A Zen kōan posits:
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
The faint image on the Shroud whispers a paradox of its own:
“Suffering is inevitable. Salvation is optional.”
By voluntarily opting in to suffering, Christ covers us under the blanket of His forgiveness.
By rising in each of us, our suffering transmutes into His inevitable promise of salvation.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
Chapter 57: Image of Assimilation
We all sin. And even if, with maturity and some modicum of wisdom, we sin less and less as our lives progress, still we sin.
The image on the Shroud is our “insurance policy” to protect us from ourselves. It embodies the reassurance that, buried beneath the burden of our sins, a blueprint of redemption is already in place.
The Shroud image holds Christ's eternal and internal residing presence. In and beyond time, He loves and forgives us by enduring human suffering and dying a human death.
Through His image, Christ unifies, releases, and sustains the vibrant and continuous dance of the particles of sin and shame and their anti-particles of sacrifice and love.
His manifestation of both the evil of sin and His loving remedy for that evil is a place of equanimity. A place where we are made whole, to be a new creation, to live in perfect unity with ourselves, each other, and God.
His image frees us to never deny our sinfulness nor our goodness, because in doing either we compound His ongoing suffering on the cross.
By accepting ourselves, we coexist in the serenity of His image. Our flaws and failures, as well as our goodness... all are assimilated by the gifts of His grace.
No more fear. No more death. Just His holy design, the original blueprint for the forever creation of humanity.
The image on the Shroud is our “insurance policy” to protect us from ourselves. It embodies the reassurance that, buried beneath the burden of our sins, a blueprint of redemption is already in place.
The Shroud image holds Christ's eternal and internal residing presence. In and beyond time, He loves and forgives us by enduring human suffering and dying a human death.
Through His image, Christ unifies, releases, and sustains the vibrant and continuous dance of the particles of sin and shame and their anti-particles of sacrifice and love.
His manifestation of both the evil of sin and His loving remedy for that evil is a place of equanimity. A place where we are made whole, to be a new creation, to live in perfect unity with ourselves, each other, and God.
His image frees us to never deny our sinfulness nor our goodness, because in doing either we compound His ongoing suffering on the cross.
By accepting ourselves, we coexist in the serenity of His image. Our flaws and failures, as well as our goodness... all are assimilated by the gifts of His grace.
No more fear. No more death. Just His holy design, the original blueprint for the forever creation of humanity.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Chapter 56: Just Beyond Violet
the word Jerusalem
lives in our lexicon like a cave
a safe place where we return
again and again
to a larger and unified event
our foundation
the heart of a world of completeness
whole and sound
guiding pillar of vision
protection of the righteous
rain of peace of Lamb of God of salvation
exalted above the hills
the Lord shall see
~~~~~
If I could place myself anywhere back in time it would be in the sacred cave, the tomb where death became holy.
I imagine the walls of this cave, orthorhomic crystals of travertine aragonite deposited from springs. Magnetizable metallic iron oxidizing in the moisture, occurring naturally in the blood of Christ. Evaporation forms while soft, silvery white strontium oxidizes and ignites spontaneously in air, turning yellow.
I would yearn to wander just beyond violet in the visible spectrum, ending at the beginning of X-rays, where space time curls up and a range of invisible radiation wave lengths hovers in this sacred vacuum cave, protecting itself from being absorbed by air.
There I envision the physical body of Christ, lying covered on both sides by the Shroud, His blood spilling onto the cloth. I conceptualize that, in His mystery He becomes something akin to a human semiconductor. An atomic lattice of three dimensional quantum dots, tuned beyond visible light into the infrared or ultraviolet, a polymer backbone of cross linking, self-assembled nanocrystals.
I fancy the cave to be some kind of Casimir cavity, a relativistic environment wherein the plates, rather than made of metal, are wafers of cloth with no charge. The two layers of cloth, the cloth above and below the corpse, are perhaps acting as thin slices of semiconductor material formed from a crystalline substance, imprinting His image through some process akin to photolithographic patterning.
Here, inside the vacuum cave and wafers of cloth, I picture Christ's body becoming a gap, an area of lower radiation due to its limits on wavelength. I dare to perceive that, as this gap, He could render that space between the taut layers of cloth empty of matter, with zero point energy.
In this quantized field, I envisage that the net attractive force between objects in the vacuum cave, caused by quantum mechanical vacuum wave fluctuations, would create radiation pressure, thereby pushing (from the outside) the wafers of cloth towards the body of Christ. Here His atoms stick together, creating friction in the nanoworld, and He becomes the force that attracts because the radiation pressure of the field outside the cloth is greater than the pressure inside the gap.
