Awkward Family Dinners At God’s House

What he did? Creation? That took work. That took sacrifice.
— Metatron

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Sam spares a demon.

I’ve been suspecting for a long time that the universe of Supernatural is a Manichaean one, and, in Wednesday’s “Our Little World,” we finally get that crystal-clear confirmation. Metatron says that Amara is God’s sister, one of God’s kin, with all of God’s powers and God’s abilities. Amara is the Darkness to God’s Light. Metatron, in his monologue, notes that she’s always been The Darkness, that what God did to Amara didn’t turn her from light to dark, but just lock away what she’d always been.

So, basically, all creation is a massive squabble over who gets to play with the best toys.

supernat3Dean is wearing his broody eyebrows today.

I’ve always maintained that the moment God shows up on Supernatural, the show will take a hard right turn and head on towards a violent denouement. I believe that Big Good versus Big Bad — represented by the lives and the proclivities of our protagonists, the Winchester siblings — has pretty much always been the eventual endgame here. Fans have their theories (hi, Chuck!), but it’s now fairly clear that we’re going to see God before the curtain calls. Once you bring out that final narrative card, there’s nothing left in the deck.

Biblical theory and the show itself would have you believe the final conflict to be between a returning God and locked-away Lucifer. In a Manichaean world, though you need more than a creation of a deity struggling against that deity; you need something as powerful as the deity itself, a quid-pro-quo, a balance, a shadow for every lamp.

supernat1Dean aligning visually with The Darkness. Not a good sign.

I think it is very fitting that Supernatural frames its final conflict through the lens of intersibling family drama. “Our Little World,” and indeed, the season itself, also sets up that same Manichaean internal conflicts between Dean and Sam. Sam has been encouraging Dean to stop killing for a while now, and consistently lets even demons live when he can; Dean, despite his brother’s backing, is still automatically setting his dial to “slaughter.”

Metatron’s monologue for Castiel raises more questions for viewers than it answers. The fact that God need to put Amara to “sacrifice” in order to achieve his Creation means something else: in Supernatural, God has rules of nature to obey as well. Is there a family of Gods? Does God have a mother? A kindergarten teacher? A nosy neighbor? Does God’s nosy neighbor have a Creation of his own, too? Is the ending literally going to be a deus ex machina? How far can this go before we jump the shark?

The last few moments of “Our Little World” show Amara pretty much owning Crowley and sending him, an impotent little shouting creature, back to Hell. Where do the only-human Winchesters fit here, when there are so many tidal waves about to hit the shore?

In Supernatural, God has been “away” for a very long time. He’s hands off. He’s doing something else. He’s a babysitter who has gone out to have a smoke and left the kids to wreck the place. And wreck it they have — even the angels are acting like they belong in the burning halls below.

I believe that is about to change.

Pontifical Science Fiction: Katherine Kurtz, Andrew Greeley, and more

“When a country is determined to remain true to its founding principles,
based on respect for human dignity, it is strengthened and renewed.”

–Pope Francis, Address at Independence Mall, Philadelphia

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We’re still not tired of Papal selfies here at Sacred Earthlings, no sir.

The Pope’s visit to the northeastern United States is over, and things in the Northeast are getting back to normal. Of all the things that the Pope said while he was here, some of the most striking for those of us in the “cheap seats” were said during the inspiring off-book speech where he encouraged Catholics and listeners to realize that “love is in the little things” and “that it’s worth being a family.”

One of the things you may not have known about Pope Francis is that he reads widely, and that he’s a fan of Catholic science fiction, specifically 1907’s bombastic Lord of the World by Robert Hugh Benson, as well as the more familiar-to-readers C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton.

In honor of the successful completion of Pope Francis’ visit to the United States, here is an extremely short (and by no means exhaustive) list of other clerical/Pontifical SFF novels to enjoy while we’re still thinking about our revered pontiff:

The God Game by Andrew Greeley — I remember reading this eighties novel when I first really got into computer games. A small Catholic priest playtests a computer game for a relative, and finds the premise real: he’s actually become God for a very real world of real people. The priest finds that it’s “hell being God,” in hilarious, touching and affecting ways.

The Deryni trilogies by Katherine Kurtz — Set in the medieval-fantasy world of Gwynedd, where human and Deryni live next to one another, much of the politics and story in this long-standing and respected series of novels surrounds the Catholic-cognate Holy Church.

Pavane by Keith Roberts — This fascinating 1968 alternate-history novel details what might have happened if the Protestant Reformation had not occurred and a less innovative, more medieval form of Catholicism had stayed prevalent across Europe.

A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. — These two novels are on the list because they should really be first for any reader new to religious science fiction. After a nuclear apocalypse and a descent into a Dark Age, the acolyte monks of Liebowitz preserve scientific information for a world that is not yet ready for it.

For the record, Dan Brown does not belong on this list at all. Sorry, Dan.

Just as a housekeeping measure, we’re trying to keep a monthly post count of new stories at Third Order, but to do that we need more submissions! Got something in your stable of shorts that might apply? Give the guidelines a look and send it over, because we might just have room for it!

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Read the August Third Order story, “A Tomb For Demrick Fauston,” by Fred McGavran!

