[This article is excerpted from a semi-autobiographical novel I am writing, entitled “Reluctant Angels”, about a global network of humans which functions as a countercultural ekklesia under the guidance of angels overseen by the Christ. Nathan Delver is one of the main protagonists. ]
EVEN FROM THE COSINESS OF HIS BED, Nathan could sense a crispness in the air outside. The temperature had dropped sharply overnight from Autumn to Winter. He walked to the window and looked down onto the normally verdant park below. The first frost of the season lay on the grass, on which starlings hopped about, leaving their footprints, like fifties teddy-boys beating the bounds of some new territory. Down the road, to the right, the same van was there as had been for some five days. Its colour was an orangey brown, rather like the hue of diarrhoea after eating at a dubious curry takeaway. Two men, one in a suit, the other more casually dressed, sat in the front seats, who Nathan presumed to be agents from the Group for Citizen Realignment — euphemistically known in government public liaison circles as “Group R” — a psyop outfit jointly run by MI5 and Special Branch, designed to straighten out dissidents with “re-education”, so they can become “more constructive members of society”, using a mixture of intimidation and wave technology. One can recognise them by the array of electronic gizmos built into the rear windowsill and a tiny antenna-like device on the roof which, appropriately, he always thought resembled a grinning goat’s skull.
In the same way that legitimate targets of “Group R” were those who openly critiqued the breakdown of society into decadence regarding sexuality, sodomy and claims about multiple genders, they had also begun to target those who denigrated mainstream religion. Thus, one could still attend a church provided one did not proselytise about Christ, yet one could not only attend a mosque but one could also stand on a street corner and preach about Muhammad. This is why the Reluctant Angels [RAGS] had to meet in secret and were hunted down by “Group R”. A friend of Nathan had been arrested for using the word “Churchianity“, and an acquaintance had disappeared after writing an article entitled “Christ Never Came to Start a Religion“. The mainstream religions were tightly controlled by “Group R”, who regarded them as “useful to the cohesion of society“. Nathan had even read about the apprehension and public denigration of a philosophy professor who said during the course of a lecture that without the centrality of absolute truth a society will be destroyed by the chaos of “situation ethics“. These were interesting times, pregnant with the hallmarks of a creeping totalitarianism which, while currently merely national, threatened to become globally invasive when the projected world-government would be implemented.
Nevertheless, despite those minor distractions, Nathan Delver was thrilled to be alive — to have woken up with all his synapses intact, despite the continual bombardment of the waves from various mobile sources (against which he had learned the art of protection) — and the thought of any surprises that his service might bring on this new day thrilled him even more. He consulted his calendar. It was Monday, October 31st, 2024. He noted a meeting at 8pm with the local Reluctant Angels group but, before that, at 5pm, there was a mysterious meeting which Livinia had arranged for him in a downmarket greasy-spoon café, of all places. He had no idea if he was supposed to be meeting an actual person or was scheduled to be involved in some other assignment. All he knew was that he simply had to show up and then whatever was meant to happen would happen. He had only been doing this work for eight months and was still feeling his way into it. Loving the learning curve, it was the only work he could ever want to do and it both excited and daunted him.
As he set about preparing his usual simple breakfast, he became aware of a disturbance in the Quantum Curtain which signalled to him that this was no ordinary day. “What’s happening here?”, he said aloud but almost under his breath. Then, within, he thought: ‘There’s a strange little touch of darkness in the air. Where’s it coming from?’ He walked back to the window, tea in hand. The car had gone; but there were other, stranger, things afoot in the street. A man was walking along in a determined sort of way with a band placed on his head with two pieces of metal sticking out of each side, so that the effect was of a long knife thrust through his brain. Red gunk was oozing out of where the entry and exit wounds were supposed to be. His face was painted white as if in shock and the eyes were blacked-up as if they were sunken in a skull. The girl beside him, struggling to keep up with him on her excessively high heels, was covered in “blood spatters” with two exaggeratedly elongated canine teeth and a huge wooden stake which looked as if it was sticking through her heart and coming out of the back of her chest cavity.
“Of course!” said Nathan aloud. “Now I understand! It’s that day again! A whole year has passed since the last one, and yet it feels like a few weeks. Where IS time going these days?” A complete essay then wafted into his mind, entitled “The Telescoping of Time in the Closing Years of this Aeon”. [Readers can find this essay in an appendix at the end of the book].
