George and the Dragon

 A personal essay by Spencer Bates

Confronted with the impending specter of death and the chaos of our universe, I had to relearn what it meant to be a Christian--and what it meant to be human.

A terrible thing, to be as Gods. We stand on this whirling orb, weak, naked little Atlases, a great Red Dragon bearing down on our shoulders with the entire cosmos in his train, all bent upon our destruction day in and day out. What a burden to carry! What a heavy cross! The Atlas of myth towered; we Atlases of reality cower, knees tucked to our chests under the fury of the sky-dome’s onslaught. 

My knees tremble and my heart murmurs under the weight. It is heaviest when my bicycle’s rear tire unexpectedly skids across the steep trail behind me as the world whizzes by, when a semi materializes out of the corner of my eye and into my lane, when the snake’s rattle jumps up in a fury from just under my feet. My heart convulses and my mind spins, and everything else seems a dream. 

Do I bear this weight alone, or have I help?

The Hidden Dragon

When I was young, I was sure the star-crowned Lady in the Wilderness and her mighty Son fought off the Dragon on my behalf. In fact, I probably was not aware of the Dragon at all. Walking day by day in the gap of his maw, I laughed and giggled and shrieked with the other children. None of us knew how fragile we were. None saw the teeth and fire and tumult of our world, kept at bay only by the vigilance of our parents and the mercy tenuously accorded young, adorable mammals. 

Once I was like the deer and field mice in the woods by my home, snuffling around in the leaves with damp noses, turning each over one-by-one to find food. None knew of the leaves’ symbolic power. None had read Homer, felt the terrible weight of those lines: “Like the generation of leaves, the lives of mortal men.” I leapt into piles of those leaves, feeling and hearing them crackle. This was a season of jack-o’-lanterns, candy, and warm smells, not of contemplation or reflection. I had never heard Homer, either.

I remember weeping tears of joy and relief and desperation and God only knows what else when death
struck close to me for the first time, Christ’s tear-blurred face stern and heroic atop a flower-strewn casket. I felt so safe peering from my pew into those eyes that day. The men and women told me from the pulpit that I needn’t fear death: The Babe in the Wilderness had grown into a mighty Hero, had smitten death once and for all, had secured for us a better world that we ought to anticipate in joy, even in ecstasy. The terror of that mystery seemed lost on them as they smiled from the pulpit. Their tears were a mask for some deeper hurt that perhaps they understood no better than I did. The masks were effective, though: the great mystery of death and what lay beyond scared no one in my immediate vicinity, and so how could it terrify me?

Through a Glass, Darkly

In adulthood, the power of my reason has unveiled at least in part the true occult burden of death. The unseen Dragon now appears to me an outline, a whisper, an entity whose wrath I begin to grasp. Later, walking down the trails by the brooks, I watched leaves yanked by gravity from life to death, little crinkled comets with neither reckoning nor visible destination. To the ground they fell, only to be blown hither and thither off to an end we cannot imagine; we see them lying there as leaves in the fall, but where are they when spring comes, and what have they become? It is Mother Nature’s great vanishing act. “Like the generation of leaves, the lives of mortal men.” I see only their green little successors budding in the treetops, but these little ones have no memory of those that came before, no inkling of what awaits them in the fall.

But I have an inkling. Men and women do not vanish like the leaves when fall comes for them. I remember well the passing of one man into the death of his winter only two years ago. I remember how the resolve in Christ’s eyes atop the casket meant so little to me that day as I stared with terror at my friend’s hands, clasped over his chest and already beginning to pale and wrinkle. 

Wrinkled hands at age twenty-four? But that was just it: he wasn’t twenty-four anymore. He wasn’t anything anymore. There, in the casket, lay a form who was my friend and brother no longer. The Babe in the Wilderness had won no victory over the Red Dragon that my eyes could see. The latter had worked his work, and it was plain for all to witness lying there, tragic, broken, final. Laid low. A man once young and vibrant and strong as an ox brought to this. They said comforting words about God and the Son from the pulpit. I even said a few to the weeping congregants that day. The mask of happy tears had been pulled off, though, and I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to put it back on. Now the tears I wore were those of sorrow.

I wandered the streets in the night for days, trying to descry some meaning or salvation from the stars. Trying to pull that meaning down into my own life from lightyears distant. I saw God up there in the eye of my mind, but he was beyond the cosmos, beyond the stars and space, someplace where he could just watch it all unfold, this chaotic and violent universe of His expanding from oblivion into oblivion. Birth, life, death, annihilation, all unraveling under His watchful eye without visible intervention. And what if His Son was there with Him? Everything I have read and been led to believe says so; wouldn’t that mean He was not here with me? There was comfort in Their presence there beyond it all, but not of the kind I sought.

