Why do I choke up when I watch the third trailer of Dune: Part Two?
Why does a tear well in the corner of my left eye? Is it because I like the story? Or because of the way the director has executed his vision?
Or is it because the cast is stacked front to back with masters? Maybe it's the same reason that I cried through Top Gun Maverick for no reason I could think of. Or maybe I'm just a nostalgic SOP who can't control his emotions.
You could probably take your pick. But I'd tell you it's none of these explanations. Do you want to know the reason?
Itโs because thereโs another realm at play here.
No, it's not the Christian clichรฉd response about the power of story. I feel the same emotions when I read The Iliad and sense Achilles's wrath1 and his ache over the death of a loved one or Odysseusโs longing for home. Or when Helen Burns dies in Jane Eyre, I can hear heaven ache even though it is just a story.
These emotive visuals and writings touch the cords of the Eternal that every person possesses. And it is during this season of change, from autumn to winter solstice, this time of wintering for land and for beasts, this Silent Night time when the world pauses to remember the unsettling event of The Creator entering Creation through the Grand Miracleโthe Divine taking human form, this winter of God where the world sleeps physically and metaphorically, awaiting the song of recreation.
A breath stirs me from the insideโthe Spirit? I open my eyes, and for a moment, I can see the Eternal Theater.
I shudder as my modern imagination expands, barely able to hold all that I see.
The Sprawl and Lure of the Ancient Imagination
My modern sensibilities, which have crusted over the eyes of my heart and soul, flake and fall, opening my senses once again to the astral reality in which the ancient peoples lived: the world of Adam, the descendants of Eve, humans who lived for millennia, who passed down stories of Eden, who saw the great and holy beast-Angels who sentried the Garden with flaming swords, the magnificent yet fallen civilizations of Sumer and Mesopotamia who lived by the light of sun and flame, no light pollution, no soot-filled-air, who binged-watched the burning heavens each night, making up stories about The Hunter and The Great Bear, The Seven Sisters, and The Runaway Star, Arcturus.
So old are the stars and their constellations that God discussed their origin with Job in the great riddle-book of the Old Testament. Said God to Job, questioning the Sufferer as he taught him the origins of Wisdom:
He made all the starsโArcturus, the Bear and Orion,
ย ย ย ย the Pleiades and the constellations of the southern sky.
โCan you direct the movement of the starsโ
ย ย ย ย binding the cluster of the Pleiades
ย ย ย ย or loosening the cords of Orion?
Can you direct the constellations through the seasons
ย ย ย ย or guide {Arcturus} the Bear with her cubs across the heavens?
Do you know the laws of the universe?
ย ย ย ย Can you use them to regulate the earth?2
(Job 9:9; 38:31-33, NLT/KJV)
Pleiades, like a flock of birds in the night sky of over 250 starsโa cosmological murmuration!โfloat in our winter sky, bound together by gravity. They will never separate. Orionโs beltโhis cordsโare loosed stars, unbound, and cosmology tells us that one day, they will drift apart so far that the belt will no longer be recognizable. Arcturus, a loner star, a wanderer thousands of times the size of our sun, moves through space at 257 miles a second while our sun careens at only 12 miles a second. Itโs a rebel star going its own path.ย
And what of the Southern Constellations? These constellations went unnamed until the nineteenth centuryโalmost six millennia unnamed!โbecause the earthโs southern hemisphere was nearly uninhabited.3 The northern sky was the worldโs sky until the Great Adventurers took to sea and found the polesโnaming lands and stars along the way. And yet many lament the names of the southern constellations, citing the loss of the Ancient Imagination and the rise of the flattened mind of the modern world. When you rob the holy from the heavens, you stop talking to God. But it is the awe of The Other that gives meaning to the data of our world.
Explore the Star of Bethlehem mystery
Is God bragging about his creative power to Job? No, he is probing the โwhyโ and โhowโ of the constellations: Why are they bound or loosed? What purpose do stars serve in space, so far from us that they seem pointless? And yet, Godโs Wisdom gives the earth mathematical and cosmological certainties through physical laws that govern our world.
The laws of gravity and time that we live by would be impossible without the Strong Force that directs our universe, which expands and burns with its own life and rules and all so that we can live on this blue dot of a planet and observe the heavensโthe Anthropic Cosmological Principle.4 The celestial bodies that we will never be able to reach work in an order designed so precisely that even agnostics marvel.
I think of Sir Roger Penrose, whose dazzling mind seeks to capture, name, and measure this astral Wisdom. He cannot escape the pointlessness of the universe that will one day vanish in a โpop,โ he says, only to be reborn again through another Big Bang (this is his โCyclic Conformal Cosmologyโ5โwhich sounds like the Norse Ragnarรถk myth). And yet he leaves room for unanswerable physical mysteries, such as the origin of massless particles, like protons, which make up light itself and will extend into infinity. Eternal Particles.
