Thus, it’s reasonable that people believe in a flat earth because we cannot see the sphere. However, we have come to know better through reason, which is a great gift from God to us. With reason, we can use induction and deduction to arrive at conclusions. We can even make proofs about the roundness of the world.

What we “know” by the senses alone is not always accurate. Our senses can fool us. This is why seductive beauty can be so deadly, but also life-giving. Beauty is like water or fire in this way, where it can aid life or destroy it. However, the same applies to reason, and by reason alone we can only get so far. By reason alone, we cannot reach the spiritual unseen realm, but we can know it dimly by logic and science. Yet there is more. By art, music, and literature, we can know of spiritual realities. Just as we can measure the earth by reason, we can at least open the door a crack to spiritual realities by art. Everyone has a song or lyric that brings tears to their eyes, a feeling that touches on something deeper than they can articulate. But to fully open the door to faith beyond this world and life requires a “willingness” to be willing, and the act of faith by our will invites our intellect into a broad new expanse that is beyond all sense and calculation. Observation and reason can take us to the door, but faith must place the key in the lock and turn it to walk into that panoramic spiritual valley.

Since I cannot see all things at once, I take it on faith, from science, that the earth travels around the sun, not the other way around. I really have no means (or motivation) to prove it, which is why it makes sense to me that, prior to Copernicus, the prevailing wisdom and mathematical models did not have the sun at the center of the solar system but rather the earth. My eyes can see that the sun travels over the sky - yet the senses can deceive us. I myself have not empirically proven that the sun is at the center of the solar system, but it’s wonderful that mathematicians and scientists managed to prove it. But contrary to popular belief, this dance of the sun and earth does no damage to the religious truth presented in Genesis. None whatsoever, because the two things are related yet separate.

Here is something important to pause on: for people who lost their faith because the earth was no longer at the center of the solar system - they were inverted the wrong way. They were not seeing God correctly. Their God was too small. Likewise, when the “New World” was discovered, a falling away from faith occurred in Europe. Enlightenment writers said that that “man was decentered” by science; man was knocked off a pedestal by the findings of Galileo and Darwin and others. Also, geology and the discovery of dinosaur bones put man into a tiny sliver of time, making him question his centrality in the order of the universe. When I was young, this all seemed to point to religion as the enemy of the truth.

Having been raised in the cult of Protestant liberalism (also called the United States of America), this made for a very strange childhood experience. We were like the mythical Pushmi-Pullyu animal of Dr. Doolittle, getting yanked in two directions by two heads. On the one end, all the history books and literature showed that science had dethroned man as the measure of all things. Then on the other end, the cults of liberalism and humanism preached freedom, self-esteem. So at the same time: I was being showered with praise for my uniqueness and specialness while scientific proofs declared me smaller and smaller. Is it any wonder that we are now confused? These two things don’t flow together well. If man is not central, but is merely matter, then what ruse are the humanists trying to play with the endless plug of uniqueness?

This raises a larger question, however. If man is not special, and is instead like any other species, to what do owe our “self-esteem”? If there is no soul, as public school and modern media taught us, then meaning is only what we make for ourselves, is it not? This is a tall order for each person to determine, since we must all start from scratch. But the truth is: we don’t need to do any of that, if we submit our intellect and will to God. The question is already answered, if we are only willing to set pride and vanity aside for peace and hope.

Truly, none of this can make sense without God as the beginning and end of all things. Thus the phrase, “made in the image and likeness of God” is so powerful, because it puts us into a relationship with His transcendence, into a nearby friendship that resolves both our smallness and our uniqueness. He is not so far that we cannot know him, nor so close that we are him. We are not God, but we are his friends.

The contradiction here is that the Enlightenment spilled much ink, and even more blood, in attempts at making meaning. When the various revolutions of liberalism and communism and capitalism failed to bring the cure for sin, the humanists took up the standard and attempted to shock us to life with a foundationless hype regarding self-worth. But without God, it falls flat.

Now: the problem is as follows. Placing man or the self at the center is an error. Genesis and the order of creation de-centers us. We are more valuable than many sparrows, yes, but we are not more valuable than God, or even the angels. Knowing our placement in creation brings freedom, because it allows us to willingly bend the knee to God for his grace and glory. From our proper place we can love and serve.

Some people believe that the dinosaurs bones were sown into the earth to test our faith. While I find this to be absurd, it’s not exactly wrong. Because if the existence of giant reptiles from a period long ago causes us to lose belief in God, then we had an error-ridden faith to begin with. If the concept of evolution upsets our ability to kneel and pray, perhaps we have never really kneeled and prayed. If anything upsets our trust in God, then we may be projecting what we want to be God, rather than receiving in humility what is God’s truth. This is not a defense of creationism or darwinism or liberalism or any other “ism”: this is a goodbye to human pride masquerading as faith in God.

The truth is that we are not the central item of all creation, we are a part of all creation, and a very important part. We are loved by God, more than the rest of creation. We are different from all other creatures. We are special, but not more special than God. Coming to trust in God’s will means to follow Jesus’ advice to “consider the lilies of the field” who do God’s will without toiling or spinning. They do not worry, they do not fear - they reach up their petals to heaven, glorifying his creation.

What I am getting at goes all the way back to Christ on the Cross. Upon the Cross you have the summary of all necessary first principles. On the Cross, the strangest experience in all history happened. The theory of evolution should not disturb you. The Christian story of the Creator of the universe being born into this world by a woman named Mary, living among us, performing miracles, and then being crucified by us - that is what should disturb you if you fully come to understand what it means.

Dinosaur bones? The beak of the finch? A new continent across the Atlantic? The sun’s position in the sky? Those are the things that made us stop believing? Those are the things that led us away from God and into the dead arms of modern idols? We trade our inheritance far too cheaply.

What this means is something troubling. Most of us believers are not that serious. Most of us are just in it for Donut Sunday and cultural benefits. We may say, “Jesus, I trust in you,” but not really mean it like St. Faustina did. We were warned by Jesus about Donut Sunday faith. He said “…there are many who will say, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’” And in hell, of one thing I am certain: there are no donuts on Sunday or any other day of the week.

No wonder our faith was sunk. Our trust is really in ourselves. We say we trust and believe, but we don’t. We don’t go out into the world and take action like Abraham did. We don’t comply with God’s will like Moses did, when he insanely walked into Egypt to scold Pharoah, the most powerful man in the world. More than words or going through the motions, real trust in God means doing, partaking of the Sacraments, and even praying for your enemies.

When geocentrism or evolution causes us to stop believing, we are like Peter walking on water who focuses on the wind. As the Lord said to Peter as he fell into the water, “Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt?” No finding or discovery should shake our faith. If anything, it is only a test to find out if we trusted God in the first place. As the Lord said to the Apostles, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, for I have conquered the world.” We are too afraid to fully trust.

St. John Henry Newman said, “Ten thousand difficulties make not one doubt,” and here I’ve only listed four: dinosaur bones, beaks, the discovery of the Americas, and the position of the sun. That leaves 9,996 difficulties yet to go before a single doubt should even be entertained.

If Darwin or Columbus or Copernicus or Diplodocus caused our faith to die, then our faith was not sailing free and fully trusting God, but was moored to the dock of the self long before we arrived at our current wacky age of postmodernism.

The key to understanding where we sit in the order of creation is to know that God is far beyond our understanding, yet is simple, true, good, beautiful, omnipotent, and omnipresent. The key to the good life is knowing that God is at the center, not me.

If a discovery here on earth is made, nothing about God changes. New findings should not rattle faith if the right ordering and principles are in place, because truth cannot contradict truth. And none of the revelations of science in the last five hundred years have done anything to displace the truth of “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Where the earth sits in the universe, where mankind sits in time and space, how our thumbs may have developed, or what land is discovered, what formulas are yet to be discovered - none of these things disrupt or shake the Creator of all, from whom all Being extends.

If any of these things shattered faith, or embarrassed believers, then the faith was not built upon a rock but was actually sitting on sand. Evolution or heliocentrism changes nothing about faith and morals, beginnings and endings, bodies and souls. It just changes the map of the heavens, or the timeline of salvation. But God is always up, and hell is always down.

As for God, these revelations are like me throwing a pebble at the moon from my driveway. Not only can the pebble not reach the moon, even if it could, it would have no impact. To me, the findings of evolution are interesting but not that important for the Biggest Questions, because humility before God has precedence. If his creation developed, it seems all the more amazing. However we came to the day of the Fall, the Fall happened, and it happened with the first two people from which we all inherit our concupiscence. The topic of how my body or brain may have developed is interesting, but not necessary for salvation. If the Fall happened 6,000 years ago or 60 billion - it makes no difference. I must live today and keep God’s commandments, not because I have to but because I want to. The Fall happened, and that’s what matters, and I can prove it by own penchant for sin, and I can only overcome it through the work of Jesus’ redemptive suffering.

If tomorrow aliens arrive, a believer should not be alarmed. The best thing to do would be to invite Gleep-Glorp to Holy Mass. If tomorrow the physicists do indeed prove there are infinite universes or that we are living in a video game, this should have no impact on a faith that knows that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This is the certainty in which you may sail uncharted waters, outlast storms, converse with aliens, navigate confusion, resist mutiny, endure war, suffer famine, persevere in poverty, ignore propaganda, and resist fear. The main thing to be wary of is those who preach against the spiritual truth of the creation, the fall, and the resurrection.

Thinking about the cosmology of the universe is fascinating because it all leads to greater wonder in creation. But in my day-to-day life, I need to prepare food on the main floor of this “house.” In some respects, you might say that I offer up prayers to the top floor, while living on the main floor, and as for the basement - well, I don’t want to go there. The house is haunted with spirits. There are spirits on every floor of the house. And the sooner you realize this, the less fearful you will be, because even now they are watching you. They are always watching you. I don’t want to scare you at the end of this inversion, but as Nirvana said in its lyrics:

Just because you're paranoidDon't mean they're not after you

The next inversion is about angels and demons.

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Everything outside of planet earth we call “space” or “outer space.” This inversion is about reclaiming wonder for “the heavens,” which has been lost during the onslaught of “The Enlightenment,” for which a better name would be “The Great Flattening,” “The Vanilla-ing,” or perhaps “The Vacuuming” since we have undergone three centuries of sucking the enchantment out of life, making heaven and all spiritual things prohibited from the public square. Instead of lying in the grass or on rooftops looking up in awe at the incredible depth of the heavens, we now are face down looking at Webb telescope pictures of space on our phones. What a buzzkill. The pictures are amazing, but the wonder is gone if we just see the pics as the images of a mechanical automation spun off by an absentee creator. Even the word space tastes like a saltine cracker compared to the triple-fudge sundae of the word heavens.

Perhaps you noticed that the word is plural in some translations of the opening line of Genesis. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth.” In some translations, heaven is singular, but most use the plural form. This requires some inspection because we tend to only think of heaven as where God is, but the bible uses this word to mean the sky, the stars, and where the angels and saints live.

Before going too far in this inversion, let’s set a stake in the ground as a marker. Whether we say “heavens” or “heaven” matters little in the end. What matters is enchantment. When you are re-enchanted to say “heavens” instead of “space,” heaven becomes larger and more inclusive than what the engineers and physicists have taught us to believe. Seeing the “heavens” opens creation back up to link the immaterial with the material. Much like the composite of our body and soul, so are the heavens of the angels and the stars and the saints and the sky. All of God’s creation brings the believer a collective wonder.

So how many heavens are there? Or how many levels? Dante had ten. But according to St. Paul, there are three. Let’s stick with St. Paul. He said, “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven.” In the days of creation, we can also read of the three heavens:

* Atmosphere or air, the place of birds and clouds.

* The starry heaven, what we now call by more dull names, like space or the universe.

* Highest heaven. The third heaven. The heaven closest to God. The unseen, invisible realm, is best described in the book of Revelation. Also known as paradise.

We still use terms like this today when speaking of the heavens, but we mean different things when talking about heaven at a funeral versus talking about the heavens in astronomy class.

The first answer everyone wishes to know is: what is this third heaven? Is it a place? Is it a dimension? We often use metaphors of mountains or clouds with our imaginations, but imagination is a bit dangerous. Popular ideas about heaven imagined by artists suggest that it’s all harps and pearly gates. Seems kind of weak. This is likely why many people would rather rock out at a music festival than pursue heaven. Harps and golden gates lack appeal. Did it ever appeal to anyone? I think not. Please set those old artistic images aside and think of them no longer, because Jesus doesn’t elaborate when he tells the apostles that he will go to make a place for them, making no mention of harps or gates. He only speaks of “dwelling places”:

In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. (Jn 14:2-3)

So it is a place, but a place we cannot fully know yet. It’s a house of some kind. A good spiritual reading on heavenly places is The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila. Now there is a mystic that needs to be read by modern people. She embraced the mystery of the heavens and had the gift of articulation for this place that can never be fully articulated in human words.

Mystics like Teresa of Avila can lead us toward God without giving us a formulaic answer. This is frustrating for us in the age of data because we want to know all the details, but Jesus says if we know him, we will know the way to this house - and that is sufficient for our salvation. We want all the data, but one of the most important steps toward humility before God is accepting that we cannot know all because we are not God. This concept of the “place” of heaven where the saints exist is a mystery, and the greatness of the act of faith, from the Trinity, to the Incarnation, to the Eucharist at Mass is enmeshing our whole minds, hearts, bodies, and souls into these mysteries in humble prayer. This “place” of heaven is yet another wonderful mystery, which is why meditating on the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary every Wednesday and Sunday is a great way to spend a holy hour.

