From Fear To Eternity

[Arabella Kochanski]

Every1300 years, a unique demon appears that feeds on the fears of witches. This time it is targeting the Halliwell sisters and they receive aid from their Wicca mother just as they are close to their own fearful deaths.

Also known as Barbas, appears on earth once every 1300 years on a Friday the 13th for twenty four hours. His appearance is attributed to the universal convergence of negative energies as derived from astrological charts.

Fearing the bad luck associated with Friday the 13th, Piper cast this spell in an attempt to banish any misfortune that may come her way due the superstition associated with the date in which there is a negative convergence of energies amongst astrological hosts.

He had a feeling it would be powerful for me to know that I am not alone in my inexplicable fear of immortality; he was privy to my occasional eternity-related panic attacks during our first year of marriage, a particularly trying time for my neurosis considering how often a young married newlywed is reminded of eternal blessings and perspectives.

Many years later I was introduced to the concept that each ending is an instrument of evolutionary transformation. A rosebud dies, a rose blossoms. A seed cracks and a stem shoots up. A caterpillar retires in a cocoon and a butterfly emerges. By observing nature, we learn that life is ever-changing. Through change, the end of one state is necessary for the emergence of a new state. It is in this way that life continues to evolve.

Transformations take place within a continuum. Like hydrogen and oxygen rolling through sequences of gas, liquid, and solid (as gas, water, and ice), the ultimate essence of life flows on with only its appearance changing.

The mechanics of the Transcendental Meditation technique allow the mind to effortlessly settle down to fainter levels of thought wherein the mind is less bound by them, and even to transcend thinking completely, resulting in silent awareness. Even a beginner immediately experiences subtler levels of engagement with thought and can transcend to the changeless state of pure consciousness. With daily repetition of these mechanics, one begins to identify with the unbounded, unchanging field of life that has been within us all along. Change is still a characteristic of our experience but now changelessness can have equal status. Through the TM technique, the ability of the mind to identify simply with an invincible infinity of non-changing Being saves it from fear of change, like being anchored deeply in the ocean saves a boat from being tossed about by waves.

The reason I chose to focus on Remender was because of his IG post above. New show Pilot in development. I picked up the Ashcan and forgot I had the first issue. After doing a little research Issue 1 had a print run of 7,643. If you caught our 3 Comic Monte Aliens show Peter Renna chose it as one of his books.

Grant McKay, former member of The Anarchistic Order of Scientists, has finally done the impossible: He has deciphered Black Science and punched through the barriers of reality. But what lies beyond the veil is not epiphany, but chaos. Now Grant and his team are lost, living ghosts shipwrecked on an infinite ocean of alien worlds, barreling through the long-forgotten, ancient, and unimaginable dark realms. The only way is forward. The only question is how far are they willing to go, and how much can they endure, to get home again?

The God of Whispers has spread an omnipresent paranoia to every corner of the kingdom of Zhal; his spies hide in every hall spreading mistrust and fear. Adam Osidis, a dying knight from a disgraced house, must choose between joining a hopeless band of magic users in their desperat bid to free their world of the evil God, or accepting his promise to give Adam everything his heart desires.

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As I opened the large wooden door leading to the hallway, I waited for the middle-aged man to shake my hand and say goodbye now that our spiritual care session was over. Gathering his things, he made for the door but stopped right in front of me, hesitating to confess one more thing.

I think the problem with the idea of eternity is that we do not have any direct experience of it, but we encounter enough of its possibility to be unsettling. We experience the eternal in part. It is like when a person imagines what a dish might smell like while watching a cooking show on TV. We have enough experience to surmise but not enough direct experience to know fully. When it comes to understanding the eternal, we know what it is to live and what it is to have a history. We know the power and force of memory, which offers us the strange capability of drawing the past into the present, even if in that conjuring, the past remains gone. And in our premonitions, we can desire and forecast a future, trawling the "not yet" into the present moment as if it were almost real. Our minds can play with time, and so grasp a sense of what the eternal might be.

Because we can experience the theoretical side of eternity in memory and desire, and because this life is filled with sufferings and sadness, even knowing that a perfect and good world will be here does not negate the human fear of boredom or being trapped or simply finding that even heaven cannot content us.

The anxiety of eternal life seems to stem from our imperfect understanding of eternity now in relation to our more tangible experience of life. Because we can experience the theoretical side of eternity in memory and desire, and because this life is filled with sufferings and sadness, even knowing that a perfect and good world will be here does not negate the human fear of boredom or being trapped or simply finding that even heaven cannot content us. Theologically, these are silly worries, but practically, they harass many.

Part of the reason I suspect this seems true is that we are Western people who are rich and full of opportunity. By historical standards, we live in a world that the ancients could hardly even imagine for their celestial heavens. Good medicine, cars, planes, access to food, and telecommunications. The internet alone allows us instant answers and commentary to any question. At no time in human history has so much knowledge been so easily acceptable and so freely given. But that is part of the challenge. All these things are part of our lived experience. They factor into our thoughts about what it means to live and, by extension, live eternal life. We have things just good enough to be bored, sad, worried, or dissatisfied. For every desire that we meet, we find ourselves just a little bit more dissatisfied. But that doesn't mean we want to go back to the dark ages or become impoverished again. So, we linger in the limbo of privileged experience, neither hot nor cold; alive, but spread so thin we have lost our depths. Finding them often is an existential crisis and requires rewriting our stories and our appraisal of truth.

In the past, the Good News of eternal life was fantastic indeed. When life was, as the political philosopher Thomas Hobbs surmised, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" (he wasn't much of an optimist), the news of a life that offered paradisal bliss was not only one worth having but gave meaning to the horrible experience of suffering and poverty (and short lives) that made up much of human history. But now, engorged with endless pleasures and opportunities to have them, we have become weary of eternity and suspicious of even the promise of everlasting joy.

Countering this requires a steady trust in the words of God and, perhaps, a practical reassessment of the idols that make a home in our hearts. Christ says that he makes all things new. This newness means the human experience as much as the renewal of creation itself. We are bored and scared now because we live in a world of sin and in bodies of sin. We cannot fathom a place where there is no conflict, competition, and, to some extent, no desire. At least, not desire for needs, since all needs will be met. Human experience now is always sin-experience. Not that all experience is sin, but that all human experience is situated in sinful bondage and brokenness and thus does not operate from a neutral place of purpose or perspective. Therefore, heaven is truly a foreign country, so illusively veiled by everyday experience that we can hardly decipher a perfect vision of its reality. Thus, the traditional image of heaven as clouds, while clearly not literally accurate, symbolizes the ethereal, wispy, and unstructured vision of our imagination. It is an attempt to grasp from human experience a reality that is "not yet" and, therefore, in some sense, not ours to see.

But we can do this: we can trust the One who died for us and defeated death. In so doing, Christ condemned sinful human experience (in his death) and exalted redeemed human experience (in his resurrection). [1] We can trust his way is better. We can trust that the newness he brings is not simply a removal of all that is bad in creation today (thus making eternal life into the leftovers that remain after sin's curse is lifted) but is also a remaking into something new. Jesus' incarnation, death, and resurrection have not simply restored humanity to a past state of perfection. No, Jesus is the new Adam; he makes things new. That means the work of Christ does not only remove past sin but creates new life. And that life is one suited for the presence of God, indwelling life with God and man. That new life is dynamic, not static, more robust, more fulfilling, and more intimately connected with the Triune God of love.

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