It then dawned on him what Livinia might intend for him to handle today. He was going to be like an innocent abroad — like a child alone on the street in a zombie movie — like putting a live grenade into an arms cache. He spent the day preparing himself by doing simple cleaning chores around his home; for those were an outward symbol of what he also had to do within himself on a day such as this. Little epiphanies popped into his mind and old skins fell away. Crucial questions were taking shape in his head out of nowhere, like condensation forming on a windowpane and running onto the paintwork below. And always the silent whisper of Livinia reassuring him like the hand of a faithful friend on his shoulder.
At 4pm, Nathan Delver stepped out of the house into the cold clean air of the day; his breath clouding around his face playfully. Within minutes, he became aware of a strange sense of excitable energy at work among the people that he passed in the streets. They were upbeat and positive; focused and outwardly joyful. It was as if they were escaping from the monotony of their work and the reality of their enslaved lives into a space in which they could at last be themselves and express their true heart. That’s what one would think. People emerged excitedly from the doors of shops, offices and buildings along the way. They were laughing with glee as if their existence was finally being fulfilled. Yet all of them were dressed up in ways which shocked Nathan to the core. It seemed as though every ugly, dirty, rough, nasty, violating, belligerent, violent, dark and evil urge had come to the surface like bloated corpses floating in a sewer. It was as if people were trying to outdo each other in filth. The competition on the street was “how can I gain kudos by being as repulsive as possible, with no constraints on bad taste or morality?” In fact, it was as if people had risen that morning, thinking: “How can I best celebrate evil today?”
“What kind of a world am I in?” said Nathan aloud to himself “where people would even want to behave like this?” Of course, he already knew the answer; but he was always shocked by it, nevertheless. He considered how much a sense of togetherness and harmony is an important part of social cohesion; but what kind of cohesion is it when it is based on the worst and most violent impulses in the warpedness of the fallen human heart?
He tried to stand in people’s shoes to understand what was happening around him. But that changed nothing. For when faced with the choice to emulate an angel or a demon he would choose an angel every time and could not understand why anyone would do otherwise. Why, if all people wanted to do was “enjoy some good clean fun” (as they so glibly say) based on imagination skills and shared experience, could they not play at being angels or beings of light? This is the way he was thinking.
When lost in deep thought, time passes quickly. So it didn’t seem long before he arrived at The Eldorado Café. It was an insalubrious dive inhabited by labourers, lorry drivers and students from the nearby university slumming it in order to be “woke” and trendy. The food had a reputation for being revolting but it was cheap for those who merely wanted to stuff their faces. Nathan had been there once before. He remembered how the door had been so stiff to open that he had even wondered if the place was closed. So this time he pushed on the door (which had obviously been rectified) with such force that it flew open and he literally fell into the café. The whole room looked round at him. He straightened himself and sat down at an empty table. It was covered in graffiti which had been painted or carved into the surface over decades. One said: “This year thousands of people will die from stubbornness”, underneath which another hand had written: “No we won’t!” In another place, it said: “Some people are so poor that all they have is money”. He chuckled heartily to himself at the inventiveness of the human spirit.
“What’s so funny then?” said a voice next to him. It was a waitress ready to take his order. “Oh, it’s just the table”, at which she had no idea what he was talking about. After all, how could a table be funny? “Do you have peppermint tea?” at which the waitress rolled her eyes to the ceiling and said “Typhoo, orange juice, pepsi or water.” He ordered a juice and waited to see what would happen. He became mesmerised by a shaft of sunlight which shone through a skylight window onto a girl’s face at the table next to his. She had a serious expression, while those of all the others around her were jocular and animated. Soon, he became aware of some sniggering from that table. It was bustling with students in pre-party mood who were revelling in what they thought was a cool working-class paradise in which to hang out. They wanted some sport. Then a voice said: “What are you going as?”
Nathan turned around: “Excuse me?” The table was chock full of inebriated students meeting up before going to their Halloween party.
“I said what are you going as? You don’t seem to be dressed as anything”.
It was true that the contrast between Nathan’s garb and those at the adjacent table could not have been more marked. There he was in an olive duffle-coat, flowery open-necked shirt and orange trousers, while the table next to him sported a range of (mostly black and white) bloodfest gory gothic clothes-porn.
“That’s right, I’m not dressed as anything because I’m not going anywhere as anything other than myself”. And then he smiled kindly.
Almost the whole table then started jeering and mocking him. “Get in the spirit, old man! Come with us if you want”.
“That’s very kind of you to offer but I’ll take a rain-check, thanks”. Nathan was most amused to be called “old man” at forty-two years of age. He felt an urge to continue the conversation into the territory where he now realised it was supposed to go: “I see you’re wearing a tee-shirt with ‘Je suis tueur en série’ written on it, in dripping red paint, by hand — presumably by your own hand”. The boy nodded furiously while laughing grotesquely. “That’s French for ‘I am a serial-killer’. Are you aware of that?” He nodded even more furiously, as if he was possessed. Then almost the whole table started to cackle with laughter with him.