But like many mysteries, Jesus gives clues. “I go to make a place for you,” tells the apostles there would be a place for them to be after earthly death. The third heaven is that place. In other words, what we usually think of as heaven means the third heaven that St. Paul speaks of when his friend in Christ was “caught up” to the third heaven. This is powerful language. St. Paul, like his friend in Christ, is a saint, which means his soul is in the third heaven, even though the bodily resurrection has not yet happened. A few people have been “taken up” body and soul to heaven already. We know that Jesus’ resurrected body and soul went to heaven on his own power, in the mystery of the Ascension. The only other human we know for certain was taken up body and soul into heaven is the Mother of God, Mary. She was assumed into heaven, as in pulled up body and soul. As for us regular humans who experienced the effects of the Fall, we know of three specific people in the bible who seem to have been pulled up to the third heaven.

* Enoch in Genesis 5: “walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him.”

* Elijah goes up to the third heaven in a fiery chariot.

* Moses’ resting place is unknown and it is a traditional pious belief that he was taken up to heaven.

This brings us to one of the strangest events in the Gospels, which is why you should pause on this mystery every Thursday during the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary. I’m talking about the Transfiguration, which has much to do with heaven. Jesus takes three apostles to a mountaintop. Jesus turns into pure light. “There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.”

Now, the light aspect of this event requires a whole chapter of its own, but for now, just consider who appears with Jesus. Moses and Elijah, two spiritual heavyweights, flank Jesus. Notably, these two men are believed to have gone straight up to heaven. Could it be a preview of the third heaven for the apostles? Could it be that Jesus is showing a glimpse of the unseen, invisible heaven? Yes. Of course it is. What are Moses and Elijah doing? They are talking with Jesus. Understand, please, that this is heaven. They are face-to-face and talking to God. To paraphrase another quote from St. Paul, he says that here on earth we see through a glass darkly but in heaven we will be face to face with God. What is happening at the Transfiguration? We see in heaven Moses and Elijah are face to face, speaking with God. That’s what heaven is. No harp is needed. Consider the sixth Beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Those who have been purified live in rest, in peace, with God, face to face.

No wonder Peter is stunned and stammers some nonsense. He hasn’t been purified yet for heaven. James and John also fall to the ground when God speaks. And what mere human wouldn’t fall to his knees and stammer at this sight? That is actually the correct response. They see their infinite unequalness to God’s glory (yet…yet, we are invited into it! Do you see how huge this is? Proceed to the Eucharist if you understand). Seeing Jesus turn blindingly bright and talking to the long-deceased Moses and Elijah - that alone would bring jaw-dropping wonder. Enter in the booming, thunderous voice of God. Then add the glory cloud of the Holy Spirit. Peter, James, and John are alive in space and time, yet somehow amid the Holy Trinity and two of God’s most holy chosen people who bore crosses for God to the end, who endured and gained their eternal souls.

This would be enough to make us all fall to the ground. But that is the point. That is how we should experience the Trinity. After all, fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and wisdom comes from humility before God. Peter repeatedly learns that God is not his equal or just some extra thing in his life, but that God is infinitely higher and utterly central to his life. Best of all, his preview of heaven in the Transfiguration was recorded by the apostle John so that we can all go there, to the mountain, again and again, and see the preview that Jesus offered. Contemplative prayer done on the mountain of Transfiguration is where the intellect, will, and even the dangerous imagination can seek a glimpse of heaven. We can see the sky and the stars, but we cannot see the third heaven without the help of scripture and prayer. The invisible realm is beyond reason and requires the submission of our intellect and will to see.

Another example of a clue about heaven is when Jesus is dying on the cross. He tells St. Dismas, the Good Thief, that “today you will be with me in paradise.” He’s not talking about Hawaii. He’s talking about the third heaven. It is the place of everlasting worship of God, where everyone lives in obedience to God. And what is paradise? It’s not likely what you think. Basically, paradise is where everyone just lives out the Ten Commandments. That is what heaven is: people living in joyous obedience to God and singing together, without trying to win or one-up God or each other. That is what the music of the birds and clouds and stars and planets and angels and saints is. Paradise is kind of like the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas where all the Whos in Whoville sing together out of joy even after all their consumer stuff is stolen. In fact, the Good Thief in his humiliation on the cross is being purged and purified for paradise right alongside God incarnate. He has a change, a repentance, a turning to Jesus. Obedience to God comes late to him, but the only thing that matters is this: it comes. It happens. Yes, perhaps he only labored in the field for an hour, but Jesus is generous and gives him the full day’s wages. He’s already singing God’s praise while being tortured to death.

St. Dismas now desires to be obedient, not out of fear, not for the promise of heaven, but out of the joy that comes from the forgiveness of a loving Father. He wants to follow the Commandments and live in harmony with God’s will. And what happens when his turn is pure and true? He is granted entry into paradise by Christ. Jesus says that heaven is paradise. Again, no harps. In the end, the third heaven isn’t that hard to understand, because it’s just people living the commandments and embracing God’s love by giving up their will and ego. What St. Dismas discovers in his last hours is what many of us never will, because our own will is in the way of God’s will.

Regarding this mysterious third heaven, the question of time arises. I spent a lot of time discussing the nature of time in the first inversion. But here we must consider the nature of time once more. This falls into mystery territory as well. Jesus is like a best friend who won’t tell all the spoilers, he only tells us what we need to know to have ultimate enjoyment, or what is known as the beatific vision - pure happiness - upon reaching heaven.

If we are talking about heaven as the sky and stars, then time certainly exists, as we can track asteroids and land rockets on Mars. We measure wind in terms of miles per hour. But if we mean the third heaven, empyrean - the highest heaven of the angels and saints - then I’m afraid that knowing the nature of time is beyond my pay grade. God is eternal, outside of time, because he created time. The Maker, the Prime Mover, the First Cause is most certainly outside of time, but can also be present in time, as the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the Incarnation of Christ prove.

However, what of time in the heavens of the angels and saints? There is an idea from St. Thomas Aquinas and others called aeviternity, which is not quite the same as eternity. This is not much spoken of today, but I wish it were. Time may be different in St. Paul’s “third heaven,” where the saints are. Does time exist in the highest heaven? What do we need to know about it, if anything? Jimmy Akin’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Heaven” can help us here.

Connected with the question of whether heaven is a particular place is the issue of whether time exists in it.

A popular conception is that it does not. The logic is fairly simple: God exists outside of time. God dwells in heaven. Therefore, there is no time in heaven.

That’s true enough when heaven is conceived of exclusively as the dwelling place of God, but it is not true when it is conceived of as a place that is occupied by angels and by humans after their deaths. In that case, a different sense of the word time is involved.

The First Vatican Council taught that God “from the beginning of time brought into being from nothing the twofold created order, that is the spiritual and the bodily, the angelic and the earthly, and thereafter the human which is, in a way, common to both since it is composed of spirit and body.”

This indicates that the spiritual realm is created and subject to time. Thus John Paul II taught that eternity, in the sense of being beyond time, “is here the element which essentially distinguishes God from the world. While the latter is subject to change and passes away, God remains beyond the passing of the world” (General Audience, Sept. 4, 1985).

In short, time may exist in the highest heaven, or some form that we don’t fully understand. But the good news - great news - is that if we partake in the Sacraments and die in a state of grace, we will learn the answer. As far as salvation goes, we need not know the details about the place Jesus prepares. This is difficult, but this is where the mysteries of the faith can be great sources of meditation and humility.

God is first. The heavens are mentioned as his initial step in creation. Earth comes afterward. Worth noting here is that the heavens are created, as God created “out of nothing.” That is to say, the heavens did not exist before or concurrently with God. Like time, it was also created. Like the stars and the sky, the highest heaven is also created. The thrones, dominions, powers, and principalities - all are created by God who created all out of nothing.

In this order of introduction regarding creation, heaven gets top billing over earth. This doesn’t belittle earth, it simply makes an argument that the spiritual realm existed before matter. This is why spirit is higher than matter. This is why we should realize that our soul has a body, too, as the spirit gives life to the material realm. This order also places us in the proper posture of humility before God, because there is an order to creation and even beings within creation.

Interestingly, this ordering fits with modern science, but I don’t think that’s the main point, since the sacred writer was making a point about religious truth, not modern physics. Genesis is not a math book or science book, but a book of higher truths. But still, it makes me pause to notice the accuracy: according to the Big Bang theory, the heavens were created first, if by the word “heavens” we mean the parts needed for making stars. Truly, heavens is a term worth much contemplation, because it can mean the stars and the sky, or it can mean the spiritual realm - or it can mean both - and it does. Just as we have both souls and bodies, so do the heavens. There is the spiritual heaven and the starry heaven.

As it turns out, astrology is mostly nonsense, but they are correct about a couple of things: the position of Saturn and Jupiter and Alpha Centauri do matter to us, because like the planets and stars, we also have matter and all of these bodies have a gravitational effect on each other. But the effect of the stars and planets is not focused on us. That’s the mistake of astrology. The music of the spheres in the heavens has the purpose of glorifying God, and that’s all. Indeed, these heavenly bodies matter to us, because like all of creation, they matter to God. But they do not dictate our moods or beliefs, because all things created by God that didn’t experience the Fall are still rightly aimed at God in their purpose.

The birds and clouds in the nearest heaven are good, just as the harmonic motion of the starry night is good, but best of all is the highest heaven, where the angels continually sing God’s praises. However, the angels are just doing what the stars and birds are, which is glorifying God. Like the birds, we should live our lives as a small humming in the great song of creation. Just as birds sing, we should make our own song of praise. Birds are fruitful and they multiply, working and singing, and so should we. The stars are in motion, dancing and giving light, and so should we. The saints give witness to the lights that we too can become through the humble offering of ourselves for the glory of God. No bird or star competes with God, rather, they are in concert with God. No bird or star attempts to make a name for itself, rather, they make a name for God. The birds, stars, and angels give us the same lesson that Christ did. The education of Christ surrounds us in the heavens, if only we would forget about ourselves to partake in the great play of creation. The goal of life is to reach heaven, yet as Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is among us.” “Repent and believe, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” Forget honor and wealth; look upward to the heavens, as the birds and stars and angels do.

The point here is to be inverted in your understanding of the heavens: all of creation glorifies God, from the birds to the stars to the seraphim. This is why the “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus” is sung right before the Eucharistic prayer at Mass. The “Hosts” of this song are the seraphim, the cherubim, and the angels, in the highest heaven, the third heaven. Like any concert, there are lights raised in the audience, moving in unison, and to partake in the divine nature, we raise our light to play a part in this amazing show, so that while we are just one little light, we can see that we are part of a whole. Every anonymous star adds to the majesty of the night sky, despite getting no name or notice. Our little light of faith is part of the whole, and we can share in the joy because of the certainty that God is at the center of all things, not us. Next time at Mass, when you sing the following words, know that you are part of a choir that includes all of creation, from us on earth and upward to all three heavens. This is why the Mass is more than just an obligation, it is a gift:

Holy, holy, holyLord God of Hosts.Heaven and earth are full of your glory.Hosanna in the highest.Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.Hosanna in the highest.

Further reading:

How many heavens are there?

The Hitchhikers’ Guide to Heaven

How not to think about heaven - Bishop Barron

Blasting Holes Through the Buffered Self - Bishop Barron

Re-Enchanting the Secular - Matthew Petrusek. Secularism is the predominate worldview in the West. However, it does not answer the deepest longing of the human heart.

Did God Create Heaven?

Is heaven a place or only a state of mind?

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

Finally, we come to the last words of the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

With these words comes an inversion that tips over ye olde pagan worldview and also the modern secular worldview. The order here is important. Ordering often has great importance in the Bible, especially once we get to the days of creation and the Commandments. Creation is an act of ordering, and we have a bad habit of disordering that creation. But I won’t get ahead of my inversions - let’s first look to the heavens.

Notice that heavens is first. Earth is mentioned second.

Consider how strange it sounds to reverse the order. Read this aloud:

“In the beginning God created the earth and the heavens.”

Just saying it that way feels strange. I have a bad taste in my mouth now. Yuck. The other creation stories are like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth. Genesis asserts the reverse. The bible drinks the orange juice at breakfast before brushing with toothpaste. This is the proper order. This may appear inconsequential, but like all the inversions, it matters far beyond mere words in a book, because the right posture of humility before God requires it.

In many creation stories, earth comes first. Genesis shoots that idea down like a clay pigeon in this opening line. In the Greek myths, Chaos and the Abyss are the first things, but then the Greeks go even farther in their wager. Earth (Gaia) pops into existence before the Sky God (Uranus). In other words, earth creates itself. Only after earth is born do the heavens arrive.

This is incorrect. Heaven is God's first and essential act of creation, as opposed to the second creation of the visible world.

Heaven is mentioned first. Another way of saying this is: heaven is over and above and before earth.

In some translations the word heaven is singular, but in most it is plural. (We’ll get to this plural/singular question in the next inversion.) But plural or singular, one thing is always true: heaven comes before earth. Heaven was created before earth, by God, who existed before both. This is intentional. Just as there are no accidents in Hollywood, there are no accidents in Genesis.

Genesis, in one single opening sentence, has set the entire Bible in opposition to every religious system that surrounds the people of Moses.

A great deal of order can be derived from this first sentence of the Bible. This single line may pick a fight across the entire world, but that is not the intention. To argue with the ancient world is not the point. To refute our modern ideas is also not the aim. The aim of these words is to speak the truth aloud, despite the consequences. Once again, the purpose of scripture is not to set the world right-side-up, but to set our eyes right-side-up so that we can see reality properly. Everything is as God made it, only we are upside down or sideways most of the time. The ancient myths and the secular world today are trying to sell you a bad pair of glasses while holding you upside-down. They are offering orange juice after you have already brushed.

