For mortals, fantasy isn’t real but pretend. But fantasy in the hands of faithful immortals is the power of sanctified imagination to fuse thought and action and build worlds in the language of poetry, epic story, ceremony, liturgy, and ritual.
Last night Sheila and I went out with our dear friends Thor and Dana Iverson and Wesley Tullis on a little adventure. After our last earthly meal at the Colorado Mountain Brewery, we went to Mars. Why not?
(Caution: Up next are borderline book and movie spoilers from The Martian, Andy Weir’s best-selling epic novel of an astronaut stranded on Mars, made into a cinematic blockbuster by Ridley Scott, starring Matt Damon as astronaut Mark Watney.)
A NASA Secret Counsel Meeting
Much to our delight, deep into the film, mission director Venkat-Vincent Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), NASA PR director Annie Montrose (Kristen Wiig), Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) director Bruce Ng (Benedict Wong), NASA director Teddy Sanders (Jeff Daniels), and flight director Mitch Henderson (Sean Bean) convene a meeting to consider an out of the box plan cooked up by astrodynamicist Rich Purnell (Donald Glover) to bring Watney home.
Venkat calls this meeting, “Project Elrond.” Wonder why? So did Annie. Here’s the scene from the book:
“What...is 'Project Elrond’'?” Annie asked.
“I had to make something up,” Venkat said.
“So you came up with ‘Elrond’?” Annie pressed.
“Because it's a secret meeting?” Mitch guessed. “The email said I couldn't even tell my assistant.”
“I'll explain everything once Teddy arrives,” Venkat said.
“Why does ‘Elrond’ mean ‘secret meeting’?” Annie asked.
“Are we going to make a momentous decision?” Bruce Ng asked.
“Exactly,” Venkat said.
“How did you know that?” Annie asked, getting annoyed.
“Elrond,” Bruce said. “The Council of Elrond. From Lord of the Rings. It's the meeting where they decide to destroy the One Ring.”
Venkat (left), Bruce (middle) and Annie (right).
“Why does ‘Elrond’ mean ‘secret meeting’?” Annie asked.
“Are we going to make a momentous decision?” Bruce Ng asked.
“Exactly,” Venkat said.
It’s hilarious that it’s Mitch who guesses that Project Elrond is a “secret meeting” because––and here’s where it get’s doubly cool, calling for a fist-bump with Thor––Mitch is played by Sean Bean who also starred as Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001 movie). Boromir is the warrior-statesman who represents Gondor at the Secret Counsel meeting Elrond calls to decide the fate of the One Ring and thus of the world. (No pressure.) When the Council agrees to accept Frodo’s chivalric offer to take the One Ring to Mt. Doom and destroy it, the following dialogue and action unfold:
Boromir: If this is indeed the will of the Council, then Gondor will see it done.
Sam [emerging from his hiding place where he had been eavesdropping on the Council’s deliberations and running over to stand by Frodo]: Mr. Frodo ’s not going anywhere without me.
Elrond: No. indeed. It is hardly possible to separate you even when he is summoned to a secret council and you are not.
The "momentous decision" made at the secret council of Elrond to destroy the One Ring is then carried out by the nine whom Elrond names, "The Fellowship of the Ring."
In that I’ve entitled this blog series, Secret Counsel, and I’m a total Lord of the Rings nut, and I would love to join the first band of Mars colonists, you can appreciate the restraint I exercised in the theater last night when I did not stand up and yell at the top my lungs, “Yes! This movie totally rocks!"
Fusing Thought and Action
Secret Counsel knowledge is not just theoretical and conceptual, but the exercise of a concrete, creative power that brings things into being. Secret Counsel sacramentally achieves new and radical solutions to real-world problems before most people in the world see those solutions manifest.
There are two stages to bringing a thing into being. First, there's its creation in thought. Second, there's its implementation in action. What's peculiar about heroes and immortals of myth and legend is their divinely-derived godlike ability to fuse thought and action into a greater whole. For them thought and action are one and the same. In contrast, mortals are low-spirited scribes who passively spectate and record objective facts in the world around them as they manifest. Scribes are reporters, not creators. Heroes and immortals, by the fusion of thought and action, create what scribes report.
Heroes and immortals know the concrete reality of things before scribes report them.
Jesus knew things and taught as one having authority, not as the scribes (Matt. 7:29). Heroes and immortals, following Jesus’ lead, operate out of a divinely-derived authority that automatically brings ideas into being. The power of Secret Counsel knowledge is the power to shape the world by the mere offscouring of one's charisma, giving scribes something to write home about.
Thus, heroes and immortals don't fight for a victory not yet won "on earth," but from a victory already achieved "in heaven." The world is created, sustained, and ruled by those who have victory in their hearts before ever setting foot on the field of battle. What gets worked out in the world of space and time is a certain destiny already foreseen and authored by heroes and immortals in gatherings of Secret Counsel.
Creative knowledge that fuses thought and action is inherent to God’s nature, which is why what He conceives exists. With God there is no gap between the subjective and the objective. While we have no such inherent power, because God has made us in His image and likeness we can by grace inherit from Him the ability to fuse thought and action as one.
