Second Terrace

i am not a liberal

I am not a liberal. 

At least, not in the way that some people think.

Having grown up in the evangelical community, someone who was “liberal” meant that he did not believe that Jesus is God, or that He was born of a virgin by the Holy Spirit, or that He rose from the dead, or that His crucifixion saved humanity from sin, or that the Bible stories of miracles are true, or that Scripture is authoritative and communicates God’s Word.

I believe all these things.

In this sense, when I became Orthodox, I became even “less liberal.” In addition to the above, I also believe things that are even older than the evangelical community. I believe in the necessity of baptism for the remission of sins. I believe that the Eucharist is the bread and wine transmuted into the Body and Blood of Christ. I believe in the continuing presence of the saints, led by the greatest worshiper, pray-er, and worker of all, the Virgin Mary.

But there has been something of a “confusion of categories.” In the aftermath of the mass shooting of 19 children and 2 teachers on Tuesday (May 24th), I was called “liberal.” Why? Because I called for the minimum age for gun purchase to be raised to 21, nationwide. Because I called for universal background checks at every gun purchase – including gun shows and private sales. Because I called for the ban of the sale of military weaponry – including assault rifles – to civilians.

This, I’ve been told, is “liberal,” despite the fact that I have never once called for the repeal of the Second Amendment. Despite the fact that I support the right to civilian handguns for protection and long guns for hunting. Despite the fact that all these reasonable gun safety measures are supported by the majority of Americans.

But in the minds of many (too many), any mention of public gun safety puts me in the same category as those who cannot endorse the tenets of the Nicene Creed.

I shouldn’t be too surprised. I’ve wrestled with this difficulty for some time now. I oppose abortion, but I try to be consistently “pro-life” in my opposition to abortion, extending from before birth to after birth. Thus I support universal healthcare and safety nets of all sorts. I believe that there must be stewardship in the care of the environment and that global warming and climate change are real things. I believe in the necessity of public health policy in addressing pandemics, and that data from mainstream science takes precedence over minority conspiracy theories. I believe in socioeconomic justice (like the Prophets, the Apostles, and the Saints, and the Lord Himself), and that our three centuries of American slavery has deeply affected our past and present and needs to be taken seriously.

And I disbelieve in the “stolen election conspiracy theory.” I disbelieve in the QAnon pedophile conspiracy theory. I disbelieve in racial replacement theory. I disbelieve in male-centered domination and what is known as “complementarianism.”

And for all this, I am called a “liberal.”

I will own up to that label in that I am deeply committed to universal suffrage – i.e., one adult, one vote. I am committed to the freedom of religion and the complete severance of the church from any collusive ties with the state. I think that neo-integralism (and all theocratic theory) is not only anti-American, but that it is deeply anti-Christian. I am committed to the eradication of autocracy and oligarchy and every kind of tyranny and totalitarianism. I despise all racisms. I deeply distrust all nationalisms and ideologies.

No nation-state is elected by God for a special purpose, neither Russia (as in the ridiculous notion of the “Third Rome”), nor America. I’m thankful for my country indeed, but I do not put my religious belief in it.

And I think there can no longer be any earthly monarchy: I have only one King, and that is the Ascended Lord, Jesus Christ, King of kings and Lord of lords.

Historically, then, on the bases of the political opinions in the last three paragraphs, it would be correct to call me a liberal.

I would argue, though, that these particular "liberal" beliefs – including my arguments for commonsense gun safety – are rooted in faithfulness to the Gospel. Call it what you will, whether conservative (as in old fashioned) or radical (as in deeply rooted), I hold these truths, that “all men are created equal,” that every human wears the Face of Christ, that Creation is loved and desired by the Creator -- Who commands the tending of His garden -- just because I believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Saviour of the world. 

Liberal democracy is rooted, fundamentally, in the personalism of the Gospel. We are persons only because the Trinity is a Unity of Three Divine Persons. We are democratic only because of the integral humanity of the Son of God. Our communion with divinity in the Body of Christ has affected and ordered all our relations – even and especially in politics.

