TRAVELS WITH MARK

 

 

PROLOGUE

 

            A great voice cried out: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthanei. Someone said he calls to Elijah. I knew that Jesus was addressing the God El, who was the God of the first creation story. This El was not divisible into God and Yahweh, the two voices of deity in the Genesis Story.

            Someone had taken a sponge and soaked it in spoiled wine and offered it to Jesus, saying: Come.

            Again I was shocked by my fellow man's need to get a crowd or a following before doing anything on his or her own. It seemed to me like the idea of aloneness was man's most frightening demon.

            Come, the man proclaimed, let us see if Elijah will get him off the cross.

            But Jesus screamed and with that his breath was gone. I heard a great ripping noise and I thought the earth had opened behind me; but it was only the curtain in the temple. It tore from top to bottom, exposing the inmost sanctuary to the naked world without.

            What a terrible thing, exclaimed a notetaker! It will mean a confrontation. There will be a fight over values. I am afraid the tall priests will one day have to say what they mean, because there is no longer a curtain to hide our fears, to justify our avoidance. I knew that son of man would be long lasting trouble.

            A centurion who was posted to watch had other words to say. I knew he was the leader of the ten. I knew he was their spokesperson and commander. I knew the ten were the sons of Israel who didn't have a voice, those whose mother was not Rachel. The centurion spoke slowly and clearly: In truth this man was the only son of all the goodness of living. Why is he killed?

            I doubted that his men would comprehend his wisdom or his question.

            I looked about and saw the three women who had followed Jesus through the tribes of mAN and had served him. Mark had told me their names. There was Mary of the watchtower of the first seven years and Mary the water bearer during the time of drought and famine and there was Salome who gave rest and peace to the adolescent mind. These women watched and waited, as the ninth hour ended.

            All of a sudden I was crying. I just waited as the tears fell on the keys of my computer and my body shook. I cried as the night rolled in from the east. I didn't care. I didn't have any energy to care. I believed I was coming down with the flu.

            This happened at nightfall on the sixth day of creation, the day before El rested. I thought El would probably not get any rest now, since Its creation didn't appear to live very long. As I was thinking this I saw Joseph arrive.

            When Jacob's wife Rachel, who was his true love, birthed her first son, she named him after her desire that God add more to her child than just a fine body. God did. Joseph had the best of both worlds. It was why his brothers were so jealous of him. Once his brothers had vented their jealousies and gotten beyond them, Joseph gave them riches beyond anything they had imagined. He alone was the one who saved their lives. Life was the offering he placed at their feet.

            What Rachel had in mind was another son. It was why she cried and cried over the innocents always being killed. She loved all Jewish boys and girls.

            Joseph had arrived from the "city of the Jews." It also carried the name of "twin Ramahs", another way of saying the twin heights a man must strive for, symbolized in twin boys.

            I was told that Joseph was a respected member of the city council and was always working to bring about a brother/sisterhood under the auspices of El. When he saw what was happening I noted courage come out of him and lead him into the castle.

            He went in to see the son of a freed slave the town called Pilate and asked him for the body of Jesus. I followed on account of the life of the party had died and everyone else had gone home. I could see Pilate was having some strange thoughts, the way his face was twisting. Already dead: he said? He seemed not to be able to get his teeth into such an idea.

            I'll get to the bottom of this, said Pilate. He called the leader of the ten men, they were the best of warriors, and posited this question to him. Has he died yet, asked Pilate?

You can bet that hat on it, answered the centurion.

            There was no need to bet since Pilate had the corpse on his blood and was fast to give it to Joseph.

            I followed Joseph out of the castle. He bought some linen and then he went and took him down. He wrapped him in the cloth, folding him in like a cocoon and laid him in a cave that had been carved from stone. I thought the image of the hole in the rock was like a hollow mind. He then rolled a stone against the door like the shepherds had done to the well in Jacob's time when all the hungry children were listing in the hot sun because they had nothing to drink. With us were the three women, watching where Joseph had laid their love.

            I never felt so tired. I trekked back to the place I had rented. I was feeling like I was the only person left in the whole world.