At this point, I imagine the Casimir-like cavity has negative energy density. Now acceleration in the cave is reduced on the spatial axis because space time is bending in the opposite direction, thereby accelerating time (relative to us) and perhaps accelerating the linen aging process of the Shroud.
In my mind I see in the Casimir-like cavity that the wafers now define an abrupt boundary that breaks the isotropy of space time. The cavity now creates a depletion zone, thereby producing acceleration in a method opposite to an event horizon.
But then... I frame a picture of everything reversing.
The Casimir-like force now switches from attracting to repelling. It becomes a force that is due neither to electrical charge nor to gravity, but to fluctuations in the all pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between objects. Here I behold Christ's body becoming the vacuum, a force that pushes the wafers of cloth and the cave (which is now the gap) away from Him, rendering Him friction free and holding His molecules aloft to levitate and rise.
And so goes His light...
I wonder if His body produced vacuum fluctuations that started an amplified spontaneous emission where the luminescence went in all spatial directions. I imagine this isotropic scattering to be with identical, uniform physical properties that radiate the same intensity of light in all directions, thereby instantly and evenly imprinting His image on the cloth. Then, like an X-ray where scatter is relevant, the intensity of the two dimensional image contains three dimensional information about the body.
I conjure up a picture of His body hovering in parallel between the top and bottom of the cloth with no trace of gravity. Acting as an interface, he designs an exact relationship between the gradient of the image and the distance between body and cloth. Perhaps he transposed His image through electron quantum holography – nanoscale writing in electron wavelengths. And perhaps now, by dividing space time, the information in the nanoparticles He imprinted between the two sides of the cloth cannot communicate.
I try to grasp that His message has no measure of lost information. That it is fully transmitted onto the cloth, without the help of gravity but with the help of something far more brilliant. Perhaps gap and vacuum fuse and time collapses to absolute zero time.
Perhaps cryptographer and message become one.
But what is the message? It seems to me that there was something else inside that cave, namely the totality of the past, present and future sins of humanity. The Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world by both dying and rising. But in the cave, before rising, what happens to the infinitesimal energy and information of all that sin?
Perhaps the entropy of sin reverses and Christ's alchemy of faith causes the isolated system of evil to collapse.
I contemplate the idea of a singularity emerging and new patterns of information taking hold, information that is not tethered to time or space. This information is living in the nanoscale on the Shroud. Arriving to us from the future of the forever Resurrection, the waves of a free communication of information that transcends light. Living waves, that can linger without threats from field or force or space or time.
Building castles in the air, I wonder if the image we see of His blessed corpse, locked in time on the cloth, is perhaps not locked at all but is alive with the impulses of a larger, unified event. Perhaps it is His body continuously and directly controlling matter on the atomic scale. A body that has already burst through the boundary of the space time singularity. A body already risen beyond the cave, already exalted above the hills...
I imagine the Resurrection process creating a new gap, a singularity that can both attract and repel simultaneously because it is both contained in and free of the isolated system. A fusion of the two event horizons, perhaps it sparks with a completely original duality regarding time and space.
In this duality, a whole and synchronized blasting of space spreads its powerful information field, while simultaneously the continuation singularity of time thaws, recovers, and encodes the image on the Shroud. Thus the image is both frozen, recorded in time, and is continuously rebooting into living impulses of the Resurrection.
Perhaps the sacred tomb is the place where the heartbeat of death does not negate creation, nor does the heartbeat of creation negate death.
~~~~~
perhaps the Shroud is a lens
through which we can at last see
the invisible and undisturbed river
Christ's everlasting and marvelous light waves
flowing around the cold stone of our sins
that are so disturbingly visible
in His image of suffering and death
lives in our lexicon like a cave
a safe place where we return
again and again
to a larger and unified event
our foundation
the heart of a world of completeness
whole and sound
guiding pillar of vision
protection of the righteous
rain of peace of Lamb of God of salvation
exalted above the hills
the Lord shall see
~~~~~
If I could place myself anywhere back in time it would be in the sacred cave, the tomb where death became holy.
I imagine the walls of this cave, orthorhomic crystals of travertine aragonite deposited from springs. Magnetizable metallic iron oxidizing in the moisture, occurring naturally in the blood of Christ. Evaporation forms while soft, silvery white strontium oxidizes and ignites spontaneously in air, turning yellow.
I would yearn to wander just beyond violet in the visible spectrum, ending at the beginning of X-rays, where space time curls up and a range of invisible radiation wave lengths hovers in this sacred vacuum cave, protecting itself from being absorbed by air.
There I envision the physical body of Christ, lying covered on both sides by the Shroud, His blood spilling onto the cloth. I conceptualize that, in His mystery He becomes something akin to a human semiconductor. An atomic lattice of three dimensional quantum dots, tuned beyond visible light into the infrared or ultraviolet, a polymer backbone of cross linking, self-assembled nanocrystals.