Before Genesis was written, all the differing ideas about our origin story had already been told. Widely different origin stories existed then and today because we can arrive at different conclusions. Nothing is new under the sun. The sacred writer of Genesis was not the first person to think of “God created the heavens and the earth,” but the writer was the first one inspired by God to record it for the purpose of setting the truth in a form that could be passed on by scribbling, not solely by voice.

All ideas that we think are new are old. No idea is original at this point. Ideas are just reintroduced, shined up like a dusty apple for the current generation to eat. Usually, in the reintroduction, the ideas are only made more confusing. Truly, before humans began writing, every idea of modern philosophy had already been told and tried. Every upside-down worldview has had its day, and the reason they never stick and stay is because it’s hard to pretend the upside-down is the right way to be. The upside-down doesn’t work in practice because it refutes reality. You may pretend that rocks are not real, only projections of the mind, but stub your toe on the rock and you will know that the only thing that wasn’t real was your imagination.

What’s different about Genesis is that it is a book that lasts because it is the written word of God, which is to say, it is the truth. This is why people who have followed the wrong path return to the path of sacred scripture. This is the same reason why mathematical formulas stick around. The reason why Pythagoras’ theorem lasts is because it is correct. The theorem cannot be modified to suit imagination. It is simple, beautiful, and true, and it can be applied to the real world. Basic math is a terrific illustration of spiritual truths because it cannot lie. Let’s consider the Pythagorean theorem, which describes a triangle’s sides. This upsets no one, because it is so easily shown as true, even with a simple diagram using squares on the sides of the triangle.

a2 + b2 = c2

You cannot write the theorem in another order, or it breaks. The order is critical, where c is the longest side of the triangle. In the image, side c must be at the end of the equation. The following re-arrangement would not produce a correct result. Anyone building a house or measuring distances would make a mess using this incorrect theorem, given the three sides shown in the image:

a2 + c2 = b2

You cannot disorder the sides and get the correct triangle. For instance, if the shorter sides of the triangle are 3 and 4 inches long, the longest side of the triangle is 5 inches long.

Correct: 32 + 42 = 52

Incorrect: 32 + 52 = 42

The incorrect equation is an absurdity. It fails in the mind and in the real world.

When I was learning to program C++ in college, my favorite error message was the dramatic-sounding segmentation fault (core dumped). This would happen when a program I had written (poorly) attempted to access a memory address that didn’t exist. The code I had written in the text editor was a representation of what I thought would work in practice. In other words, it was an idea in a text editor, not a physical reality in live memory. But once executed, the code came to life and quickly died, because what I had concocted on the screen was incorrect. A flaw in the design caused a devastating error that dumped the process.

There were other errors that came from impossible attempts made in my code, like dividing by zero, but a segmentation fault broke the program in an abrupt fashion, like when mechanics say that an engine has “thrown a rod.” To “throw a rod” or hit a “segmentation fault” is to have violated certain truths of math and physics.

The incorrect equation for a triangle is a violation of the truth of mathematics, and if used in the real world, it would “throw a rod” or hit a “segmentation fault (core dumped)” error.

In essence, the opening line of Genesis, like the Pythagorean theorem, declares spiritual truth in the same way. Pythagoras is declaring a mathematical objective truth with his formula, and Genesis declares a spiritual truth.

If you change the order of “God created the heavens and the earth” you end up with a segmentation fault or a thrown rod as well. At the very least, you move toward a misshapen worldview, just as an error in the theorem creates a misshaped triangle. It does not match reality. Likewise, you cannot square a circle, nor circle a square. This is even impossible for God. You may protest, “But all things are possible with God!” Yes, except for untruth. God is the Sheer Act of Being Itself and God is Truth. Like the Pythagorean theorem, God is also simple, good, and beautiful.

A circle cannot be squared. Invalid memory addresses cannot be accessed. A brittle piston rod cannot withstand engine pressures. A triangle cannot have a shape that misfits the proper formula. And earth cannot come before heaven.

Pythagoras found one of God’s great tricks of geometry, and surely he was not the first, but he was the first to be famous for it, despite it actually being a truth from God, not Pythagoras. He was the first to be widely read, like the sacred author of Genesis, but the truth of “heavens over earth” was known before the age of writing arrived.

Numbers (not the book of Numbers, but the numbers used in arithmetic) provide a wonderful method of thinking about God and immaterial things, like heaven. Numbers are not things I can pick up and move from my kitchen to my bedroom. I can pick up two cats, but I can’t pick up the number two. We can contemplate the idea of “heavens” by using numbers because they are invisible, unseen things, but we know they are very real. These odd things called numbers have no bodies but have real applications and effects in our material world, where we do have bodies.

We cannot use the wrong equation in immaterial numbers and then apply it to the real world because a material triangle will not comply with an incorrect representation of the triangle. In other words, objectively wrong ideas are not a thing - they are nothing. Let me try to explain.

If an architect of the Flatiron building in New York City had drawn a blueprint but put the wrong dimensions on each side of his triangle building, the construction company could not have poured the footings to match the dimensions on the drawing. The physical world cannot fit with imagined falsehoods. This is why objective truth matters both in math and in spiritual physics.

As long as people have lived, however, we have resisted ideas of objective truth. This is why Socrates and Jesus were both put to death - for not playing along with the imaginary truths of the Sophists, for not playing along with the subjective truth of Pilate and Caiaphas. To speak of objective truths in a world that resists them is to invite anger. If you fully adhere to objective truth, you will be hated. One thing is for sure: it is not the British who first had a stiff upper lip, it was surely Abraham and his descendants, particularly Moses and his court for writing these truths down, because to record and speak these things invited anger, just as it does today.

This inversion may not seem relevant today, but like Pythagoras theorem, the order of “the heavens and the earth” is as relevant now as it was in Canaan or Greece. Moreover, if you scratch the fresh paint of modern sacred things with your fingernail, you can find that the old paint job of Gaia’s primacy is just beneath the surface.

But it is the wrong formula and does not work.

“Earth First” has returned for many people. During the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, the chattering classes got high on an old philosophy that tossed out God, and many held that the heavens do not exist at all. Classical antiquity became all the rage for some, and Gaia, or Earth, made a comeback. This was most obvious in what we built in our cities, because when the West believed in “Heaven First,” the biggest building projects were cathedrals glorifying God. When we switched to the “Earth First” disorder, we began building skyscrapers, government buildings (that looked like cathedrals), and stadiums for sports. St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York was the last big project for God, which now sits under the shadow of so many towers, like the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center, the UN building, Madison Square Garden, and Yankee Stadium.

However, it wasn’t just the builders who shifted to “Earth First.” Truly, the intellectual class has relentlessly tried to invert Genesis and either cancel the idea of heaven altogether or tell us that we need not worry about this unseen realm. We are five hundred years into this process now. We have mostly forgotten about heaven, because we live as if it does not exist, yet at funerals we declare that every deceased person’s soul is there. We are godless in how we live, acting as if heaven is not a concern, then suddenly universalists at funerals, where God is just a version of Oprah Winfrey (everyone gets a new car just for showing up).

Yet, the upheaval of modernity’s blessing of all sins is revealing to people which side of the chasm they want to be on when the collapse comes. As the chasm widens between right and wrong, truth and untruth, Jesus and Pilate, people are reacting and changing sides while they still can. To be on the side of the Pythagorean theorem is to be on the side of “Heaven First.” Some feel that a “Heaven First” view is finally coming back. If that’s true, it’s happening slowly, but then there are wonderful, wild conversion events like with “Our Lady of Guadalupe” where the efforts of missionaries and evangelists hardly move the needle, while God re-enters our lives with a lovely picture presented by a peasant like St. Juan Diego, and suddenly millions once again recognize that the “Heaven First” viewpoint is the truth.

We are seeing the result today of a world that has rejected the spiritual mathematical formula of “God created the heavens and the earth.” Like the example of the architect drawing the Flatiron building triangle with invalid dimensions, a world built on bad math and untruth becomes visible. To use biblical terms, it bears “bad fruit.” We all know what bad fruit looks and tastes like. The error of “Earth First” is becoming more plain by the day. Look no further than the transgender craze to see modern Sophistry at work, yet even this craze is not new but has a history in the ancient cult of Cybele. If someone cries out, “The cult of Cybele was absurd,” that will not bring a mob to his house today. But for those who speak out against the mutilation fad of middle-schoolers invites active, living hatred. But as an advocate of both “Heavens First” and the Pythagorean theorem, it’s impossible for me not to speak or write about both, because I think Cybele’s followers were wrong just as I disagree with the living, modern version of Cybele’s cult that mutilates children.

Like Jeremiah, the prophet, I would like to stay silent to avoid the burning hatred of the world, but I cannot do that because to speak untruth feels dirty. It’s like drinking orange juice after toothpaste every day, instead of the other way around. It’s gross. Most of all, to speak untruth means I have abandoned God. I would rather abandon the Pythagorean theorem than God, but I can’t abandon the theorem either, because it came from God. This causes a problem for believers in both the integers and God.

Jeremiah, under persecution, wanted to stop talking about the truth of God to save himself some pain, but the burden of objective truth was too much and he had to speak or he would explode. He declares that he would like to stop talking about the truth of God to avoid the ridicule of others and save himself the headaches, but the fire burns within him to speak:

“I will not mention him,    or speak any more in his name,”then within me there is something like a burning fire    shut up in my bones;I am weary with holding it in,    and I cannot.” (Jer 20:9)

I can relate, although I am more cowardly than Jeremiah. Today, to argue against the media and professors, both of whom insist on a materialistic worldview, is to be a modern prophet. To be a prophet is not to predict the future, it is just to declare truth, like the Pythagorean theorem and God creating heaven before earth. Oddly enough, many atheists now sound like Jeremiah because they understand the implications of mathematics and objective truth. This has been a fascinating turn of events. I marvel as it unfolds, as atheists like James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson sound like devout Catholics. This is why I do appreciate atheists. God bless them. They cut away all the fluff that stands between the two options of 1.) God Most High or 2.) nothing. I feel that if most atheists properly understood the formula called “creation ex nihilo,” they would be suddenly re-attached to the tree of life and chugging God’s grace like a bong at a college party. I pray they are all at the next Easter Vigil service where they can join their terrific sense of reason to a newfound faith that makes them whole.

The prophets are not that strange after all, because they speak truth. The prophets arise at times of disorder because, like Jeremiah, it’s impossible not to speak of the order of God’s creation. These prophets are not the crazy ones, but the last remaining sane ones. Jonah, the reluctant prophet, must speak, despite wanting to hide like Jeremiah. He doesn’t want to, but he does. Why is that? Because he can’t avoid the truth. The prophets are like Socrates and Jesus, who are the most sane people in all of history, and both Socrates and Jesus were very much “Heavens First” in their theology. Plato’s Timaeus has a Socrates that sounds an awful lot like Genesis 1:1. This is sanity. Reading the tales of mythology is wonderful entertainment, but nothing to take seriously - they are like Marvel movies: fun to watch, but unbelievable, and not aligned with reality.

The reason Jeremiah may seem crazy is that he is speaking objective spiritual truth to a world of Sophists, to a world that worships the wrong “order,” like in the book of Judges that repeats the ominous line throughout: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

In an age of unbelief, however, it seems natural that people would be more concerned about the material world than the immaterial heaven. But this is only due to people not thinking deeply about their first principles, of which way is up (Hint: Heaven is up). They are flipped over because the advertisements spin them around. They are merely thinking about what they desire and calling it good. In other words, they have rejected God to do “what is right in their own eyes,” as the book of Judges repeats over and over. The naturalistic worldview, where God is not alive nor involved seeks all its answers in the chemical and biological, not in the spiritual. Yet not only the materialists do this - so do lukewarm spiritual people, where the desires of the flesh are projected onto God. Merely declaring “Heaven First” does not cure the error, but it is the first step on the path to wellness and sanity.

Many people today complain about the politics of “America First” while in the next breath, they preach sermons of “Earth First.” But I am a keeper of the old code, of “Heaven First.” This is probably why my social life is limited. I reject both “America First” and “Earth First.” I definitely reject “Self First,” which is the most sacred belief of our age. The “Heaven First” view isn’t a popular worldview today, but I grew up in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Listening to hundreds of hours of Nirvana’s Nevermind album ingrained in me an ironclad belief that popularity is for sell-outs.

The ancient religions are never far away. They don’t actually die. In fact, ancient people didn’t even know what the word “religion” meant, because the word was invented only a few hundred years ago. Religion is not where you go on Sunday for one hour, it’s how you live every day. It’s not just an add-on product or opinion or something done in private. We don’t really know what religion is today because we’ve tried to cordon it off like a coat room, and while we point at religion in the coat room, we are actually living our true religion and calling it something else.

Thus, with the myriad lifestyles and behaviors today, rest assured that everything from the Bronze Age is still here, but those ways and views have just taken on new names. While we may chuckle at stories about “Gaia” from the ancients, we do not chuckle about the chilling tales and dogmatic belief systems of climate change as handed down from those in lab coats and preached by the scribes of the laptop class. To challenge any assumptions about carbon credits (which are a parallel of what Protestants think Indulgences are in the Catholic faith) or sustainable planning is to invite a mob upon you. Attack the sacred things and you will be attacked. Why? Because the sacred things go back to the order of creation: who created what, when, and why. Thus if you subscribe to “Earth First” then you have a shield against spiritual things. Worse, you have an elevated sense of importance, also known as pride (as opposed to humility), and we will get to that nefarious inversion later.

