The Puissant

 

An angel prevents the sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham and Isaac, Rembrandt, 1634

The Puissant

We have our admired role models whom 
it is our undeniable fate to attempt to 
understand and to emulate in striving to 
come to vexing terms with the meaning  of life. 
For scientists, it is Nature in her glorious
splendour and awesome power throughout the 
Universe. Omnipresent, indifferent, timeless, 
capricious. For the faithful who willingly 
suspend the realities of proof, it is a sublime, 
supreme deity, omniscient, forbidding, demanding 
and equally capricious, though not indifferent. 
That Spirit halted Abraham from the proof of 
faithful devotion in the sacrifice of his genetic
survival, urging upon the father of Isaac a ram,
much to the consternation of that poor beast, 
demonstrating God's selective compassion. 
Yet He also planned and executed the sacrifice 
of His only begotten son to prove his own faith 
in the devotion of the mass of humankind. Then 
again, did the Lord assume to offer an even more
puzzling sacrifice, of Abraham's heirs, in their 
incalculable numbers, the flock especially selected 
to represent God's Chosen unto the craven world 
of worshippers, trembling before a world overtaken 
by Satan's spawn. The God of goodness, hope 
and charity setting before humankind an object 
lesson in hubris, puissance and majesty before
whom all must quiver and quaver, as upon 
confronting a massive clash of ill-fated heavenly 
bodies, erupting in the flux and fiery ending of 
absolute destruction, an atomic Holocaust.