Call me liberal, if my politics bother you. But the libertarian insistence that there can be no public imperative for safety and civility, that there should be no mandate for epidemiological measures, that there can be no restriction of military arms sales, that the reason for mass shootings is mental health or video games -- anything but guns -- such libertarian insistence is grossly liberal. Libertarianism is precisely what happens when liberalism is severed from its Christian roots. Libertarianism is nihilistic as it is antagonistic to the self-denial that is necessary for the life of any community.

(Unlike well-meaning "post-liberals" like John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, I draw a sharp distinction between essentially Christian liberal democracy and essentially non-Christian extremely liberal libertarianism. I harbor no nostalgia for "Christendom.")

I do not suggest that anyone espousing libertarian doctrines (like unrestricted gun sales and use) is “not Christian.” Anyone on any day may hold to opinions that digress from the Christian faith, and no one can determine the precise boundary when one has excommunicated himself for that reason.

But I can say this. The espousal of libertarian doctrine, and the partisan support of authoritarianism, and the adherence to celebrity and personality cults, are beliefs that are far more modernistic than my own so-called “liberal” notions.

My call for gun safety, in these heartbreaking days after the slaughter of children in Texas, indeed is “political.” Of course it is. Everything that has to do with community and relationships is political. Jesus' saying, 
"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these My brethren, ye have done it also unto Me," is a profoundly political statement.

But the very accusation that I and others are “politicizing” this tragedy (a charge made by Senators Cruz and Rubio and the boisterous mayor of Uvalde) because we are trying to prevent this sort of "American carnage" from happening again and again and again -- is the most politicized (and heartless) action of all.

ideology and bullets at buffalo

The shooter in Buffalo on Saturday, 2:30 pm, did not show up at the scene of the crime by accident. He had used census data to locate his target: a grocery store in a predominantly African-American community.

He left no doubt as to his motive. In a long screed -- a "manifesto" -- he complained about the falling "white birth rate," even using demographic statistics culled from any one of a myriad of sources on grievance internet sites. He referred repeatedly to a conspiracy theory about the white race being displaced through intermarriage, immigration, and violence. It is a deeply anti-Semitic theory, as – like Tsar Nicholas II’s “Protocols of the Elders of Zion" – it fantasized that powerful and rich Jewish men were behind the conspiracy of “replacement.”

And so this 18-year-old was going to do something about it, armed with an assault rifle, body armor, even tactical headgear. His assault rifle was modified with a kit he purchased on the internet. He scrawled, with a permanent marker, racial slurs all over the gun. 

He got in his car, driving three and a half hours and over 200 miles, from Conklin New York to Buffalo. He tried live-stream his brand of “racial justice” on Twitch.

Ten people were murdered (including an 82-year-old widow) for the sake of white nationalist ideology -- an ideology that stokes itself into a frenzy about changing demographics -- that whites will no longer be dominant; that the American version of Protestantism will no longer have the influence it once had; that socialism is somehow replacing libertarian capitalism.

Ideology is not merely one "option" out of many possible opinions, a "freedom of choice." Ideology is not just intellectual laziness (which it is). Ideology supplants Christian theology -- it drives out faith and belief and charity.

Ideology rips apart community. Ideology always turns extreme.

Ideology turns human persons into inhumane agents of wrath and destruction. 

I say this because the “replacement” manifesto of a murderous 18-year-old is exactly the sort of screed I received in an email I received some years ago. The benighted author lived in the DC area and was employed somewhere in the federal government -- he told me in "intelligence," which I found hard to believe, given its oxymoronic character.

He was trying to get me -- an Orthodox priest -- and other conservative clergy to sign on to a letter to "the Bible-believing church leadership" – begging them to demand of the US government protection of "the white Christian establishment." 

This man, too, deployed statistics and was wringing his hands over the "diminishment of American white Christianity."

I replied simply and concisely. I told him there was nothing Christian about his concern about “white Christianity.” He could say this as a radical ideologue, but he could not spout “replacement theory” as a Christian.

