Joy

     After the resurrection, "The Powers that Be" refused to be outmaneuvered.  Having been soundly beaten in the public opinion polls, their initial reaction seemed to be surrender ...and Christianity spread throughout the western world ... but Truth was never their favourite tool, instead they found ways to insinuate lies and deception into the very core teachings of the new church, to corrupt the very words, language, and concepts even as they seemed to support them ... individuals like Emperor Constantine, Saint Augustine, the august members of the Nicene Council, the Popes, and later on King James, John Milton, and others, they all managed to subtly alter the message that Jesus had delivered, in ways delicate but powerful...

     Darkness will never be destroyed ... emptiness, utter stillness, and absolute zero will always be just around the corner.  They are not forces, they represent the absence of force.  They are not people, or gods, or devils, there is no intelligence behind them.  Those people who teach that pain, suffering, and loneliness can be eliminated forever, they have an insidious desire to teach people utter hopelessness as they begin to suspect that that message itself is a lie.

     "He is Risen"

     Joy unbounded.

     It is what it is, it can be brought forth in every thing, in every person, in every place, and time.  There is nothing else worth living for, nothing that can be made to be permanent, nothing that lasts, certainly there is no scientific basis whatever for the mathematical concept of "eternity".  It is ephemeral, it is ethereal, it is the mists rising from the grass in the morning that will burn off in the afternoon.
     Ours is the potential, the possibility, to create happiness, new, in the people around us.  Jesus showed us more ways to do it.  Don't try to make it into more than it is, do not try to capture or keep it or turn it into stone, else you will lose it forever.