Nathan fixed his gaze on them all and said: “What would you think if I came in here wearing a tee-shirt which had the words written on it, “I am a Rapist”?” Immediately, their demeanour changed into one of anger and gravity and a masculine-looking girl who sported a Skrillex haircut said venomously: “Yeah right that’s not funny, okay?” Nathan noticed that she was wearing an earring which had what looked like a bloody human ear hanging on it.
He fixed his gaze on them even more, thinking ‘These young brainwashed grinksa are so easily triggered’. He then said in a quiet, non-aggressive voice: “You’re dead right. It’s not funny at all. But where is your logic? You think it’s perfectly okay to pretend to be serial killers, vampires, demons and any other psychos which violate people’s space and lives but you draw the line at a rapist. Yet they are all essentially on the same sick, invading, controlling, destructive power-trip”.
“Yeah but that’s so not true”, said one of the other girls. “Rape is really really serious, but the other things are just a joke, right?”
“No, not right”, Nathan replied. “Not for those who’ve been hurt by a serial-killer or any other psycho. You think it’s funny to celebrate wanton bloodshed and massacre? They are in the same dirtbag drawer as rape. You’ve been brainwashed by trendy movements so much that your logic is all over the place. You may think vampires are a funny thing to mimic but they’re symbolic of demons in another dimension which really do take over people’s minds, sucking the life out of them. And those demons are having a field-day tonight, feeding off the debauchery of humans who have forgotten what angels are. This is dark stuff. Very dark. But it’s one of the elements of life in this world which we need to understand before we can begin to make sense of our existence”. Nathan became animated and moved his arms around in slow sweeping motions. “Who do you think controls all these activities — even the so-called celebrations you’re doing tonight? Why do you think there are so many movies about vampires and zombies and invading aliens taking us over? Why do you think that movie-goers are being desensitised to extreme horror, violence and bloodshed? Look up the word ‘archons’ when you get the chance.”
The group was looking a little more serious now but still would not respond to his questions. There was a brief silence then one of the guys said: “Listen man, you probably don’t realise it but Halloween is an ancient pagan thing which has been celebrated for centuries. It’s harmless. Just loosen up. It’s all just some good clean fun.”
To which Nathan replied: “My friend, I know only too well about the pagan festival of Samhain, of which Halloween is a vague modern remnant. Like many pagan festivals it was rooted in dark superstition and enslavement to demonic entities. I know it’s trendy and romantic to glorify paganism but that’s the height of naivety. Naivety and darkness is a volatile mixture”.
The group stared at him with a mixture of puzzlement and resentment, as if they were children having their toffees taken away from them. But Nathan continued…
“Samhain was seen essentially as a celebration of chaos and destruction, in which spirits of any kind would be unleashed on the earth. People would dress themselves as ghosts and ghouls to disguise themselves in the hope of not being possessed by the spirits. In order to depict the abolition of order and a descent into chaos, people would switch genders and cross-dress. Animal sacrifice was practised. So when you say “Halloween is an ancient pagan thing which has been celebrated for centuries. It’s harmless. Just loosen up,” you’re really showing your naivety. We are in the midst of a battle with the forces of darkness. This festival of yours is based on superstition and ignorantly wallowing in that darkness. It reveals what side you are on in the battle”.
“Oh man!” intervened one of the guys in the group. “Stop lecturing us! You think you’re so right. Just do your own thing and we’ll do ours!”
Nathan: “Well hold on; I’m not out to stop you doing your thing and, yes, I will continue to do mine. I can assure you that I don’t want to be right. I want to be light! But if you remember, I was just minding my own business waiting for a drink and you asked me why I wasn’t dressed as anything. It was you who challenged me. All I’m doing is responding to your phenomenal naivety. Why do you think this night is a celebration of evil, darkness, ghoulishness, satanism, demons, extreme bloodshed, slaughter, violence and mayhem — all of which is even encouraged actively by the government? The archons are laughing all the way to the soul bank!”
He shifted himself forward onto the front edge of the chair and turned even more closely to their table, as if he was about to say something even more important than what he had said before. “Can you imagine if, instead of Halloween, there was a national day set aside in the Western world for the celebration of goodness and beauty, the glory of the Christ, angels and seraphim, archangels, and so on? Would people want to be going to parties to celebrate that? I don’t think so. There is definitely some hidden force at work which is warping people away from Light into darkness.” (He emphasised the word “Light” with its capital “L”). “I would tell you about the Christ and why He came but you would only roll your eyes“.
