GUEST POST: Andrew Bowen

Andrew Bowen is a thinker. A writer, an editor, a theologian, a philosopher, and did I mention one hell of a thinker.

That's why I'm kicked up nicely that Andrew agreed to write a guest post here at Bent Country. It is a true pleasure to give such a mind some room to run and not only have the chance to read the results but share them with others.

Now, read this heat-seeking essay, this "human narrative" as Andrew would call it, and enjoy.


A DIVINE THEORY

By Andrew Bowen

I’ve got a theory. Some of it has been proclaimed before but hey, like Muhammad said, I’m only here to remind you. Perhaps what follows will change mankind’s point of view; or maybe just yours. By the end, you just might come to understand that these are actually one in the same.

It all started with God, and God was small…very small. God was so small that there existed no volume, no space within. Picture a grain of sand. Smaller than that. With me? Imagine an atom. Smaller than that too. This was reason, what kept God’s substance together.

Then there was the heat. This heat was actually love; all the love that would ever exist. This heat was absolute, the temperature at which realities are ignited. Heat—love, wants to rise and expand. It is an electrical current, a heartbeat.

Like the constant push-pull fury in a star between the outward convection of its furnace and its own gravity pulling it inward, love and reason eternally fought. The density of God was so infinitely great that the resulting gravity withheld the heat—the love—thus creating a compressed core of molten passion, the heat and light of which could not escape God’s gravity. This is what theoretical science has called the singularity.

God wanted to create, to be known. For God to do this, gravity would have to surrender. All reason, the very force that held God together, would have to unfurl in order for love to bloom. This created a great risk. In the event of this release, God’s very essence would scatter outward in an uncontrollable flare across a vast landscape of time and space with little hope of ever coalescing again.

Unless, of course, Creation was made aware of its origins and was willing to join.

God’s passion grew too hot, too wild to control. Then, when the balance between love’s expansive heat and reason’s reigning gravity came to a head, he relinquished control and gave himself to passion. Gravity collapsed. This was the Divine Spark that set creation into motion.

And so it came to pass, that 13.5 billion years ago, God truly died.

The resulting explosion, an exponential spray of passion’s molten core, spread through a black nothing a tick faster than the speed of light. Theoretical science calls this the Big Bang.

Thus, God became the first martyr. His essence, countless sparks of primordial matter and energy, spread throughout the newly expanding bubble. Though ripped apart, he still had one more act to help ensure Creation’s hopeful recognition of itself as one. His last thought, “Love”, delivered a seismic burst into all matter and energy, thus animating its creative properties and the universal frequency of all. Mankind has listened. The phenomena we know this as are sub-atomic vibrating strings of energy called “quarks”.

Creation had a heartbeat, a vital sign of God’s collective existence. Our experiences in prayer, meditation, visions, and ecstasy are the background radiation of God’s former existence. An echo of our birth; an evidence of our base, shared substance. Our attraction to one another, toward peace, love, fellowship, and the cosmos is a natural and divine magnetism. God cannot come together without us doing so, and we will never know God without submitting to the same force of Love that ripped the divine asunder.

I made this up; it’s bullshit—a metaphor, but that’s what makes theology fun and enlightening. Only when we take ourselves and our traditions too literally or seriously do we miss the chance to come together and share our human narratives, to claim our birthright, to truly become the image of God.

Andrew's work has appeared in places like Prick of the Spindle, decomP, Metazen, Wrong Tree Review, and others. He is the founding editor of Divine Dirt Quarterly and blogs at www.bowenandrew.blogspot.com.