There is no such thing as “white Christianity.” The minute these words are uttered, that language might be white but it is certainly not “Christian”: “In Christ,” St Paul said, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free” (Galatians 3.28). And, neither white nor black. Race – as demographically defined by loudmouth TV pundits today – is a modernist construct and has nothing to do with faith.

I told him that Christianity need not be so cowardly, that it had nothing to fear about any demographic change. That Christianity was robust enough to walk into any secularism, any sort of liberal democracy. I told him, too, that he hadn't a clue as to what socialism was (especially as he was conflating that with communism -- an all too common and uneducated error that too many politicians leverage). 

And lastly, I told him that his white nationalist thinking makes racist violence likely, if not certain.

Well, here we are.

If I were writing to him today, I'd say that at least one of the bullets of Buffalo yesterday had his name on it.

But years ago, when I wrote him back, I told him to never contact me again. That is, until he had repented of his wickedness in sackcloth and ashes.

Today, it is grievous that my own Orthodox community seems to attract many who hold to this "replacement theory" ideology. This is part of a larger trend in American Orthodoxy in particular, along with American Christianity in general, of a lurch toward rightwing authoritarian ideology.

It should be impossible to believe in a feetwashing and crucified Jesus in one part of the heart, and to embrace racist authoritarian ideology in another part.

To do so is to fail to discern the Body of Christ, St Paul says, and "That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have fallen asleep" (1 Corinthians 11.30).

In Orthodoxy and elsewhere in Christianity, in America and in the world, we have to work hard and bravely for the Holy Apostolic Tradition -- and thus we have to denounce replacement theory, QAnon theory, stolen election theory, and all sloppy extremist-driven conflations of socialism with communism, conservatism with rightwingism. We have to stand up for Jesus and denounce authoritarians, and their ideological fifth columns.

Why is this so? Why has ideology taken the place of theology and belief in so much of American Christianity?

Because Tucker Carlson (and his ilk) have more influence than your congregation's preacher, or your Sunday School teacher, or your neighborhood Bible Study leader.

Or, more likely, the Bible has less to do with too many preachers and Sunday School teachers and Bible Study leaders say than what they've heard on extremist TV. 

People would rather hear "do you want to get mad?" stuff on cable rather than theology from the pulpit. People would rather hear evangelists spit and crow about pedophiles in the deep state, and not the red-print of the Gospels.

While we've long complained of leftwing radical ideologues, we've closed our eyes to eyes to the steady and "nativist" march of rightwing ideology and its punditries. Perhaps these talking heads looked too much like us for us to notice.

So. Every single real Christian preacher has a sacred responsibility to resist extremism in their congregation and community.

Every single Christian leader and teacher is called by the Holy Spirit to proclaim the truly-traditional Gospel of peace, rationality, and justice. True Christology. True Trinitarian faith.

And every single Christian has heard the truth that every human face is the Face of Christ: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.”

Demographics and ideology hide this Face.

Because when a shooter shoots, he shoots Christ.

Pray that we don't end up being complicit.

the third sign

The Seven Signs

The Gospel of John can be read as having four parts: a Prologue, (John 1:-1:18), the Book of Signs (1:19 to 12:50), the Book of Glory (or Exaltation) (13:1 to 20:31) and an Epilogue (chapter 21).

There are Seven Signs in the second section:

1. Changing water into wine at Cana in John 2:1-11 - "the first of the signs"
2. Healing the royal official's son in Capernaum in John 4:46-54
3. Healing the paralytic at Bethesda in John 5:1-15
4. Feeding the 5000 in John 6:5-14
5. Jesus walking on water in John 6:16-24
6. Healing the man blind from birth in John 9:1-7
7. The raising of Lazarus in John 11:1-45

Of course, there were many more miracles. John said as much at the end of the Book of Glory: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book” (John 20.30).

But John emphasized especially these Seven Signs for a single purpose: “… but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His Name” (John 20.31).

