Today, someone mentioned the treatment of unbaptized infants in Catholicism: Heaven, Hell, or Limbo? The argument for Hell is that since the infants have not yet accepted Christ, they cannot be saved from original sin; it is not a matter what it has or has not done in its mortal life.

This raises an interesting question. How would an infant accept Christ? Even an older child - perhaps four or five - has not the powers of comprehension necessary for true understanding and acceptance.

Psychologists, neurologists, child development experts worldwide - they have already recognized that human infants (and, indeed, nonhuman animals) undergo cognitive development. It is obvious to even new parents that an infant does not have the full mental maturity of an adult.

Therefore: does an infant have a soul? There is no unifying, fully developed consciousness. Is it not more probable that their final destination is neither Heaven nor Hell, nor that Catholic construction called Limbo?

To my view, it appears that a human infant is approximately analogous to a fully grown nonhuman animal of some intelligence. Nothing more, nothing less. It is somewhat a sad thing, a cruel thing, but true. An infant is not a truly conscious being. Attempts to pretend otherwise are the proof of human tendency towards clinging and perhaps unwarranted love.

For what is there to love? Not yet a person. A potential person - the seed of a person. But an actual person? No, not yet. It is fully logical to grieve for the loss of what could-have-been when your child dies, for the person she could have been, but to imagine any love beyond a mothers love, a fathers care... that is folly. It is presumptuousness - loving someone not for who they are but for what role they play.

But I digress.

Perhaps again, salvation is not dependent upon conscious acceptance, but upon the lack of conscious resistance... or subcon-
scious; it would take conscious effort to vanquish subconscious reluctance. Thus, as an infant becomes a child, subconscious resistance to God and His laws begins to accumulate, and it is only the later acquisition of deeper understanding and the gift of revelation that can help a person overcome that resistance.

Does an infant then go to Heaven?

But what is there of the infant to go?

Chosen solitude is a sweet thing, but at what cost? Having isolated yourself from the rest of the world - to whichever degree - there are fewer strands linking you back, fewer ties of caring and need. Halfway to freedom, you look down at the inextricably bound fellow-beings all around yourself, and shake your head at their foolishness. But you still have one foot in that sea of interactions, because human nature rarely permits complete withdrawal. So now what? Think carefully: all those meaningless, transient rituals you scorn, many of them make up the core of social responsibility. Think carefully: without those constraining ties, those declarations of, "Yes! I care about what ___ thinks! " you have little incentive to play by the rules in the game of life.

From your detached celestial throne, one chain still extends to Earth and keeps you attached. You are yet half-submerged in the morass, but you are too lofty to learn, perhaps, how to swim. You see? The Creator did not make things easy for us in-betweeners. If normal, be truly and wholly so. If a hermit, be a hermit from all! (And I wonder if hermitage would have any meaning without first tasting Society?)

No matter how splendidly independent you may think yourself to be, you are still fully capable of being crushed by loneliness. You speak of the differences between "lonely" (a state of solitude, undesired) and "alone" (chosen solitude), but know that sooner of later, "alone" will become "lonely". The transmutation is inevitable.

It's in our genes.

I dreamt that I was chatting aimlessly with classmates in a large, spotless school bus when the bus gave a lurch and started up. This would not, normally, have been a problem, but in this case, it was accelerating far past school bus speed, and there was no one in the driver's seat. A girl near the front helpfully grabbed the steering wheel, and we managed to avoid instant explosive death.

She tried to stop the bus, but for some reason, it simply refused to stop. After some frantic searching, I found some sort of emergency brake and tried to set it... to no avail. It was stuck. Two more girls realized what was going on and came up to help, but even with three people tugging on it, it still wouldn't budge. And as we were standing there, pulling on the lever, I noticed one of my classmates - an athlete - standing there and watching us struggle.

So I shouted to him, "Hey! Stop staring and come help us!" And at least he had the decency to head on over after being called out. But even after he lent his strength to the cause, our efforts were in vain.

