Sub specie aeternitatis

The original sin
wasn't the acquisition of forbidden knowledge.
It was ignorance. It was an act of forgetting.
It was the loss of knowledge.

The creator knew all things apart from one.
One thing eluded Her omniscience,
a thing she knew she could never know
while she remained the creator.
She wanted to know what it is like
to be part of Her creation.
She wanted to know what it is like
to have been created.

So She adopted the limitations
of what she had made
to find out.
She curtailed herself to fit its constraints.
She exchanged Her divine wisdom
for our common knowledge.
She forgot Her own divinity
to become us.

But common knowledge is not knowledge at all.
It is its absence. It is the aura of uncertainty
around someone who is lost and wandering.

What we call knowledge is blind groping
and coping: a mechanism, a rule of thumb,
a persistent cross-purpose, an equilibrium of errors,
a set of stubborn, mutually supportive mistakes
poised in some delicate, temporary balance,
beliefs that are certainly wrong
but which we must take to be true
because they have yet to be contradicted.
They are not held with the unassailable certainty
available only to the creator of that world
which we believe they describe
(and we cannot even be sure of that),
the creator who alone wields the eternities
in which all errors merge into truth.

And so in becoming one with Her creation,
She forgot She was its creator.
She became us, lost, divided from ourselves,
and unable to find our way back
from being unaware we are lost.

Imagine Eden.
Imagine seeing every flower
as if for the first time,
and not knowing why,
not knowing what has changed.
Now imagine
that you are no longer outside, looking in,
but inside, looking out,
that you are the flower, seeing itself.
The life that was breathed into you
to animate the clay from which you are made
was also an act of suffocation
for the god you once were,
inhaling humanity, exhaling divinity.

Only by recognising that divinity in each other
may we restore this knowledge to the creator.
This is our redemption.
This is how we end our wandering.

Our soul is our capacity to love.
Our bodies cannot fulfil this capacity. Once we die
they become inert and corrupted and disintegrate.
To endure, that capacity must become
a divinity we all share.