The group, almost all of them, rolled their eyes. “You only roll your eyes because you’re ignorant about all this at the deepest of levels. That’s hardly surprising because most likely no one has ever given you a plausible explanation. That’s why I’m here tonight. It is not a coincidence that you and I are having this exchange this evening. It has been specially arranged”.
At his use of the sinister-seeming phrase “specially arranged“, some in the group looked as if they were beginning to listen. Maybe Nathan had been sent by “Group R” to test them! Suddenly, a large rough-looking young man with green-coloured hair and the words, “I am the clown you always feared!”, written on the back of his bright purple clown-coat (he was also made-up as one, so that he looked like The Joker from Batman comics) approached the group at the table, saying: “Is this guy botherin’ you?” jerking his thumb in Nathan’s direction. “I’ve been listenin’ to ’is bullshit from over there and I’ve ’ad enough”. One of the group replied “Yeah, he’s full of shit but he’s just some screwed-up old guy who hasn’t got a clue”.
Nathan smelt the air, smiled, then began to take his leave. He raised his non-existent hat and swept it round in front of him and bowed, in the manner of Cyrano de Bergerac. The evil clown who came over to the table shouted: “Now ’e’s takin’ the piss!” And with that he walked up to Nathan and grabbed him by the hood of his duffle coat, pulling him towards the door.
Nathan: “Livinia, where are you when I need you. This hasn’t gone well”. Then he heard that silent voice within him saying “I’m always right here and it’s gone extremely well. Just watch and wait”.
One of the girls at the table who had been very pensive and quiet throughout the conversation rose to her feet and placed herself in front of the clown-to-be-feared and said with the sweetest smile: “There’s no need for that. It’s okay. We can take it from here”. The clown looked surprisedly into the girl’s face — which was sure and radiant, full of youthful innocence and framed by a halo of naturally-curly strawberry-blonde hair — and removed his hand from Nathan’s hood. He made an impatient noise with his teeth and lips, then departed quickly from the café, muttering to himself. Nathan realised it was the girl in the shaft of sunlight. His eyes briefly met hers and he smiled himself quietly into her being with a “thank you”. Strangely, he hadn’t been aware of her at the table as she had remained silent throughout. He made a note to himself to be more conscious in future of those who didn’t speak as well as those who did. He knew very well that music can often come from the silent ones even more melodiously than from those who voiced their words. He saw a deep beauty in those eyes, together with a reticent honesty which warmed his heart. That reticent honesty only seemed like a tiny spark in a darkening world, but it was one of the building blocks on which the new aeon would be founded. From tiny sparks explosions flow. From little seeds, whole fields can grow.
At that point, having forgotten that Nathan was about to give them a deeper explanation, all the group got up and left the café. The girl who had defended him was the only one who looked at him and she smiled caringly as she went.
Two hours later, the girl who stood in front of the clown was standing in front of the bathroom of her studio apartment looking at herself in the mirror. She had excused herself from the party to which they had all been invited. Recently, she had become increasingly dismayed by the whole Halloween routine and the discussion in the café had brought her suspicions home to her even more. This was like the final straw, for in her heart she had been quietly questioning so many aspects of her life and why she was even alive. She had the feeling that she was caught up in a charade which was not of her own making, as if she was a diamond in a disused sewer. She studied her appearance in that mirror and concluded that she had somehow tarnished herself in some deeply serious manner — not only tonight but accumulatively over many years. The blood spatters on her clothes; the simulated axe-gash on her neck; the ghoulish make-up on her face; the photographs of amputations she carried in her bag, her earrings with a large upside-down cross hanging from them. The whole ensemble felt demeaning to her humanity and to the beauty of the nature in which she never wandered. She ripped off the clothes and put them in a black plastic bag, closing it shut with a double-knot and leaving it by the apartment door. She dived into the shower to remove the make-up. Afterwards, she felt cleansed in more than just her body. Many questions popped into her head one after the other. Why had she never felt this way in earlier years? Why had that earnest middle-aged man suddenly appeared just when she needed to hear what he said? She knew she would never disguise herself in that way again. In her freshly-clean mind it almost seemed like a wonderful conspiracy, as if unseen forces had planned this day for her [which indeed they had]. She remembered a saying she had once seen in some graffiti on a bridge: “When the pupil is ready, the teacher will come”. Now she was excited. More questions came bouncing into her brain like bullets ricocheting around a firing range. Her work, her relationships, her life, all came under scrutiny. “Why do I carry on doing a course which drains my energy and gives me nothing?” “Why do I go out with stupid men who don’t deserve one minute of my time?” “What is that ‘new aeon’ which that guy was