 I remembered too that at least a third of those stars, twinkling and benign as they seemed, were trailing the Red Dragon, corralled by his terrifyingly mighty tail and bearing down on me with all the fury of a hostile universe. The Dragon had devoured the best man I ever knew; what time was left before he would come for me, too? My shoulders heaved as I gasped in awe and terror, years of pent-up anxiety catching up with me all at once as I made the connection: what gods could turn back such a power who were not in the space between it and me? What power could I claim in its face, when I had seen its work only hours before on the greatest man I knew? How could I bear up under that kind of power and determination?

The happy tears of bishops, friends, relatives, and others had once dammed up these feelings. They represented a frightening thing, an aspect of some phantom beyond any of our experience that we were never to face honestly: better to buck up and pretend it was all alright, all swallowed up by the Babe-Hero of the Rood, and that it couldn’t bother us anymore. 

The Dragon Unveiled

An odd thing happened when I finally broke the tear-dam and faced the Dragon one-on-one, though. Suddenly, I realized that he isn’t the devil. He and the devil are quite separate, in fact. Readers of Revelation have, perhaps, been too eager to find their Satan in its pages, too unwilling to admit that this Red Dragon who reigns over so much of our cosmos is a feature, not a bug. He is no rebel, no archvillain: he is just another part of the brilliant but tragic universe God put around His children. Christ bore the cross of our sins, the Rood, and fought the “Dragon Blak” as a Scot once put it. Perhaps we must bear up under the Red Dragon of death and chaos by our own virtue, warriors learning to be as the Warrior. 

I careen now down trails on my bicycle in the sunset, the rush of the wind in my ears, and I can’t help but feel the call of the future in my mind. I defy my end in the very act of cycling, speeding through space with nothing between me and lethal impact with the earth but a thin and uncomfortable seat, two thin tires, and a fragile balance. Birds tweet among the reeds on either side of my course, only to fade into silence again, as one day—one late or one soon—I will. 

But somehow it doesn’t bother me today. I stop and compose a poem, a practice I have taken up to cope with what I know is inevitable. Warriors used to do the same, kneeling in the beautiful ancient woods and setting their swords by, unaccoutred men become creatures again. It seems bizarre to the enlightened twenty-first century Westerner, but these ancient and violent Eastern men were onto something, something we had already forgotten centuries prior in the “civilized” corners of Western Europe. Perhaps deer turned leaves over in their woods, too, leaves whose meaning the ancient Easterners knew as well as Homer: the biwahoushi sang that the hue of the flowers in their trees “reveals the truth that to flourish is to fall.”

None of those warriors knew of any resurrection, any hope beyond the grave other than to stand as guardians to the budding generation below them. I can imagine some world beyond this one where I am unified with the Babe in the Wilderness, the One who I used to think fights the Red Dragon for me. His world means something different to me now than it once did, though. His world and mine do not, perhaps, overlap as much as I once thought.

The Good Fight

Once I saw Him as the Warrior God who “did battel on the Dragon Blak,” who was (to my mind) the same as the “Red Dragon” of John. Now I think perhaps I am the warrior fighting the Red Dragon, He the Fate that awaits me after the “battel” if He awaits me at all; He’s fought His dragon already, and needn’t fight another. I am George without the sainthood, a terrified but brave knight that must learn to fight my battles without Christ’s constant intervention. My sword hand is, I think, driven by my strength, and my strength alone. The way I see it, I could do one of three things: live a life of happy delusion, live a life of realistic despair, or live a life in which I honestly confront what’s coming.

That’s why the samurai did what I do now, clouds of fire on the smoky horizon as I stand amid the reeds and sage of this world, all tucked deep into the mouth of the Red Dragon. I see his handiwork, his fire and smoke, settling on the horizon as the sun goes down and another day dies. I am deeper in his mighty jaws than I ever imagined; the entire world, spinning globe of metal and stone, exists merely by his say-so. 

 Am I really, then, so different from those warriors, child of the modern West though I am? Am I above their insight, holier than their honesty and courage? Cannot I, a Christian, learn from them, too? Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe this is the only sanity I’ve ever known.

Two short peeps he makes,
Song begun and song ended;
Man’s life in birdsong.

My bike ride continues into the twilight. I shut death from my mind again.

Image credits: Photo licensed by Pikist, photo by Donlon Funeral Home licensed by Creative Commons sharealike, photo licensed by Pixabay, photo licensed by Pixhere, photo by Doriakiz licensed by Pixabay.