            That night I was restless. I was living in a garage on Mountain Road and whoever remodeled these quarters I would never call mine was not a carpenter. I know, because most of my working life carpentry was my trade. I loathed the place I lived. This night I wanted company; I even thought of going to a bar and drinking a couple of brews with the boys. I never actually did that; I was fearful someone would recognize me and want to kill me. I have the Cain complex. I have been so afraid of fights for so long that the idea had a totally irrational hold on my imagination. I am a disgusting coward. And of late the awareness has been constant. So I stayed in my garage, berating myself for my aloneness and my fear until it finally got late enough for me to justify going to bed. It was around midnight.

            My eyes popped open. The room was dark. I didn't feel right.

Where am I? I said out loud.

            You were asleep, answered a voice to my right.

I'm in bed, I said.

            Yes, the voice again, you woke up.

I'm scared, I said.

I had never felt so frightened. The feeling was totally strange, inexplicable. The feeling was so new that my confusion was total. The room I was in was made out of fear. Everything looked normal except every object seemed to emanate terror. My guts felt like they were about to contract.

            I know how you feel, said the voice. Last night you were afraid. You were scared to go out. Your fears kept you from going. They beat you up again, and you let them. So you went to bed. You didn't even masturbate. You were worried you wouldn't get to sleep; but you dropped right off.

I'm sick, I said. I think I am going to throw up. I can't feel my body.

My skin was clammy and cold. I didn't understand anything I was experiencing. It seemed the terror had crossed over from some gut level emotion and entered my blood and bone. Was my body dying?  My thoughts were totally paranoid. But why?

            Get up, said the voice, go into the bathroom.

I don't think I can walk, I said. I must have food poisoning. Something is abnormal. What is wrong?  I could hardly breath.

            Sit on the toilet; tell me what you are feeling.

I don't know, I said. I don't know. Help me! My God, I see that it’s splitting. It’s coming apart. I can see it. Its like my mind is tearing.

I was sitting on the toilet, looking into the bedroom; a dim light from the street gave my apartment a shadowy luminescence. I saw this thing, a fuzzy line, blur the vision directly in front of my nose, where my focus seemed to go out of control.

My eyes are moving apart, I said. Am I losing my mind? I am going crazy, I said. I can't believe this. What is wrong with me?

            Breath deep, said the voice. Slow down. Urinate. You are OK. Let's go sit on the bed.

It's his fault, I said. It's his fault. It's the woman's fault too. She left me. No, it's his fault.

            Whose fault, asked the voice?

I jerked by head to the right and looked: God's, I answered. I did everything I was supposed to. I followed all the laws. As good as I could. But nooo! Slowly God took everything from me. And the last straw was chasing my woman away. I scared her, I guess. I couldn't make money. That was not good enough for her. I worked, God damn it. I worked hard for my companion and listened to her too. I couldn't make money, though. Some guilt held me back. Fuck if I know what it was! I know what it was! The guilt trip I stayed on for so long was only a diversion. Guilt is real. Whenever I got tense or nervous I masturbated. Have done this same thing all my life. It's not BAD; it's chickenshit! I didn't want to hurt any more. Can't you see I was tired of hurting?  So I paid the price and took home guilt because I couldn't live with fear. Fear was just too much work. And it didn't make sense, God damn it. At eleven I learned how to pleasure myself while dissipating all tension. That became my business. Why compete? I made it my business and projected my bitterness and loathing into the outside business world.