“Earth First” is alive and well. Books about Gaia have been all over the place in the past decade. Mother Earth is worshipped by millions, and while our earth is very good, it was not first. Genesis in its boldness says, “Heaven First.” However, this does not mean, “Earth is not important.” All of creation is important, as the whole is greater than the parts. This is true in geometry, bodies, families, marriages, communities, and God’s whole creation. But there is an order of precedence, of how God created everything. If you error in this inversion, more errors will follow. This is why I’m writing this series on inversions, because the errors accumulate, where one wrong turn leads to another. The Catholic cosmology is not arbitrary or strange, it is just not understood or discussed because of the many layers of distractions that clutter our minds, due to centuries of misinformation about what the Church actually teaches, and what the truth really is.

Moving on, let’s look at the second inversion that comes with the words “the heavens and the earth.” Why is “heavens” plural?

Further reading:

On Earth as It Is in Heaven

Heaven - Catholic Encyclopedia

What is heaven?

Catechism 1029-1029

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“In the beginning God created…”

Creation was covered in the last inversion with creation “out of nothing,” but there is more to be said about the verb “create” and how God creates. At this point, I will venture beyond the first verse of Genesis 1 (finally!). Here are the first three verses of Genesis, which are worth committing to memory:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

The first thing to notice about this beginning, this creation, is that there is no battle or struggle. The maker here has no writer’s block, no hand-cramping. He’s not in a rush to complete the project. The painter doesn’t run out of paint. He isn’t interrupted by deliveries or doorbells or drop-ins. Neither is there any negotiation nor argument. No supply chain issues disrupt the critical path of keeping this building project on schedule.

The flow of creation is gentle, as God simply states, “Let there be light.” No laser show or fireworks are needed. No soundtrack. No music video.

God creates in peace.

Most of all, we should notice that God is not attacked or killed or overthrown in any way.

Why is that important?

This inversion of a creation story flips the Greek, Sumerian, and other creation stories, which contain a battle, a struggle, or a war in which the victorious god “wins.” There is no struggle in Genesis. There is not even a competition of any kind. This is unlike the Sumerian, Norse, Greek, Minyong, Cherokee, and just about every other creation story. In other words, Genesis is about simple beauty, not struggle. Creation is an unfolding, not a mash-up. Consider the difference between humans constructing a building with metal, wood, cranes, and hard hats, versus a seed in soil receiving rain and growing into a flower. Jesus spoke of this when he compared Solomon’s man-made opulence against a simple flower: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” All that we can make pales to one of God’s wild lilies.

In the gentle act of creation, God merely speaks. “Let there be light” makes all other creation stories violent and slightly ridiculous. The false gods seem to be trying too hard. Against the beauty of “Let there be light,” the Sumerian story of Marduk’s conquering of the primordial god reads like a cheesy TV drama, such as Game of Thrones or Succession.

This is the inversion: a “succession myth” is built into nearly every pagan creation story, where the primordial god or gods fight, and the first gods are overthrown. These other creation myths tell of a victory that never happened. Genesis declares that there was no fight whatsoever. There wasn’t even an argument or a dirty look. That’s because there is only one God, the God Most High, the Author, the Creator, the Artist. Once again, Genesis calmly calls all other mythologies absurd - because they are. They may entertain us, but so does a gladiator fight, which doesn’t make it right.

James Joyce, who rejected the very God who gave him his great talent to write, knew much about the creation of literary works. In The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce wrote about a version of God that seems quite right and quite wrong at the same time:

“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

There is something wonderful about this quote and something false. The God who creates in Genesis does indeed remain within/behind/beyond/above his creation. Unlike human artists, he does not struggle in the act of creation, as it is a labor of love. When he completes the creation, he rests, like Joyce’s image of the creator. I like the image of God seated in heaven “paring his fingernails,” even though he would not need to do so. Joyce is correct about God’s presence and about his resting, but he makes an error in the middle where he says that God is “refined out of existence” and “indifferent.” In other words, Joyce’s character is like Thomas Jefferson’s view of God. He envisions God in the Deist view, like a clockmaker, who creates the heavens and earth and then moves on, not caring at all what happens to it.

The God who creates in Genesis is not like that. He is not like the pagan gods who lust for power, nor is he like the Joyce version who creates and then drifts off distantly. This is indeed a central inversion to understanding the God of the Bible, in that when he speaks to create, he brings all things into being, and actively sustains the creation. While he could be “paring his fingernails” at rest, he is never indifferent or distant. He is an all-powerful creator who is also a loving Father, without being an overbearing one. Free will is granted to all, and free will often feels like a cross but is most assuredly a gift for those who read the Gospels to the end. In addition, the constraints of time and space, which seem a burden, are the teaching tools God uses to tame us after the Fall. The succession myths and science theories that throw out God only hurt us. God is fine whether we love him or ignore him. But when we do not conform our will to God’s will, it is we who struggle, not God.

In the Sumerian and Greek myths, the gods are paranoid about who will take their power. Even Zeus is sneaking around so Hera doesn’t catch him. But the God of Genesis has no threats, no challengers, no contenders, no scolds, because God is like Joyce’s all-powerful creator who is within/above/behind/beyond his creation. But he is not like Joyce’s “meh” version of God who could care less about his work. This is the difference between human works of art versus human life - as in children.

This is an important lesson for all those who dislike children but see their own lives as a work of art. The ultimate work of art is the generation of new life, and dying to self in favor of living to serve that life.

To write a story is to create, but it is not new life. When I was young, I was obsessed with writing and publishing a novel. I succeeded. It sold about 4,000 copies. That was nice. But that creation now sits on a shelf and only comes to life if I open it, and I rarely do. Then I had children and realized that writing a novel is a dead letter compared to the work of a family. In other words, to see God as merely the writer of a story is to misunderstand the living and the dead. And James Joyce, who wrote a famous short story about “The Dead” was himself flatlined because he thought “to create” meant only writing, painting, and art alone. The greatest act of creation is life, and not just static art, but life that respirates and moves and sings and suffers. In other words, the greatest work of art respirates - it breathes - and creation comes through relationships we have with the living God and with one another. In particular, the total gift of self means handing over your whole life to God. In marriage that means being open to creating new life and serving others instead of the self. The Church is said to be the Bride of Christ, and he emptied himself to bring new life to all its members. God does the same through all creation, as life springs from his word.

God calls us to life by speaking, not struggling. Jesus brought life to all the world starting with a small group of friends. They changed from ways of this world into saints by giving away their time and space to others, forgetting the struggle. With Jesus at the center, this shedding of struggle became possible. The only struggle in Jesus’ earthly ministry happened when competition against God’s will tried to insert itself: the Pharisees wanted control through rules, the Romans used brutal violence, James and John lobbied for top status in the kingdom, Peter was rebuked harshly when he tried to stop the path to the cross.

Whenever anyone wants to make a name for himself, a struggle begins. This is a spiritual law, it seems, from the Tower of Babel to Pontius Pilate and Simon Magus. The opposite of serving is gaining a name for oneself, and those who gain fame by doing God’s will tend to get new names, not from themselves but from God. Abram becomes Abraham, Jacob becomes Israel, and Simon becomes Peter. With their new name comes a mission of servitude, and status only comes with their dying to self.

When Jesus says, “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force,” he is talking about the status-seekers and the power-hungry who rule this world. To serve is to take the lowest seat, not the highest, and we should consider this whenever we admire celebrities, the wealthy, or the proud. When the guards strike Jesus, he opens not his mouth. Not once does Jesus attempt to make a name for himself. He repeatedly tells others not to announce what he has done. Healing in private he seeks no fame. This is exactly how God creates: in peace, in quiet. “Let there be light” makes no sound, it just happens. Thus, when the proud loudly mock God or take his name in vain, God allows them, for he has already won, and he just hopes his persecutors eventually stop trying to make a name for themselves and come to rest in his infinite peace. Surely when he watches us struggle, it must look foolish, since he wants us to partake in his divine nature, which does not struggle.

The creation of life that God gives to the universe and each human body and soul composite is an act of love. Mothers and fathers can know this to a depth that can never be understood by the childless. Dog owners often think they understand what parenthood means, but they do not, and they sound silly when they attempt to conflate dog ownership with actual parenthood. Artists will often talk of their work as like that of a mother’s love for a child. But they are ignorant of the depth of the Father’s love for his children, or a mother’s love for her child. The images of the Holy Family endure because that is the greatest work of art - a living family. We have a living family both earthly and spiritual. For we not only have an imperfect earthly father, we have the perfect heavenly Father who created our earthly father. Better still, we have our imperfect earthly mother, and our spiritual Mother of God, Mary, who Jesus stated from the cross for all people, “There is your Mother.” The God who created all is not an absentee deadbeat dad, he is near. Nor is he angry and controlling, he is simply calling us to listen and be listened to. In other words, there is no struggle in this relationship except for what we introduce to it. We bring the struggle. Because we chafe against our containment in time and space, we want to escape it and control it. Struggle ensues exactly when we deny God’s will and try to make our own will the authority and power. This is a fool’s game, but since the expulsion from the Garden we never tire of playing it until the invasion of grace enters our lives. When Jesus steps into our boat, as he did with Peter and Andrew, the struggle can end, if we let it.

The creator of a work of art struggles and can love his book, painting, song, or statue that they “bring to life.” But it can never be alive like a child. A book or painting cannot bind you in flesh and bone like another person that was generated by yourself and another person. And here is where the Trinity can first be discussed (but not too much yet), because when God the Father creates, the Spirit hovers over the waters. To create is the act of love, and that which is created and living will be loved by the creator.

I can be indifferent to a story that I wrote, or to a woodworking project that I complete, even if I am pleased with the result. But I cannot be indifferent to a child that is alive who came from husband and wife. This is why many parents seem somewhat insane: they love so deeply. They love so deeply that they err in strange ways. This is why the saying, “You’re only as happy as your most unhappy child” hits the nail on the head for many mothers and fathers. The living creation that is generated by parents, from their shared bodies, can never be separated in a child. Genesis and Jesus both repeat: “…and the two shall become one flesh; so they are no longer two, but one flesh.” In the same way, God loves us. The Trinity is a loving family of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the peak of love, at a greater depth, with rightly ordered balance. God does not try to control us, but allows us to err, with the hope that we will recognize the way back home. And since we are all children of God, can’t we imagine how he feels when we ignore him? (We can’t fully, but we can get an idea.)

This is why the other creation stories feel like entertainment rather than truth. They are accounts of struggle, whereas the true God never struggles. To read the “struggle stories” of creation in the ancient world is to see what they valued, which was power. We do the same today. In poker, the big bank takes the little bank. In geopolitics, big armies and big navies control the shipping lanes. In the office, the loudest voice drives the agenda. The proud and violent “win” here, and for it, we all lose. Disorder comes from struggle and squabbling over scraps from a zero-sum game that doesn’t need to be played. None of the power games we play come from God, but rather from our disordered will. What we consider creation is often destruction. Fortunately, Jesus shows us God: he is a humble servant, a loving creator, a living act of love who takes the last seat at the table. Real power is to be at rest amid the storm, like when Jesus slept in the boat that was about to capsize. The seas and the wind obey him. So should we.

In America, “wealth creation” is worshipped, and the creation of wealth is an endless struggle. Yet if Jesus returned tomorrow, he would not come forth saying, “We must get the economy back on track.” The only economy of concern to God is the economy of salvation for our souls. That is the plan, and to carry out that plan we must stop struggling.

But we celebrate struggle. Everything seems to be built around it today. We seek it out. Activists calling for permanent revolution crave a struggle. Sports is an endless invented struggle of those rising and falling. Cities and nations clamor for influence. We think we love struggle, but we loathe it because it is a trap. It is a container that we crawl inside, pull the lid down over ourselves, and suffocate under. We hate this competition and we want to rest, but for most of us, the draw of struggle pulls us into our own bad creation stories. Glory days and power plays are what gets remembered, not the quiet servant, the mother who made all the meals.

What we should do is notice who is not struggling. God is not struggling. He is seated. After creation he is seated, not struggling, but also he is not indifferent. When people come to know the living God, who created all things, a sense of active participation in that peace comes to them, which is why St. Augustine’s memorable line rings forever true throughout the centuries: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

In case you ever wonder why people like to kneel and pray in adoration chapels, or in the pews, it is because they are talking to the one that gives life, meaning, and rest. Once you come to see that the only place without struggle is at the center, at the source, from whom all things are generated, then the attraction of the struggle in this world makes little sense. Aside from needing our daily bread, the struggles of our world have come from sin. To sin is to struggle. Once again, Jesus said, “Consider the lilies of the field who neither toil nor spin.” We have rational souls, yet we should look to the lily, or the ant, for models of living in our bodies, and for our spiritual example we must look to God - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - for how not to struggle but to find peace.

How is it that God does not struggle? He is without pride or fear. Only we who have fallen know pride, vanity, and sensuality, and that is the source of all struggle. Sin is the absence of God. When we sin we reject God in favor of our pride, vanity, or sensuality. In choosing to sin, we choose disorder and struggle. But we do not harm God when we turn away. There is nothing that can harm God or overtake him. He does not force us to love him, but he invites us to do so.

God is not “containable.” The great error is thinking that he can be contained, tricked, or boxed in.

God is uncontained.

His creation is an unending relationship and conversation. He creates with a living, breathing, moving, open heart toward us all. He is uncontained because he’s not in competition with anything, including us.

When I was in high school, I was putting dishes away one day in cupboards and drawers, and it dawned on me that everything had a container. Forks go into a drawer, but within the drawer, there is an organizer. Within the drawer container, was another container for holding the forks. I began to look around and saw that everything I did was moving things from one container to another. The world seemed to one big Containment Management System, as I would wake up in the house container, go to the shower container (containing the water) and eat breakfast moving many containers to and fro, and then get in the car container to go to school, then go into the school container, in the classroom container, and with my backpack container, I would open up my books which contained words.

