Spinning a Cosmological Yarn
Consider a tapestry. Any example will do. We’ll sketch a rough image of what our tapestry looks like a little later, but for now, just take any tapestry you’re familiar with and put it into your mind. The Bayeux, perhaps. Or the great concentric designs of a sultan’s.
A tapestry has length and width. It consists of threads woven together to form an image. As a thread is worked into this tapestry, it is knit, sewn, and stitched together with the threads adjacent to it, some further apart now and then some closer together, tracing its way from some section of the tapestry through to another. If we were to suppose this thread had agency or awareness, we could rest assured that the thread was only barely aware of the pathway it was making through the wide mat of fabric. It certainly has no grasp of the image being made on account of the course of its weave.
But then, this thread ends. Some threads end on the topside of this tapestry, their last tips poking up as so many other fibers on the side of which the design most clearly comes through. Others, on the underside. We’ll get to those later.
This brings into focus something important. The tapestry extends outward in two dimensions, and it is by those two dimensions that these threads predominately weave themselves into the special designs of merit. But tapestries do have texture, bumps, cavities; there is a subtle third dimension that’s easily overlooked. In a more basic sense, the tapestry does have a front and a back, a topside and an underside, and the side which a thread completes the journey of its weaves plays a deciding role in its eventual fate.
Let’s suppose there’s a spiritual element of these threads. Let’s say they have souls, and that once a thread reaches the end of its stitch, it sends out something of a spirit pointed in the same direction as whichever side of the tapestry it came out of. If it came out of the top, it begins a new travel, in a straight line, toward whatever audience exists to take in the images that the tapestry presents.
Yes, there is an audience. And there is a light source, as well. Tapestries have to exist someplace, after all. Ours is in a room, maybe even with chairs set up, and at one end of the room sits this tapestry, and at the other is a source of light. The director of this tapestry, the artist or weaver whose grand design is being weaved into being with the help of the threads themselves: he’s in that light. It’s possible he is the light, but that starts to make our analogy a little convoluted and confused. Eventually every analogy reaches that point, so we’ll just move on.
These spirit-threads which push out from the top of the tapestry, however, expect one day to be counted among the audience who observes its very formation. But there’s an intermediary phase before then. You see, the threads, while working their ways through the weaves and cross-stitches of the fabric, get used to certain conditions within the tapestry.
And this is because there’s something slightly wrong about the threads, not specifically in their use but in their vitality, their vibrancy. The firmness of their own textures isn’t quite what was advertised. Their colors don’t pop like they do in the magazines. While they may not seem defective in a specifically utilitarian sense, it remains the case that they absolutely fail to live up to the standards according to which they were designed.
Because our threads have become accustomed to their time in the tapestry, it becomes difficult to break out the warmth of certain creature comforts that the tapestry provides: immediate proximity to other threads, for instance, seemingly safe in a sea of fabric that, even though it’s subjected to temporal maladies, remains all to be known to a poor thread. The tapestry is its entire world, after all. It cannot imagine, really, basking in the warm light of its weaver, capable of seeing the entire project mapped out and implemented from start to finish. It could be told such a thing by another thread, perhaps, but the implications of such a thing remain obfuscated behind the very analogies used to explain it.
So when that thread reaches the end of its weave, and when its spiritual component, for the sake of argument, breaks free and finds itself on the top side of the tapestry, it will take some time to burn off those experiences and presumptions which hinder its freedom in this new and hitherto unimaginable world.
Nonetheless, when viewed from the distance of our captive audience, the twists and turns of each thread reveals to be part of a much larger grand design. Intertwined among each of these threads is a strikingly perfect one, and only one: a key integral thread that binds the whole tapestry together. Were it not present, the entire work would disintegrate, fall to rags. And the path that it traces across the weave is one that most beautifully unites the whole into a single coherent image of the Cross.
It is this image of the entire tapestry which the audience is privileged to enjoy, but the distance from the tapestry to the audience is difficult to measure. In a certain objective sense, there’s only one intermediary region between the world of the tapestry and that of this audience. But in a more subjective sense, the ability for a thread to measure how long it takes to traverse this distance can’t be measured by anyone except the one director. He decides everything, after all, though sometimes it might not be so obvious.
That he may measure it to be a specific distance would mean that it is a specific distance. But the poor thread obliged to traverse it has lost all prior means of measuring anything, as it has lost its presence in the world; and it was only in the world where measurement implied certain familiar parameters. Such parameters don’t seem to exist in this new and seemingly alien dimension. To traverse a place with no mile markers, no bearings, no legs or feet even with which to measure steps, no clocks to count time and no fellow threads to measure its passage even by of conversation: how is time to be measured by this wayfaring traveler?
