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Final Exam Paper for Course RS 0305

Essay Number 2

By Hugh O’Donnell, April 27, 2005

This essay addresses question number 4 of the Final Exam handout. The question this essay addresses is as follows:

To celebrate the semester’s end, you invite a guest from among the semester’s authors and characters to your house for dinner [of course they accept]. The guest must come from the readings of the “crisis” portion of the class [choose Antonius Block, Kierkegaard, Ivan, the Grand Inquisitor, Mother Maria]. Create a dialog or short story in which the two of you discuss the aspects of their respective works, experiences, or thought you might find most gripping. You may include other guests in your discussion as well. Ask your quest at least two questions not directly covered in the chosen text. How does your quest answer your questions?

Question #1 to my dinner guests is as follows:

Why did Christ not write the Gospels himself? Why did He leave His disciples to remember what He said and then allow them or someone who knew them to write down what they remembered Him to have said, decades later? Why did He leave to chance the many varied interpretations that have now been put forward in place of His own definitive words?

Grand Inquisitor: I don’t believe many of the things that were written in the Gospels are what Jesus would have exactly wanted to say. But that is not the point. What is written is what was written. We cannot change what was written without creating chaos and confusion among the masses.

Besides, when I interviewed him in the 16^th century He was silent. I think He chose to be silent because He was afraid if He spoke definitively He would have been later discredited. By having other people write what He said, He thus allowed for later found contradictions to be written off as writer’s error. Do you remember that I met Jesus when He visited Seville during my real life time? I had Him imprisoned for performing miracles that gave my Church members false hope. He would not say anything definitively in response to my questions even though I suspected Him to want to change what had been previously written.

Mother Maria: I believe Jesus did not write the Gospels Himself because He did not want to trample on our free will. This point is rather hard to explain but very important in understanding the loving nature of His visit to earth. Perhaps the best way to explain this is through an analogy. Hugh, I believe you have children of your own don’t you?

Hugh: Yes, I have five grown children. All five either attend or have attended the University of Notre Dame. All five have freely come to know and love “Our Father” and “Our Mother,” “Notre Dame,” as far as I can tell?

Mother Maria: Your great love for your children is obvious. Tell me, would you like to force your beliefs and thinking on them to the point you write down every word you want them to follow?

Hugh: No, I guess not, at least I have not tried to do that. I must admit when I write these essays for Amy Slagle’s Religious Studies RS0305 class, I do think about how they might come to be read by my children in future years. I even have a web site where I share with the world some past essay’s I have written. But I write not to be definitive. I write merely to express my feelings. And I have learned these feelings change quite frequently.

Grand Inquisitor: So, do you believe, if Jesus had been able, he would have written down his words?

Hugh: I feel pretty sure he would have written the Gospels Himself had He wanted to; but I think I’m starting to understand what Mother Maria is driving at. I’m starting to understand the free will aspect of this question. Mother Maria, let me quote from your writings to see if I already have an idea of what you will say further on this. Your writings are filled with an understanding of the importance of individual freedom in producing human progress. They are filled with an understanding all loving fathers have in permitting their children to grow in freedom. You write at great length about the importance of individuals freely choosing to accept their crosses and not be ordered or intimidated into carrying them under someone else’s autocratic control, like I suspect the Cardinal here believes.

“And this makes perfectly clear what our relations to people, to their souls, to their deeds, to human destiny, to human history as a whole should be. During a service, the priest does not only cense the icons of the Savior, the Mother of God, and the saints. He also censes the icon-people, the image of God in people who are present.”[1]

I, as a father of five children, understand well the respect I must afford my own children in granting them their freedom. I understand the need to “cense” their independent dignity.

“Christ, in giving us His free path and His freely chosen burden, thereby confirmed, as it were, the possibility of a belief in human freedom and in the divine dignity of the Human race.”[2]

Grand Inquisitor: “Freedom, free thought and science, will lead them into such straits…they will destroy themselves”[3]

Hugh: Let’s change the subject to something far more important to me. Let’s talk about reincarnation. I believe reincarnation is a part of God’s plan for giving humans 70 times 7 chances at choosing our return to Heaven. I believe “Our Father” gives us as many as 490 chances to change our choice, a choice that will separate us from our worldly spiritual slave master, Lucifer, after we all walked out of Heaven with him at the Big Bang during the original fall.

Question # 2 to my dinner guests is as follows:

Do either of you believe in reincarnation, the return of a spiritual soul from one human body that lived in a previous lifetime to a new physical body where somehow memory of the past physical lifetime is lost however the spiritual progress is not lost but allowed to continue toward salvation in a new period of freedom, a new chance to choose incarnation into the Mystical Body of Christ ?

