A Treatise on Whimsy, Pt. 3

The Young God Theory

Part Three: The Young God Theory

“A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daises alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”- G.K. Chesterton

“1 At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ 2 And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them 3 and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 ‘Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, 6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.’” Matthew 18:1-6, ESV

The disconnect between man and his stories happened over time; a cruel and torturous death. We are left with voids where our imaginations once were. We’ve handed over the burden of consciousness to our robots and the intelligence we’ve created rather than offloading it onto our pages for others to jumpstart the ones we were born with. You can see it all around you. Next time you are around a middle school student, give them the book The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway. It’ll take you just a little bit over an hour to read. They will either 1) get bored and throw it away within the first 20 pages 2) never read it at all or 3) manage to get through it but say it was “about nothing”. We slowly throughout our days become increasingly numbed by the most human of acts, that of art. We don’t “get” it because we have no soul nor imagination to comprehend such a thing. We’ve progressed beyond our own humanity. We are post-human.

It wasn’t always like this. I’m not talking about within the scheme of imaginative history from the last section. We weren’t always like this as individuals. There was a moment in all of our lives where we saw glory abound infinitely in fractalized, kaleidoscopic dreams. There were years when everything we saw was new. There was a time in our lives where we had our imagination alone and thereby had all the knowledge of the ancients and the wisdom of God himself. This was childhood.

Children are in a state of constant wonder. Everything they see, hear, taste, touch, and smell they are experiencing for the first time. They grow, and the senses get compiled in “good” and “bad” folders, neatly placed in mental filing cabinets that they take out when necessary. Babies reach for the mundane, everyday, boring things and they become much more. If we see a young toddler grab a door handle, we adults get excited, proud that the child is learning the mechanics and purposes behind the magic of doors, opening and closing. When we see that same toddler reach for a stapler, it becomes a dangerous totem of the evil one, which could harm our beloved child. Children change everything we see into something else. That’s their imagination emanating off of them and seeping down into our souls. We remember we had one then, because we see they have one, and wonder where ours went.

Yet children grow, and whenever the world becomes ordinary even to them, they escape into the wondrous heavenscape of fairy tales, monsters met, beasts slain, knights victorious, and princesses rescued. In the earlier stages they learn their external world, what is harmful and what is healthy. Through stories, because they are fantasy and can no longer represent the external world, they show a much deeper truth; the internal world. They learn the nature of sacrifice, love, and devotion. They begin to understand why their mother and father leave them at the daycare and why they feel sad whenever they return home away from their friends. They start to ponder the most basic, and therefore the most profound, of philosophies; who am I? What is becoming of me? How can I be good? What do I want to do? These lessons are not learned through the body, but must only be learned through the imagination, through their fantasies.

But they weren’t just “fantasies” in the sense of “unreal”. It was the only way forward for their planet, our planet to progress. G.K. Chesterton claimed, “it is not Earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges Earth…it was not Earth that criticized Elfland, but Elfland that criticized Earth”. Before children were exposed to the “nature” of the moon, they knew there was a man in the moon. Before children could see the tops of trees, they thought there might be a world of giants. Before children knew the harsh realities of life and work in refineries, they knew they were making clouds. Before they were ever knowledgeable of the outside world, they marveled at it with ecstatic wonder, beauty, and whimsy. They watered and cultured an interior garden and made it extravagantly bloom before they ever knew of horticulture and botany.

What was the moment when we, as individuals, and then as a culture, forget the wonders of childhood? When did we abandon our dreams for more appropriate, safe futures? When did we read the stories of old and forget what they were trying to tell us? When did we stop playing in the snow, the dirt, and the bog? When did we grow cautious? When did we become anxious? When did we abandon all that we were in exchange for nothing we were meant to be? I don’t know. But someone has to, right?

This treatise seeks to provide some sort of proposition to our cultural malaise, our social ennui, and our deprived imagination. We’ve discussed how we got here and the cultural symptoms of the cultural illness of wondrous decay. We’ve talked about where, historically, our whimsy has been offloaded, as our stories are extensions of our consciousness, a physical representation of our soul. We’ve discussed the truth of stories, how they contain the only truths worth talking about regarding foundational human elements of existence. But we’re left with a single question, one that no one can really answer; how can we get it back? What’s the original source? If the stories are offloaded from our experience as humans in the wild and wondrous world, where does the whimsical tendency delineate from?