In this theory of containment, I realized that if I go very close with a microscope, there are smaller and smaller containers, from cells to molecules to atoms to protons. And all of these contain smaller things. Likewise, if I back up from my containers and look up, there are more containers, like the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe. So as far as my finite mind could understand, the largest container was the universe, and beyond that wall, our material selves could not go.

But then there were containers for immaterial things as well, like ideas, as we categorize things as Platonic forms or mathematical constants or schools of thought. There were numbers that had rules of containment from Euclid to Einstein. There were stories that had beginnings and endings, like virtual bookends. Even our imagination is contained by time and space. This fed into a period when I discounted all spiritual things, where anything immaterial was not real, like feelings or opinions. Only scientific evidence made for knowledge. Right around that time, I became very depressed as well, as I had rejected God’s existence. But I did have one realization at that time when I was looking at forks and drawers and atoms and planets. A question came to me:

What would it mean to be uncontained?

I felt as if this was like Zen koan, a question like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” To be uncontained was to be free, completely elevated outside of time and space. And who could be like that? Who could always be in that place of no struggle?

I know who it is.

Whenever I thought of what that must feel like to be truly uncontained, without the aid of mood-altering things, I recalled a day when I was working on a farm one summer, leaning on a gate at the end of the day after making silage, watching the cattle toss the fresh, green food up in the air and onto their backs, almost joyfully, as the sun set in the big orange horizon beyond the silo silhouette. It was one of those moments where the body was tired but fulfilled and I knew that dinner would be good because I’d worked for my daily bread, and the music of the spheres, and the harmony of nature, all seemed to be flowing in concert, and I’ve never seen anything so true, good, and beautiful in my whole life. That day I felt uncontained basking in the beauty of creation.

I had other moments like this, such as when my children were born, where the impossible occurred. There have been quite a few times like when I would be out on a long bike ride at dusk and stop for a drink of water near a cornfield, or when I would look at the stars on the hood of my car in high school with my friends, or when I hold my wife’s hand, or when I listen to certain songs, or when I look at certain Caravaggio paintings like “The Conversion of St. Paul.”

To be uncontained is impossible for me. I can not stay there. But I can be there from time to time. Like Mary Magdalene at the tomb, I can witness the glory, but cannot hold fast to it while I’m in this world. In these moments, I realized something that seemed profound (at the time):

God is that which is uncontained.

God is the only thing that is uncontainable.

This is why God does not struggle. This is why he rests. Can we ever be uncontained? The answer is yes. We can partake of the divine nature. What the Eucharist means in the life of a Catholic is just this. For those who believe, receiving Communion is just what it means: we commune with God. We partake in the divine nature. In other words, we partake in the uncontained wonder and awe of the creator of the universe. Critical to the understanding of the Eucharist is that we are not God, but we are made in the image of God, and our life is entirely about moving back into his uncontainability. The key is to remember that I am not God - I am contained, but by partaking in his nature, I can be more like him, and in heaven I will be fully with him again, for we came from the uncontained and can return there - and someday we will return if we remain in his grace, for “by your endurance, you will gain your soul.”

But like every original thought I’ve had, I found out later that my idea of uncontainment was not original at all. In St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book 1, Chapter 3, the heading is: “Everywhere God wholly fills all things, but neither heaven nor earth contains Him.”

Those who understand what the Catholic Church teaches have known about this notion of uncontainment for millennia. Sometimes I see Church Fathers use the term uncircumscribed, which is like saying uncontained. But most importantly for this inversion, this is why the God of the Bible is different from all the other gods. All of the gods of myth are within time and space. Even if they are in the heavens, they struggle. God does not struggle, he creates, even though he did not have to create. He chose to do so out of love, and it is only we, the fallen, who choose struggle. Because our pride, vanity, and sensuality fool us we believe that struggling against each other will gain us a higher place, but when we struggle we dig our graves. In making a name for ourselves, we will be forgotten by God on the last day. In struggling, we lose our peace and rest, because it takes our focus off of what is most good, what is the highest good, which is God, the uncontained creator who does not struggle, ever. Like the loving father in the parable of the Prodigal Son who runs out to meet his wayward son upon his return, he calls to us, he runs out to meet us, and when we return he fills us with a wealth beyond human understanding. And that is why we are here in this world as we are: we are not kicked out of the Garden as a punishment, we are kicked out for our own good, so that we may come to know God and return to him of our own free will. He invites us but never forces our hand. He calls, never coerces. He is beyond all things and sustains all things, which is why we cannot run from God.

All that we create that is not living becomes rusted, corroded, and overtaken by time and nature. Every ancient temple and city dedicated to the false gods has turned to dust, just as every skyscraper, stadium, and data center today will turn to dust. Every mascot and corporate logo will be as powerless and meaningless as the eagle of Rome or the oracle at Delphi. We are passing by on our way to an eternity in one of two places. Like a bird flying by a window, our time is brief, our stay here is short, and all that we create will fade, no matter how we struggle to maintain a sense of security. The pages in books we write will turn yellow, the machines will fall into disrepair and sit like rocks. But the life we create can create more life, as the generations continue.

This is why a child who plays a video game is disengaged, while a child who catches a fish is full of wonder. One is playing in the world that God created, and the other is playing in an artificial world that a programmer created. Likewise, this is why a reader of Joyce may experience something like transcendence, but a reader of the Bible (and especially the Gospels) experiences something alive. Joyce could write a book, but his book cannot generate life. But those who approach the Bible as the written word of the uncontained God who created all things and does not struggle will find life. Yes, it is a strange book that can bring a robotic modern person back to life. Interestingly, Joyce’s most famous short story was called “The Dead” which referred to Jesus’ saying, “Let the dead bury the dead.” This was a reference to spiritual death. When Jesus said that he is the vine, the bread of life, and the living water, he was telling us to plug into God. He was notifying us that struggling and floundering only happen when you desire something more than God. You will forever be searching and struggling until you come to realize that there is only one path to the end of struggle, and that is the path back home to God.

Jesus reminds us: “In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” He has created the world, overcome it, and rests, waiting for us to recognize his ever-present voice. When we find him, in those moments, we will want to stay there and never leave. In the Eucharist at Holy Mass we can partake in the uncontained. Jesus is there - truly present under the appearance of the bread and the wine. Again, Mary Magdalene at the tomb wants to stay with the risen Lord forever, but she cannot. She has to move forward, and moving forward she is full of life, she is changed. Her sadness is swept away upon seeing the risen Jesus. How can that be? Because she is no longer struggling, and her sorrow turns to joy.

She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her. (John 20:11-18)

And then, once we meet him, after he surprises us, we know beyond our worldly containers what is true, good, and beautiful. He invites us into that peaceful present. Then our pain and sorrow become strangely redemptive. Coming to know how he does not struggle, we can do likewise. We can go to the chapel in the heart even when a church is nowhere near. As St. Paul said, we can pray constantly, and thus be with the one that is forever uncontained by time and space while we work and live here - for the kingdom of God is among us - in relationships, not in art or status or stuff. Once we recognize our relationship to God, we know the Father, and we know our mother Mary, and we become connected to the angels and saints - including Mary Magdalene, who will pray with you if you but ask for her intercession. Then like God, we do not have to struggle. For God alone is uncontained. And God alone satisfies.

Further reading:

* The Bible’s Conflict-Free Creation Story

* How God Redeems Pagan Imagination

* St. Augustine and Cosmology

* Creation in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and the Ancient Near East: Order out of Disorder after Chaoskampf - “The background of the Genesis creation story has nothing to do with the so-called Chaoskampf'myth of the Mesopotamian type, as preserved in the Babylonian "creation" myth Enuma Elish. In Gen 1, there is no hint of struggle or battle between God and this tehom—water.”

* Chaoskampf - Good overview of myth systems that assume a struggle, but the article misses the inversion of Genesis entirely. God does not struggle. He just creates. He orders. There is no rival. Even Leviathan is God’s plaything or pet (Psalm 104). The ancient dragon, the devil, is cast down to earth like a swatted fly falling to the floor (Revelation 12:9). He was never a threat to God, never a contender, rather just a rebel and nuisance to the good of creation, as he still is for us today.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

Here is where we come to the inversion known as ex nihilo, which means, “out of nothing.” If you are like most modern people, Latin phrases may make you uncomfortable, which is why they are probably good for you. They can jostle us out of our spiritual slumber. But this is one that you should know about for mental health reasons.

Prior to God, there is nothing. This was discussed briefly in the previous inversion, but it is so important that it requires an extended look.

What does this mean? Consider a woodworker who wishes to build a birdhouse. To do so, he needs wood, nails, perhaps glue, a saw, a tape measure, and a few other things. To create, we need material that already exists. God, on the other hand, does not. He creates from nothing.

The book of Genesis states that God is the beginning of all things. Nothing is before God, not even chaos. There is a reference to a watery, formless void in the verse that follows, but God is prior to this amorphous blob. Also, this “formless void” does not get a proper noun like the Greeks give to “Chaos,” as if it were an American Gladiator. The formless void is just a watery meh. It’s nothing. But good luck thinking of “nothing” because we cannot with our finite abilities.

Nothing is incomprehensible to us. Ghostbusters did a nice job of showing that we cannot think of “nothing.” The monster tells the Ghostbusters to “Choose the form of ‘The Destructor.’” Venkman then tells his buddies: “Empty your heads! Don't think of anything!” But poor Ray can’t think of nothing. He can only think of something. That’s when he thinks of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man and says, “It just popped in there!” Then the Ghostbusters do battle with a giant marshmallow and make cinema history (and flatten spiritual things into the material realm, but I digress - that’s for a later inversion).

We cannot think of nothing. We can try to contemplate it, but we can’t achieve it, because even if we believe we’ve found the nothing, we are either thinking of God or fooled, because nothing existed before God. He is first. The Buddhists aim their meditation at nothing and think of the self as god. Catholics do the opposite. Catholics focus prayer and meditation toward God, who created everything out of nothing, including us - and most importantly - perhaps the most critical thing of all to remember is this: we are not God. Repeat after me: “I am not God.” And this is why Buddhism and Christianity are incompatible at the very root; the first principles are in opposition. Buddhism rejects a creator and rejects creation ex nihilo.

That’s what this inversion is about, as are all the inversions. Not only does God’s creation out of nothing disagree with Buddhist thought, but it also rejects Greek and Sumerian myth systems, as well as many modern pseudo-scientific theories where the universe was created from pre-existing parts. Today, some will claim that the atoms have always existed, but the Jew, Muslim, or Christian rebuts this by saying, “I know who made the atoms. They did not always exist.” In ancient times, if some would say that water was first, Abraham would say, “I know who made the water.”

In the Sumerian creation mythology, water is first and the gods come later. It’s not surprising that we might think of water, the sea, as a primordial source of life, since water supports life, but water alone cannot bring life. The substance of water can quench our thirst or destroy us with a flood. It is a healer and a destroyer. But water itself is not “Being”. Water cannot create life. Water cannot create planets. Water cannot create the protons and electrons required to make water. The old myths fail in light of modern science, but creation “out of nothing” does not. Ex nihilo outlasts even science, because God made all things that make science possible. He created science by creating. All of it depends on his being and his act of creation. A scientist has no paper to write without the atoms, just as a woodworker can build no house without the wood that God made.

This idea of water is associated with Chaos in various myth models, and the modern arguments of “which came first” do not sound very different from the Sumerian and Greek disorder of where Being came from. Water is not Being, water is material. In other words, it is created by something prior to it.

There is nothing before God in Genesis. Not water. Not time. Not a chaos monster. Not an island. Not a pie shop. Nothing. God is first. We cannot describe God, but we can know what he is not, and he is not merely water. To mention something as being prior to God is to misunderstand why God tells Moses his name is “I AM”. In other words, God is “Being Itself.” This first Being must precede everything, even chaos and formlessness.

This is the road to mental health. Why modern psychiatry has not yet caught on to this is simultaneously sad and comical. Listening to the modern cures for mental health that exclude God is like watching a coach execute a play repeatedly that hits a brick wall of defensive linemen, when a simple bootleg rollout pass would bring an easy touchdown. When Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and when he says “I am the vine” and when he says “I am the bread of life,” he is saying, “I AM” just as God said to Moses at the burning bush. This “I AM” cannot be stressed enough, and if I fail in this series to fully hammer home the importance of understanding the radical transcendence of God, as in, “There is no being without God because he is BEING ITSELF,” then I too am like the quarterback running the failing dive play instead of the rollout bootleg for the touchdown.

For this reason, I do believe Big Pharma fears a comeback of creation out of nothing, but really, I wish they would sell a sugar pill called “ex nihilo” and use their marketing prowess to sell it, because they truly would change people's lives with something better than the dubious SSRI pills they sell. But the more people I meet who believe in the idea of “ex nihilo” have astonishing sanity and positivity toward life. Please, if you’re out there Pfizer, Merck, hear my plea: start selling ex nihilo, and make one of those ads where people are prancing about in clover fields, full of joy, but be sure to include a picture of them kneeling in humility before God, otherwise its just another snake oil. The same reason SSRIs fail to fix anything is the same reason that “whiskey ain’t workin’ anymore,” as the country singers say. Pills and booze are band-aids for a spiritual malady. The inversion of marketing with pills and booze is to pretend that something man-made can fill the void, the sense of nothing, when only one thing can do that, and it is God who created ex nihilo.

