When I was young, my favourite summer days were the first Mondays of the month when the new comics came out. I’d rush out to the drugstore to buy the latest Superman. I was a DC fan because Superman wasn’t serialized. One story and it was over. One fully realized moment after another.
The problem with Superman is that he can fly really fast around the earth backwards and make time reverse. He is supposed to only do this for something serious like when Lois gets bumped off. But imagine how tempting it would be to use this power more often. Superman is not perfect, after all. Remember kryptonite? Imagine if he happened one day to take George Orwell to heart:
Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past.
Might that not be enough to tip him over the edge?
How long would it be then before he realized he could just hang around all day schtupping Lois, drinking coffee, and watching TV? It would make everything else about him pointless. Faster than a speeding bullet? Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound? Who cares - when he could just read the newspaper each morning, fly really fast around the earth backwards for a while and go back to his easy chair? He’d get lazy and fat. Meanwhile, think how frustrated Lex Luthor would get. He’d… well what would he be? He’d never really do anything, because every evil deed would be wiped out even as it was merely contemplated. The more evil he tried to do, the more futile his life would become, his evil intentions now a Sisyphean boulder.
What about the rest of the world? Aren’t there times when the sequence of events seems jumbled, when you have a sense of déjà vu? Do you think perhaps we have all become Lex Luthors starting and stopping our lives according to Superman’s whim? Every day is first one thing, and then another? That every time you try to get something done, Superman is up there flying around backwards like a maniac making everything pointless? Where does that leave us? In limbo with the unbaptized babies, not exactly the best of company, that’s where. And if you think you have it bad, what about poor Lois?
Maybe this was what Red Flower was trying to tell me. Despite his faults, Superman can undo evil. He is the benevolent but unpredictable God in a predictable universe, a counterpoint to the raging God my grandfather had also threatened me with. “We are all sinners, ” he would tell me. “We are born evil, carrying the sins of Adam and Eve on our backs. Children are like serpents; they cannot help but be evil; they are an abomination in the eyes of God. They walk upon a thin crust covering the pits of Hell. With each sinful act they perform, the load they carry becomes heavier, and the crust holding us up thinner and thinner. With each sin they bring us all nearer to the pits of Hell, nearer to eternal suffering, nearer to an eternity of the most f rightful punishments, an eternity of screams.”
As I lay in bed afraid to sleep for fear I would awake in these most fearsome depths, my mother would come to me. Knowing what her father would have told me she would hug me. “God is not angry. He is patient. He understands us. He forgives us for what we do. He loves all children and would not send a little child to Hell. Jesus died for our sins. What we have done can be undone. Sleep, little one.”
I had grown up torn between these conflicting descriptions of the nature of God. By my teenage years, I found it easier to ignore the whole thing. I became an agnostic, an uncertain atheist. Now, though, I found myself once more kneeling before my bed each night. The question returned: to whom was I praying?
Red Flower returned the next night. For once, she had a smile, small as it could be, but a smile nonetheless. She had a book in her hands. She held it up for me to see. It was an ancient book written in a language I could not understand. Superimposed over the unintelligible symbols was a circle of some type. As she brought it closer, I could see it was a dragon, snake-like, a worm eating its own tail. She read, “The tail of the snake should return into its mouth making the first day the last, and this shall be the day of its death and the day of its Nativity.” And she left, but whether it was with a wink or a nod, I could not tell.