Our stories are all legends of yesteryear, ghosts of a cultural imagination long dead and gone. But there is one story that continues to shake the foundations of the Earth, and people claim it has ripped curtains from their eyes and changed their lives. It is the only story that I know of where people convert solely on the story’s philosophical and spiritual merit. It’s the only story, that I know at least, that proposes the most preposterous and onerous claim as its starting point, not in junction with a more rational one. For again: great stories are about man experiencing God, the greatest story is about God experiencing being a man. That story is the story of Christ, the Godman.

I must, here, provide a theological background with some insights into the nature of this supposed Godman; something the scholars call “Christology”. From the moment he began claiming “I am”, people who claim to be his followers argued over the nature of Christ’s duality. For he claimed that he was God, yet stood there with his ears, eyelashes, wrinkled 30-something year old skin, and toenails like a man. He was the vulgarity of all humankind while also claiming the infinite, eternal formless God, Logos to the Greeks. How can that be? God has no plaque in his teeth. God has no need of a bathroom. God has no itch to scratch. But Jesus did. He claimed things like, “I and the Father are one” and not in the unified, hyperbolized version some claimed he was, but rather they were one in the same.

That is why the dual nature of Christ, being both God and Man, was the most controversial issue for early Christians. For nearly 300 years, Christians argued about what Christ meant whenever he claimed such things. It was an argument over this dual nature of Christ between Arius and Athanasius. Arius claimed Jesus was not fully God, Athanasius disagreed. They both garnered a certain following, but they couldn’t be simultaneously correct. The early church decided to meet at Nicaea in 325 A.D., a mere decade after it was finally safe to meet at all as Christians. They then devised a creed; a system of beliefs all must adhere to if they are to call themselves Christians. Most of it was about the Godman named Jesus Christ.

Still, there was infighting. Disagreements about the exact nature of Christ was the leading cause of separation from the mainstream orthodox Church. They never once considered the idea that it was supposed to be a mystery. If Christ is all-knowing then he cannot be all-known. We were reaching aimlessly in the dark attempting to explain that which is only meant to be known by the highest level of imagination called faith. However, though he cannot be all-known, Christ can be known rightly.

A short time after the Council of Nicaea, a man named John Chrysostom began to write some theological treatises. He claimed something that made quite a lot of sense in understanding this Godman and the church tended to agree with most of the things he said. He claimed that Christ was “essentially” God but “experientially” human. This means Christ was God in “essence”, his very being is that of God. He was God in consciousness. However, he experienced existence as a human. That is why he was hungry, why he wept, and why he anguished in the garden.

The nature of Christ must be seen in this way, or else his life becomes incoherent and illogical. For how did he pray to God? Why was he afraid of facing the cross? Why did weep at the loss of Lazarus? How was he able to be baptized? Because he was a man in experience and God in existence. To this day, this is highly contested and controversial. For these mere statements, one can be subjected to the most diabolical of punishments, and the opportunity to pray for an enemy.

But it also creates an interesting notion for our current dilemma. If we desire to gain whimsy back, since we have lost it to the burden of disenchantment, and left it with our stories, which are offloaded consciousness bred by our experience, then Christ is the only Godman who can save us. For he is the only God who knows how to be a man; because he had the courage to become one. Stories before Christ were stories of man experiencing God, and they were scripture, true, powerful, and worthy of consideration. Yet Christ is the Godman, and he can tell stories of God experiencing being a man. He experienced what it was like to be angry, and he told stories about it. He experienced what it was like to be in the throes of loss and grief, and he told stories about it. He experienced what it was like to die and live again, and he told stories about it. That’s why his stories are still talked about today as if they were still happening, and Thor, Ares, Jupiter, and Thoth are only known by the scholars who analyze their graves.

