The Golden Ass

In a theater, is what is behind the curtain in a different room from what is in front of the curtain? Or, rather, does the curtain separate two parts of the same stage? Does all the action occur in one space, or are there two separate sets of action in front of and behind the curtain?

This is an important question, because our basic sense of the appearance of things and people and of events in the world is a mystery. What's on the other side of the contours of the horizons of all that appears before our senses is the overwhelming rush of the abysmal depths of the waters of Creation. Creation was not a one time act at some potentially locatable point in the measurably distant past.

In other words, we all live in God's theater. We appear on God's stage, and we are living the action of the play. Though it's full of mystery and wondrously unfinished - as is our raw sense of the power of creation - we even have the script for the play.

The original question of the layout of our divine theater, then, is an important one. Our popular imagination is dominated by our total separation from what we call "outer space.” This image of a divine theater of two separate rooms and two separate sets of action relies on a science and technocracy of control that makes it not only easy but our habitus to cover over our vulnerability and need in the face of the basic mystery inherent in existence itself with illusions of progressively higher levels of certainty as we better come to grasp with our minds what in previous times would have been "on the other side of the veil." So, what I’m asking is a question of the difference between control and trust.

2014 Art Installation at Griffith University Art Gallery in Brisbane by Dereck Dreckler

To ease potential or even inevitable suffering, heartache, fear, and even trauma, and to assuage our utter confusion in the face of so many disjointed, crisscrossing, and con-fused contours of daily life that appear before us like the ever-moving waves of the sea, do we craft our own poor image of what goes on behind the veil of reality, on the other side of the horizon of what appears to us? When we do, it tends to become its own monstrously large, and elaborate system of mechanizations that become a separate and even deathly contested theater in and of itself - an entirely disjointed room cut off from all that makes sense.

On the other hand, do we, in a state of wondrous awe, let go of our tight grasp on such illusions and fantasies and open our hands in trust to receive the fullness of what appears before us, as though from just on the other side of a thin veil we see moving in the wind?

We tend to kill each other - or perhaps splinter off into separate "voluntary associations" - over massive wars fought over competing dismissively technocratic explaining-aways of mystery rather than participate in the action of our divine theater in one space together.

"Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us THROUGH THE CURTAIN, THAT IS, THROUGH HIS FLESH, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of trust and allegiance, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water...And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works..."

In other words, our trust and confidence is because God himself appears on the scene of his divine theater. This demonstrates for us, in the fullness of mystery and knowledge held together, what appearance means. It is inherently the bearing fruit of the gift of Love, because God is Love.

"...about Jesus at Easter. Indeed, he appears as a human being with a body that in some ways is quite normal, and he can be mistaken for a gardener or a fellow traveler on the road. Yet the stories also contain mysterious but definite signs that this body has been transformed. It is clearly physical, using up (so to speak) the matter of the crucified body; hence the empty tomb. But equally, it comes and goes through locked doors; it is not always recognized; and in the end it disappears into God's space, that is, heaven, through the THIN CURTAIN that in much Jewish thought separates God's space from human space." - N. T. Wright, in Surprised by Scripture (emphasis added by me to "thin curtain" lol)

When he said he would "return," did he mean from a whole other place that went through or currently undergoes the groaning of a whole other act of creation? Or, rather, did he mean to say that he'll reappear again on this side of the veil, just as he did through the walls of a room full of praying disciples?

"For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf."
Hebrews 9:24

In a theater, is what is behind the curtain in a different room from what is in front of the curtain, or, rather, does the curtain separate two parts of the same stage. Does all the action occur in one space, or are there two separate sets of action in front of and behind the curtain? This is an important question, because it's posed between postures of control and trust.

Notably, if you actually sit in a theater, there isn't a "right" or "wrong" answer. Because of the mystery interwoven in all that appears before the rawness of our senses, different people will inevitably give different answers to this seemingly simple question, and for different reasons. The real answer, then, is not who is correct and incorrect but who will be vindicated. What I'm telling you is the reason the curtain in my bedroom is crimson red.