These Seven Signs reveal just that — that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. If you believe this, then you can have eternal life, in His Name.

In the all-important sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus says this about “life in His Name”: “I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him Who sent Me; and this is the will of Him Who sent Me, that I should lose nothing of all that He has given Me, but raise it up at the last day. For this is the will of My Father, that every one who sees the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6.38-40).

Each of these Seven Signs is Jesus working the will of the Father. Each Sign is Jesus’ invitation as the Good Shepherd. It is a revelation so that we might see Him and believe in Him.

There is a beautiful progression in these Signs. The First Sign was Jesus changing the water into wine at the Wedding in Cana. There was a lack, a deficiency at a Feast, and the joy of the occasion was in peril. Mary the Theotokos interceded for the newlyweds and the family, and Jesus acquiesced to her request. The wine that He provided, miraculously, was of the very best vintage. “This, the first of His Signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested His Glory, and His disciples believed in Him” (John 2.11).

What is real faith?

The Second Sign also occurred in Cana. And this one shared some similarities with the First. Someone comes with a request. Jesus first seems to refuse the request. The questioner persists. Jesus then grants the request. Then a new group of people believe in Him. Contrary to other miracles, after these two Cana miracles, there is no discourse. And, after the first two Signs in Cana, Jesus goes immediately to Jerusalem.

Jesus says something during this miracle that bothers a lot of readers: “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe” (John 4.48). This is one of John’s emphatic points in his Gospel. Belief in Jesus — whether you call it “belief,” or “faith,” or “religion” — that is based on the spectacular is of a lower, less firm, quality.

Jesus calls for faith that is based on communing with Him. He desires us to love Him because He first loved us, in giving us His Body and His Blood. Faith that is based on witnessing signs and wonders is little better than being impressed by a magic show. That kind of faith will come and go, at the first appearance of difficulty.

Real faith is more than just being impressed by spectacle, by flash and thrill. Beware of and be skeptical of loud preachers that shout about “signs and wonders.”

Real and authentic faith is the recognition that Jesus is the Son of God, and our relationship with Him.

Real faith is life that is eternal, an eternity that is begun in the here and now.

Which is precisely the lesson of the Third Sign, the Gospel that is appointed for today, the Fourth Sunday of Pascha.

The Healing of the Paralytic

The “Feast of the Jews” most likely was Pentecost. The Jews were obliged to go to Jerusalem at the three major feasts — Pentecost was one of them, the other two were Passover and the Feast of Booths (or Tabernacles).

The Jewish Feast of Pentecost was a celebration of Moses’ receiving the Law on Mount Sinai. This is important, because Jesus’ relationship to the Law was an important subject in all four of the Gospels, and John’s Gospel emphasized the Law regarding the Sabbath.

John makes clear the Christian fact that Jesus Christ is now the new Moses, the new Lawgiver: “A new commandment I give to you that you love one another.”

It was on the Sabbath that Jesus came to the Pool of Bethesda, which in the area northeast of the Temple where the sheep were brought into Jerusalem for sacrifice.

The pool itself was large: about 200 feet wide by 315 feet long, divided by a central partition. On each side was a colonnade, or covered porch. A fifth colonnade sat atop the middle partition — hence the “five porticoes” in John 5.2.

There was an old local tradition that occasionally, an angel came and stirred up the water. The first person who got into the pool after this was healed of his maladies. So one can appreciate the crowd of the sick and the disabled waiting in the porches, alongside the pool, to get in.

The paralytic was a man with atrophied limbs who had been sick for thirty-eight years. This does not mean that he was at the pool all this time. This is a detail of the story that speaks to its concreteness and authenticity — manufactured tales do not have these kind of details. John is famous for this: at other places, he gives the precise time (3 to 6 am) that Jesus appeared to the disciples walking on the water, and he even gives the precise number of fish (153 tilapia) the disciples caught after the Risen Lord tells them to throw their nets over the other side of the boat.

So the ailment was not a temporary thing, something that one could just wait things out until things all got better. It was permanent. It was hopeless.

