Stories are wonderful. We all love to tell and share stories with one another. Sometimes stories teach us lessons and are fashioned into moralistic tales to challenge and instruct us. We often call these collections of stories mythologies. Most early cultures had some form of these stories. But more often today, stories are simply employed to entertain us, to thrill us with their intrigue, or to enthrall us with their sense of adventure and excitement.
Jesus Himself liked to tell stories to the masses of people who thronged about Him every day to hear Him speak. His stories were told as parables. They were simple stories, made up of simple elements, yet their true meanings were often hidden from the common people and have remained shrouded in mystery. To decipher their true meanings takes discernment and a keen awareness of Biblical symbols.
My story is not a parable, but rather it is an allegory. Contained within it are small glimpses of truth from our own world. These glimmers of our reality are couched within an enjoyable plot-line (I hope) and can be readily ignored by those who simply want an avenue of pure escapism from our workaday world. Yet there are always those who seek to plunge deeper into a story, into the underlying framework in order to satisfy their curiosity as to why something is the way it is.
Some of these truths I have drawn upon might appear blatant to a few, yet might not even occur to others. Any framework for an imaginary world must be based upon some model, and for the most part, its construction is primarily based on our own world, for that is the world we know, that is the perspective from which we see things. The world of Anarra is simply a reflection of our own, except for one enormous difference. I have tried to encompass aspects of both the visible world we know, the world we can actually see, and the eternal, unseen world which lies beyond our own feeble attempts to pierce through the surrounding veil. That which we call the here and now, the reality which we have managed to see and touch, is really only temporal. It is fading away and one day it will all be gone. But there is a reality beyond our visible world which we cannot see with our eyes nor touch with our hands. Yet it is more real than this digital simulation we find ourselves wandering within, and that domain will last forever.
Travel with me now into a realm where the temporal meets the eternal. Enjoy the journey!