This is the standout characteristic of Christ compared to other Gods, men, and Godmen. This idea is what separates Jesus Christ from the other myths and miracle workers. The grand connoisseurs of whimsy, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis discussed this at length in the same conversation I quoted towards the end of the last part. From this conversation (which should be referenced at length on your own time), they were discussing how significant stories are to humanity, and how Christianity plays a distinct role in this. Myth is human thought, as we have discussed. It is human cognition offloaded and seen as truth, not in substance, but in content. Myth occurs when we are too dumb to understand ourselves and God. Therefore, we must resort to stories as a reflective process; myth is but a mirror. Tolkien remarked in the most scholarly whimsical why by saying, “now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact…by becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle”.

Here is the truth; the story of Christ is preposterously illogical. If you were to read about an all-good, all-virtuous teacher who was convicted of a crime though innocent, killed in the most violently humiliating way, and rose from the grave to forgive the moral degradation of mankind, you would think it was a novel written by some far off writer, from some far off place, at some far off point in time. It is a fantasy. It is ridiculous. Yet it has transcended all other myths, fantasies, and fairy tales by becoming not only truth, but fact. This is myth transcending into the material world. Creator made creation. Heaven touching earth. Fantasy reaching reality.

This is the most whimsical story ever told. The true myth of Christ is the most magical of all. Since his incarnation, he (or at least an imitation of him) has become the subject of every hero. Hercules died the moment Christ rose, for there is no longer a need for a hero to slay beasts, for Christ had slain them all. People began noticing a change in their motive. We do not live any longer for our own glory, but for the glory of the Godman, who has won the only battle we could not fight with steel; the war with death itself. Surely, we have abandoned our souls and unburdened ourselves with the gravity of our own consciousness by placing it upon artificial angels and pixelated prophets. Surer still, we shall find it on Golgotha’s hill and in a silent tomb in Jerusalem, where there is no stench of decay, but the blossoming spring of redemption.

Why, if it be that apparent, do we not immediately run to the mountain, arms stretched wide? Because every scholar knows, in order to provide a truth, you must also have a method. Methodology is a means by which we obtain truth. The dominant method of the modern era is the scientific method, which claims you have a hypothesis, test that theory with experimentation, record your findings, and interpret those findings. There are other methods though, lost through the slow pangs of disenchantment. The most profound one, is the method by which we know the stories to be true, especially the “true myth”, which is faith.

Faith is a particular form of imagination. It is the bridge between fantasy and reality. It makes the blind person see, the lame man walk, and the captive free. Yet, if misplaced, it leads to the most horrid of consequences. That same faith can lead to manipulative leaders preying on the weak imaginations of the vulnerable. Faith can move mountains, but it can also murder the masses.

Faith is the strongest imagination because of its purpose; making fantasy reality. If you make false fantasies reality, you get spiritual decay. Two Mormon men had faith that their God told them to kill their sister-in-law and her 15-month-old baby. Young, radicalized Muslims had faith that their God would reward them if they killed themselves and their enemies. Even those who have the wrong kind of faith in the “true myth” are at risk for this depravity. Perhaps more than the others.

Yet if you have no faith, then there is inevitably despair. Soren Kierkegaard famously posited in his book Fear and Trembling, “if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”.

Yet life is much more than that! We enjoy those whimsical moments of petting a dog, breathing in the first cold air of autumn, that first smell after you lift the lid from the cooking pot, and the warm embrace of mom and dad. Life is magic! Only if we have faith in something. Even those that have faith in nothing have a strong enough imagination to classify itself as faith to bring some sort of magic into the inevitable mundanity of modern earth.

But who has the capacity for such wonderment? Who in their right mind can observe the world through such whimsical means? We live in a world of taxes, 9-5 jobs, student loans, war, famine, high school break-ups, school shootings, and big pharma. We have too much on our plate to be dabbling in such fairy tale, mumbo-jumbo nonsense. Maybe that’s why we gave up our imagination, because we had faith in the world when it was never meant to be worth it. Maybe we have grown old, yelling at the kids to get off our lawn. Maybe we’ve grown tired, too tired to write a little story or a poem before bed. So, we gave up the very thing that made us human, so we can have just a little less on our plate. We replaced the wonder of when we were young with the automatic thoughtlessness of adulthood.

