About the Book

The aim of Holy Night is to blend an old mystery with a new one; the old bible story of God being born on planet Earth with the new story of that same planet being but one tiny dot in a gigantic universe which had emerged from the deeper mystery of Nothing billions of years before the Bethlehem event. It's a mix of science and theology in which the traditional account of the Nativity remains the same (Joseph
and Mary arrive in Bethlehem, find no room at the inn, the baby is born in a stable, a star hovers overhead) but is now widened into science fiction mode to include:

First, Satan. He is the stark and beautiful figure at the beginning of the story who stands scrutinising the winter sky, having sensed the imminent arrival of something long awaited: not the coming of a child, of which he has no notion, but of visitors from another dimension, angelic beings who were once his kin but have long since been his enemies.

And here, at last, they are. The point of light which now materialises and hangs like a star in the night sky carries a specific crew with a specific purpose. Its commander is Michael, victor of the "war in heaven' which saw Satan and his angels defeated in battle and expelled into the world of time and space. With him are Gabriel and Raphael, come to supervise the birth, plus a band of warrior angels ready to go down and protect the child if need be. But none of them, not even the archangels, knows
why this particular mission is so important, since none of them would presume to ask. The only being who ever questioned God's doings was Satan - and look what happened to him.

For Satan, however, what happened then is far from over, and this could be his chance, having lost the battle, to win the war. First he must gain access to the starship, which he contrives to do by the simple expedient of getting himself taken prisoner. Only when he's on board do his captors realise that it is they who are the captives, for in his headquarters deep beneath the Earth's surface Satan has trained on them a weapon of such destructiveness that if they attempt to leave without his permission,
their starship and everyone on it - including himself - will be annihilated. Yes, he's prepared to pay that price; and they've known him too long to doubt it.

Yet all he wants is the simple chance to meet God again, here, face to face, for the first time since his Fall. Is that really asking too much? To the astonishment of the other angels - no, it isn't. Not only does the Almighty suddenly appear but, even more amazing, it seems that he actually wants Satan back.

That's the framework of the plot. The main story themes which then develop are:

(1) Satan's deeply cynical view of Creation. Whether you begin with the anarchic quantum nature of matter itself, or with the macrocosm of an entire Universe so condemned to expansion that in the end it can only dissipate into a boundless ocean of dying particles (or, just the reverse, collapse back under its own weight into the Nothing it came from in the first place); or whether you pick at random any of the evolutionary stages in between those extremes, the overriding principle you'll always find at work is Uncertainty. This is pernicious, destructive and entirely subversive to the nourishment and growth of an intelligent Universe, to which Satan is dedicated, and stems solely from the fact that God has never really known what he's doing.

(2) This also applies to biological evolution, another anarchic system blatantly unreliable in producing "the fittest". Its most recent and dangerous product has been Man himself, with his ludicrously inept neural structure guaranteeing a constant war between his new human reason and his old animal instincts. This is a poisonous polarity, and in such greedy, violent - and now highly inventive - hands the precious gift of consciousness is being and will increasingly be abused. Such a situation not only guarantees misery all round but is already on a collision course with disaster - quite possibly for the entire planet. Unacceptable.

(3) It is Satan's duty, therefore, indeed his destiny, to put all this to rights, and he's working (with his scientific staff) on exactly how to do that. But there's a missing piece in the new model, as simple as it's huge: the actual power of creation. The need, therefore, is not to start another war but to educate and persuade a deeply ignorant God into seeing that he must finally hand that primal power, and the role
that goes with it, over to this most realistic, disciplined and brilliant of all his angels. Satan will then be able to re-create Man, planet Earth, and eventually the Universe itself, into what God might well have made in the first place if only he'd known how. As far as Satan is concerned, he's presenting God with a priceless gift; unspokenly, the ultimate love-token.

(4) God. Whether he's up in The Star, down in the Creation Room in Hell, with Mary in the Stable or as a visitor in Joseph's dream - or all of them at once - God is delighted to find himself being taught about the world's realities. From Satan's tutorials on the human brain down to Joseph's lessons in elementary woodwork, he revels in all of it. But there's a dark side. The more he learns, especially about Man, the more he realises the terrible amount of suffering which has come with the emergence of consciousness - and for that. He is responsible. It seems that the search for I Am is always the prelude to I Hurt.

(5) So: what to do about it? There's only one way to find out. To understand his own story he must enter into it and live it; suffering and all. He'll know what to do when he knows what it means; when he knows what he is; or even if he is.

(6) How can God and his rebellious angel come together from such different positions? The question supposes a wider one, namely: what do you do about suffering? Do you travel further and faster down the Conquest of Nature Highway, eradicating every troublesome aspect of life until in the end (you hope) there isn't any suffering? Or do you accept Life as a sacred given, whose real purpose is to teach you how to transcend it? Do you take a worm's-eye view and drill a high-speed tunnel through the mountain, or do you pull yourself up by your spiritual bootlaces and toil to the top of it, so that you can experience the truth of its reality from a higher level? You don't suppose you can do both, do you? Or do you?

© Vincent Tilsley 2005