            I couldn't be all the time masturbating; it doesn't work that way. I grew my shame along with other work. I worked. I learned to build with my hands or work in the soil or made cabinets. I learned to love the work. I was always afraid to ask for a higher wage because I might loose my job. It did happen a few times, and those times were scary. Shameful too. I ended up not being able to provide a good living for my daughter. My companion knew I never would, so she went to work. I supported her in the ways I could, but I could see how much she resented it. I couldn't make the money. That only added to other shames I carried. All my friends were working at good jobs. They worked hard; I saw that. No harder than I did, though. It seemed to me they somehow were in the right places all their lives to get what they got. It seemed to me their parents loved them and supported them and gave them what they needed to succeed. I didn't envy them exactly. I thought they earned their fine houses and their new cars. They paid. Though I never found them glad to pay me for the services I did for them. I never brought much home. And what I did was never enough. It was enough for me, but my children need a foundation and the contention between my companion and myself was killing any good feelings we might have nurtured. So she left. God damn it, she left. It is God's fault. He gave me the desire for her and then he drove her away. You can't know how deeply that hurt me. It made me realize how much hurt was in the family I came from. I never knew how to really appreciate others. My family was cold and separated. My mother was hostile. My father was gone all the time. When he was home I couldn't relate to him. I have been alone since I was four. Everyone would call me a liar, but I know where I'm coming from. I was close to my older brother, but we were five years apart and when he left home, I was thirteen, my aloneness only grew deeper. My younger sister and I mostly fought. I did most of the fighting. I probably had a "thing" against her. Well, I GUESS! All girls scared me and I stayed away. I probably hurt her like I felt my own hurt and was just a bully. Like I said, my father never helped. He was a believer and as cowardly as I imagine I became. He was afraid. So like my father I followed God. I just wanted someone to love. I just wanted love. God damn it! I knew I would never have a body to love. It's evil. You can't imagine how long I carried THAT idea. The hold it had on me was much deeper than any remembrances I carried. My mother must have spanked the living hell out of me before I crawled. SO WHAT! The female body terrified me. When I first had sex with the woman, the one who was my only lasting companion, I shook like a leaf. I mean I vibrated. Totally out of control. It was like teeth chattering, only it was my whole body. I guess I was waiting for a lightening bolt from heaven to kill me for my unholy act. When my companion left I thought I would die. I did die and cried and cried. Another experience which was totally out of my control. If my daughter hadn't returned for a while I can't know what would have become of me. It was all my fault, the divorce and everything. I knew I had failed. Hey, don't get me wrong. Failing is what I learned from the beginning HOW TO DO. I didn’t want to DIE, therefore I didn't; I was a success! Fuck success, what I won for the umpteenth time was pain. If I were sane I'd swear I craved pain!

            God, I knew it was my fault. But I was so alone. Always alone, and I was married and we were living together. Now this! Alone and looking, wanting to find anything that would quell this fire that is consuming me. Trying to figure out how to survive this aloneness and to make a living with no skills to sell in the open market. I have the skills, but excuse me! I am not for sale! I am not for sale and I hate the world where everything is for sales and money and people with all the things money buys. Alone! Alone all this time. Scared and living in a hole, a garage where the cockroaches take over at night. Cockroaches, here’s another problem. I can't kill them. Nor can my daughter. Neither of us have a taste for killing. The cockroaches must have a secret entrance into my garage; no matter how clean I keep the place they still like it. So I work, doing carpentry to make a living. I ponder ways to solve my aloneness problem too. Work, fuck, no one wants a man. The world wants a man who makes money. Of course, every woman wants a real man, but doesn't working for money kill the man? I feel like I’m up against some bad fate! I am too shy to play the man. Too chicken too. I can't lie and there are other things on my mind besides fucking. Fucking is attractive and a pocket full of dollars has a lot of power; but in the end are women not used like toilet paper? God started all this and I can't say its the fault of any other. I believe God is one. That negates the good one on one hand and on the other the evil one. What bullshit. I don't believe all the chickenshit churchmen.

            God left me, he abandoned his people and if you follow him what do you get? I'll tell you what you get. This is what you get. You get crazy and your mind splits. I have lived through my own hell and my own fright and aloneness and shame and uncertainty. I have lost all my love and lived on practically nothing so as to keep my impact on other life at a minimal and what has been my return? Madness! God, I could kill him.

            You have, said the voice, it's over. You are awake and alive. You have one thing to say before you can get out of this house. You will need to rest for three days before you, sitting here with your life over the waters, will be healed. You are healed; this is the fact. You will be tired and listless for a time. The worst is over, but now you will have to learn to work again. But your mind is whole. Your mind has two sides. Surgeons know it. Let me say it this way. Your right hand will not know what your left is up to. This is the only way anything can get done. In the past the two sides were muddled, each a parasite on the other. Your thinking was very disturbed. But you literally saw them pull apart. You will learn to read the issues in your life with more clarity now and fear will not be dominating your actions. The man ideas you have grown since childhood are dead. You won't see it for some while, but this is true. How do you feel?

            I am angry, I said. Angry at having been abandoned. Angry because I don't work and mad at my own fear and coward-ness for keeping me isolated and always hiding. I don't want to live my life like this. But everyone left me. They thought I was crazy. I was only lonely and hurting. Hurting for some place I could heal my heart and my head. Hunting in some chickenshit way for affection and understanding. God, I said, I got this huge resentment. I think I am going to explode.