Penrose marvels that humanity was given the gift of mathematics that allows us to measure and define space with shocking precision. He wrestles with these three questions: Why is it that the mathematical realm describes the physical realm? Why is it that the mental realm can exert physical effects in the physical universe? And how does the mental realm grasp the abstract realm of mathematical objects?
I read Penroseโs questions, and I hear a mind alive with existence, one trying to get outside the Modern Sensibility, one trying to use our knowledge advancement in an ancient way, the ancient way of beholding the sky, observing its movement through seasons and cycles to make sense of weather, plants, vegetables, trees, rivers, and oceans. It is this sense and meaning-making that goes beyond the physical (metaphysical) world of what we see and think we know.
I marvel at the Ancient Imagination. The people named the celestial lights, observed their movements, and figured a power to be behind it all. They saw this power in the majesty of the Nile River, and they named the southern sky after itโThe Way of Ea, the beneficent god of earth and life.6 Yet, this knowledge and figuring, a mixture of physical and metaphysical, did not hamper their advancement as peoples or nations. It informed it. The same sages of stars also gathered to listen to stories about โthe men of renown, the great heroes of old.โ
I whisper, โMaybe Homerโs Achilles was once a man of renown. Maybe Giants did roam the earth.โ And I pine for the Ancient Imagination.
I sit in wonder, realizing that we share two great gifts with the ancients; we live under the same night sky, the same named constellations from which the cardinal directions were called, and we feed off of the same great ocean, which covers most of the planet with its unfathomable depths of churning water and is governed by the lunar cycles of gravityโa force we cannot define and whose origin we do not knowโwhose reaches we cannot search out, whose knowledge remains a hidden treasure.
And yet, even with all the purity of vision of the Ancient worldโa world with dew still on it, all the sense of the Divine that governed the intellect and imagination of the world for five thousand years, all the ache-inducing beauty of the virgin lands, all the heroes of old that inspired legend, the human race still took up the mantle of the World King, the fallen one from heaven.
I sit dumbfounded by how easily we reduce and remove the supernatural from our lives. I think of the Scripturesโthose ancient texts so revered in the medieval worldโthat we carry around in our digital rectangles, scrolling the words of Scriptures as if they are merely descriptions of food choices from take-out menus. I think of how weโve robbed Scripture of its awe by making it a commodity.
I think of the mysteries we toss aside because weโve allowed our brains to be reprogramed so that we approach Wisdom not with humility and a seeking mind but with the pragmatism of a Self-Help society that strives to become better versions, iterations, of whatever it is we areโDid you get the new Upgrade to your Self? We live as data collectors, efficiency mongers, and power brokers bent on wealth and statusโprestige derived from the trinkets we think we own: houses, cars, diplomas, jobs, computers, and phones.
The Ancient Imagination did not bifurcate the sciences from the arts. It valued human understanding of the cosmic order philosophically, theologically, mathematically, and historicallyโall of it mixing into an elixir of Wisdom. This Wisdom became the aim of classical education, which seeks to make sense of the mysteries of the universe from all areas of knowledge and learning.
It is this cosmic connection threading itself through reality that still reaches out to us through science, Hollywood, rock music, and even the night skyโflooded as it is with light pollution and noise. The Modern Sensibility has tried to annihilate Beauty but has only managed to mutilate the Self.
For Beauty yet rings in Ancient song each night as the waxing crescent ascends and Orion rises in the east. You can ignore the Pleiades, but the Sisters yet dance.
The Cosmic Drama Embedded in Everything
I stand gazing out across the Eternal Theater as the Solstice approachesโa changing of the season. A cosmic film trailer plays,
I can hear the voiceover of God reassuring me that The Great Rescue is coming and has already come and is coming again. That his love operates in the aorist tense, a mystery of time I struggle to grasp.7 The voiceover says that the Dragon cannot bash the gates of heaven and steal the Child King.8
<<Beat>>
A pause.
Then, the voiceover continues. God whispers of a prophecy as the B-roll plays, revealing distant lands and warrior angels engaged in a battle of immeasurable fury.
Cut to:
A lone vagabond trembles in the desert, half-naked and starving, as the World King torments him with power, influence, and โultimateโ satisfaction.9
Me, the Audience.
I look round about me, and my world seems so ordinary even as Screwtape closes behind, blood dripping from his mouth, as he salivates, ready to consume me with the drone of nonchalance that besot this age.10
Then, I realize I am not the Audience. I am a character, and the drama is about me and you and you and you. So, the trailer plays, and the Eternal Theater fades to black.