It didn’t help that the paralyzed man was petty and dull. When Jesus asked him “Do you want to be cured?”, the man responded with a complaint. He said that had no one to help him get down into the water. He also said that by the time he shuffled down to the end, someone always got in before him.

St John means for us to raise an eyebrow at this story. Really? He languished for thirty-eight years, going to the pool, waiting passively for a miracle, and he blames everyone else?

The paralytic was not a bad man, but really, he wasn’t all that great. The paralysis lay not only in his atrophied limbs. More seriously, it lay in his will, his desire, his belief, in his mind and heart.

The paralytic is us

That is exactly why our main hymn today wraps us all into one song: “With Your divine protection, O Lord, as You once raised the paralytic, now lift up my soul paralyzed with all kinds of sin and evil deeds of wickedness, so that, as saved, I may cry to You: ‘Glory to Your Might, O Merciful Christ!’”

That’s just what hymns do: they lift us up into poetic splendor of the one timeless moment of the Divine World, the Precinct of the Holy Trinity where the Theotokos, having passed beyond the Judgment into the Resurrection, intercedes for us always, saying to her Son and her God, “They have no wine,” and she tells us, “Do as He says.”

We are like this poor paralytic. Or maybe I should speak for myself: “You are truly the Christ,  Son of the Living God, Who came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the first.”

We should all “speak for ourselves” in the Presence of Christ. We are all the “first of sinners.”

The Rescuing Shepherd

I love John 5.6: “Jesus knew that he had been sick a long time.” Jesus knew. Jesus knew. St John, in his Gospel, underlines the beautiful fact that Jesus knew and understood humanity. Jesus is the Good Shepherd Who knows His sheep and calls them by name and leads them to abundant life (John 10.10). He is not a hired hand who runs away when the wolf comes, when the lion threatens. He leads His flock, He does not drive them: “I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23/22.4).

Jesus is the Living, Risen and Rescuing Lord Who goes to every length, and descends to any depth, no matter how dark and desperate, to find the one lost lamp who strayed away from the ninety-nine. No matter the intensity of the storm. No matter how long the darkness has stretched into the night.

Even if that night has gone on for thirty-eight dull, atrophied years that’s left us a moral weakling, blaming everyone, complaining about our lot in life, in the Great Dismal Swamp of moral poverty.

“Stand up,” Jesus commanded, very much not participating in the paralytic’s self-pity. “Pick up your mat, and walk.”

Well, this was abrupt, and came as a shock to the man who had grown accustomed to his paralysis.

“And at once the man was healed.”

We are not given, in the text, any details about the process. In other places, we are told that Jesus took saliva and made a salve with mud (John 9.6, the “Sixth Sign”). Or that He took the hand of a little girl, and said “Talitha cumi” (Mark 9.41).

But here at the Pool of Bethesda, there is only Jesus’ words, and then the simple statement “the man was healed.”

When there are no details, St John means for us to pay attention to Jesus Himself, and what the Sign means — that Jesus is the Son of God.

The Lord of the Sabbath

To his credit, the man picked up his mat and began to walk.

But it was the Sabbath. The scribal and Pharisaical expansions of the Mosaic Law — which had devolved the Covenant of the Loving God into a legalistic, juridical code — framed explicit prohibitions against work on the Sabbath. Carrying things from one place to another is the last of 39 works forbidden in the Mishnaic treatise Sabbath.

The Sabbath was meant as a day of rest, because God Himself rested on the seventh day of Creation. But men had sunk the theology of divine love into the picayune do’s and dont’s of fundamentalist lawyers, Inquisitions and Puritanical theocracies that “When a convert is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves” (Matthew 23.15).

We Orthodox Christians are particularly vulnerable to the temptation of the Pharisees. With our emphasis upon ascetical works -- like fasting, long services, prayer rules -- the perennial temptation is to frame them as "expansions" of Holy Tradition. And some of us move beyond mere legalism and juridicalism -- we go so far as to join in the Pharisaical contempt for those who break regulation. We revile those we regard as "unclean," who lay outside our definitions of "Orthodox Christian." Some have even taken the mantle of Epiphanius of Salamis upon themselves to look for heresy and denounce every supposed appearance of it.