            I know, said the voice. What are you holding back for? Do it. Breath deep and then let go. Men everywhere are waiting to hear why they hurt so badly.

 

MY SELF, MY SELF, WHY HAS THE GOODNESS OF LIFE FORSAKEN ME?

 

 

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

IN THE END IS YOUR BEGINNING

A SHORT STORY

 

 

I was wrong again. How can anyone like me, being so wrong all the time about everything, be so blessed with everything life has to give? This needs to be explained.

            Many years had passed and the Sabbath was yesterday. I was wandering in a place called “three guns” where I used to run and climb on the boulders. I neither ran nor climbed any longer. My efforts at trying to write down my insights on the Book of Genesis had dissipated all my energy. I was following a trail up to a spot where a couple of weeks earlier a large boulder had broke loose from its ancient resting place and crashed two hundred feet down the side of the mountain, plowing trees and rocks in its path into rubble.  The devastation was awesome. I was on my way back for another look when I ran into Mark. He hadn’t seen me when I shouted:

            “Hey Mark!”

            I must have startled him because my shout stopped him dead in his tracks. His mouth fell open and I looked at a dumb tongue. It just lay there behind his white teeth and I watched as the water turned into little H2O molecules and floated away. “Mark!” I shouted again.

            His eyes blinked and his mouth closed and I watched Adam’s apple rise and then come back down into his throat. Then he threw his arms around me and hugged me close as tears ran down his cheeks. My body immediately tensed up but then, like miracle of miracles, something broke within me and I too was squeezing back like this strong man was family, like brother. His hands had my shoulders and he pushed me away from him.

            “How you been?” he asked.

            “Good,” I lied. “And you?”

            “I wondered what happened to you,” he continued. “I have not seen you for three days. I was worried.”

            “What are you talking about?” I said. “I haven’t seen you for so long that I had completely forgot the whole journey.”

            His eyes bore into me and his brow narrowed. I was uncomfortable with his scrutinizing. I knew it had been at least three years since I last saw Mark. In those years I had lived with an ever-sinking feeling that I was dying. I had worked and reworked ideas about my past to the point of despair, always trying to find a voice and a style to put my feelings and my life into perspective. I was never satisfied. The dissatisfaction was wrecking my life. I felt I was a total failure.

            It had begun with me trying to rewrite Genesis. That was in the spring of ’91. My life was in shambles after my divorce. Working through Genesis had revived my spirit and I believed I had uncovered some worthy insights but I was still terrified and very cognizant that my writing hid more than it made clear. I was still running, you see, for I had no mastery of my feelings and they were totally wild and ravenous. My spirit, though, had come home and she wanted to carry our work into the public arena. The only problem, I was a baby. My night of terror was around that time.

            “I was with you,” he said.

            “Pardon me!” I said to Mark. His words scared me; I didn’t want to recall that night.

            “Three nights ago, when the Lord was crucified, I went home with you,” he said.

            “Mark,” I asked, “what the hell are you talking about?”

            “I’m not Mark. You know me so why don’t you admit it?” he said. “You woke up terrified. I talked you through it. I was worried about you. I have been looking for you all my life.”

            I sat down on the side of the trail. My breathing had no stamina. I never wanted to write my travels with Mark, or whoever, in the first place. I thought Genesis would be enough. I thought finding a publisher would be a piece of cake. I believed everyone would want to hear my findings about our religious heritage. I had actually sent out a number of inquiries to publishers, but everyone said the same thing. HUH? That didn’t stop me. I couldn’t stop. Except by killing my self. I was working on that also. Not openly, of course. That awareness was first a steady whisper growing into a conversation that lately had reverted into a scream: YOU ARE KILLING YOURSELF!

            Smoking, not eating well, living alone and isolating myself from the few friends I had, writing, always writing to reach the place where I could stop writing. I hate writing. Over the last three years my one social activity, in a society of one, had been making hikes up a canyon called “three guns” where I could be totally alone and get a little exercise and quall the fire that was consuming me. Man, I thought, if this is living, why bother? Rebekah had first asked that question and she wasn’t referring to hiking but having babies who were at war with each other.

