During the newsround on occasion of John Paul II, the spiritual leader of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church, a nun commented that the Pope has left behind time and history and entered the peace and abundance of God. Time, meaning this world. However successfull the Roman Church, or for that matter any organization around the theme of Ekklesia, this is what each single participant in religion may hope for – a final transcendence of the boundaries of local time and space, which confines our consciousness to a desolate realm of shadows and types, this world under this world’s regent, who is not God and never where God and never will be God, and who has no characteristic in common with the Divine Logos. Karol Wojtyla always struck me as a thoughtful, sincere practicioner of the Christian faith, a person of mystical and contemplative disposition who understood the meaning of duty. Alas, the Roman Catholic Church, like any ecclesiae, types and images striking at times powerful similes, but never more than that – of the true Church, the only claimant to any perfection any Pleroma (fullness.. I mention this because the Vatican has made use of the term to describe the worldly organization of the Roman Catholic Church in this current age and world, an assertion even the most ecumenical of Gnostics are bound to disagree with)- laid claim on him. Through his illness I became increasingly aware of the frail condition of all mankind through his suffering, and how we with old age and the tearing of time and gravity upon our bodies, succumb to an inglorious end. Or such an end the world sees, but alas, the world is blind. When the Logos descended, raining like a drop out of the Pleroma, it was not the Kosmos that received it, but Man. In this sense the Man is the Logos incarnate and the distinctions which the disciples insisted upon, which Christ on his own part dissuaded – are as clouds before the luminous sun.

Rome will see in the coming days a great pilgrimage, it will be marked by reverance, love and a sincere sorrow at the loss of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, but also of a person whose attention and care they greatly respected, like they would respect their (biological) father. For my part I will be attentative to the necessary change which will come over the greatest, numbers-wise, religious denomination of the world and the most continuous representative of the Apostolic Christian tradition.

Pope John Paul II. has overcome the world, he stepped out of time, his journey, however, as the mysteries reveal, has just begun.