Mediating Mediocrity

Well hello everyone, here is an actual theological post about whether sin, death, and evil are needed for true adventure. I have thought yes and no.

No, in that I have seen how things get more interesting, such as literature, when people are doing their darndest to obey God.  Like when you get in the heights, the more interesting thing is whether to put the hymn in B major or C minor, as opposed to some anti-hero’s struggle of faithfulness about some actually low grit aspect of human life.  I really believe that and think that literature might soon recover from groveling in the pit of wishy washy human ambiguity for I don’t know maybe about a hundred years. Washy would be good, actually.

I did not mean to take a judgemental turn there.  But what I am saying about this now, is that I myself dipped into suspicions about purgatory and a variety of afterlife possibilities based on a view of Jesus’s descent into hell after he died, his subsequent raising people from the dead, and Peter’s direction of his upside down crucifixion, which to me could have signaled his intent to follow Jesus’s example to go to other worlds for people’s salvation.

Plus, my hopes long ago of being in a Lord of the Rings adventure someday after the boredom of earth was behind me influenced a willingness for lesser heavens. I also so desperately wanted the holy spirit’s presence that I thought something like that alone could make me tolerate anything else. 

However, I have to say, that there might be some kind of adventure where choosing a route between greater goods might be just as worthy a destiny as fighting some unknown monsters throughout millions of years of muddy reincarnation and evolution. 

Anyway, I just read an article relevant to this discussion, which is Chen Malul’s substack about Dante’s Divine Comedy, and I also now recall Tobias Wolff’s book called “In the Garden of North American Martyrs.”  

Which brings us back to the idea of context and choice, and where is the glory given what location, I mean there are a lot of possibilities, or maybe no possibilities at all, but only reality.