We all have a sense of spiritual nostalgia. It is, as stated in Part One, one of the symptoms of the loss of whimsy. We have forgotten what it meant to be young. The G.K. Chesterton quote above has haunted me recently. We have become spiritually old. We remember the good old days when we had nothing to worry us but our own joy, so we tended to it well. We knew that it was magic that made man happy. We knew that it was fantasy that made sense of all that we see and hear and touch. And we’ve lost it all. That is the weight of sin, and the true burden of disenchantment, to grow up, and forget what it was like to dream.

At this point of our logical stream, we need to obtain that childhood back. We all desire to retrieve what we have lost, which is why we are so nostalgic. And therein lies a piece of the “true myth” that makes the story of Christ a self-inducing whimsy machine. Christ himself is the highest form of fantasy, because he alone was the only myth to transcend myth itself and become fact. Yet also, Christ contains the highest capacity for wonder, because he was the all-transcendent God experiencing the world as a man. Therefore, it seems the Godman knows, through experience, what no other God does; what it’s like to be a child.

There are pieces of apocryphal literature that attempt to create a certain mythology around the Godman’s infancy. It seemed to be one of the first questions people like to ask when someone claims to be essentially divine. They mull and ponder in dull so-called aphorisms such as, “where did this God come from?”. In an act of perhaps self-preservation, or in a merciful gesture of invitation, the Bible which claims to be the truth of this Godman is silent on the subject. There is very little written about what we desperately need to know.

Nevertheless, we can wonder. We can imagine. Maybe when the text is silent, that is when faith must become our guide, our method unto something substantial. Imagination, when fully formed and cared for, becomes faith, and faith moves mountains, kills dragons, heals the sick, and casts out demons. So, if I may, in a last-ditch effort to save myself from the burden of disenchantment, I will choose to imagine, and allow it to fund my faith, as a stream does the ocean. I implore you, to wonder whimsically with me.

Christ claimed in the verse above in Matthew’s gospel that the greatest in the kingdom of heaven were little children. Why? It seems ill-fated for children to be the greatest. They have no wisdom, no insight, no crown, no glory, no honor just yet. They are still growing, learning how to use their bodies, and understanding the foundational principles of humanity. It is also a tremendous tragedy when one dies. If heaven is populated with the souls of children, then Earth is littered with their little skeletons.

I think it all exists, every last drop of glory, in the Christ-child. Yet again I say, children are perpetually whimsical. No matter the cultural boundary, ethnic home, or language, all children are the same. Their state is perennial, universal. The existence of a Christ-child supposes that the essential God, the everlasting “from, to, and for” of Creation, saw with human eyes the interests of man. He began to cry when the infant consciousness rushed to his tiny head. God himself limited his majesty to being solely dependent on a human woman, nursing at her breast and finding comfort in her touch.

As the Christ-child grew, was he like every other child? For that reason, we ask was he like every other man? To a degree of finality and emotion, he was. To another degree of infinity and deity, he certainly was not. Yet, we focus on the former. If he was like every other man in experience, then he was like every other child too. Did he marvel at the grass beneath his feet, seeing grasshoppers and crickets pounce whenever he stood by them? Did he gaze at the clouds and make them to be creatures? What did Christ see in the sky? Did he smile and giggle when a butterfly landed on his little finger? What fantasies did God make when he was prancing about the lilies on human feet and following the sparrow’s flight with human eyes?

This explains the Chesterton quote above. God, in his infinite capacity for wonder now through the Christ-child and his subsequent experience as the Godman, has maintained his youth. Yet we, in our quest for worldly glory, have exchanged the means to achieve a heavenly one. For we are old, and God is young. He remembers gazing at the stars just as much as he remembers setting them in their place. He remembers the feeling of cold river water on his toes just as much as he remembers etching its course with his hands. He remembers the warmth of the sun’s mighty rays just as much as he remembers igniting its initial blaze.