            I was aware. If I wanted my life back, I knew I was going to have to go to war. Or at least I thought that! Not the kind that kills life but the one that wrestles with the other. For me, the contest seemed endless. I believed I was about dead from fighting with my quote unquote bad habits, since I had lost every fight. Not only that; my habits were just as powerful now as when I first picked them up. I still wanted them. They pleased me way back then, and they kill me now. How the hell does one get around charges like that? Where the hell does power like that come from? 

            I didn’t have any answers, except work. I could not give up the effort even if I didn’t know what work meant. And I didn’t. This is what was clear to me, I didn’t work and if I wanted to live I had to work. It wasn’t a job I sought, I was skilled enough to earn my survival in a money world; but totally unskilled at caring for and nurturing my feelings. There was my dilemma. I knew about grace, she had given me a million insights and woke me up just like the sun every morning; but? Something was still missing. Work was my Job and yet I felt I didn’t. This was starting to piss me off. I was angry, but at who?  Another dilemma, anger was very scary for me. As a kid I couldn’t show it around my mom, cause then I got really beat up.  I felt I had a duty to learn about work. Maybe, if I worked, then I wouldn’t feel so bad. And, I wanted love. I wanted love to WORK.  That is ALL I ever wanted. To know and have love, for this to be the driving force of my life and to know and understand this force in my self and in every other, who is my neighbor and my sister and brother. I had allowed my shame to make me weak and timid and to drive me to kill – me! I knew I could not survive that kind of attitude. Work takes energy and my tank was on empty. I had never been in a worse situation.

            “So who are you?” I asked.

            Alias Mark smiled at me.  I wanted to cry but only because I was so rundown.

            “Remember that night at the 12-Step meeting?” he asked.

            “Yea!” I answered and had to smile too.

            I had been seeing a guidance counselor at a local university at the time and had been talking about my childhood and past and what a difficult time I had with shyness and talking and how ill at ease I was around people. He suggested I attend some 12-Step program and listen to the experiences of others.  There was a weekly meeting not far from where I lived and I began going. I liked the group, it was for children of alcoholic parents, and had been attending for about a month when I invited a friend of mine who had childhood problems to come with me.  His name was Michael and he had once been an editor of a paper in Los Alamos and his dad was a big paper editor from the west coast but he had become a hermit and lived east of the mountains. Michael was an enigma to me, big strapping man and I believed wild and crazy; but I liked him and thought his talents and skills were way beyond mine. He was a word man, which I was aspiring towards and envious of. This group began each meeting with each attendant introducing himself or herself by “Hi, I’m Susie” and everyone would respond by saying “Hi, Susie, welcome!” The people there were still unfamiliar to me and I to them and as the ritual began I was thinking that I would use my other name and the idea gave me an empowering and strange feeling. In fact, I remember I was scared to introduce myself as other than Paul. But I was determined to open my life outward and this seemed a good exercise. We sat in a circle and the introductions had started on the other side of the room and there were 20 or so people in attendance so I had time to mull over this idea. Michael was on my right and so he would come after me. When it came my turn I said “Hi, I’m Tom,” and everyone welcomed Tom. I felt exhilarated. That moment I will never forget. Michael was so discombobulated; he didn't know Tom was my Father's name, and that caused him to almost forget who He was. Michael and I had similar holes in our metaphysics.

            “You’re me, aren’t you?” I asked.

            “Well, I guess, like father, like son. You know the stories!” answered Tom. “We have to go, though. There is not a lot of time.”

            “What do you mean,” I asked.

            “I came back because you wanted me to; but there are many who are divided and estranged from themselves and they need reassurance. We need to put an end to Mark’s account. Three days have passed and I see the women now. They are bringing spices to make the imagination of our kind sweet. The mind of menkind has been angry and mean and very distrustful for long enough. No one in his or her right mind wants that kind of imagining. Meanness is created. It doesn’t have to be, since all meanness is a covering for fear and hurt. In the beginning there was no meanness. I watched you suffer, I felt your fears, I heard your cries; they were a smoke screen. I think you know. Also, you have work to finish or your boss, he’s mine too, will never leave us any peace. That is why I came to find you.”

            “In three guns?” I asked

            “I don’t know anything about guns, besides the blight which they have brought. We need no more of that. Look around you! See the seven hills? We are going to Jerusalem and we are going to invite our species to come in, all of us to come in the twelve gates. Each gate is just right for each kind of our personality and when every kind is in we can plant some peace. You know the Good News, don’t you?”

“I believe not!” said I.