The many forms of nihilism today extend directly from this rejection of God as the first being, because we often think that nothing existed before God. Modern philosophers and psychologists got stuck in neutral over this issue, with the big names all being atheists, like Heidegger and Sartre and Freud and Jung and Foucault. Is it any wonder that depression is at an all-time high, when the replacement for certainty in the rock of God is a watery void of endless therapy and “vibes”? Can anyone seriously struggle to understand why the “Self” is a crappy god to believe in, when one seasonal cold or inflamed elbow joint can render us weak? When we are unsure that God was first, and before him there was nothing, then we have a gap in our consciousness that nothing cannot fill. In particular, the Self cannot solve it, nor can serotonin. I call this giant, gaping void the “Big Empty” (shoutout to Stone Temple Pilots). And the Big Empty can only be filled by God.

The inversion here is that God existed, has always existed, and will exist forever. Once again, the nature of time matters for sanity in knowing that there was a beginning, and being came from God, who preceded all things.

That God created “out of nothing” means that you can stop worrying about everything, because quite literally “he has the whole world in his hands.” The children’s song is not just a feel-good happy-clappy preschool ditty: it is the key to mental health - because God does indeed have the whole world, the wind and the rain, the little bitty baby, you and me brother/sister, and yes, even ev’rybody in his hands. Why? Because there was nothing before God, and so there is nothing without God. Thus, with God, who created all things, there is also nothing to fear, because he created all things and saw that it was good (more on that later). Because of this, even death is not something to fear, because he has the whole world in his hands.

This is also important because when the devil tempts Jesus to make bread from stones, Jesus answers, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Thus the Word of God feeds us, because it is the source of everything, the pipeline that nourishes all life. The tree of life is rooted in God. The tree of knowledge leads to death. A simple lesson in making choices is to choose the tree of life over the tree of knowledge. Knowledge is a like side hobby, whereas the tree of life is where the joy of connection to the source never ceases. There is nothing before God speaks all into existence.

This should comfort you. This should give you focus, not anxiety.

We cannot actually think of “nothing” so the closest thing is a formless void. This language is stunningly complex while using simple words, but “beginning,” “created,” “without form and void” - if only I could write so concisely and meaningfully, but I can’t. So let’s continue with the long-form non-academic journal style that a hack writer like myself loves to use.

One way I try, rather pathetically, to imagine the pre-creation nothing is a painter’s easel with a blank canvas on it. The canvas can be black or white to represent the absence of anything. But even then I’m not thinking of nothing, I’m thinking of a canvas. Or, I’m thinking of a space like that whitespace in which Neo trains against Morpheus in the movie The Matrix. Yet that is also not nothing, it is a three-dimensional empty space, which is something.

I can dimly understand what it means to say “out of nothing, God created the heavens and the earth.” Ex nihilo is a powerful idea that gets brushed aside too easily today by those who believe that atoms always existed, or that there never was a time when the universe did not exist. The bible says that God “created” the numbers, atoms, time, three-dimensional space, and every possible thing that we can think of (or not think of). He created the heavens and the earth, which means a material and spiritual realm, thus even that which we can imagine comes from God. Angels and Elves and Orcs and Fairies and Furies are attempts by us to think of something to explain the spiritual realms, the “heavens,” and as St. Paul said, we only look through a glass darkly now, but will someday see God face to face. But we aren’t prepared to do that now, not in our mortal state. To do so in this finite form would destroy us (more on that inversion to come).

As created things, as creatures, we can only think in terms of time and space, we cannot think of nothing, nor can we comprehend the infinite. This is why so many people err in an understanding of God in the bible because they think of him like an idol, as something that exists in space and time. God is not like Zeus who lives in a mountain. God made the mountain and everything else out of nothing. He is the Author of all things who lives outside of his work of art, called “Creation.” Famous atheists like Bertrand Russell swing and miss on this when they compare God to objects within the universe. Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins make the same category error. God is outside of time and space, because he created time and space.

Ideally, everyone would read the opening to the Catechism of the Catholic Church so we can get our terms straight, because like the word “Love” today, people mean very different things by it. We’ve flattened “Love” into one word when it can mean four different things - sex/passion, fraternal love, familial love, or agape (total self-giving). Few people say “Love” and clarify what kind.

We do the same thing with God and “create.” We are speaking in babbling tongues to each other even when using the same language of English, hence the confusion. When we create, we use existing materials. When God created, he did not. He made the materials - including the materials that make us and allow us to create. He made the immaterial things, too. Stephen Hawking wrote a book called God Created the Integers. This is a terrific title. I almost tip over with joy, for Hawking is so close to faith in the source of Being, but he worshipped the nuts and bolts of the creation that he studied instead of the Creator. He was in hot pursuit of the truth, and was close, yet so far. In his quest for the holy grail of the origins of time and space, he was bringing the language of mathematics so near to theology that he almost wrote a love letter to God. Math is indeed one of the places where our finite minds can get close to this idea of ex nihilo. To say, “God created the integers” is to realize that when God first spoke, he did include the number “1” because before that there was zero - as in nothing. For God to create the number 1 is to create “out of nothing,” and without the number “1” there could never be such a thing as the number “2”, or “3”, or any number beyond. All numbers can only come from God who is infinite, and like the infinite, is comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time.

Physics is not even far back enough in the chain, because its laws could be different than they are. But math basics cannot be different. God could have made the gravitational constant different and thus changed the universe. But the integers cannot lie, nor can God. 2+2 must always be 4, and that applies to both God and humans. Mathematics is one path to God, oddly enough. Who would have thought the nerds in math league could be mystics? With mathematics, to contemplate the Integers as a creation of God is to get close to the concept of ex nihilo - creation “out of nothing.” For even the Integers did not exist before God made them. Stephen Hawking, even if he didn’t believe, had so many gifts, that it always seems worth sending up a prayer for his soul (and for the many other seekers who never came home) just in case Purgatory is his residence. He appeared to pass away with the same rejection of Bertrand Russell on his lips, saying, “Not enough evidence, God, sorry.” Perhaps he sealed his eternity by the rejection of God, by dismissing the first commandment, but surely there is hope in his turning in the last hour, to confirm his belief in who “Created the Integers.” This is why the danger of knowledge can lead to pride over humility, and pride is the false guide of so many souls. St. Dismas and St. Gertrude: pray for Stephen Hawking, and pray for us all.

In short, we are finite - we are in a box called the universe, or space-time. Yet there is a spiritual reality that we can feel, know, sense, and even reach somehow in prayer. Because we are creatures, no amount of LSD or marijuana will allow us to escape our state of being, even though we know there is another dimension, or perhaps more than one. Although trippy drug experiences may seem transcendent, it can never grasp what it means to be God. Worse, drug experiences are all about pulling God toward the self, and not the reception of God’s grace. We cannot bootstrap our way to God, we have to be silent to let the still, small voice enter our ears. This is why prayer works, because when you pray, you need to stop trying and just be. Because what is “Being”? It is a connection to God. When Jesus said, “I am the vine and you are the branches,” he was telling us that “to be” is to connect to the source of all being. This is why Christians who are born again make no sense to unbelievers - they have a life in them that is inexplicable.

In other creation stories, matter exists before creation, which seems odd until you hear modern people say that “the atoms have just always existed.” This is an echo of the Greek philosopher Democritus who felt that atoms and motion were eternal. Thus the writer of Genesis shouts, “No! Atoms did not exist before God. Before God was nothing, not atoms, not photons, not electrons, not strings, and not even the greatest invention of all, not even ice cream.”

Again, we pass over this inversion with a yawn, despite the fact that like the first inversion, time, this inversion dumps a whole pantheon of gods and assumptions into the dumpster. Zeus? Get serious. Gaia? Take a number. All of the Canaanite, Egyptian, Greek, Sumerian, and Roman gods are booted out of the Biblical worldview. And I say good riddance, because it is much more fun to read Ovid as literature anyway.

However, the ancient writers of Genesis did not have the luxury of looking at Moloch or Zeus as literary figures that explained phenomena in the world. No, this was a deadly bet in the declaration of the creation story, because the people of Abraham, Jacob, and Moses did not go with the flow when it came to creation. They did not believe in the maxim, “When in Rome, do as the Romans.” (I realize that’s an anachronism). To say, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is to elevate God, the one true God, over all the human-like gods of their surrounding peoples. To give an example of what this would be like today, consider how people react when someone takes a knee during the National Anthem during an NFL game. Or, you can test this today, simply by posting on social media: “Abortion kills a human life.” This upsets the worldview of others. Overzealous patriots worship the flag, and those who worship the self do not believe in the souls of certain people groups, especially the unborn. To speak of God as a reality today still invites anger. The twentieth century had more violence than any century in history and repeatedly the Jews and Catholics were killed for their association with belief in God. Right now in Nigeria or Nicaragua or Israel, your declaration of faith is a deadly statement.

That is what Genesis is doing - it is giving a voice to that view, that opinion. It is inverting the idea of what God is. It is asserting a concept of God that makes all the king’s horses and all the king’s men look foolish for offering sacrifices up to absurd idols. Our current idols and religions are really not that different from Moloch or Zeus. What is most important in this inversion is that it tips over the canoe in which Zeus, Protagoras, and Richard Dawkins were all riding in, paddling backward in their fictions.

Why is this inversion so powerful? This is a threatening implication because creation out of nothing kicks the stool out from faulty origin stories and causes them to tumble. Most myths, including ones from modern science, are attempts to invert the worldview of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. They claim that water or atoms or a turtle was first. The Jewish and Christian origin story says that there was no-thing, not one thing, before Being Itself, and that Being is more commonly known as God. And how mighty a being he must be to craft such delights, like integers, atoms, time, gravity, the nuclear forces, light, water, earth, fire, wind, and (much later) pie shops - all out of nothing. That is a creator before whom we must kneel in awe and wonder and love and a healthy fear.

Poets like William Blake understood this wonder. When he wrote about the fierce beauty of a tiger with its stripes, we can get a sense of the power, depth, and stunning awesomeness of God’s ability to make things:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

He is asking: “Who or what could possibly create such a thing as a tiger?” The answer is God. Once this is understood, we can also begin to know why the Proverb says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” For it is only infinite power and glory that can do such a thing as creation ex nihilo.

Further reading:

Isn’t Creation Ex Nihilo Logically Impossible?

The Case for Creation from Nothing

Church fathers comments on ex nihilo

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

With the fourth word of Genesis, the second inversion arrives. At this rate, I may not get far, because here a long pause is required on this word.

“In the beginning, God…”

There is no word more argued about, discussed, twisted, bargained over, or rejected than the word God. We all have some idea what it means. But more importantly, what we believe at this top level affects the heart and mind. What we believe about this fourth word of the bible ultimately directs how we live. This acceptance or rejection of God, and what that word means, acts like a compass along the journey of life. Where we end up depends on the compass we use as well.

We can have wildly different understandings of it, but let me stop here to address the most common errors: the word God means neither cop nor genie. Many bad understandings regarding God fall into either the cop or the genie category. For some, he is both a genie and a cop. But this inversion suggests to you that he is neither. He is several things that can be asserted with confidence, that is, with faith, which is what the word confidence means:

* He is one. He exists. He is first.

* He is the sheer act of “being” itself.

* He is an all-powerful Creator.

* He is a loving father, not a bully, who desires your return.

* He is true, good, and beautiful.

That is all you need to know for your mental health regarding this inversion. Good night! The end.

But clearly more must be said, even though we could (and should) just contemplate all of these in silence. There is much to be said, so starting from the top, this inversion will focus on the oneness of God.

He is not many. He is not none.

He is one. (Truly, he is three-in-one, but even then he is one. Later inversions will discuss the Trinity.)

Genesis is not a shouting match, but it is quietly entering a deadly serious argument at this point. Genesis is in dispute with every other culture and myth in the world. By this fourth word, the first book of Moses sets his belief apart from every culture - literally, every culture - that surrounds him. Before Moses, Abraham believed the same, but Moses and his scribes wrote it down. This is important, because had he not written it down, Jesus would not have said so often, “It is written…”

Jesus invokes the written word of Moses and the Prophets rather often, especially to rebuke the devil during the temptations in the wilderness. If you believe Jesus is God, and Jesus quotes what is “written” by Moses and the Prophets, then these words have weight - infinite weight - in how to view the world and, by extension, how we should live our lives.

Thus, what we think of God matters greatly in how we view scripture, the world, and the spiritual life. If Jesus is God, and Jesus quotes scripture, and God inspired scripture, then God used human authors to convey his eternal word. This makes for a simple waterfall set of conditions that fall with gravity into place:

If Jesus is God…

And Jesus quotes scripture as the word of God…

Then Jesus inspired the sacred writers…

Meaning Jesus authored the scriptures.

That was mighty kind of God, in my opinion, to give us the scriptures. Even more kind, he came down to us in the form of man to go ahead and make things more clear to the apostles so they could pass on the tradition and teach us. But this should give you some idea about why we all like to argue about scripture. We argue because we disagree about who or what is God. Further, we argue about how he reveals himself, and to whom. But most of all, we argue because we dislike authority and the Catholic Church believes it has the teaching authority. This is why we argue. Even atheists love to argue about all of this, but they come at scripture wearing a bent pair of glasses, because the word God means something very different if you reject the idea of God. Likewise, you cannot understand the cross of Christ and the resurrection without at least getting the foundational idea of God in place first, not to mention the idea of an ultimate authority in heaven and on earth.

Thus, it’s no surprise that the “word of God” only makes sense if you believe in the supernatural existence of God. Truly, reading the bible without belief in God is like reading a bike repair manual without believing in bikes. Even if you believe in God, the perception of it leads to wildly different conclusions, which is why we have such wide-ranging belief systems as Islam and Jehovah’s Witnesses and thirty-one flavors of Protestant churches. The bible is a difficult read, and this is why the “bible alone” is insufficient as a teaching authority, because we can see with our own eyes how different each group uses that teaching authority.

