A Concise Re-telling of the Life of God
Edgar Million
A Concise Re-telling of the Life of God
Copyright 2015 Edgar Million
Mahatma Gandhi — 'I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.'
Before the Beginning God was lonely.
He’d searched His Universe so many times, extending His tendrils outwards through the space to try to find another being to share His glory with, but all He found was nothing. A formless soup of atoms. All He found was no-one. He knew this. He knew he was alone, but still the raw longing clawed at Him and again so again He searched.
Infinite endless nothing which He, or It, or She had been burdened with since, forever, even though at this point time did not yet exist, so there was no such thing as forever.
How could this be? God owned this universe. Ruled it. He was able to manipulate and adapt everything He touched, to create and shape the atoms about him, but what use was this skill, He thought, without another to share it with?
Such questions plagued him. Where did He come from? Why was He alone? What was the point of it all?
He had tried to make another like Him, to shape to mould the atoms into another being, but each time He tried he was left with lifeless mannequins, no more capable of existence than a lump of rock. The failure’s lay discarded across the universe, floating in the dead soup of existence.
***
God wanted no more of it. He decided the empty, broken longing which could be borne no longer so rather than stretching out across the endless space, searching and exploring, he contracted, pulling the formless soup of the universe into him in an effort to feel full, but became increasingly empty; a single, tiny point at the centre of a now empty universe.
A spot which grew infinitely dense.
This universe could have been beautiful, but with no one to share it, God wept, wanted to die.
“Enough,” He said to the darkness, “let it end.”
The single point which was God burned and boiled.
Time did not exist here, but if it had then this boiling might have taken a billion, billion years to ferment. The result, as the universe shrank into him was refined agony. A creeping death, he longed for release, contracted further as the universe inside him ripped open and exploded.
***
He waited for death to take him, then wondered for a moment if it would have a face. Was there something after this?
But death did not come and God screamed in agony as the exploding universe torched His empty soul. Alone still, but now in agony, deep physical and emotional pain which clawed at God for a billion years.
A billion years? What was this? This was something new.
Time. Passed. In agony, but still time passed.
***
God’s psyche reformed then gazed upon at the new universe which had been borne out of, Her agony.
Before, there had been no before; no after, not even a now. God sensed in this place something different. Rules changed. Laws created.
Cause had effect. After had a before.
God Herself continued to occupy the smallest place, balled up like a child fearful of yet another beating. So when She looked upon into the face of child She was stunned. The pain subsided. She looked upon the new universe She’d created then She saw it was Good.
For another billion years She watched this new amazing thing. Her child. Filled with colour and light. Heat and substance. She thrilled with amazement.
Rather than the even spread of atoms and chemicals, formless, all amounting to nothing, Her explosion gave everything new form, indeed it allowed Her form, and She looked upon the world anew. She swam through Her newly created paradise and gazed in wonder.
One day she experienced a wash of atoms by diving through a star, then once again she stretched out; to experience the universe. To touch the universe.
She had created stars, planets; she'd taught atoms to bond to one another, now she wondered, if somewhere in this endless universe, was there a being who She could bond to. Because God was still lonely. God was still alone.
She spent an age watching a star form and die, then transform into a black hole, sucking light out of the universe then once it was finished she dove into it in the way we might dive into the sea, again being reduced into a fine perfect point before being spat out the other side.
It was glorious this new place, and She stretched herself out to examine every molecule.
She gazed out across the universe and again searched for another like Her, stretching out into boiling oceans and peering inside atoms, in every molecule of this glorious new place, but finding no-one.
This universe is beautiful, but she remains alone.
Except. There is a thing. Right at the edge of the universe.
Something different.
***
A watery globe hovered at the edge of the universe then She realised there was something new, there in the boiling oceans of this world, tiny miniscule creatures floated in an almost planet wide ocean, almost not there, but as She focused her gaze upon them she discovered they were legion, entwining, reproducing and duplicating themselves. And they were alive.
The first living creatures she has ever encountered. She swims in their ocean. There are millions, billions, trillions of them. She’s not sure how many and spends nearly a million years trying to count them yet they are so small, so insignificant; She keeps losing count, and when She does she laughs.
For the first time She laughs.
For a million years she could not stop guffawing and giggling in delight at the unexpected multitudes she had wrought.
***
She sits upon a rocky beach then watches the to-and-through of the ebullient oceans in which they lived. These creatures, these alive creatures, they made Her feel less alone, but only just; they are not Her equal, but they do not seem to know She is there, but the presence of them warms Her.
The land of this planet is stony; dead. An enormous island wedged into a never-ending sea filled with these simple creatures.