Aside:
I remember Chesterton. The Iliad is only great because all of life is a battle.11 And the warrior in me rises with my eyes opened to the shadows.
Back to the Real:
The B-roll vanishes, and I'm half sobbing at a movie trailer called Dune: Part Two.
But the voiceover, the prophecy. It's true. The King of Heaven's Armies comesโan invasion of light.
Thus spoke the Father, and the light shone, and the universe burned into existence all physical, yet aflame with metaphysical resonance. For light is first form12โeternal, protonic,13 constitutive of reality. And the darkness cannot comprehend it. And so, the Day of Days is comingโit has already comeโand the battle has been won.
Yet, still, we must fight.
I cry, I suppose, because I've grown into my dad. He always told me, as a boy, that the Child King was coming soon, that he'd see him on this earth. No doubt. Only certainty. And in that way, a father was younger than his son, in the way Chesterton tells how belief and wonder keep us forever childlike.
I am opting for battles these days. Not because I'm bloodthirsty. But because I'm finished with nonchalance. I'm over sugar and candy for my soul. I want to stand against the darkness. I want to raise my Chrysknife and shout, โThis is for the fighters.โ
โBut Tim,โ you say, โAren't you the beauty guy? Aren't you the writer, the art guy?โ
โAh, Yes,โ I say. โBut beauty is hard. And art is war.14 And the Good is worth fighting for. And Truth? Well, truth is existence itself. And I exist. And so, I live as a testimony to the Light King, even as I raise my sword of pen and canvas, my shield of imagination and wonder.
In Sum and For You
The Dune trailer contained ancient echoes: grand narratives, mystery, heroes, cosmic wonder, the need to fight, the need to love, and the need for a Savior.
It awakened the ancient in me and invigorated my imagination to think about The Ancient of DaysโGod himself. Before the modern era, the whole world believed that a supernatural power or force lay behind the created order. Weโve lost this view of the universe. Studies show that even Christians struggle with miracles and the supernatural.
When I try to put myself in the Ancient mindset, Iโm filled with awe just imagining how they saw the night sky. I giggle with wonder thinking about the reality that at one point in history, whole villages or cities could have journeyed to talk with the first man and first woman, the ones who walked with God.
I also think about how the Ancients viewed the supernatural world as something tangible and how weโve lost the belief in the unseen realm as having any kind of impact on our days. This led me to the cosmic trailer as I imagined the story of humanity opening up before meโand much of it happening in the unseen realm, given through prophecy, and occurring in ancient times.
I want to challenge us to do three things as we enter this, the winter of God.
First, stop. Just stop. Pour or make your favorite drink. Sit by a fire or alone in a quiet room. Let the stillness of winter wash over you. And pray for your modern sensibility to flake and crumble and ask God to show you his love, an ancient love embedded in the very fabric of creation. For Godโs love is โsteadfastness,โ and he tells us repeatedly in the Scriptures that he will never leave us nor forsake us. He tells us he sustains creation with his very words. He holds the universe in his handsโhands of steadfastness. As the seasons pass, sustained, repeated, cyclical, so too is Godโs love for you and you and you.
Second, see. Go outside after 10 p.m. You might catch the last of the Geminid Meteor Shower thatโs been going all through December. Gaze at the night sky and think about how amazing it is that you are looking at the same sky viewed by the ancient peoples of Sumer. You will see Orion rising in the east. Now imagine God standing next to you and asking you if you can loosen Orionโs beltโbecause he has, and for good reason! As youโre standing there gazing at Orion with God, ask him to awaken wonder in you, to set ablaze your imagination with the beauties of the heavens, and to keep your intellect childlike.
Finally, explore. Read about the Pleiades. Click the link above that invites you to explore the Bethlehem star. Grab a book about constellations. Read a great epic or listen to one on Audible. The Robert Fagle audiobook translations of The Illiad and The Odyssey are superb and will make you fall in love with Homer. Read the book of Job from start to finish in one night. You wonโt regret it. Read Revelation 12 about the woman and the dragon and think about how it is the story of Christmas. Read Michael Heiserโs The Unseen Realm and challenge yourself to see behind the veil of the Christmas season.
The invisible realm exists, friends. Letโs see beyond the wrapping paper and candles to the spiritual reality set before us during this quiet time of the world. Let's arm ourselves with wisdom and lightโfor a child is born. His name?
