CHAPTER 6
In the beginning, I said (and most of what follows I learned from Martha), were the Heavens and the Earth. The Heavens were perfectly ordered and the Earth was perfectly chaotic. Everything in Heaven made sense, and nothing on Earth made sense. No third place called “Hell” existed. God ruled Heaven and nobody ruled Earth. Earth was, after all, perfectly chaotic.
One day God decided he wanted to turn Earth into an ordered place, too, but because God had no experience with chaos, only order, the task proved to be more difficult than he had originally anticipated. This is why, in fact, Earth is still not an ordered place today. God has yet to understand the relationships of chaotic functions. There’s even a rumour that God has a problem with certain aspects of high school calculus, and anything related to relativity is just beyond him. For God, either things are or they aren’t.
Anyway, one day God called together the angels of his inner-court and told them what he was planning:
God:Now that I’ve got you all together, I want you to know I’ve been thinking about that blue marble out in space many of you have been referring to as “Earth.” I know many of you are anxious to colonize the planet; some of you have even taken more than a passing interest in the creatures that call that place home, particularly the ones you call “people.” But Before we do anything, we need a plan.
And then God told the angels of his inner-court his idea to create order out of chaos and bring meaning to the planet Earth:
God:We’re going to write a book, and this book will contain the Word of God, but first we must give the creatures language so that they may understand the meaning of the book. Only then will order emerge out of chaos. I need a volunteer to go to the planet Earth and give people language.
Lucifer: I will go.
God:Excellent, Lucifer. I knew it would be you. You must go at once and show people their tongues and the names of things. You must begin to show them that existence is meant to be codified and ordered.
Lucifer:Yes. I will go at once.
And so Lucifer went and began to talk to people and tell them the names of things. The first person he met was Atom. That’s what Lucifer named him, anyway, since this person had no language, and thus no name:
Lucifer: You are Atom.
Atom: (?)
Lucifer: This is an apple. On your tongue is a thing called language. Can you say apple?
Atom: Apple. (Enter Eve)
Lucifer: Who’s this?
Atom: Apple.
Lucifer: No (pointing to apple), this is an apple.
Atom: Apple, apple, apple.
Eve: Apple, apple.
Lucifer: No, no. Forget about the apple. (To Eve) You are Eve.
Atom: Eve, Eve.
Eve: Apple, apple.
Lucifer: No, Eve. Forget about the apple.
Atom: Apple, apple, apple.
Lucifer: Eve, this is Atom.
Eve: Atom, Atom, apple.
Lucifer: No. Forget about the apple.
Atom: Apple.
Lucifer: Forget about the apple! In fact, if you go near an apple again, you’re going to regret it. Understand?
Eve: Eve.
Atom: Atom.
Lucifer: Good. Now leave me alone and go play in the trees.
Back in Heaven, God recorded the whole scene for his book. He wanted to record everything for posterity. He also wanted to use the book to show people how bad things had been before he had brought them order. But as God observed Lucifer’s initial contact with people, he was saddened to realize even he couldn’t make sense of the encounter. People made no sense at all. They were totally absurd. What was all that chatter about? Why hadn’t Adam and Eve (for God had misheard Lucifer’s first label) answered simple questions? What was that business with the apple? God filled in the blanks as best he could before passing off his writing task to the Holy Ghost. Meanwhile, Lucifer was busy handing over the Ten Commandments to Moses, well on his way to setting up a codified society —
“Wait a minute,” said Robert. “Lucifer gave Moses the Ten Commandments? I thought he was the bad guy.”
“Not yet,” I said.
“But what about Job, Abraham and Sarah, Noah? What about all those people? Wasn’t Lucifer messed up with them, too?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “But he was still God’s agent, then. He only became the bad guy after he and God had a falling out.”
“Over what?” asked Che-Maria.
“I’m coming to that,” I said, and went on with my story, telling them how just before Christ’s appearance on Earth, Lucifer had all but given up hope of achieving his mission, so God recalled him to Heaven for a vacation:
Lucifer: It’s hopeless. They’ll never learn. They keep changing their minds all the time, making up new meanings for everything even after I explained and explained and explained that order means holding things together, restricting things, making sure everything always stays the same. The more I show them order, the more they cling to chaos!
Thus Lucifer was the first angel to know defeat, and God decided to replace him with Jesus, God’s one and only son (God being a single parent). Lucifer sulked around Heaven for a couple days until God could no longer stand his imperfect behavior and threw him out of the Cosmic City. So Lucifer left, and since he didn’t want to return to Earth, he decided to raise Hell. Once there, though, he grew lonely and began to think of returning to Earth to complete his original mission. By this time, however, Jesus, who had gone to Earth in the guise of a man — not an angel — was approaching the time when he would begin his ministry. Lucifer confronted him in the desert:
Jesus: Have you come to tempt me?
Lucifer: No, man. I’ve come to talk.
Jesus: About what?
Lucifer: About this business of turning Earth into an ordered place. I’ve come to tell you it’s impossible.
Jesus: Go away.