I fancy the cave to be some kind of Casimir cavity, a relativistic environment wherein the plates, rather than made of metal, are wafers of cloth with no charge. The two layers of cloth, the cloth above and below the corpse, are perhaps acting as thin slices of semiconductor material formed from a crystalline substance, imprinting His image through some process akin to photolithographic patterning.
Here, inside the vacuum cave and wafers of cloth, I picture Christ's body becoming a gap, an area of lower radiation due to its limits on wavelength. I dare to perceive that, as this gap, He could render that space between the taut layers of cloth empty of matter, with zero point energy.
In this quantized field, I envisage that the net attractive force between objects in the vacuum cave, caused by quantum mechanical vacuum wave fluctuations, would create radiation pressure, thereby pushing (from the outside) the wafers of cloth towards the body of Christ. Here His atoms stick together, creating friction in the nanoworld, and He becomes the force that attracts because the radiation pressure of the field outside the cloth is greater than the pressure inside the gap.
At this point, I imagine the Casimir-like cavity has negative energy density. Now acceleration in the cave is reduced on the spatial axis because space time is bending in the opposite direction, thereby accelerating time (relative to us) and perhaps accelerating the linen aging process of the Shroud.
In my mind I see in the Casimir-like cavity that the wafers now define an abrupt boundary that breaks the isotropy of space time. The cavity now creates a depletion zone, thereby producing acceleration in a method opposite to an event horizon.
But then... I frame a picture of everything reversing.
The Casimir-like force now switches from attracting to repelling. It becomes a force that is due neither to electrical charge nor to gravity, but to fluctuations in the all pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between objects. Here I behold Christ's body becoming the vacuum, a force that pushes the wafers of cloth and the cave (which is now the gap) away from Him, rendering Him friction free and holding His molecules aloft to levitate and rise.
And so goes His light...
I wonder if His body produced vacuum fluctuations that started an amplified spontaneous emission where the luminescence went in all spatial directions. I imagine this isotropic scattering to be with identical, uniform physical properties that radiate the same intensity of light in all directions, thereby instantly and evenly imprinting His image on the cloth. Then, like an X-ray where scatter is relevant, the intensity of the two dimensional image contains three dimensional information about the body.
I conjure up a picture of His body hovering in parallel between the top and bottom of the cloth with no trace of gravity. Acting as an interface, he designs an exact relationship between the gradient of the image and the distance between body and cloth. Perhaps he transposed His image through electron quantum holography – nanoscale writing in electron wavelengths. And perhaps now, by dividing space time, the information in the nanoparticles He imprinted between the two sides of the cloth cannot communicate.
I try to grasp that His message has no measure of lost information. That it is fully transmitted onto the cloth, without the help of gravity but with the help of something far more brilliant. Perhaps gap and vacuum fuse and time collapses to absolute zero time.
Perhaps cryptographer and message become one.
But what is the message? It seems to me that there was something else inside that cave, namely the totality of the past, present and future sins of humanity. The Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world by both dying and rising. But in the cave, before rising, what happens to the infinitesimal energy and information of all that sin?
Perhaps the entropy of sin reverses and Christ's alchemy of faith causes the isolated system of evil to collapse.
I contemplate the idea of a singularity emerging and new patterns of information taking hold, information that is not tethered to time or space. This information is living in the nanoscale on the Shroud. Arriving to us from the future of the forever Resurrection, the waves of a free communication of information that transcends light. Living waves, that can linger without threats from field or force or space or time.
Building castles in the air, I wonder if the image we see of His blessed corpse, locked in time on the cloth, is perhaps not locked at all but is alive with the impulses of a larger, unified event. Perhaps it is His body continuously and directly controlling matter on the atomic scale. A body that has already burst through the boundary of the space time singularity. A body already risen beyond the cave, already exalted above the hills...
I imagine the Resurrection process creating a new gap, a singularity that can both attract and repel simultaneously because it is both contained in and free of the isolated system. A fusion of the two event horizons, perhaps it sparks with a completely original duality regarding time and space.
In this duality, a whole and synchronized blasting of space spreads its powerful information field, while simultaneously the continuation singularity of time thaws, recovers, and encodes the image on the Shroud. Thus the image is both frozen, recorded in time, and is continuously rebooting into living impulses of the Resurrection.
Perhaps the sacred tomb is the place where the heartbeat of death does not negate creation, nor does the heartbeat of creation negate death.
~~~~~
perhaps the Shroud is a lens
through which we can at last see
the invisible and undisturbed river
Christ's everlasting and marvelous light waves
flowing around the cold stone of our sins
that are so disturbingly visible
in His image of suffering and death
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