Furthermore, was it then God himself developed the necessary words, the proper philosophy, the truest truths to share with his world? The modern Christian will have a hard time thinking about other influences on scripture besides divine inspiration. But that is not what I am claiming. Quite the opposite. Within Christ’s words we see the everlasting impact of the wisdom gained during his childhood. These wonderful and whimsical things we’ve been discussing about the nature of the Christ-child is the divine inspiration.

Christ’s death showcases God meeting his own wrath, but that must be contrasted with Christ’s life, which perhaps reminded God on the goodness of his initial creation. Christ must have saw the world with all the silliness and unfettered whimsy of the children of your yard or neighborhood. That is why they call them the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Because they are born with the default setting of exuberant imagination, imagination to the point of faith. They have no other care than their own joy, supplied by their parent and their parent’s guidance within the ecstatic beauty of God’s glorious world.

That is why Christ uses the word “Abba” when talking to God. Abba is a childish word. It is a nickname meant for a child in reference to his father. Many modern Christians focus on the “dad” aspect of God’s nature. I wish for us to focus on the childish position Christ takes in the Garden of Gethsemane and the cross, when Christ is at his weakest. Children, when they are at their weakest, look up to their father for guidance as well. Sometimes the father leaves them to struggle, knowing it is the best route for whatever comes next.

That is also why Christ calls us to be “born again”. We have forgotten our childhood, but Christ did not. He found within it the greatest possible wisdom and the noblest possible pursuits, which is faith. This process of rebirth, however, must begin with death. Many Christians believe Christianity is a religion of life, indeed it is everlastingly. But faith begins in death. It’s the backwards life, the upside-down kingdom of God. Humans live from birth to death. Christians live from death to birth. For there is eternal life only after temporal death. This is why Christ is severe while at the same time silly. He reminds himself of seeing the lilies and the sparrows as a child and devises a parable that proclaims the truth of faith, while at the same time claiming, in all four gospels, “whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it”. It is why Paul, the misunderstood brute of early Christianity says in the freest sense, “I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives within me.”

This is the new birth, to resurrect our faith in the impossibility of God and work in Christ. God in Christ, and his salvation through Christ, is the truest truth yet it can be only understood by the faith of the child. Children are effervescently wise. They know it not; it is their nature. For they are much closer to having been with God in heaven than a 30-, 40-, or 50-year-old. Their seemingly impossible capacity for whimsy and wonder comes from the one who has the infinite capacity for the same tendency of infancy, imagination.

Because of the confluence of these things that I say it is Christ who is the objective of every philosophy and the motif of every myth. It is Christ who is the recurring, endless, eternal, and infinite theme resounding throughout the annals of history. It was Christ’s beauty the myth maker attempted to convey, though flawed. It was Christ who was at the end of the logical inquiry of the philosophers, the end of their attempts at virtue and wisdom. He is the source of every good and perfect gift, including the internal, infinite ones of imagination, wonder, whimsy, and marvel, which we have grieved him by abandoning for the foolish endeavors of our own convenience.

That is why Christ in the above passage in Matthew 18 ends with a harrowing conclusion. To destroy one’s inner child is to sell you soul. To a certain degree, it is sin itself. It is the loss of innocence for the sake of some worldly pleasure or gain. It denies the certainty that God has given you all the pleasures you shall need, the wild wonders of life as a kid. He knows you need them and indeed knows because he was one of us. He is the only God who knows his creation a posteriori, from experience.

How much more, now, does it grieve the heart of God that we may jeopardize the very mechanism that can know him, the purest and highest form of imagination, which is faith? The burden of disenchantment, the unloading of our consciousness now unto artificial altars, and the selling of our childhood has left us with culturally chronic anxiety. We’ve not only been ever so awakened to the maze of the modern world, but we have also lost the way out. Not only have we lost faith, but we’ve also lost its precursor, its prerequisite, the imago dei. We’ve even distorted faith itself by thinking science and archeology are the foundations which we build our hope upon. Blessed more so those who believe without seeing, says the Lord. If faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and the confidence in the unseen, then what does that say of us, who only believe what we do see. “I need evidence” used to be the cry of only the atheist. Now it is the wobbly surface upon which Christians now build their faith.