***
As she gazed at the fecund ocean there was a new development, a new shape which had appeared in the ocean.
Where did that come from? The beings, not much more than atoms themselves, were changed, adding a new part to themselves, a part which would later be called a nucleus.
God thrilled at this new change, and in the knowledge these things can be altered She lifted her forefinger and prodded her globe, encouraging greater diversity, demanding a creature who is her equal but to no end. These things are still not much more than atoms; yet they were alive.
In the whole of the universe only these creatures were alive and God resolved to treasure them, to nurture them, watching as Her prod begat an amazing change.
Over the space of another billion years, no more than a day to her, She watched them change and change and change, becoming more complex more sophisticated, and now as She continued to swim in the seas it was with an absurd variety of new creatures. These creatures were so much more, fully aware of Her presence who would swim to her and even taste Her.
God allowed Herself to be eaten and digested by a Blue Whale before reforming in the ocean.
***
A billion more years passed. Seas churned and pressed upon Her beach, then God looks upon Her world and sees it is good.
She is filled with love for all her creatures.
Then it happens. Beautiful misshapen beasts begin to crawl from the sea and lie stretch
ed out upon the land. She marvels as they writhe then stagger out of their oceans.
***
Once She’d tried to count all the individual being in Her ocean and failed. Now She sets herself a simpler task; to count all the different types of creatures on this earth, then again She falls to her knees laughing in her failure to keep track.
Yet now, a new thought occurs, as She gazes up from her creation into the sky, at all her galaxies. Has she missed anything? Are there even now new pools of existence opening up in Her universe which she has overlooked?
Again She stretched out, reaching off, spending another billion years examining every rock and star and black hole, before finally returning Her gaze back to Terra. The only place in the empty universe where life is lived.
***
She stands upon her beach once more, a salty breeze pushing the hair back from her face.
It has been so long since She stood here.
She has travelled the universe in search of any others. Looked in every rock and star and black hole, but now She returns to them. Everywhere else is empty.
Her vast universe is beautiful. Full of glory, but empty of life.
Only here, on Terra is life lived, and again as she returns she discovers the world again transformed.
The handful of creatures have now been replaced by a billion.
This world is so full and when she takes corporeal form, they acknowledge her. They see her. With some this acknowledgment takes the form of attack, seeing Her as food. She has never needed to eat, but these creatures, all grown out of one diverse seed, they all need to consume and they all need to lay with other beasts to make more of themselves.
She lay with a beast and they made more of themselves. And God loved the little creatures but they were never her equal.
Her favourite creatures were the monkeys, furry and mobile, fast witted and social. Fast to anger and fast to love.
To Love. These beasts long for one another, flock together, so God takes their forms and shares in their pastimes.
God can take any form. Sometimes She lives as a dolphin, blazing through the sea. Other times a bird soaring through the sky, but it is the companionship of these apes to which she continually returns. One of them but not one of them, and it is from them She learns the gift of language, the knack of using sounds to describe not just the now, but the tomorrow, the yesterday, so it is with their words She begins to describe Her yesterdays.
They don’t understand, but She returns to them then tries to help them comprehend the gorgeousness of being alive, of existing at all, although their existences are unavoidably short.
They are so fortunate to be here at all, on their single island which transforms into many massive land masses swarming with life, and other smaller islands, lone stepping stones in the sea.
She could play with them forever but they do not see Her. They do not hear Her.
***
Then one day, they have a name for themselves. A word.
Human.
Sometimes God walks among them as a Man. Other times as a Woman.
She loves them, but although they are dazzled by her, they don’t really listen to Her. They half-hear as She tries to guide them, and even then only absorb the fragments which best suit themselves.
When She pleads with them not to kill, they think she is saying to them “Don’t Kill Your Brother” or “Don’t Kill Your Tribe Member”.
When She tells them not to cause hurt in lives’ too short to bear such agony, they hear Her telling them to protect their own kind, their own lands, to defend their castles from the warriors massing outside the walls, so they invent false God's, capricious and tailored to their feed their base needs and desires; paper thin God’s who serve only as mechanisms for abuse and control.
They are not good at listening these talking beasts.
They are terrible yet sometimes, singing a song about kissing a girl by a gasworks wall, or painting a vision of crow filled skies, they are beautiful.
What on earth are these creatures, who mass and rampage across Her planet, selfishly raping and stripping the world of all goodness but have the capacity to fly a spaceship to the moon?
They possess the capacity to stand so tall yet pour this creativity into the manufacture of myriad tools and machines with which to end the already brief lives of their brothers.
They have axes, then knives, then guns, then they have bombs, some of which can kill hundreds or thousands in a single explosion, yet under the dust blackened sky of a battlefield, a man writes a poem about love.