But what if the "Sabbath-breakers" that upset us are "taking up their bed and walking" because Jesus told them to? Christians who are known by Jesus and who in turn know Him do not go in the business of determining who's in and who's out, the clean and the unclean, and drawing boundary lines that divide the acceptable faithful from the unacceptable rest.

It is clear that Jesus deliberately performed many of His miracles precisely on the Sabbath, doing the works of the Father. And why?

He did so because He Himself is the “Sabbath rest.” He is the “Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2.28). It is in the Body of Christ alone, in communing with Him alone, that we have our “rest.” “Take My yoke upon you, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11.29).

The Light of the true Sabbath

When they saw the ex-paralytic walking around, carrying his mat — which was something along the lines of a bedroll, like a sleeping bag — many were offended. The poor man was breaking the letter of the Sabbath regulations. So they came down on him, and hard.

“It’s the Sabbath, and you are not allowed to be carrying that mat around! Who told you to pick it up and walk?”

What is missing here? The wonderful healing had been lost sight of. The “offended” people paid attention only to the infraction of regulations.

And something else was missing: Jesus’ Name! When asked “Who told you?”, the healed man didn’t have a clue! Jesus had slipped away into the crowd at the pool.

Later on, Jesus found the ex-paralytic, whose atrophy had been miraculously reversed, walking around in the precincts of the temple.

Once again, it is Jesus Who does the finding. It is Jesus Who knows, Jesus Who does the work of the Father.

Jesus told him, “Remember now, you have been healed. Sin no more lest something worse will happen to you” (John 5.14). It is important to remember that the Lord rejects the nasty idea that illness and disability are consequences of someone’s sin.

The sin that Jesus is warning the man — and all of us — is real sin, participation in evil. Fr Raymond Brown writes that “Jesus brings out what a man really is and the nature of his life. Jesus is a penetrating light that provokes judgment by making it apparent what a man is. The one who turns away is not an occasional sinner but one who ‘practices wickedness’; it is not that he cannot see the light, but that he hates the light … it is a question of radical evil.”

The “something worse” that Jesus warns of is the “outer darkness” of rejecting God’s Light and Love.

What happens next, as St John concludes the story, makes one shake his head (“smh” is the texting abbreviation).

Right after Jesus meets him in the temple yard, the man “went off and informed the Jesus that Jesus was the One Who had cured him” (John 5.15).

Some commentators, both ancient and modern, see this as outright treachery (Theodore of Mopsuestia, friend of St John Chrysostom, asserted this idea).

But St John indicates that this is not betrayal, but rather that the man is just naive. He’s still pretty dull, even after the miracle.

I think this confirms how real and true to life the Gospel is. Jesus, the Son of God. The miracles and the Signs of Jesus’ divinity do not exclude the humanity and the shortcomings of the people He draws into His Eternal Life.

Divine Light and Life penetrates and pushes out sin — but it takes time, and growth, and work and effort, and cooperation.

The ex-paralytic is learning something very important. He cannot be passive anymore, just waiting around for 38 years and complaining that nothing is happening.

It’s time for him — and us — to get up and walk, and sin no more. ❦

Elon Shoots the Moon

Elon Shoots the Moon

Mr Elon Musk had, by now, checked off many items in his bucket list. The creation and, more importantly, the cashing out of PayPal. The digging of big holes through six US cities by the Boring Company. The implantation of Neuralink brain chips in monkeys (though that didn’t work out too well at a 70% mortality rate). The successful launches of manned spaceflight by SpaceX.

He was particularly pleased by his acquisition of Twitter. “Imagine,” he chortled to himself, “people wanted me to pay taxes, or even,” he guffawed, “to help the poor.” It was only logical that he restored the once “permanently banned,” and opened the floodgates of the loud and alternative voices all for the cause of “freedom of speech.” And the money from all the subsequent rage-tweeting flooded his overflowing coffers.