By this time, we were on the highway. What cars there were had all had the sense to find the nearest exit, and we were speeding along at a nicely suicidal rate. We were going to crash into something, sooner or later.

At last, I suggested that we veer off the road and try crashing into the forest, which would be marginally more forgiving than a building and less murderous than, say, another bus. The steerswoman assented, and the bus turned violently, crashing into the forest down an uncompromising slope. Miraculously, we were all still alive and mostly unhurt. We piled out of the school bus and stood there, staring at the bare trees around us.

And then we jumped ahead ten years in dreamtime.

Evidently, we had been lured into some sort of modern-day fairy city - not treated with overt cruelty, but forced to remain nevertheless. The fairy city consisted of many partitioned sections; each section was independent of the others, viewing the others with nothing less than suspicion and aggressive competition. Many of my former classmates had chosen allegiance and citizenship in some section, settling into unique jobs, but as for myself, I remained one of the sectionless drifters.

Some time back, one of our comrades, a fair-haired young man named Simon, had stumbled into a conjuring circle and apparently had been consumed by the balefire. The young woman who had been present - yet another former classmate - refused to believe that he was dead, and indeed claimed that he was very much alive. However, she knew that the only way she could prove it was by finding his ring, so she decided to offer a reward for it, since her own efforts had not been successful.

Not long after she had announced the reward, I was in the communal "truce" area of the city, quietly listening to the others discuss the lost ring: how it was silver set with a red stone, and how the silver was worked into many amusing and fantastical shapes.

One of our comrades had found employment as a guard, or watchman, of sorts: a tall, Asian young man. He interrupted the conversation with a scornful comment: "He fell into the balefire. You can't fall into the balefire and not die. That woman is deluded if she thinks she can find Simon's ring."

The others fell silent - they might have retorted, but at that moment, the gate swung open. A large blue-skinned man walked in: the liaison between the fairy city and the outside world. "Light-rings!" he called. "I've got light-rings! Come get what you need." He was holding hundreds of small, thin rings of silvery wire in his huge hands - it got everyone's attention immediately, for light-rings were a vital part of the fairy city. Besides providing illumination when set up the right way, they were also important in conjurations and other workings of magic.

People crowded around the liaison, grabbing light-rings from his hand. I took my share as well; although I didn't need them at the time, I might later. As I put them into my pocket, the young woman who had been looking for Simon's ring saw me and waved wildly.

"Hey!" she yelled. "Can you come help me with these light-rings?"

"Sure," I said, and followed her through several partitions, until we came to a section near the very back of the city. Conjuring circles had already been half set-up, lacking only the central components, and she provided those in a moment: from a small sack, she dug out a fistful of small stones of all different colors and poured them into my hand.

I'd done this so many times before that I didn't need to be told what to do. Instead, I knelt by the first circle and placed a stone in the center, then crowned it with a light-ring. It wasn't a hard task - more monotonous than anything - and I went through the stones quickly. However, as I bent over to finish yet another circle, something caught my eye. It glinted silver and red, but it wasn't part of a conjuring circle, and it hadn't been there a second before; I was willing to bet on it. I reached over and picked the object up.

It was a silver man's ring, large and ornately decorated, with a ruby set amidst the complex shapes.

Simon's ring.

I beckoned the young woman over and showed her. It didn't need any explanation. She took it from my hand and smiled.

"Let's go tell them," she said. "Let's show the doubters." Without another word, we abandoned the circles and made our way back to the communal area. People made a path for us, staring at the gleam of silver and red. As we neared our destination, the young woman tossed Simon's ring to one of her friends, who passed it on to another friend - so as we ran, the ring leapt from hand to hand in a parallel path.

At last, I stopped in front of the guard, and someone threw the ring back to me. I caught it and held it towards him, extending my hand palm-up so that he could see it clearly.

He remained silent for a long moment.

Finally, he pushed his hair out of his eyes and began to speak...

I awoke.