The disparity between the randomness, chaos and cruelty of nature and the aspirations of the human heart for forgiveness and understanding are reflected in two different masks religions usually give to the divine: God the Just Judge and God the Loving Creator-parent. There is usually some attempt to have love trump justice, and that reflects well the human hope for acceptance, forgiveness and love. That for which we hope we trust in, and that which we trust in we love. We define God, we set our ultimate goal within our hearts, and so we define ourselves and our world today and for eternity because all times stand together, connected and enduring. Our awareness of a moment may flow on and fade, but the moment endures, and that is the ultimate basis of responsibility. No act, no state, no time is ever absolutely past, merely past for our awareness of it. The moments we create endure forever, and in them we endure forever. Therein religion finds its basis for the narratives of heaven and hell and life everlasting. We can speak of a Creator only because we find ourselves creating. We can speak of life eternal because the time we create, our moments past and present endure forever, linked, meshed, melded, woven together in absolutizing endurance, purest history. The future is the potentiality of time awaiting its externalization in the absolute of experience, of communication, of communicity, of community.
It is this creation of meaning through experience, of living in time, that is reflected in the Platonic philosophical theory of Logos (creative idea) and its Christian theological parallel mask of Divine Word (the Son in and through whom all is created). The divine transcendent can enter, become immanent, incarnate, only through and in its Word—its process of creative and communicative thought. Communication—be it with nature, self or other—is the groundwork and being of all creation and creativity. Christian sacred writings begin and end with the creativity of communication: “in the beginning was the Word…”, the Word names itself “alpha and omega” (the alphabetic parameters of the Greco-Roman world) and speaks “behold, I make a new heaven and earth”. The intelligent experience, the communicity of our existence creates, spins out, weaves our world and eternity.
We can move from moment to moment building with creative and positive, with loving acceptance. We can fixate on moments and revisit them with tortured hearts and weave a knot of frustration and deformity. We can create, we do create—really, concretely, and eternally–our own heaven, our own hell.