Grand Inquisitor: Reincarnation is possible, I suspect, but science has offered us no proof and there are no Gospel passages that would indicate reincarnation has actually occurred. If the Church allowed possibilities to surface such as reincarnation we would drift into chaos. If people believed another lifetime was possible, there would be no limit to the evil humans would commit in this lifetime. Besides, in no way do we want to stray from what has already been written. What is written has been written.

Mother Maria: Why do you ask that question Hugh?

Hugh: I have always been interested in the concept of reincarnation having studied thermodynamics, human nature and religion for years. Many years ago, as I observed unexplained differences in my own children, I subsequently started to wonder about reincarnation. I also started to wonder about the existence of spiritual entropy and its possible connection to its counterpart, physical entropy.

Grand Inquisitor: I don’t know what you mean by entropy. Please explain Hugh. I’m interested. I certainly understand that spiritual bread cannot feed the masses. Would this entropy concept help me understand human nature as other than utterly broken and utterly lost?

Hugh: I think it might Cardinal. I particularly wanted to hear Mother Maria thoughts on this because she so beautifully wrote about Jesus incarnating human nature. I like how she has written about love, and individual souls incarnating the souls of others, in a sense, dying to our own soul, losing our own soul, in order to relieve the physical and spiritual suffering of fellow souls? And further, Cardinal, I do think the concept might help lead you out of your totally scary and dark vision of human nature.

Mother Maria: You are right to know that the concept of reincarnation has crossed my thinking, and that my writings hint at the possibility; however, I have always been hesitant, even careful, not to be so dramatically radical, to the point where my teachings get me excommunicated. Tell me more about entropy and how it relates to incarnation. I never studied science in any great depth.

Hugh: Entropy is an awesome thermodynamic concept. Entropy is a measure of disorder contained in any chemical system. In physics, which is a bit beyond my field of study, entropy is a measure of the universe’s randomness. If the universe is net positive entropy, as science now speculates, then the universe is a disordered system and will continue to increase in randomness and divergence.

But if instead, the entropy of the Universe is net negative, as I suspect, then the universe is becoming more ordered. Science tells us that at the big bang, fifteen billion years ago, the Universe came into existence as matter expelled forth from a single point with the resulting hydrogen atoms spreading out, separating, and diverging in a massive display of positive valued disorder. Negative entropy occurs when atoms come together forming more ordered, interdependent communities, such as chemical compounds and human life. Scientists think the universe is expanding toward net positive entropy, a net disorder. Science predicts the Universe will evolve to net disorder. I have a hunch they are wrong because I believe they ignore, or cannot calculate, the spiritual orderliness of the Universe. From what both of you write, the Cardinal would agree with the theory of positive entropy while I suspect Mother Maria would side with me, understanding the Universe as an exploding fountain of negative entropy which I call Christian love.

Mother Maria: Is “love of neighbor” negative entropy and a measure of more order?

Hugh: Yes! I have always thought science has not been able to measure the negative entropy of love. They are able to estimate the awesome negative entropy of physical human life but not the spiritual orderliness of the communal concept of human love. I particularly am speaking about the collecting, incorporating love of Jesus. I am speaking about the way Mother Maria describes Christ’s love as enfolding into humankind and emerging as a single mystical body. If science could measure spiritual entropy, they would see the “Mystical Body of Christ” as a huge formation of growing negative entropy while the “Mystical Body of Disorder,” which I call Satan and his original followers, is a disintegrating physical and spiritual mass of positive entropy.

Grand Inquisitor: Are you suggesting that reincarnation is negative entropy? Are you suggesting that human nature is becoming more ordered starting after the time of Christ?

Hugh: Yes, Cardinal! Computer technology and modern science may soon be able to measure the disappearing disorder of spiritual entropy such as Satan’s mystical body while being able to comprehend and quantify the emerging incarnation of Christ’s love into the ultimate community of order, the “Mystical Body of Christ.” Mother Maria excitingly hints at these concepts in her writings.

Mother Maria: How so, Hugh? I am not following you at all right now.

Hugh: In your essay, Types of Religious Life[4], you say;

“These examples suffice to let us know where Christianity leads us. Here love truly does not seek its own, even if this be salvation of one’s own soul. Such love takes everything from us, deprives us of everything, almost as if it were emptying us. And where does it lead? To spiritual poverty.”[5]

And you go on to say spiritual poverty is paradoxically great richness, great love, great negative entropy I would add.