“You can feel good, if you want.” Answered my once double doubting brother/father Tom.

Feel good, I thought, what an impossible concept. I saw the three spirits of my life coming and knew they were looking for the place where the creator of all feelings was buried. I was afraid.

“There is your wife,” said Tom. Yes, thought I, there is my first love. My love for her is always, though we definitely have our differences.

“You’re supposed to!” whispered my brother; “how else could anyone piece together the other world if all one saw was his side? But do you remember the great gift she gave you the first year after your divorce?”

No way could I forget, although the gift was of a dubious kind and one so unexpected that it took me years to understand how valuable it was. All I understood after the divorce was aloneness. I was completely on my own and overwhelmed with fear and dread. I was so panicky that I lived in a frenzy of activities. If I stopped I feared I would incinerate into a pile of ash. My mother had died the year before our divorce and my father had gone six years earlier.  My brothers and sister lived in other cities across the country and our contact was minimal. I had few friends here and none of any intimacy. For the past six years I had been teaching myself cabinetry while my wife began her career as a lawyer and I stayed at home tending the domestic chores. And then she and our daughter left for the east coast, where she was to immerse herself in a year’s study of the law. At the time I was making jewelry boxes in my shop behind our house. I was house sitting while she was away and that alone was a bad idea. There were too many memories everywhere around me and I guess I had a steel gripe on my feelings just so I could breath through all the lonely seconds.

It was around noon on a bright fall day. The air was warm and all morning I had been cutting dovetails. I had laid out enough pieces of different woods to make thirteen boxes and the dovetailing was taking forever. I had worked all morning and then gone into the house for something. And I found it, the gift. Some recent correspondence of my wife’s was in her desk; it was from a lover. That was the gift and I could hardly breath. I must have gone back outside because all I remember is standing outside my shop, in the sun, and completely falling apart. I was crying so hard and so deeply that it severed my consciousness and I rose up above me.

“That I was me,” said Thomas. He had his arm around me and I could feel the sorrow rise again within me. I didn’t cry but a feeling of compassion flooded my being and an old sadness wet my eyes. My vision was covered over with the onset of this returning feeling.

“I was amazed,” said my brother. “At the time I was in wonder and awe. I was thinking, wow! This Paul is really hurting, like some wounded animal you shook and your voice was deeper than I had ever heard it. Your voice was like another, older, creature that I had never encountered. And you cried and cried, like there was no end to your sorrows. And I waited. It was all I could do. Strangely, though, I wasn’t worried. Even more strangely, I was totally at peace. And then I disappeared.”

“Over the years,” I turned to look my brother in the eyes, “you kept reminding me, didn’t you? It was you who kept pushing me into memories, right?”

Thomas nodded his head and warmly smiled at me. Then he pulled me into his embrace and whispered: “You see mom? She is one with the women. And you remember that run you were on when mother came back to us?”

“Yes,” I answered. The spirit of my mother was right there looking for her son along with my wife. The love within me stirred once again for her. Mother was hard, there will never be any denying that; but I never doubted her love for me in all my life. Every mother only loves; love is her being. Even I knew that much! My brother was prompting me down memory lane and was jumping all around in time. What the hell, thought I, there is no time in memory; memory is a country spread out at my fingertips and holds gifts for solace that are always present. You can have a birthday party any time you wish and be overwhelmed. I was.

 Some years had passed! I smiled as the words prompted Mark’s way of storytelling. I had been seeing a couple of counselors now and again, never much on account of how little I really wanted revealed. I was becoming cognizant of how revelations had a tendency to impact on me like semis might when playing on the interstate. But one counselor had opened this door. The way mother disciplined us kids, primarily me, was with a wire whip and as one counselor put it, this was abuse. At the time I didn’t know about abuse, though nothing in me objected to the terminology, but I sure knew that her spankings put the holy hell of god fear in me, beside hurting like nothing I have since experienced in real time ever did. I mean it was like this: my legs would become flames and the fire took time long stretched out to die back down to gone. Plus it left red whelps around my legs that didn’t go away for days. It did impress my memory and curbed me from certain specific actions for periods of some duration. Unfortunately, her disciplines encouraged and empowered other demons within me who had a loathing for my self and who deeply planted the seeds of distrust and fear that I would carry for all of my first life. Mother planted death in me in her efforts to make me good. She didn’t know this, though, and later in my life I recovered the discipline she gave me that carried me through the fears that she wished and tried not to pass on to me. I do believe that she overcame her own, late in life, but I will never know for sure. What I do know, most of mine have now dissolved. And again, it was mother who gave me solace at the time of my travails.