โGod WITH us.โ
Post Script: Thank you for your patience with me during these last several months. I took time away from social media and Substack because I needed to breathe again. Iโve changed the name of this space to The Beautiful Disruption. Iโll post more about the name soon. Iโll write monthly pieces here that coincide with what Iโm writing for the follow-up to The Beauty Chasers. (We only need six more reviews for 100! Letโs go!:) Iโm also working on a YA mystery novel and an academic book I hope to announce sometime in the spring.
Post-post Script: For all you creatives and writers, Iโve started hosting monthly workshops called The Writerโs Workshop. The third one will be held on January 20, 2024. You can pre-register now. The Writerโs Workshop.
Sources & Notes
The Iliad opens with the famous lines: โThe wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus' son, Achilles, that destructive wrath which brought countless woes upon the Achaeans, and sent forth to Hades many valiant souls of heroes, and made them themselves spoil for dogs and every bird; thus the plan of Zeus came to fulfillment, from the time when first they parted in strife Atreus' son, king of men, and brilliant Achilles.โ See โHomer, Iliad, Book 1, Line 1,โ accessed December 15, 2023, https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0134.
Most scholars place the writing of Job around 650 B.C. But the only universal agreement on the dating of Job is that itโs unknown, as is the author. Chesterton calls it a โriddleโ on suffering.
โEverything You Need to Know about the Southern Hemisphere,โ ThoughtCo, accessed December 15, 2023, https://www.thoughtco.com/geography-of-the-southern-hemisphere-1435565.
John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford [Oxfordshire]โฏ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe, 1st Vintage Books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 2012).
Rogers, John H., โOrigins of the Ancient Constellations: I. The Mesopotamian Traditions,โ Journal of the British Astronomical Association 108, no. 1 (February 1998): 9โ28.
โThe Aorist Is so Much More than a Past Tense,โ billmounce.com, accessed December 15, 2023, https://www.billmounce.com/monday-with-mounce/the-aorist-so-much-more-past-tense. Mounce puts it like this: โYou are in a helicopter over the parade, looking at the parade as a whole. Buist Fanning talks about seeing the action from the outside as a whole rather than from inside the action (i.e., being part of the parade).
โBecause this is the basic genius of the aorist, it can have a phenomenally wide range of usage. You can be looking at the action as a whole but paying special attention to the beginning (โingressiveโ) or to the end (โconsummativeโ). It can describe something that simply is regardless of any time reference (โgnomicโ).โ
โRevelation 12 NLT - The Woman and the Dragon - Then I - Bible Gateway,โ accessed December 15, 2023, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=revelation+12&version=NLT.
โBible Gateway Passage: Luke 4:1-13 - English Standard Version,โ Bible Gateway, accessed December 15, 2023, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%204%3A1-13&version=ESV.
C.S. Lewis ends his epistolary novel with Screwtape ready to devour Wormwood. Lewis depicts demons as ravenous to devour humans and other lesser demons. Throughout the book, Screwtape instructs his disciple to use subtletyโa kind of nonchalance about lifeโto lure humans away from the awe-spiring, the beautiful, the simple, the charms of life because this is how the Father woos them.
G. K. Chesterton, The Wit, Whimsy, and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton. Volume 6: The Defendantโฏ; Varied Typesโฏ; A Miscellany of Men and Other Stories (Landisville, PA: Coachwhip Publications, 2009).
Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, โRobert Grossetesteโs Thought on Light and Form of the World,โ International Journal of Sciences 3, no. 04 (April 27, 2014): 54โ62, https://doi.org/10.18483/ijSci.486.
โAre There Any Massless Particles?,โ Science Questions with Surprising Answers, accessed December 15, 2023, https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2023/10/23/are-there-any-massless-particles/.
Steven Pressfield and Robert McKee, The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle, First Black Irish Entertainment paperback edition (North Egremont; MA: Black Irish Entertainment LLC, SANAGE Publishing House, 2012).
Tim, thank you so much for working hard to communicate these things in a way that some at least will understand. Your words remind me of Lewis' Space Trilogy -- conjuring in my mind a greater view of the Big Picture, this enormous story we've been participating in with our ancient brothers and sisters, people so "far behind" us in what we see as technological advancement, yet so far ahead in understanding the deep things of creation. I too wish to see the world more as they did, looking beyond the surface and into the heart of things. What a different time December would be if we took notice of these cosmic truths more than we did the lights and toys.
What a lullaby this world we're living in has been humming. Thank you for being a fighter, for shouting through the sleepy noise. You have affected me very deeply with your writing, and been something of a beginning in my journey into wakefulness.
I'm glad that you've taken time to step away and look at the stars, and collect your thoughts for impactful pieces like this -- and for the silent growth of your own soul. I look forward to reading more, and to getting my hands on your next book.