In God’s economy, participants in Secret Counsel gatherings conceive “in heaven” the reality of things before they publicly manifest “on earth.” As Jesus says, we have the authority to bind and loose on earth only what we first bind and loose in heaven (Matt. 16:19).
The primary means by which heroes and immortals bind and loose in heaven is by enacting Secret Counsel first in story and drama, like what happens in novels and movies. For mortals, fantasy isn’t real but pretend. But fantasy in the hands of faithful immortals is the power of sanctified imagination to fuse thought and action and build worlds in the language of poetry, epic story, ceremony, liturgy, and ritual.
Over the years, I’ve come to experience the Liturgy of the Church as the high-drama in which our low-spirited mortality is swallowed up by high-spirited immortality, transforming us into storytellers who cannot help but colonize worlds in thought, word, and deed.
The Power to Give Vision Being
The power to give vision being is divine. By grace we may become partakers of the divine nature and exercise such power as a gift, which some call a charism. Because we are created in God's image with this potential, there is therefore a kind of restlessness in us to see the things we can conceive brought into being.
In the Ainulindalë, J.R.R. Tolkien's account of creation in The Silmarillion, there is this wonderful passage:
Then there was unrest among the Ainur [powerful beings created by God who in turn sung creation into being via a Great Music]; but Ilúvatar [God] called to them, and said: 'I know the desire of your minds that what ye have seen should verily be, not only in your thought, but even as ye yourselves are, and yet other. Therefore I say: Eä! Let these things Be!
Those who live in the zone of Secret Counsel can be shocked that in the chronological unfolding of the world in space and time that what they've conceived has not yet been manifested. To high-spirited creatures for whom thought and action are one, this can take some getting used to. Many entrepreneurs in the business world, for example, operate this way––speaking in the past tense about things they have envisioned before they have come into being in the realm in which mortals live.
And so the Ainulindalë continues,
But when the Valar [those of the Ainur who choose to leave "heaven" and continue their work "on earth"] entered into Eä [the universe of space and time] they were at first astounded and at a loss, for it was as if naught was yet made which they had seen in vision, and all was but on point to begin and yet unshaped, and it was dark. For the Great Music had been but the growth and flowering of thought in the Timeless Halls, and the Vision only a foreshowing; but now they had entered in at the beginning of Time, and the Valar perceived that the World had been but foreshadowed and foresung, and they must achieve it.
I've come to see colonization as the act of achieving the world that we conceive in places of Secret Counsel.
Cultivating to Colonize
The Martian just keeps on giving.
There’s a scene in The Martian (film) that ties together themes we’re exploring in this Secret Counsel blog with another blog series I’m writing for CenterPoint, a business Initiative of the Basileia Abbey of St. John. Watney, a botanist by training, figures out a way to take a few potatoes and turn them into a crop so he doesn’t starve to death. Documenting his accomplishment on video (in part, for posterity, should he not survive), he combines a little colonization theory with his characteristic humor and wit:
“They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially ‘colonized’ it. So technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong!”
As I implied in my recent CenterPoint blog, “Listen to the Grass Grow,” the rational for “why I farm” is to join with other heroes and immortals in the Kingdom colonization of earth. We have a world to terraform ("farm"), making it just like heaven (Matt. 6:10).
“They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially ‘colonized’ it. So technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong!”
The word cultivate is based on the Latin cultus (“worship”). The Divine Liturgy is worship in the form of cultus, which in turn gives rise to another form of worship––culture. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, culture also means “worship,” but of a different kind than cultus. Crop cultivation is quite literally a form of worship that gives expression to the essence of what starts out as cultus. All culture, beginning with agriculture, is cultus externalized. Cultus sacramentally fuses thought and action as Secret Counsel in the drama of the Liturgy “in heaven” which in turn gives rise to culture “on earth” in colonizing efforts that achieve the world.
Culture is the outworking in space and time of a drama conceived and first enacted ceremonially by heroes and immortals in gatherings for Secret Counsel. While the Liturgy is a fantasy for mortals, the Liturgy is the stage upon which immortals structure and restore the world by eating Christ’s flesh and drinking of His blood. Such liturgical acts enact the story of the power of Christ’s death and resurrection for the life of the world. Sacramental, liturgical acts of achieving the world are stage one. Colonization is the stage two unfolding of stage one. Heroes and immortals at times can hardley distinguish between these stages.
To make the Garden in Eden a colony of heaven on earth––a beachhead for expanding into all the earth (and to Mars too!)––God commanded Mankind to cultivate and keep it (Gen. 2:15). Likewise, as astronaut Watney rightly understood, to cultivate a potato crop is the definitive colonization of a world. "I colonized Mars." Once that happens, it only makes sense to enact Project Elrond to bring him home and inspire others to follow in his steps.
Check out The Martian for yourself. You’ll see what I mean.
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Nineteenth Week after Pentecost, 2015
Boyd writes a new Secret Counsel blog every couple weeks. Click here to see the whole collection.