Faith is an inherently childish value, yet it is the highest value. To believe, trust, and hope for something unseen is the antithesis of modern thought yet is the power of miracles. To kindle it, care for it, and nurture it like the child itself will present to you a host of unimaginable strengths. In fact, it will allow you the power Christ had, victory over death. It is will by whimsy, to have faith in the impossible. Faith is the final form of whimsical strength.

It is within the halls of faith, with its shield and promise of new birth, that we have our revolution. The push back against the dark arts of artificial living and the slow creeping of the digital demons will be victorious, only if it’s a children’s crusade. For even Christ, when faced with the eternal anguish of sin and death, still called God “abba”, as if he were a child. It is with this childish faith that not only do we receive favor in heaven, but victory on Earth. Yet we burden ourselves with the most devious sin of all, the sin of spiritual age.

But what makes a person spiritually old? What blinds them from seeing God and discovering all that he may contain? I believe it boils down, ultimately, to one singular symptom: the apathy towards discovery. There is nothing more devastating than this malicious resolve. With that very breath when one says, “I don’t care to know”, one gives up the very thing that makes him human. To know is to be human. Rene Descartes’s maxim speaks worlds; “I think, therefore I am”. Going somewhere new, reading a new book, researching a new topic, meeting new people, trying new food, praying new prayers. This is the soul of man, to know the glory of the Lord, and those who seek will find.

The quest for knowledge has always been our greatest pursuit. It got us kicked out of Eden. We attempted to gain knowledge that wasn’t yet for us. Yet “knowing” Christ is what the apostle Paul writes as the thing worth losing it all for, for everything grows dim under the “surpassing worth” of knowing Christ. There must be some sort of balance between these two seemingly contradictory forms of knowledge. One says to pursue knowledge is to ultimately invite sin and death into existence, the other says it is the very means by which we are saved. Which is it? For both circumstances, we wanted to be “like God”. Paul wants to imitate Christ. Eve was tempted to see what God sees.

It seems there is only one way out of this logical conundrum, to realize that there is much more blessedness in imitating Christ than becoming omniscient. Christ is God’s plan to relieve us of sin by giving us, through the most theologically perfect route, exactly what we wanted; to be like him. The old maxim, “God became man so man could become like God” is not necessarily wrong, but it misses a key to the formula. We always wanted to be him. It was why we ate from the forbidden tree, built a tower to heaven, and made golden idols of ourselves.

Imitating Christ is to imitate his childishness: 1) his innocence manifested in his moral perfection and tarnished by the spiritually decrepit (you and I) 2) his connection with the mysterious, unseen God, his “abba” manifested in his undying, whimsical faith and misunderstood by his very disciples and 3) his command to be born again, to be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, confusing to those around him because they, much like us, have grown old.

I urge you, dear reader whoever you are, to constantly discover God. To restore yourself, daily, to the joy of your salvation. Many people today want sermons that give you practical steps and programs to achieve spiritual enlightenment. That’s not how Christ works. 12-step programs are for the old and decaying. We are but children. Children don’t need road maps. They just begin walking and see wherever their road may lead them. That’s what we have to do. We hold truths tightly to our being, integrating them with our every move, but faith is the driving force of it all, and faith comes from imagination, and imagination from whimsy. Do not let it be done by the computers. In fact, spend a large amount of time away from them. You will be awakened by the sickening addiction we all have been inoculated with, and you will want to throw them away forever. Mark yourselves lucky for the luxuries of modern life, but be cautious of their appeal, for they seem to now begin to take more than they give. Do not allow the burden of disenchantment to suffocate you. Treat the world as if it is alive with resplendent wonders unknown to even the brightest, wisest men yet understood as typical, quotidian knowledge by the youngest child. Rediscover everything again. In doing this, you will be born again. This is the revolution against the tech tyrants of our day. This is our progress, by staring into the pit of an unknown humanity, realizing its path to doom, and turn around to our default settings. A factory reset where we, once again, see the lilies spinning and the sparrows’ flight, and worry not for our God is younger than we, and has known death, and defeated it.