”…the laws of spiritual life are the exact opposite of the laws of the material world. According to spiritual law, every spiritual treasure given away not only returns to the giver like a whole and unbroken ruble given a beggar, but it grows and becomes more valuable. Those who give, acquire, and those who become poor, become rich. We give away our human riches and in return we receive much greater gifts from God, while those who give away their human souls, receive in return eternal bliss, the divine gift of possessing the Kingdom of Heaven.”[6]

I believe the Kingdom of Heaven is within the bounds of our Universe. I believe the Kingdom is the evolving “Mystical Body of Christ,” a collective consciousness of human spirit, a growing crystal of interdependent people connected around the seed crystal, Jesus.

If we study history closely, if we study groups of people who lived in civilized communities, we find a clear trend toward more ordered “democratic” communities. Although we find that these communities eventually die out over the decades, we subsequently see their remnants reborn into more ordered, more collective, more ordered communities. I like to describe these evolving communities as brilliant diamond-like crystal structures. As these old civilizations are “re-dissolved,” we see them reincarnate to ever more increasing orderliness. What is happening is great negative entropy.

I believe Mother Maria describes the same trends in her essays. I believe she describes evolving Christian communities as more democratic, more tolerant, more coherent communities which self-sacrifice themselves into “The Mystical Body of Christ.” Could it be that orderliness has increased exponentially with the dawn of the current era? Could it be that Jesus’ death on the Cross, and the Easter Sunday Resurrection, was the second Big Bang of history? Was this a bang as large in negative entropy as the first Big Bang was positive in entropy? Did the Universe undergo a sudden reversal from disorder to order as the Good Shepherd arrived to lead His dispersed flock back to the Kingdom of Love?

Mother Maria: Hmmm, and if I remember, I went on to say in that essay:

“How do they receive this gift? By absenting themselves from Christ in an act of the uttermost self-renunciation and love, they offer themselves to others. If this is indeed an act of Christian love, if this renunciation is genuine, then they meet Christ himself face to face in the one to whom they offer themselves. And in communion with that person they commune with Christ Himself. That from which they absented themselves they obtain anew, in love, and in a true communion with God.”[7]

Hugh: Mother Maria, do you remember the chemical science experiment concerning crystals I was telling you about before we sat down to eat.

Grand Inquisitor: Do you mean the one about crystal solutions constantly reseeded to the point of spontaneous growth?

Hugh: Yes, I see you indeed studied science to have understood my discussion in such concise imagery.

Mother Maria: I believe you told us about certain chemicals that cannot order themselves into crystals by themselves, but can be made to order themselves by repetitive dissolving and reseeding with a master crystal? Am I correct?

Hugh: Yes! Rupert Sheldrake, a British scientist and spiritual writer, described the experiment to me. Many chemical compounds do not spontaneously crystallize no matter how much care is given to the crystallization method. We know these compounds come from a master crystal source, however the “chips” off the master crystal when dissolved in water fail to re-crystallize spontaneously, unless, unless they are repeatedly dissolved and re-crystallized with a seed crystal from the original master crystal source. The more the “offspring” crystal compound is repeatedly dissolved in water and then reseeded back to crystal, the easier the compound can subsequently be crystallized, until spontaneous crystallization is possible. By spontaneous, I mean no seed crystal is required. The compound crystallizes of its own choosing, its own free will.

In other words, after enough reincarnations, the chemical solution of disorder learns to model the master crystal eventually learning how to crystallize itself independently. Science believes it now understands why this happens. As Rupert Sheldrake describes it, subsequent crystallizations leave behind a “Morphic Resonance”[8] that causes the solution to eventually crystallize without a seed crystal. Could it be that the concept Sheldrake calls morphic resonance, or remembered pasts, is similar somehow to what happens with human reincarnation. Could it be that human love works the same way? Could it be that the more humans love, somehow, perhaps through “morphic resonance” or reincarnation, we are somehow better able to love more completely, more deeply, more selflessly, the next time around?

Grand Inquisitor: Sounds very complicated!

Hugh: Yes, but its significance and parallel to the model of Christ as the seed crystal, is absolutely breathtaking. I believe Mother Maria, in her writings about Christ and incarnation into other souls, describes a similar and equally mystifying and breathtaking concept.

Mother Maria: How so Hugh?

Hugh: Mother Maria, you continued to say in your essay;

“Thus the mystery of union with man becomes the mystery of union with God. What was given away returns, for love that is poured out never diminishes the source of that love, for the source of that love in our hearts is Love itself? It is Christ. …Here we are speaking about a genuine emptying, in partial imitation of Christ’s self-emptying when he became incarnate, so to speak, in another human soul, offering to it the full strength of the divine image which is contained within ourselves.”[9]

What that means to me is that Christ is the seed crystal who showed this disordered universe, this un-crystallized, dissolved solution of disarrayed souls, thrown out of Heaven at the Big Bang, how to love by dying on the Cross. As each new person in history is incarnated with the spirit of Christ’s love, via free selection, a new more highly crystallized Church is formed but then re-dissolved at the end of each generation. Hence the more people that collectively re-appear in future generations, people who have been re-crystallized by the seed crystal Christ in past generations, eventually become part of an ever increasing creation of perfect love communities centered on a spontaneous collection of free self-sacrificing souls. What seems to be happening is an emerging “Mystical Body of Christ,” a universal system of great thermodynamic energy and order; a free will community marked by collective salvation. Could it be?