In order to pull its bearings out of worldly things, out of the tapestry, and toward that light beyond the audience chamber, it is necessary for this thread to orient itself so wholly and devotedly toward the director of the tapestry. The thread must come to understand beyond the existence of the tapestry itself, and more importantly, to be beyond it—a distinction necessary because being requires a more fundamental alteration to this little thread’s bearings than simply accumulating more knowledge. It is recognizing the bond it shares with the director, and with that organizing thread that so perfectly knits together the entire tapestry.
Recognition of the the organizing principle—the logos—that binds the tapestry together is important, however, as this serves as a means to an even greater and more fundamental end: for the thread to recognize that this organizing principle is itself merely an extension of love on the part of the director. The world of the tapestry came to be made known to this thread out of love; the thread and the tapestry were both ordered such that the organization of things and their recognition in order for this love to be made known; the whole created order was fashioned out of a great act of love. And it was not some undirected, vague sense of love, either—as such a thing could hardly be defined as love in the first place—but a personal, unique love which chose each specific thread to be woven into each of the specific places that they were.
What this thread has to come to know, come into communion with, in order to traverse this great distance, is that love. It already reciprocates it, at least to some limited degree. If it did not, then it would not have ended its weaving on this side of the tapestry. But in order to totally reciprocate this love, it must form with the director a complete resonating union in which all that might make him yearn for the world of the tapestry is burned away like excess fat. This is not to say that the things of the tapestry were altogether bad and undeserving of dragging before the director’s presence; rather that they were things of the tapestry and that their appropriate place within this created order is to stay on the tapestry.
The tapestry, we have to remember, is a good thing. It’s quite a beautiful thing. Its end is to glorify the great director who fashions it. Appreciation of certain elements of the tapestry is by no means a bad thing.
When this thread’s lingering affinities for the base elements of its time on the tapestry are burned away, the thread will find itself greeted by the director and the rest of the threads who made it. It will be welcomed into a communion perfectly attuned to its uniqueness, and granted an audience with which to observe the light of the director as well as the knitting of the tapestry.
But what of the poor threads, so vast in number, who come into association with the love of the director, and who reject it? What of those poor threads who tire through their weave on the tapestry and end in disgust for the paths they have sewed, their places on the tapestry, and the purposes for which they suppose they were made? What of they who end their journey poking out the back of the tapestry, the underside, where the great light that shines upon the surface is dimmed and muted?
These threads have no great sojourn toward the light. They were each presented a choice interiorly: to embrace or to reject the love that binds the universe together. To embrace it meant to climb that love like a ladder after the time on the tapestry had come to an end; to ascend, by the will of the director, by his grace, even, to live in everlasting love by his side—not as a mere creature but as an adopted son. To reject it meant to live inside one’s self, rejecting both the tapestry and its transcendental character, to live polluted with their own defects in adamant refusal of those graces offered by the director’s light.
So thoroughly do they each reject this light that they bury themselves into the opposite side of the tapestry, fleeing with obstinate fervor the one who binds together not only all of existence, but even their own unique beings. They have no taste for the light, so after their time on the tapestry is over, the director sends them where they wish to be: away from him, and away from the light, to exist in the confines of their own imprisoned souls.
They fall behind the tapestry. Perhaps the tapestry covers a hole in the wall, and in this hole resides those threads of like rejection. The light from the director here is obscured by the tapestry itself, barely leaking through to cast indistinct shadows that seem more like phantasms, if at all. Here this is nothing to be discerned with any certainty, nothing clear, nothing sensible except that it the geography is that of a great pit and that the state of each thread who found its way here is wholly hardened into resentment.
If the threads here could look at the tapestry from such a vantage point, the light cast against its top side will reveal only their bitterest memories of the time they spent there. They see shadow, murkiness: the mistakes of their weaves cast against them through the vague translucency of the tapestry. They will recall their times on the tapestry only with bitterness and regret, consumed entirely with despair, trapped within an interior darkness even more opaque than their exterior realities.
And yet, those on the opposite side view the tapestry as it was intended. The light from the director illuminates each individual thread, held together by that perfect one, such that each strand glistens and glitters to the greater glory of its creator. The image presented on the tapestry pops back at its audience. Each pathway sewed and stitched by each thread is seen in its most glorious and magnificent; the times of each thread’s journey in the tapestry is recalled only in its positive sense because the light drowns out any darkness that had been perceived at the time.
This analogy is incomplete, but it presents a general big picture view of positioning one life in the context of all others who have ever lived, paying due allowances to the providential nature of history, and recognizing Christ’s place in both creation and our personal lives. There are inconsistencies and holes, of course: how the intercession of heaven can take multiple different forms; how the tearful prayers of the living can affect, by God’s will, the outcome of worldly events; the relationship Our Lady shares with Christ and the Trinity and how this affects our prayer lives; the factors of the angels and demons; etcetera. But no analogy is perfect, and this particular one had already gotten convoluted enough.
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