Well, folks, here we are again at Happy Hour. For generation upon generation the old gang has gotten together for this window of happiness at the familiar bistro. In recent years the gang has been joined by ladies or maybe trannies. Changed in other ways too, the Happy Hour gang has gone from baby boomers to computer zoomers perched on park benches or toilet seats or still in lonely cubicles. Again we have raised our real or zoom glasses and sometimes sang-along with the concert grand Kawai Happy Hour pianist.
And now, as has been traditional for generations, to climax the end of Happy Hour, the Happy Hour pianist begins his familiar final arpeggio ascending, swelling like a mighty Wurlitzer lost in space, and then after a slight pause for musical drama, the golden finale, the final single transcendent note swollen with harmonics, a glorious CHIIMMMME overflowing with the most resonating vowels and consonants.
Alas, it’s never happened, never. Always the gang groans instead of applauds. The single anticlimactic note, it falls flat, a dud – a pile of thud on the dance floor.
And before the pitiful thud fades comes the cosmic raucous laughter, Satan belly-laughing and knee-slapping because he’s JNXED, KLNKed Happy Hour, whereupon he wheels around and without missing a beat ludicrously blames God for creating that one Happy-Hour-spoiling bleak key in Steinways. And thus spoiling rather than creating everything.
And before the thud fades and the duds pile so high it covers the pianist, the realities must be presented, clearly.
Satan. Perhaps the most brilliant and powerful, certainly pridefully evil, created angel in the universe, Satan proclaimed, ““I shall be like God, only better.” Whatever Satan knows he learned from the infinite God, and tries to one-up Him. That’s impossible so it comes out a pretty convincing facsimile or downright mockery. It comes out lies spun happily layering layer upon special effects layer, culminating in it’s all God’s fault, every disappointing denouement in the universe is God’s fault.
And over the millennia he has baited his traps with unnaturally euphoric, erotic pleasures while creating complete theological, academic, philosophical perfect chaos with utter contradiction aka doctoral debate, temporarily characteristic of certain geological niches, ranging from government mandated burnings at stakes to total cortical drug or self-induced coma, aka religious nirvana. God created us with brains; Satan distorts or even ablates them.
Satan has been especially lavish to the US of A, giving us Happy Hour and arpeggios, iffy overnight internet wealth, postmodernism and individual if contradictory truths, Hollywood’s Three Stooges now beginning to appear as the Maji in our Xmas celebrations, deliberate gender babel babble, and currently pandemic pandemonium, and woke-siness, all awarded the golden calf or the Oscar for best depiction of the most degraded human condition.
God. The creator of quarks and constellations, the whole universe from unknowable subatomic particles that are also waves and whatever else. Personified in the form He created us, this Entity also created truth and love, sacrifice expressed in action, in giving His only begotten and beloved son for all otherwise doomed humanity for eternity.
So vast was God’s love of humanity while yet enemies to Him He took upon Himself the death mankind deserves and then swallowed up that death in victory. Christ speaks happiness and peace as the world can neither give nor understand. Throughout eternity we shall never cease learning the science and song of His and His Father’s love.
Christ will personally welcome us to heaven. Heaven, whence He came and whence has returned to be our advocate, intercessor, priest. This He has done so that we may be where He is, and inhabit the many mansions He has gone to prepare for us such as eye has not seen nor ear heard of nor entered into the heart of man. And the welcoming feast, maybe starting with five loaves and two small fishes as hors d’oeuvres, but ending 100 incomparable ever-happier courses later, all garnished by fruit from the Tree of Life.
But now, as captives of the prince of this earth, we know less about heaven than about Satan’s Happy Hour cornucopia of erotic, sensual, euphoric, deeply unnatural pleasures. Satan is what seems real, even his bleak notes, like what he said to Eve seemed more credible than what God Himself had said. About not just heaven but everything, even the truths that Christ Himself spoke, and never a man spoke as He. To the natural man, even His apostles until they were truly converted, spiritual things spoken by Christ Himself, are foolishness.
Vodka we can buy at a state store with a credit card, guzzle at Happy Hour. Heaven takes faith, God’s kind with full evidence, not fideism (you could look it up) which hates evidence.
But God has given us reason to have faith. From antediluvian retentive intelligence to necessary writhing and maybe now MP4 and video, He has from Genesis through Revelation described His heavenly joy and peace that only He can impart.
By faith we know the redeemed will be learning songs of praise to God with eternally increasing intricate counterpoint harmony and grandeur, rising ever upward, upon organs with pipes and stops such as Johann Sebastian Bach never dreamed of.
It was King David who composed most of the Psalms, King David the warrior, librettist, singer, musician, lifelong psalmist from his youth when he wrote the 23’rd Psalm, to the 51st of his concupiscent middle age, to the 71st in his old age. I would like to think that after the Last Supper Christ and His apostles sung a Psalm (Mark 14:26 KJV) and went out to the Mount of Olives, to Gethsemane.
Not knowing heavenly language yet, I must speak symbolically– this Hallelujah of praise, King David’s and all heavenly singing could start with a trumpet fanfare like that which announced Christ’s second coming, eternally swelling and segueing into every type of stringed instrument, especially harps to form a grand cantata which I hope to join then. In this life I have not been able to carry a tune. Selah!
Meanwhile, back to Happy Hour and the final piano note falling flat. But to end this, Satan himself is poised to take a vaudevillian pratfall into the Lake of Fire, purifying the universe of every dub and deception forever.
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