Mother Maria: I’m afraid you are losing me Hugh with this Rupert Sheldrake morphic resonance idea. However I am very much into the concept of the “Mystical Body of Christ” and the concept of collective salvation over individual salvation. I remember I once began to allude to similar ideas in one of my essays;

“..the most fundamental understanding of the goal of the Christian life divides, as it were, the Christian world into two basic points of view. I am speaking here of the salvation of the Soul.”[10]

Hugh: Yes! Yes! You went on to describe the lesser of the two points of view by saying:

“Someone who bears in himself all the stain of Adam’s sin and is called to salvation through the blood of Christ has before him one goal: the salvation of his soul. By itself his goal determines everything for him. It determines his hostility toward anything that stands in the way of salvation.”[11]

“One must eliminate everything that stands in the way of salvation.”[12]

“But along with this, you will feel a certain coldness, an extraordinary spiritual stinginess, a kind of miserliness. The other person, the other person’s soul – stranger’s, of course- becomes not the object of love, but a means for the benefiting of my own soul.”[13]

Your words, Mother Maria, were breathtaking for me. However you did not go on to fully elaborate on the second point of view, the view about collective salvation of souls. You did not continue the view where we love others to the extinction of our own soul, to the point of reincarnation into another person’s soul, if you will. Rather, you stopped short, and redirected your writing to describe two kinds of love instead of two viewpoints of salvation. After just describing the cold and selfish aspects of individual salvation, I was expecting you to expound on the warm and self giving aspects of collective salvation.

So my question to you, Mother Maria, why are we afraid to explore collective salvation in more specific detail? Why do modern Christian apologists dare not address the ancient idea of reincarnation that I believe is so frequently hinted at in the Gospels? We no longer need to fear the Cardinal’s wrath. Why not ask the question; could it be that reincarnation provides great potential for better understanding a loving and forgiving Father who values free will at all cost?

Was not Christ incarnated into a human soul at the Immaculate Conception? And is He not continuously reincarnated into our very souls with His creation of the Sacrament of Communion? Do we not believe His actual Body and Blood becomes a part of us in the Eucharist? Is this not a clear example of daily physical and spiritual reincarnation? Is this not a clear example of the Gospel command that a seed must die to become new life? Does not the “Love of Christ” described in Mother Maria’s writings point to an immeasurable amount of negative entropy? Does not the Easter Resurrection mark the beginning of the reversal of the diverging, dying, disengaging, decomposing “Mystical Body of Satan” into the converging, converting, collective, compressing, connecting “Mystical Body of Christ?”

Grand Inquisitor: You both would have been burned at a very warm stake in my time. Your thoughts create the very disorder, the very chaos, the very tension and suffering we tried to stem with our autocratic rule. How do you possibly see thoughts like this leading to order, to an emerging collective consciousness that might show hope for universal salvation?

Then again I never did understand the deeper magic, deeper mystery, the deeper freedom of spiritual bread represented in the consecrated host that I used to control the masses with from the altars of my Church.

Hugh: Mother Maria, do you remember your words: “But if at the center of the Church’s life there is this sacrificial, self-giving Eucharistic love, then where are the Church’s boundaries, where is the periphery of this center? Here it is possible to speak of the whole of Christianity as an eternal offering of the Divine Liturgy beyond church walls. What does this mean? It means that we must offer the bloodless sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-surrendering love not only in a specific place, upon the altar of a single temple, and for this universal liturgy we must offer our hearts, like bread and wine, in order that they may be transformed into Christ’s love, that He may be born in them,”[14]

Mother Maria: Hugh, we must continue this conversation again. I must read up on entropy and you must study my essays a little deeper. In an exciting way, you have nicely misrepresented my writings, abstracting ideas from the words I was inspired to write, that I guess future generations, like you have, will further interpret differently than I meant when I set my pen in motion. Certainly your ideas can add to our understanding of Christ and Creation. Certainly your ideas could not have been understood or addressed by the writers of the Gospels when they set their pens in motion. For now we must continue to ask the question: Could it be that reincarnation of the human soul is indeed a possibility? The only answer I am sure of is that no freely created thought or question should ever be burned at the stake.

End of Dinner Dialog.

We all hug each other and kiss the Cardinal tenderly on the cheek.