talking about this evening?” “And what exactly are archons?” She had also often sensed the presence of some dark force seeking to interfere in her life, dragging her down into a morass of depression and even the contemplation of suicide. Suddenly, for the first time in her life, Greta Wagner (for that was her name) had the feeling of some presence around her which was the very opposite of that dark force to which she had almost succumbed. The words from the conversation earlier in the evening had made sense at so many points. She simply hadn’t joined the dots before. She wished she had said more to Nathan, asked him questions, instead of staying quiet; but peer group pressure is a worse taskmaster than a sadistic schoolteacher and many times more controlling. There was now a thirst within her for understanding, which surprised her greatly. She had never really been one for studying and learning but now, here, on this Samhain night of supposed chaos and destruction, she instead felt the beginnings of a sense of order and reconstruction at a very profound level. Tears of gratitude spontaneously welled up in her eyes and all of a sudden she fell to her knees sobbing at her life of stupidity and vacuousness — a life she wanted so desperately to leave behind [as indeed she later would]. “Please help me!” she cried out. “Please show me the way!” She had no idea at that point to who or what she was crying out, other than that it was a force and power beyond her current understanding — whoever it was that was enthroned behind everything. But the words just rolled off her tongue with ease. Although she had never done such a thing before, it all felt completely natural. She somehow felt as if she was “coming home” without knowing what or where “home” was. Something had fallen into place — something she had longed for all her life without even realising it. A piece of the jigsaw puzzle had been put on the board which now revealed the big picture. A light had switched on that she knew would never be extinguished. She felt a deep healing taking place within her, like clean water rippling through the underground passages of her heart, and a silent voice said to her soul — “I am here. I will never leave you”.
At the stroke of midnight, on Tuesday November 1st, 2022, Nathan was sitting on a park bench near his home. The local RAGS meeting had gone well the previous evening, but he had been shaken by something he’d said earlier in that greasy-spoon café. He was ashamed that he had doubted the process of what had happened and that he had doubted Livinia’s infinitely superior wisdom. He knew very well how ripples of that spontaneous sea will always find their destination, whether or not he had any awareness of what that destination would be. He also knew that most of the time he would most likely never know which ripples went where. (He was then unaware of Greta’s later recruitment into RAGS and would only find out three months later in January at a European meeting in a disused quarry in Lithuania). He only had to stir up the ripples in this three-dimensional prison-planet and the higher powers would turn those ripples into tsunamis of revelation and transformation. Epiphany. This is how it works. Every time. “It will never happen again”, said Nathan aloud, hoping that Livinia had heard. “I know, my lovely, I know”, were the words which echoed silently deep inside him. And he wept.
So, Nathan’s tears and the tears of Greta that evening were like a sacred flood to drive away all the dark spirits from their lives — to keep them at bay in the angel’s way. No rituals needed. No superstition, appeasement, religious acts, animal or human sacrifice. Two things only bring new life: An overwhelming realisation of all previous stupidity (that is, alienation from the Divine and the resultant violation of natural and divine law), together with a passionate thirst for a present and never-ending burst of Light from the Creator of this cosmos. Nathan already knew the true source of that Light in the Logos, which he had longed to talk about in that café but which wasn’t then the moment for it to happen. In a disused quarry in Lithuania, Greta would fully discover it for the first time in her life and Nathan would have the opportunity to explain it to her, as well as realising that the events in that café on October 31st were solely about the recruitment of Greta Wagner into the community of RAGS. For she had already long been questioning what she observed around her in her search for truth and knowledge. One only has to begin just a tiny little bit to step off the conveyor belt of brute existence for powers beyond human imagining to sweep in and caress you with a wash of educative vigour.
These were then the thoughts of Nathan Delver that night: There is no end to the dark inventiveness of the untransformed mind, which it kids itself are entertainment or “good clean fun”. Such a mind is like fodder for those discarnate or incarnate entities who imagine they run this world. For this earthly theatre and all the actors in it belong to its Creator. There are those who admit that and those who deny it. But denying something does not prevent its reality. Fortunately.
[This article is excerpted from a semi-autobiographical novel I am writing, entitled “Reluctant Angels”, about a global network of humans which functions as a countercultural ekklesia under the guidance of angels overseen by the Christ]
© 2018, 2021, Alan Morrison / The Diakrisis Project. All Rights Reserved. [The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]
diakrisis-project.com 