Where we are at in this opening line of the bible is the origin story of all creation. Every culture needs a creation story. Every culture has one, and even atheists have a faith-based creation story. We certainly have our stories about the creation of America, just as the Soviets did (or tried to), or the Italians, or the English, so this should not seem odd to anyone. Comic books have an origin issue. Businesses have foundation narratives. My favorite pie shop, Betty’s Pies (“The Best Pies in Minnesota”) has a founding story about Betty. Without a story, we are left stuck in a no-man’s-land. We’re like the orphan Annie who runs away from Miss Hannigan in search of her real parents.

As it turns out, the beginnings of things need a cause, a character, a maker, or doer, or a force. The choices for who lifted the curtain on this grand play called “Creation” come in three sizes: many, one, or none. Also, you cannot mix these - you must pick one, and only one. Genesis declares that the answer is one. And if you think you don’t have to choose, you are incorrect. Really, you have already chosen. You may think you have chosen in your mind, but you choose by how you live today and every day. Actions reveal the choice, as Jesus described in the great Parable of the Two Sons. Actions speak louder than words.

Every seeker must accept or reject God’s oneness. For the seeker, the treasure to be found is the truth, but only one choice is not fool’s gold. Every angsty teen, every doubting Thomas, every physicist, every Greek mythologist, every internet atheist, every Christian and Muslim - truly, anyone who is seeking truth must venture into the test of oneness.

Genesis is inverting the worldview that accepts the “many gods” and the “no gods” hypotheses. Genesis states that there is one God.

This may seem trivial but it’s not. Genesis declares a truth that many do not want to be true. And even those who say “Amen” often do not fully understand the implications of what this “oneness” means.

Greek myth has a story of creation. The old mythology is a search for the truth, just as astronomy, psychology, and chemistry are also deep investigations into aspects of truth. And we all want the truth, more than anything, except for when we want to do something that requires a different truth.

But what is truth? Ah, that is the question. Now we are getting warmer. Hamlet asked the great question of “To be or not to be,” and Hamlet was right. That is indeed the question. He was close to the answer just by using the word “being.”

What does it mean “to be”? We are getting warmer still.

Pontius Pilate, long before the fictional Hamlet, said it even better when he asked Jesus straight up: “What is truth?”

This question of “What is truth?” and “What does it mean to be?” are related. When Moses asks for God’s name at the burning bush, God tells him that his name is “I AM”. I found this rather confusing as a child. But just consider what “I AM” means. This is the verb for “to be.” God might have said it another way, as in “I BE.” In fact, that phrase sounds like it could be the name of a modern pop song.

“To be” is to have come from God. Being comes from God. Being and truth both come from the simple, beautiful, transcendent oneness of God. God is to be. John Keats said “Beauty is truth,” but God’s being and truth go together with beauty. Descartes said “I think, therefore I am,” but thinking is not being. No, God is “to be” and he created us, giving us our being.

In any case, it’s worth pointing out that Zeus is none of these things: he is not good, true, or beautiful. Zeus is an ugly power-hungry shape-shifting rapist. That is not the God of the bible. This inversion is easy to spot if living in the ancient world. Today, we have different versions of the pagan gods, but they are still around. They have moved into other forms, such as honor, wealth, pleasure, and power - but rest assured, for every god of the ancients, we worship strange versions of it now.

More important, however, is the subtle inversion regarding Zeus and every other contender god. None of the other gods are the act of “being.” Again, God’s name is “I AM.” In most stories about Zeus, he shifts into the shape of a swan or a bull, so he could say the opposite: “I am who I am not.” This is exactly what the shape-shifting devil presents to Eve: a lie.

Once again, like in the first inversion, regarding the nature of time having a beginning, a middle, and an end, there is one Creator, one “sheer act of Being,” and one source of all truth.

This, once again, is an inversion upon which you can rest your head, where your finite mind can focus. One true God is much better to aim your meditation toward than nothingness, and much more sane than thinking about the pantheon of Greek and Sumerian gods. However, when in prayer, you can easily find out which gods you worship, because your distractions will lead you there. The distractions reveal your fragmented understanding of God, as they pull you away from the oneness of God.

Knowing that God is one is an act of faith, because no amount of proof can sway the mind alone to accept it. But it is an act of faith anchored in reason. And reason can take you to the doorstep that there is one Creator, but faith is needed to knock on the door. As St. John Paul II wrote, faith and reason are the two wings that make us fly.

St. Anselm and St.Thomas Aquinas presented rational arguments of the “ways” to know that God is one, and that God is logical, and that God is beautiful. People can and will argue until the end of time over God’s existence - and this is a good thing because skeptics often come to believe in the oneness of God in a most profound way, such as Augustine, Dostoyevsky, or Antony Flew. To doubt the oneness of God is not a defect, it is part of the journey back to God. However, argument will only take you to the door. You still have to knock, enter, kneel, and pray. This is a mystery and it is wonderful. God seems to have designed it this way for our own good.

The most common doubt today is about God’s existence. But there is no existence at all without God, who is the act of being itself. When we doubt God’s existence, we are much like the “self-made” billionaire who thinks his fortune came entirely from himself instead of the complex set of circumstances that were needed to allow for his success. In his self-satisfaction, the billionaire ignores the whole and only sees himself. Sure, he may have worked hard, but he didn’t create the infrastructure, culture, opportunities, timing, talent, and need that led to his wealth. He did not educate himself or feed himself as a child. In other words, he sees everything in terms of the self. (Hint: we are all the billionaires in this metaphor).

The pursuit of wealth is a search for meaning, as are the pursuits of pleasure, honor, and power. But the real search is for the origin story, the place of rest, the giver of life - we are searching for home - but we confuse where that place is at. Seekers who are burdened with the burning need to find the truth will undoubtedly try on the differing hypotheses of “many gods” and “zero gods” before they really look into the possibility of “one God.” With the Zero hypothesis, this leaves only the self and the void to find answers - there is no soul to save. With the Many hypothesis, it leads to a flattening and scattering, a divided mind and separated body and soul, a rudderless chase.

With the One hypothesis, there is no confusion. There is a body and a soul, and one source, one origin, one beginning, one ending. This puts solid ground underfoot and a proper heaven overhead. It almost seems too simple of an answer, because there is no struggle. Mythology seems more exciting, more dramatic (but that is the next inversion after this one to discuss).

The One hypothesis of Genesis also shrugs off the coercive policemen concept, as God creates out of his goodness. He is the Artist who creates because he can create. Moreover, God creates and does not engage in transactions with his creation, but rather made everything for its beauty. He is a great artist who creates out of love and calls all of this creation to himself.

St. Anselm called the Christian search a way of “faith seeking understanding.” You might say that those who believe in Greek myth or pure materialism also have a faith seeking understanding. Even the atheist is a believer in no gods, and that a faith in nothing must seek understanding through reason alone.

With all texts, with all searches, we must take something on faith to find the truth. This is unavoidable.

To compare a creation story from Greek myth, from Hesiod, against Genesis, let’s take just the opening lines:

Here’s the opening from Hesiod’s creation story (after he finishes praising the Muses):

In the beginning there was only Chaos, the Abyss, but then Gaia, the Earth, came into being…

With that one line, we have a whole cast of characters to consider, and it only expands from there. With Hesiod, we don’t just have to bother with the Muses, now we have three more beings, and soon there are about fifty.

Genesis starts much cleaner, simpler.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Done. The writer of Genesis starts out with a roundhouse. He says, “Let’s cut the nonsense: God was first and created everything.”

So much is said in so few words. The first line of Genesis is a masterful sentence that never stops speaking. But what else is the fourth word of the bible saying? What is God? We know there are basically three options: no gods, many gods, or one God. If the bible is declaring one God, which it is, what does that mean for us?

Our idea of God has everything to do with where we came from and where we think we are going. I’m not yet talking about the big “why,” but just the where for now: where did we come from and where are we going?

I often think of the analogy of trying to fly a rocket to the moon. First, the rocket must be pointed upward, not toward the earth. The Zero gods hypothesis aims the rocket at the ground. That rocket is going nowhere. The One hypothesis and the Many hypothesis is aiming the rocket upward. But clearly, that is not enough, for even a rocket aimed upward must have precise calculations to reach its target. Missing by a single degree will leave the crew lost in outer space. This inversion is about calibrating and setting the sights on the right target, charting the destination. Declaring that there is one God, not many, and not zero, will get you going in the right direction (and later inversions will fine-tune the landing).

With this inversion coming so soon in sacred scripture, this sets apart the people of Moses from all surrounding families and nations. The Canaanites and Egyptians of Biblical fame did not have one God, they had many. Abraham must have seemed a strange man in the ancient world and even had to leave his home in order to follow the one God. His city likely worshipped a moon god, meaning their rocket was aimed at the wrong heavenly body. Abraham must depart because he knows that will end in disaster. His faith in God Most High is not the norm. It’s not popular. But he knows it is the truth.

Even today, Abraham would have to leave home, because we still have many gods. We have believers in no gods and believers in many gods, and then we have believers in the one God.

Mythology as we know it today is what we refer to when we want to talk about dead religions. When the Sumerians were worshipping moon gods or the Greeks were rocking out at a Dionysus fest, they were not saying, “Man, I love our mythology!” No, those gods and goddesses were real to them, or at least some of them. The household gods of Romans, which taught men and women to live virtuously, were not like Calico Critter figurines that didn’t mean anything to them. These were meaningful objects, symbols of unseen realities.

Genesis, in its quiet boldness, states out loud that all of these little gods are ugly babies. Really, the sacred writer just cannot pretend any longer - these are false gods. Thus, these are fighting words for people and nations who have entire lives, rituals, and power structures built around these gods. Every domain of life, from hearth and home to war and sex, all had a god or goddess. Genesis rejects all of them. We have them today too, which we will get to later.

Again, we have lived with the idea of one God so long that we cannot comprehend how hard it was for Abraham and Moses to say, “All of your gods are fake. Only one is real.” This is the inversion that brings much hatred against Jews and Catholics to this day. Yet while we nod along about the idea of one God, we often live as if there were Many or Zero.

But why? Why is it so irritating to believers in the Zero or Many hypotheses? Why does saying, “There is only one God” irritate us? Why does saying, “There are no gods” bother people? Why does saying “There are many gods” make us do a double-take?

The reason is that it matters immensely, because like our view of time, our sanity and cosmology rests upon:

1.) Does God exist?

And if the answer is yes, then:

2.) What is the nature of that being (or beings)?

The question of whether or not God exists is fundamental to how your life is lived, how your family eats, and how your government operates. This is where we build our lives. Like it or not, upon this rock we stack up all other things.

And this choice always requires an act of faith. Even if we select the Zero hypothesis, that is an act of faith. The internet atheists make an act of faith when they say, “There are no gods or God” just as much as when a Catholic says, “Credo in unum Deum” (I believe in one God). The “unbelievers” actually are believers, they just subscribe to the belief that there is only matter and energy. That is a creed, also. There is no proof for either side that can be used to win the other over by pure argument or technique. It is not pure geometry. Nor are feelings enough to prove anything. There is only an act of faith in the end.

The act of faith in One God, Many gods, or Zero gods comes down to an act of the will, where we submit our will and intellect to a choice. When I felt there were no gods, never once did I say, “God help me be willing to be willing to believe no gods exist.” Why not? Because I didn’t want to believe in God or gods. I wanted to mock the idea that God existed, crown Jesus with thorns, and be unburdened by the consequences of what it means to say “God exists.” Because if you say those words, then it follows that God is not just matter. Then it follows that God matters. Then it matters in how you live your life.

But wait - the bible just says “God” in Genesis 1:1, it doesn’t give any details. What kind of God is this one God? Is this the clockmaker God of the Deists? Is it a vindictive God? Is it a God merely made in our likeness? Is this an invented God to control people? Is this a God of convenience for power? Is this a God you can barter with? Is this a God who built the universe and then departed, or is he watching us with his many eyeballs right now?

These are the questions that the rest of the bible answers. But the Catechism of the Catholic Church has a nice little paragraph to help us here.

Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and thinking.

God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect, if we are not to confuse our image of God--"the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable"--with our human representations. Our human words always fall short of the mystery of God. (CCC 40-42)

In this inversion, we can start small, without diving into the nature of God too far. It’s often easier to say what God is not than to say what God is, because being bound in time and space does not allow us the language to describe God, but it allows us to know there is a God. Once again, we are given all that we need for salvation and sanity, not every last detail that we want out of curiosity.

Just as hunger goes with our craving for food, and our thirst matches our need for water, so does our spiritual longing pair nicely with the God that created all things. Our hearts seek God, and God is all that can quench that seeking thirst. But mostly, in this inversion, what Genesis is saying is:

* God exists.

* God is one.

* God was first.

* God created.

This inversion marks a departure from all other creation stories. It casts out all myth systems and modern atheism.

In the Greek creation story, Chaos gets first billing and then mother Earth just pops into being, as if birthed by itself.

The point that Genesis makes is that the first mention of any “being” is God, who is “Being Itself.” Chaos is not first. Earth is not first. Nothing is first. But God precedes that nothing.

Surely it is proper for the first character of the bible to be God, from whom all being is sustained. “It is right and just,” as we say at the Catholic Mass. This is also why Genesis is so memorable. It’s simple. It’s beautiful. It’s good. No one memorizes Hesiod, not just because it’s longer, but because it’s not as good, not as simple. We don’t memorize Hesiod because it’s false. It lacks the three transcendentals of goodness, truth, and beauty. Many people know the opening line of the bible because it is terrific writing and speaks a truth that makes sense, even if many wish it wasn’t so.

We can’t look away from Genesis for a reason: it is a masterpiece, and masterpieces do something to us.