There was only one thing left to do, one still as yet unchecked item. One thing remained in the bucket: going up himself. That is, sitting himself down in the Dragon crew capsule and taking a rocket ride atop a Falcon, even a BFD Starship.

So that is why he is elevating up the launch gantry right now, in his designer space suit, accompanied by the best pilot that money could buy. Elon couldn’t remember his real name, but the ace’s nickname was well-known: “Angel.”

Under his breath, Elon warbled his golden tune: “Money, Get back. I'm alright, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack. Money, It's a hit. Don't give me that do goody good …” 

Angel interrupted: “Everything is green for launch Mr Musk.”

Elon couldn’t believe how easy the launch was. It was dreamily smooth. He hardly felt the weight of G forces pressing him into the launch chair. He congratulated himself for the design of the spacecraft, and, to be perfectly honest, his own excellent physique.

Here they were in weightless outer space already, floating and not a care in the world.

“I’m outpacing Starman,” he tweeted, referencing the spacesuited dummy that was floating in the Tesla driver’s seat somewhere in the Solar System.

Then things went strange. The Moon loomed up in the dome window of the Dragon’s cupola. This was supposed to be just an orbital flight, maybe a stop off at the International Space Station. Not a trip to the moon.

“Hey, Angel, you made a wrong turn!”

“No Mr Musk, this is our destination. We’re going to the far side of the Moon.”

“I demand that you turn this thing around and take me home. And after that, you’re fired!”

“Mr Musk, I’m afraid that there’s been a change in your, errrr, eschatological position. There can be no round trip. Yours is a one-way ticket.” With that, Angel turned on some appropriate music, one of Pink Floyd’s best albums (his favorite). “Us and Them is good,” Angel said. “Money would be coming at it a bit too strong.”

Having crossed the horizon to the far side of the Moon, Elon was amazed that things were not at all what he had expected. “Everything is so green and beautiful!” he gasped.

“Why yes,” Angel replied. “We’ve crossed the sublunary sphere. No more mutation and darkness over here. You really ought to have studied your Ptolemaic astronomy better, Mr Musk.”

The craft glided down and landed softly in a green field. Angel opened the door and a warm fresh breeze wafted in. Elon stepped out onto a waving sward of verdant grass. 

As far as he could see, there were beautiful magnificent houses, gleaming white, nestled in the hills and trees. The horizon stretched much further than anything on earth – and the lawns were filled by all kinds of people. Laughter and singing echoed in the hills.

“Who are these” Elon asked, waving at the expanse.

“Everyone,” Angel said. “It wouldn’t be heaven if it weren’t.”

“Everyone? But everyone has a mansion! Even the poor? Even the deadbeats, the lazy, the undeserving?”

“Why, yes. The meek shall inherit the earth, after all.”

“This isn’t fair at all,” the unhappy billionaire twittered, and then he delivered the punchline, his life note:

“What’s the use of being rich if everyone else is?”

Angel sighed. “It’s been very hard being your guardian angel. I’d much rather be up on cloud nine strumming my harp. Ah, the music of our choir, the harmony, the joy from these heavenly inhabitants floating up into our hearts and leaping into our music. You haven’t lived until you’ve sung that singular song.”

“What rot! You’re not just a bad pilot. You’re a rotten guardian angel. You’re fired!”

Angel shook his head. “This is not The Apprentice. This is the dark side of the moon.”

“No,” the rocket man said, “This is hell.”

“You’re welcome to climb back in your spaceship. But I won’t be coming this time.”

"Justinian didn't like it either," he added, sotto voce: "Too many people. Too many of the wrong kind of people."

The owner of SpaceX climbed back aboard the Dragon and the craft took off to another horizon.

The Angel sang, softly, “Out of the way, It's a busy day. I've got things on my mind: For the want of the price, Of tea and a slice, The old man died.”