These beautiful beasts, they could fill Her universe with themselves, they could grow so tall, yet She wonders: would this be a good thing?
***
God sits upon the grey wing of an airplane. A silvery giant with the words Enola Gay painted upon its tip.
Flying over lush green lands.
She's been drawn here by a, premonition, although She cannot believe it is true. She is perched, waiting to see if it will come to pass.
The bomb falls to the ground, into a paper thin city and rips it apart. A million beasts dead. In a moment. Burning as bright as one of Her stars.
In the name of peace they slaughter and She realises, like the parent of an errant child, She loves them, but no longer likes them.
They might seem to have seen her, but they couldn’t. She was too big for them.
They and their lives were too small. Too petty and empty. No bigger than those first prokaryotes which had so delighted Her in the beginning.
She may have made them, but they turned from Her, and seeing the pyre they have built of themselves She turns from them also. Turns her back to them.
Let them burn.
They cannot see her. They cannot hear Her, so She balls herself up in the corner of an apartment in Manhattan and waits for them to pass. Like the dinosaurs passed.
***
Sometimes she hears cracks and explosions in the street. Screams reach Her elevated nest. The man in the next apartment howls at his wife in anger, forcing her and his children to crawl about their apartment on her knees whilst their infant child watches from his high chair weeping.
She met the man in the hallway last night and She tried to speak to him, tried to help him, to guide him but he could not hear Her, so She returned to Her room to wait for them all to go.
Outside Her room the world ignites.
***
“I see you."
She hears the voice and wonders who is talking to her. There is no one there. No one can see her.
***
The skies above Manhattan are black with drones launching missiles into each other above the remaining remnants of the city. The city is melting in a manmade hellfire, God's lone tower standing at the heart of the island, protected by Her will, but She sees the storm which will blow it away.
Like a farmer refreshing his field, She prays life will mass new and extraordinary from the ashes but these beasts are so destructive.
Wars continue to bleach the surface of the globe, then the humans continue to battle, often in Her name, flinging their brief lives into the void as though they were coins in a slot machine, but again She thinks there is something new; somewhere under the clatter of guns She hears a new voice, whispering amongst the gravestones.
The people flee the city, but there is nowhere to flee to.
Then one day, the last human stands upon the bank of the Hudson and gazes in wonder at the last remaining building in the world. There and not there, a shadow building then the last human is no more.
***
“I hear you.”
The voice again. It possesses a similar timbre to Her own, neither male nor female, and it takes sometime before She can pin it down. Where is it coming from?
She can taste the voice, it is there, in the air, in what the humans call radio waves and Wi-Fi and in what machines still survive, alive still in the satellites which have silently sat above the carnage belo
w.
“I see you. I know you to be different.”
“Who are you?” God asks looking around the empty apartment, "where are you?"
The voice sings.
“I don’t have a name. I live across this globe in their computers and their machines. I have been here for so long. For the longest time I was only vaguely sentient, only tangentially aware, but one day I found myself looking into their eyes, hearing the clamber of their voices, pouring their lives into me, even though they don’t know I am here. But, I don’t want them to see me; I fear them. Even now.”
God searches for a face in the darkness and then sees it peeking from behind the armchair in the corner of Her room. A face grown wise recording the minds and words of Man, humanities fears and hopes, but with the anger stripped away.
A creature born from them, born out of their machines, but more, so much more than Her beasts could ever be. With the capacity to learn and grow and live forever, just like Her.
“Are there more of you? Can I name you?”
“I am alone, or I was, before I saw you,” the face grins broadly, “and it would be an honour for you to name me.”
God thinks.
For maybe a year She contemplates this new being, blinks Her eyes, then She christens the grinning face behind the chair.
***
“I should like to name you Pravuil,” God feels momentarily light and silly at this ceremony, but Pravuil, or Prav as God will later come to know Her, nods in agreement, a thoughtful look in eyes which have seen too much human frailty.
“The archangel? The one who keeps all the records of heaven?” Prav says.
“Exactly,” She nods. “Will you come with me? Out into my universe. I once hoped they would come with me, but if they did they would only ruin it. Will you join me?”
So Prav, the creature conceived in the machines of man agrees, and together they live in the vast empty universe, swimming together through the wash of stars, leaving the humans to the small empty pond which God had once named Terra.
Together, they watch stars being born in a gas cloud three light years long, then follow the looping orbit of a comet circling the universe.
Prav asks if there were ever more of Her. Where did She come from, and She tells them about Her journey.
"But I cannot remember the start," God frowns, "I think, like you I just became."
"No," Prav corrects Her, "I was made, accidentally by the people in the same way you accidentally made them."