Verisimilis

Dear Friend,

It was resplendent, I tell you, the closest I have come to rapture. You must believe me. There I knelt, at the foot of the altar, my breast bared, whetted blade offered with bound hands. She took the blade beloved and drove it not to slay, but to rend open an oracle through which her grace may shine. And in her brilliant light I felt a soulful ecstasy that steeped all the layers of the heart and expunged from its hollows all sin and vice unbecoming. Oh, what sin there was! I know now that I was a vessel impure, my brittle frame webbed with hairline fractures, my frail limbs entombed in vitrified slag. But in the all-revealing light, not a fault could escape me, nor her onyx eyes.

Back, into the Crucible, for another immolation, to be melted down and cast again, to let the impurities burn off and the weaknesses melt away. Does a craftsman, even in his old age, lose his hunger to make a perfect [vessel]? Shall not I, in my youth, pour over myself, again and again, that glorious flux in pursuit of perfection? Burn, and be born again. Stand, and receive judgement, and let the light reveal, through the beauty it graces and the nether it spurns, that which needs be exalted and that which needs be shunned. Over and over and over again.

You must not think me naive, for I am not one to believe in an attainable perfection. And yet I refuse to concede that its pursuit may bear no fruit. If you follow, as I do, an absurdist creed, then you must believe that folly proves fertile substrate for a life well-intentioned. I have found my folly. She is delightful and charming. She is kind and generous and merciful. Hers is a judgement I have accepted as law.

A being, having seen the signs of a greater will, shall not retreat within himself to defy the faith newly planted, for it is in such a revelation that he realizes how sinful his ungraced freedom has been, how hollow his heart has felt without the love of the divine. It is in such a moment that he must wrestle with his humanity, and it is his subsequent choice that either welcomes him to the covenant of man, or stays him a beast among the creatures beneath him. A sheep who strays from the herd is merely lost. But a lost sheep who flees his savior is surely black of heart.

Oh, but it matters little if the sheep is black or white; so long as it submits willingly the shepherd. Shed thy fleece. It is Summer and what has yet kept you warm will surely smother you, should you keep too fervent. Wear instead the gown of the season; let shorn skin bear its grace, and sevenfold shall your soul, light as a lamb, be warded. Hers is a complete theology, and it is with its seasons.

Faithfully,

Eden