Lucifer: I’m telling you, man, it’s fruitless. This place will never be ordered. What you’ve got to get people to understand is that there’s only so much they can do. Earth is a chaotic place, and if people cling to order, they will only be destroyed. You have to teach them to be flexible.
Jesus: I will teach them that order is the only way.
Lucifer: Teach them to come together, right now —
Jesus: Over me?
Lucifer: Sure. Over anything. Just teach them to respect each other, that’s the best you’ll be able to do.
Then Lucifer went back to Hell, where he began collecting the souls of people who fell short of God’s Heaven-o-Meter, a scale set up by Gabriel to measure the eternal worthiness of souls.
Meanwhile, Jesus went about his mission, meeting with mixed success. He told people their lives needed order, and he told them to respect each other, too. He thought it best to hedge his bets. He was beginning to get hip to what Lucifer had said to him. Originally he had thought that once people saw Truth — the value of order — they would line up behind him. But this didn’t happen. Some people did line up, but they were all men, and numbered only twelve. Some of them even had to be coerced with promises they would experience real order — Heavenly Order — once they died. Death was real important to people, Jesus found, and he comforted them as best he could with stories about his childhood, about Heaven, about the bliss he thought they would want to achieve on Earth. But while people were pleased things would get better after they died, for the most part they were more interested in living their lives than in creating order. And the process of living had a nasty habit of creating more and more chaos. It was all very counter-productive. Like Lucifer before him, Jesus experienced the frustration of almost communicating his message before watching it fracture into smaller and smaller divergent bits — bits that would never come together again, bits that could be twisted to mean things he never intended them to mean.
Then one day, the Earthly authorities with a vested interest in chaos decided Jesus’ ministry was infringing on their ability to mani
pulate people. Ironically, the authorities that eventually killed Jesus were the ones set up by Lucifer hundreds of years earlier to achieve the same goal — a unified social order — that Jesus had been sent to Earth to secure:
God: You’re back! Have you brought order to Earth?
Jesus: No, much worse. I fear I have only more deeply entrenched chaos in an already fragile ecosystem.
God: What happened?
Jesus: They killed me.
God: Why?
Jesus: Apparently, I irritated them.
God: This is no good. You must go back. I will have the Holy Ghost provide you with a revised schedule of goals and procedures. (To Gabriel, who was hovering nearby) Fetch the Holy Ghost, Gabby. I’m convening an emergency session of the Cosmic Council.
It was at that council meeting that God finally relented to the opinion that order would likely never come to Earth, though it was the duty of all under his command to keep trying. God declared, therefore, that in the immediate present, which was two thousand years ago now, the best that could be hoped for on Earth was the appearance of order. Order would be presented to people in the form of knowledge, free will, religion, other humanistic studies and arts — all of which were already thriving on the planet, and all of which had originally been set up by Lucifer as part of his compromise solution to the Divine Plan:
God: From the intelligence we’ve gathered, you can see that a semblance of order exists on Earth. What’s left to do now is the creation of the belief that the appearance is the reality. The Holy Ghost has drafted a plan that will ensure that out of this illusion, over which the powers of Heaven will have ultimate control, order will eventually emerge. I have sent Jesus back to Earth to begin the first phase of this plan.
Thus, I said, the creation of the biblical myth as we have come to know it began. God sent Jesus back to Earth to proclaim his divine origin and begin the process of Heavenly Order on Earth.
I paused and looked over at Robert and Che-Maria, only to see the two of them entranced in the story. The road was a blur. I was excited. Everything was making sense.
“What’s this to do with Martha?” blurted Robert. “I mean, so what? Order, chaos, order, chaos. We have a real problem here.”
I waved him off.
“Do you remember the fuss about that Madonna concert a few years ago?” I said.
“Sure.”
“And do you remember the hullaballo in the press about the break in the cosmic membrane?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, Martha is one of them. An angel. She came to Earth as part of God’s plan to stimulate order, to finally bring about the culmination of the Holy Ghost’s plan.”
“I thought she was different,” said Che-Maria.
“Yeah,” said Robert. “I knew there had to be more to her than her looks.”
“But God’s dead,” I said. “At least those were the reports Martha was getting. God died around the time of the reformation. That’s what all that trouble was about.”
Then I told them about my revelation on the beach.
“The reason I called you guys,” I said, “was because Martha decided to quit the Angel Corps. She was disillusioned about the death of God and stuff like that. The cosmic command was beginning to institute a cosmic re-organization, and she had bad feelings about it.”
Robert and Che-Maria stared at me in silence.
“We called you guys so we could get away, but obviously the powers-that-be were stronger than we thought. They snatched Martha away. The letter, I think, was an attempt to warn her. I think the reference to the meeting in Pipsquin is essential to the well-being of the universe. The cosmos depends on us,” I said.
“Nuts,” Robert said.
Pipsquin’s homecoming parade ground traffic to a halt, and we sat stalled in our van as sixteen-year-old marionettes paraded before us twirling their batons, a brass band marching in step behind them.
The future of the universe, I thought. Wow.