Messiah Week: Neo from The Matrix

“Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy.
Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.”
– Isaiah 35:4-6

It’s Messiah Week!
#1: Neo from The Matrix
#2: Paul Atreides from Dune

If you’re Christian, you believe the Messiah has already arrived on Earth; if you’re Jewish, you believe he is still yet to come. That hasn’t stopped creator after creator from adopting (or co-opting) messianic imagery to tell their own stories.

Messiah stories are easy to explain and fairly easy to write if you’re not worried about the implications, so fans end up seeing a lot of it, for better or worse. Done correctly, messiah stories reach us right at the heart with stories about sacrifice, belief and devotion. Done cheaply, the two-dimensional Space Jesus splays his arms in a cruciform fashion, grows a beard, and waves his hands to create cheap miracles. It’s a story we’ve heard over and over, so it’s a story that loses its oomph, sometimes. The central sacrifice, the death and resurrection, the temptation from the evil figure — it can get a little overdone until a writer cuts their reliance on overdone imagery and instead cuts to the heart of the story. The problem with many messiah stories is that the central Messiah in Western Civilization — Jesus Christ — was not a secular savior. He didn’t come to rescue the Jews from Roman rule, even though people around him certainly encouraged him to use his power to do so. Many modern messiah stories, though, are more about bodies and politics than faith or souls.

For the next couple days, we’ll talk about the best (and worst!) Messiah-figures in science fiction and fantasy, and their varying levels of effectiveness:

neo1Let’s talk about Neo.
Messiah Level: SUPER OBVIOUS.

There is no ambiguity to what the Wachowskis were doing with their central character in the Matrix trilogy. Neo is such a literal Jesus analogue that some bloggers and authors wonder if The Matrix and it sequels could be counted as “Christian” films, even if the Wachowskis many not have intended them to be such.

neo2Not exactly loaves and fishes there, Neo.

The central figure of The Matrix and its lesser sequels is pretty much a Jesus surrogate from the beginning; he is “The One,” performing miracles on behalf of the residents of “Zion” and the humans still enslaved by the Machines in the Matrix. He lives among them, in their poverty, wearing the same clothes, eating the same food, and encouraging them with his words and presence. In this way, he is eminently messiahlike.

neo3Is this what God sees?

Neo’s first messianic moment comes at the end of The Matrix. After having been gravely wounded — and possibly killed — by Agent Smith in the Matrix, Trinity sits over Neo’s dying body in the Nebuchadnezzar and instructs Neo to get up, telling him that she is in love with him, believing wholly in his identity as “The One.” Neo is restored to life with energy from Trinity’s miraculous love, with a never-before-seen set of abilities to bend the reality of the Matrix like the Machines do, to dodge bullets and to slow down time. There’s a small side-effect to this; fully actualizing as “The One” also frees Agent Smith from the control of the machines, causing chaos down the line for both sides of the story.

Christian scholars translate “Trinity” literally here, seeing her as a God analogue, a figure of pure love and forgiveness breathing life into Jesus at the end of the third day.

neo3Just a little obvious there, Andy and Lana.

Neo makes his final messianic sacrifice at the end of The Matrix: Revelations, when he gives himself over to the Machines and is carried off, his arms cruciform. While it’s heavily implied at the end the Neo is truly dead, it is also implied that his death is the only thing that could have saved the humans by eliminating the viral, evil Agent Smith from the world. When Neo is carried off by the Machines, his arms are cruciform, and his body disappears into a light that is very reminiscent of a golden cross or the Buddhist lotus. Is Neo truly dead? Do we care?

That is answered at the end of the movie, when the Oracle utters, “It is done.”

If you’re a Christian scholar, you’ll hear this as a clear callback to Jesus on the cross, saying “It is finished.”

Of course, that wasn’t quite the end of the story, either, was it?

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NEW FICTION: “A Tomb For Demrick Fauston” by Fred McGavran

“How do you know when you’re dead?”
— Demrick Fauston, “A Tomb For Demrick Fauston”

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I am so, so excited to bring you Third Order’s first — but not last! — new story in over five years.

If the name of August’s author sounds familiar to readers, it’s because “A Tomb For Demrick Fauston” is actually Fred McGavran’s second story for Third Order. The first, “The Sycamore Street Anchoress,” was published in 2008 and can be read by clicking here.

McGavran’s is the Marvel universe of Episcopal fiction, with the priest Charles Spears serving as his central axis; stories based out of the Downtown Church of Our Saviour appear in his short story collections as well as print journals and e-zines, and we’re honored to have two of them at home right here in Third Order. Spears is a very human priest doing his best to serve a congregation with very human issues — and, occasionally, some that are a little more superhuman. Anyone who has ever been to a vestry or parish council meeting will feel right at home; anyone who knows a church that does the best it can to accomplish its mission in the modern world or a priest who does his best each day will recognize the Downtown Church.

In this month’s excellent story, we revisit Our Saviour and its world of magical realism; this time, we visit the offices of mega-developer Demrick Fauston as he faces death, the world beyond, and a great and terrible secret. This is McGavran’s response to the world of the selfie and the world of the self-centered, and the world that develops around the burdened soul.

On Sacred Earthlings this month, we’ll revisit McGavran’s story through interviews with the author — and expect a lot more about death, reconciliation, atonement and what might come after this world is done, as well.

Enjoy Fred McGavran’s “The Tomb of Demrick Fauston,” August’s story on Third Order Magazine.