Our Constantinian Moment

(Daydreaming before a Milvian Bridge of sunlight and air)

Anna Moneymaker’s iconic image, made leonic and angelic by me, and also sepia-colored, as if nostalgic for a simpler, less enchanted world. (Source)

If ever there is an American Byzantium (and I still don’t want there to be), our American Constantine will be revealed suddenly, in a moment like this: A colossus-builder, with ego as colossal as the sun, one foot in Christian or at least Christianized waters, and two hands and two feet clamoring like the pagan strongman of old, to the top of a human dogpile—chin up, defiant, newly awakened to the real reality of divine protection.

A breath of wind,

A subtle feeling, from the rays of the sun,

Against a face scorched in sunlight, whispering

Time to cock your head

For those of us rushing back into the sacred cosmos, or letting it rush back into us, post-2020 technocalypse, it feels like we just got our first really interesting pop-quiz of internal mythology-coherence and brutal introspection: Not a solar parhelion this time, but a sunlit projectile miss—but since one event is as susceptible to sacred language as any other, and all still remain open to the banal and the profane, let’s let the one question on our quiz be something this: A breath of wind, subtle feelings, rays of sunlight: Was the bullet, arcing through the old Cartesian geometry of emptiness, actually touched in its course by seraphic veils of air, crashing down from the new universe?

Or are are we finding ourselves—and be honest now, radically self-honest—falling back into the default nihilism of the last age, nostalgic for the halcyon days of nothing but unassuming atoms and void?

Or what?

Where are we right now?

Because Constantine was a scumbag, too: To prefer one man over another, or to hate them both, is no real answer to the question. And the old Roman order, like our new one, was the most anti-human of anti-human Machines, so the divine election could be no confirmation of its virtue (though perhaps a renewed summons to it)—and, anyway, the story of the Hebrew bible is that God chooses both the beautiful and atrocious (the beautiful and the atrocious in one and the same king or prophet, and in one and the same tribe or nation), so if that story still lingers for us, it only piles on the sudden strangeness of the moment, with its usual self-transcending non-relief of My ways are definitely still not your ways.

Who knows, man; I don’t know—this is a strange and brutal world we’re living in, dappled with the dark shadows of strange and hidden gods.

But be that as it may, I want to remember first of all the everyman, firefighter Corey Comperatore, of eternal glory, who actually did die yesterday, sheltering his wife and daughter with his body—may you live in paradise forever, brother. And may we join you there, also, after the God-only-knows, come-what-may of the new sacred order.

* * *

Something, and someone, to think about. Meanwhile, I am struggling hard through the last essay of the Nurturers of the Real series, which I wanted to have done by this past Friday, but didn’t. As you can see. But I will—by Wednesday, God willing; Friday, at the latest.

Peace and love in Yeshua, the one true and gentle king, the Lion of Judah,

and lord of Sabbath rest,

-graham