The first eleven chapters of Genesis cover massive territory, but there is nothing that says quite so much as the very first line. This is much like the Apostles’ Creed, with the opening line of “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth.” A lifetime can be spent meditating on that alone. To meditate on Chaos and the Abyss does not satisfy in the same way. In fact, Chaos and Abyss in capitalized letters sound like a couple of rollercoasters at Six Flags or Cedar Point. (What a strange time to be alive, when we name our fun distractions after the things that terrify us - Leviathan, Behemoth, Goliath, Medusa…I suspect an amusement park will just go all in and soon name a rollercoaster “Satan, the Accuser,” but let’s not get ahead of future inversions to be discussed.)

I realize that there are many differing accounts of the Greek, Sumerian, and Roman creation stories, so Hesiod’s writing is not the only version. However, all of them start with something other than one God. This is why the inversion of Genesis is so stark in contrast.

This inversion, of coming to know that there is one God, is not like the fleeting thrill of reading about Chaos and Gaia. This is no cheap Double-Bubble parade gum that grows stale after a short time, but rather it is endless food for the mind and the soul.

The idea of one God, on its face, does not seem as interesting as a tale that begins with Chaos, the Abyss, and Gaia’s spontaneous generation. If I had two movie choices to select from, I would choose the one starring Chaos in the leading role. But Genesis is not a movie. It is not about entertainment. Genesis is going higher and deeper than what Hollywood or Greek myth does. Genesis does not set out to titillate and persuade. So while Chaos may be more exciting in the short term, it makes far more sense logically and spiritually that before all things were, God is.

And merely four words into Genesis, the sacred writer has inverted the nature of time, and asserted the existence of one God, and declared the number of God is One.

This is why, as these inversions gather together, it becomes increasingly clear why the tribes of Jacob cannot help but be called “the chosen people,” because these differences are not small, not subtle, but glaring and sharp, like a knife that carves them out from a world of very different expressions of faith.

In closing, the mention of God in Genesis upends other worldviews.

We believe that God needs no pre-existent thing or any help in order to create, nor is creation any sort of necessary emanation from the divine substance. God creates freely "out of nothing":

If God had drawn the world from pre-existent matter, what would be so extraordinary in that? A human artisan makes from a given material whatever he wants, while God shows his power by starting from nothing to make all he wants. (CCC 296)

God exists. God is one. God is first.

Many people have gotten caught up in an academic distraction about the word Elohim being used in various lines of the bible. This is where personal interpretation of the bible can go wild, like college students on spring break. This is where deep dives into Giants and extra-biblical texts like the Book of Enoch and the Divine Council become unhealthy distractions. Interpretation of the bible should never be approached as a research exercise, but as an encounter with God, in a living tradition. If there are two books to keep on your shelf, or to take along to a desert island, to keep from getting lost or going insane, it is these: The Bible and The Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Many heresies start when the idea of the oneness of God is discarded or doubted. Rest assured, however, that God is one, even if he is three-in-one. The many and none hypotheses are upside-down worlds. The oneness of the Trinity has fingerprints all over the bible, even in the opening line. The Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is still one God. Yes, there are other created spirits, like angels, but there is no other God than the one true God, also known as God Most High. The Trinity is beyond full comprehension, and this is a wonderful mystery to pray on. As always, prayer is the key, as it pleases God and is offered like heavenly incense to Him. To embrace the certainty of God while letting go of the desire for all divine data is a liberating act for your mind, body, and soul. The certainty and mystery of God’s oneness is glorious.

With that, let’s move to the next inversion, which happens in the fifth word of the bible, which is the word “created.”

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When we open the bible and read “In the beginning…” we must stop right there.

In that short opening statement, we have already reached the first inversion.

The bible begins with these three words and tips over an apple-cart of worldviews. This idea of time having a beginning upsets various ancient and modern philosophies by saying, “I respectfully disagree: time had a beginning.” Many people then and now will claim that time has always existed, that there was no beginning. The bible inverts this idea.

Why is this radical? It depends on where you live and what worldview you have been taught. Many in the ancient world believed that time was a flat circle, or that time always existed, or that time is an illusion. Many people today also believe those same ideas, and have added more variations, such as that time is a social construct. Most people today accept the Big Bang theory, which mostly aligns with the opening phrase of the bible, but not everyone accepts it.

None of the ideas of “circular” or “cyclic” time fit with the Jewish and Christian view of time. The circular time models are kind of like the Ouroboros of a snake-eating its own tail. This image is a good metaphor for the view of time that many hold, such as believers in karma or reincarnation or Stoicism or The Matrix or Groundhog Day. “In the beginning” swings an axe to the root of these beliefs and philosophies. For instance, Hindus and Buddhists are on the outside looking in just from these three little words. Beliefs about “eternal return” and reincarnation suggest an infinite loop. Stoics, too, did not believe in “a beginning” but rather the idea of eternal return.

Genesis may have been written down before the Stoics or the Pythagoreans wrote down their ideas, but the idea of circular time was around long before the Greeks or Moses spilled ink on the topic. But the message of scripture is that Genesis clearly disagrees with the “eternal return” time loop.

“In the beginning” takes this declaration even further when we get to the creation story, because time itself was created. Another way of saying this is that time is a creature. Time was created just like planets and people. The same goes for energy or gravity. There is a beginning, and that beginning was created by God.

What the bible does not say is that there are multiple beginnings. Genesis does not start with “In this beginning…” or “In the current beginning…” or “In the 999th beginning…”

There are not multiple beginnings, there is one beginning. This time and space that we are living in had one beginning. Now if the Creator wanted to have more than one version of the universe, he could do that. Moreover, there may have been other beginnings, but we don’t know - nor do we need to know for our salvation. And here is a critical point of this inversion and all that follow:

The books of the bible tell us exactly what we need to know for our salvation - and no more. What sacred scripture gives us is all that we will ever need to do good works and seek the highest good, which is God. Worth noting here as well is that the word “salvation” is based on the word “salve,” as in healing medicine. The sacred books administer to us all that we need for our healing.

This is hard to accept for modern people. We want more data, more information. We want certainty. But the bible opens with one of the greatest mysteries of all, which is time. These mysteries, if you come to understand the inversions, are wonderful things to ponder without ever knowing the answer. This is what St. Paul meant when he spoke of seeing through a glass darkly: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” So it goes with our understanding of time.

What the bible says (without saying so) is what we partially know by instinct: if there are other time-space continuums, we cannot fully know it - not yet - because we can only know the time and space we live within now. Multiple universes? Yes, there could be, but it doesn’t really matter for our salvation. Could there have been a million beginnings before this one? Yes, but it doesn’t matter for our salvation. Once we know this, we can call our mothers or invite a neighbor over for a pop. Once time is accepted as having one beginning, we can move on and live happily without worrying about all of the possible other beginnings and endings. This universe is the only time and space where we eat, sleep, marry, raise children, and die. This is simple to understand and allows us to go ahead and get started doing just those things. Time is a gift to us - it is not a curse, but a cure. In the time we have, God gives us all sufficient grace to understand our purpose and place in time.

All of creation is something like a book that has a first page, or a movie with its opening scene. Consider a play like Macbeth, where the opening line is the First Witch in a deserted place saying: “When shall we three meet again / In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”

Surely, within Shakespeare’s pile of manuscripts, there could have been an alternative opening line. Perhaps in alternate manuscripts the witches would have decided to meet at the mall or in a nightclub. But in the book we have, they intend to meet again “In thunder, lightning, or in rain.” There could have been infinite other manuscripts, with infinite other opening lines, with wild versions like one where Macbeth makes balloon animals for Duncan, or where Lady MacBeth starts a food drive - but we will never know, and none of those other manuscripts are relevant for our understanding of the play Macbeth. In the play that exists, the one that we read, Macbeth is forever going to slay Duncan and Lady Macbeth always will be power-hungry. Whether or not Shakespeare wrote other versions, the version we have is what is. It has a beginning and an ending.

As for the ending, Jesus mentions a cliffhanger about the “age to come” without great detail, telling people that it is only for the Father to know when the world will end, and not for him to reveal it. He came to tell us what we need to know, not what we want to know. This confirms that sacred scripture gives us only what we need, and no more. Our curiosity is the cause of so much of our trouble and Jesus, who is fully human and fully divine, is all too aware of our catlike ways. Rather than give away the ending, Jesus is that good friend who already saw the movie but doesn’t spill the spoiler. The end is not to be announced, otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a climax.

A natural question for our intellect is: “What is the nature of time?” Who does not look into the night sky and ponder time? Who does not look at a fading photograph of past memories and consider the march of hours? Who has not been at a funeral of a loved one and wondered where did all the time go? But in this question, “What is the nature of time?” we can get lost. This question alone is enough to take us into a wilderness of intellectual drift. To simplify it, consider the two basic answers: Time is circular, or time is linear. The inversion states that the answer is a both/and. Time is linear, with cycles of events within time that appear to repeat but are unique. As a whole, what is needed for our understanding is simple: there is a beginning, and there is an ending.

Physicists speak of “the arrow of time,” which actually matches the idea of biblical time and salvation history. It is linear, not an endless loop. Yet there are loops within the arrow. We have lives that begin and end, like circles moving along the arrow. If you look at the shape of a nautilus shell or a galaxy or a hurricane, you may get a sense of this arrow of time and the patterns within it. There are loops within time of beginnings and endings.

We cannot think of anything without time and space invading our ideas, but God can because he created space and time. God is eternal. Eternal means “outside of time.” We, on the other hand, are not outside of time - we are temporal. God does not experience time like we do. Thus, he already knows the beginning and the ending. But we do not.

Now, this can spin us round and round until we fall down over the concepts of fate and free-will, but rest assured, both are true. God knows our fate, yet we have free-will. This is a wonderful paradox to embrace, not something to despair over. In fact, this makes reading a play like Macbeth, where fate and free-will are a heavy theme, much more enjoyable.

Thus, this first inversion of the bible about time prunes away many alternative worldviews. Socrates and Greek mythology are some of the last ideas standing after a mere three words. Reincarnation is out. Karma is out. Stoicism is out. The Matrix is out. Groundhog Day is out. Before we even reach the fourth word of the bible, every circular and illusory view of time is set aside as error. The worldview of Abraham, Moses, Ruth, David, Elijah, Mary, and Jesus declares a beginning, which means there will also be an end.

To say that “time began” is a declaration. It is a rudder for living in troubled waters and windy seas, for the journey's destination has a purpose beyond power, money, wealth, or pleasure. Moreover, it assures one in difficulty that “This too shall pass.”

Atheists ask, “If time was created, what was God doing before that?” But the answer is simple: the question makes no sense to the Christian view of time. They don’t understand what they are asking, because before creation, time did not exist. “In the beginning…” is before time. Only God was, because God is. He is Being Itself. This is why when Moses asks for God’s name, the answer is “I am.” This is mind-bending but worth pondering, for there is nothing without the Being of God’s Being. (More on this in upcoming inversions.)

When we misunderstand time and who created it, we can get in trouble as to who will conclude time and how it will happen. What we need to know is only this:

Time began. Time was created. Time will end.

As for “the end,” it is coming. The end will arrive when God’s will is done, not ours. When the end comes, there will be no time to modify our behavior or turn back, “for as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.” Thus, there is no need to be concerned with when time as we know it will end, just as we need not worry about exactly when time began. Sufficient for our salvation and sanity is to know: time began; time will end. The best answer to this mystery of time is exactly as Job concluded about other gifts of creation: “the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

To experiment in the belief of eternal return, or circular time, is to go dancing on slippery rocks that may lead to a concussion and mental instability. The only answers on the circular loop of those slippery rocks is nihilism or the will-to-power. Why? Because when time is just a loop, God is not the one that gives life. If all will fade away and return over and over, self-destruction or self-salvation is the only means to get off the spinning wheel. Oblivion or victory: choose your escape.

For physicists and philosophers, it is an enjoyable task to argue over the nature of time, or string theory, or the multiverse, or other speculations, but for those who have to get kids to school and laundry to fold, “In the beginning…” is enough. Truly, a lifetime can be spent pondering the nature of time and its many theories. This is wonderful for those who can afford such a lifestyle, but not practical for most. And here’s the funny thing: this idea of “In the beginning…” is where the greatest philosophers and scientists have ended up anyway, such as Plato, Aquinas, and most recently Stephen Hawking. The conclusion that came to both St. Augustine and Albert Einstein, after spending years pondering time, was Genesis 1:1. They both said, yes, it’s true: “In the beginning” is correct.

But we do not need to be Stephen Hawking or St. Augustine to understand this, as the Word of God has the answer you need in the first three words. A child or adult can sleep peacefully knowing that “In the beginning” is the correct understanding of the nature of time. Time began. Time will end.

For those who have to live in the world, the declaration of “In the beginning” fits with reality, where we see beginnings and endings everywhere: of days, of meals, of classes, of jobs, of friendships, of automobiles, of diets, of seasons, of wars, of affections, of plants, of pets. Within the arrow of time we observe little beginnings and endings, and they are not purely circular and going nowhere or repeating without meaning; they are the same, yet unique, like every human life or nautilus shell. They may look the same, but they are all going somewhere and they cannot be repeated in the same way again, ever. Thus our time in creation is our one chance. This is not just a read-through or simulation or a scrimmage: this is the real thing.

The next inversion we will look at is the very next word that follows “In the beginning…” That word is God.

Further reading:

Horn, Trent. “Thinking Deeply About the Nature of Time.” Catholic Answers. 23 July. 2020. https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/thinking-deeply-about-the-nature-of-time

Barr, Stephen. “St. Augustine’s Relativistic Theory of Time.” Church Life Journal, 7 Feb. 2020, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/augustines-push-against-the-limits-of-time/.

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Penguin, 2008. Book 11.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com