Strange Pilgrimage, part 4

All went pitch black as I went deeper. No vestiges of light on tragic faces. And here I felt compelled to remind You, "You've been talking in my ear all along, but here it is so dark I have no idea what is around me. You said You'd come after me. I'm thinking now would be a good time to show up--"

Immediately, something akin to the glow of a black light threw a purplish wash over me. In that light, I saw no "enviroment" per se but I did see things moving around me.

I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth: I said not unto the seed of Jacob, Seek ye me in vain: I the LORD speak righteousness, I declare things that are right.

Such are the words You spoke to Isaiah, maybe when You took him to such a place as this one. For I sought You in a dark place, and my search for You was not vain even here. Were it not for You, I would nothave known how to comprehend these creatures that moved around me. That they had spirit I felt, but nothing else gave them any remaining semblance of humanity. The closest I could come to a physical description of them would be to say them undulating, oozing blobs of formless spirit matter. Here a tumor swelled up, there a patch of knobby flesh stretched and receded, and all of it rolling (for lack of a better word for their mode of perambulation) through the purple-lit space around me.

Many such beings came and went; and as I studied them, I realized they evoked a different feeling within me than those first souls had stirred. These beings simply existed now, and thus drew no aching ropes of compassion from my inward self. They wandered in and out of the purple spot light that surrounded me without the slightest awareness of me or the light. They simply oozed and wandered, making glugging sounds.

You let me observe them for a while; and then straight away, You voice was in that black-light above me, and You began to "declare things that are right."

"This is where I'll hide you when the time comes," You said.
"Here!?!" I responded, and in my mind there was nothing to recommend this place. I could almost see being placed among the ones that still bore some semblance of their former human life, but these woke little more than revulsion in me.
"Stop and think about it, " You said. "These beings are so far removed from their days brushing shoulders with grace-carriers that they have lost all their power of recognition for one such as you."
And the wisdom began slowly to dawn on me. "So they don't even remember what would serve for common spiritual history with me?"
"It was the last gift of grace they were able to receive," You said. "Here, they can't see you as a source of interaction. They don't really see anything as potential for interaction as you know it. All remembrance of anything that could serve as fabric for relationship--all that has decayed completely in them. So among them, you are as good as invisible."
"But how does this place hide me? Is this not 'his' territory?" I asked, my forehead still in a furrow.
"The Dragon?" You said, as You smiled a strange smile. "In the first place, he'd hardly believe I'd hide you here. In the second, he's done his job too well. He has so filled this place that it has swelled to vast dimensions; and since he is not so omniscient as he'd like to think, he could hardly afford to spend the time looking for you. Like a needle in a haystack you'd be, as they say. As a result, he'll resign himself to attempts on your life in the actual world, but that will prove futile as well. If I were to hide you in that earlier place of lost souls, he might stand a chance of finding you. Those beings might still be able to remember enough to recognize in you the glow that is fading in them. They might report such a strange sight. But not these. This deep, your life-light is unrecognizable. "
(And I remember again Isaiah's words about longing to remember God.)

We watched them mill around us a little while longer, and I realized that I was not afraid in this place. No suffocating panic as in the 'pestilence' place and and no overbearing ache as in the first realm of lost souls--none of these weighed on me in this place, only an alien strangeness that was heavy but not unbearable. To be so far removed from the peace that is graced to all in the form of a morning star, a summer breeze, a sun-glittered snow--the utter absence of such peace was heavy, but tolerable in the context that I was but on pilgrimage.

When You spoke once again, You referred to a dream You gave me once long ago, a dream where I "saw" Lucifer and was tempted to feel sympathy for him; for I could ascertain, although not quite spiritually "see" the loss of his former glory, a loss so obvious within his now-broken framework. Where once he was blinding to gaze upon, the ultimate, creative masterpiece channel for the light that is God: to see him was to see brilliant glowing prisms of light shooting through him and beyond across the highest heavens; but, now there remained nothing than a sticky brown death mucking his surface, disallowing all passage of light through his being. The huge arcs that were once his thundering, crackling spirit wheels were now nothing but broken shells. When I had that dream long ago, You told me that You would not show me plainly his former glory; for were I to see the full range of that beauty lost, I would be all the more tempted to feel sympathy, and it was not the time for sympathy toward him. Now as we gazed on these creatures, You brought back to mind that natural pull toward sympathy wired into still-living mankind...I wondered what consitituted the lake of fire.

"You see now, why these 'lost' ones are not to be regarded with pity, not in the sense of the reconciliation still available to the living. Their choice of path, choice of allegiance, choice of indulgence, however you wish to perceive and define that choice--it has taken them to an existence that can no longer even desire or remember what is lost. For them to even remember would be an indication that the God they resolutely rejected is still imposing His presence upon them, for He is the author of the law that condemns and therefore points to Him. To be able to perceive the concept of having an existence of value implies things like growth, hope, and respect for what is good--to have such perception would put a little bit of God still in them."

And even though You didn't say it, I wondered about that last "sympathy" for the devil that You restrained me from feeling in that former dream. I wondered if the same grace that allowed these to 'forget' what they abandoned would ultimately reach even to him...making him no longer cognizant. Could he lose the "feel" not only of his current adversarial relationship with You, the Intercessor, but also with the just Father, in whose presence he has so long stood, accusing so many--from Job in ancient days to that firebrand who is yet to be? I remembered the verse about one who looks in the mirror but immediately forgets his reflection when he looks away. God has been just such a mirror for him--showing Lucifer who he is, who he was--but when the last reflection of all former things is removed, will even Lucifer forget? It is a wisdom beyond my capacity to perceive. But I think on this:

For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.
Would the grace of this "failure to remember" reach even into the realm of its negative image? Extend even to those who rejected the offer to inhabit these new heavens and new earth? But these things, I simply pondered in my heart. And again, Isaiah whispered in my ear. With but a few words, he recounted my entire pilgrimage, from the time I found myself outside those iron gates that shielded me to a place that--strangely--offered even safer shielding, safer because You'd been there before me, and knew the path I should take:
Isa 45:2
I will go before thee, and make the crooked places straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron:

Isa 45:3
And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call [thee] by thy name, [am] the God of Israel.

They are words that have served as a protective glaze over many a life...and now over mine, too.

One more day and the story will all be told. For every pilgrimage must reach its end, and every pilgrim must leave the foreign land where he travels or else make himself one with the natives.