I was still mountain jogging but my energies were forever depleting and I was finding that the distances I could jog were shrinking. At the time I was living with a male friend and would occasionally drive up to three guns and jog up the trail as far as I could. It was winter but the day was warm and I had just started up the trail and the sun was out and the morning at peace when a voice asked:

“Mother, why didn’t you love me?” said Thomas.

I just started crying. Here I was, out under the big sun, surrounded by all the beauty in the world, no one but me, not a thought in the whole world except how little stamina I had, crying and trying to help my feet along the trail and hoping my breathing would still convert oxygen into energy so I could run away from my sorry self that seemed determined to entropy back into the whatever it had come from. I was scared and sorry and didn’t have a clue how change could save me. I thought I was fated to die and that was the end of it. I wasn’t angry at her or anyone else. I was just defeated and betrayed and clinging to any straws that might prolong my time. I didn’t know it; but I was washing all my dirty spirits and time was definitely on my side. It was all too strange, crying and jogging along, weeping and quietly wailing, I was soo mixed up and confused; but I was definitely working and this light was dawning across my being and I was willing to participate with it. 

“Mother was squeezing your heart,” spoke Thomas; “but you were such a proud and strong willed child that she just didn’t know how to get into you.”

“I know I was,” said I. “I know I was.”

“There is one more woman,” said Tom.

“Yes.” I answered. God, I thought, and what a woman she is. I could see her with the two others of my life. My happiness has no bounds; I have no idea where it might grow and into what love it is moving towards. All I know is how much my happiness has grown over just these few years in which it began to blossom. My body begins shaking and water washes over my eyes as I remember and taste the just now of the love already overflowing inside my being. I cry. But my tears are not wet with sorrow and my feelings harbor no dread nor anxiety; they are bountiful with grace and gratitude and joy and they flow through me as naturally as rain finds the rivers to flow into the body of this earth for all life to live upon. The sorrows are gone from my past, the regrets dissolved, the fires of fears all dowsed and the wounds and disabilities healed. The guilt, the shame, the death sentence; all gone. This is truly amazing to me. I am like a baby dropped into the embrace of all love and I owe everything to these women who begot me. How did all this happen, I ask?

“Baptism!” answers my doubting other. “You uncovered your nature. But aren’t you going to talk of this last one?”

“I don’t know how,” I answered. “She is too close to me, too dear; my love and trust of her I don’t know how to measure nor to read. I have no words here. It’s just shiny and bright and clear and silent; it is so bright! But it wasn’t always like this.”

“Remember a few things,” asked Tom, “for me.”

“Yeah,” I said, “OK! 

“I remember when it all began; and I do mean all. It was Sunday morning and the sun was shining outside our house. My wife and I had decided a divorce was our only real option and we were sitting in the living room to tell our daughter. We did this very rationally and openly and without any hostile or hard feelings between the two of us, my wife and I. Our daughter sat and listened, she was twelve at the time. I could see that she was devastated. I was devastated and my wife was devastated but you know how hard life makes our personas and how mental our gripe upon ourselves has evolved and how we pretend to be proper and all, even in the mist of extreme trauma and destruction. To me, this was just such an occasion. Anyway, she listened to the both of us explain our madness and then she said she was going to take a shower and get ready for the day. She expressed in her body language and words very little emotion, other than being almost unable to walk out of the room and having a face that was as immobile as diamond. When she left for the shower my wife went one way and I went another, which of course was all we could do since we both had built our own walls to protect one another from our other. It’s hard for one to read one’s own self, except by being open enough to read our real world behavior which exactly mimics our real self behavior but almost always our mental creation of life is a cartoon where erasures or additions can be accomplished at any time one wishes to justify or begin over anything that is not going the way one wants the story to be read. This is easy for adults; children are not so talented. My wife and I were great cartoonists.

I had moved away into the kitchen. A guest bath was just off the kitchen and our daughter had gone there to shower. I heard the water come on and then I heard my daughter crying. I was devastated. My self-esteem, any sense of value I might have had concerning this self I was, crashed and burned. And I was distraught beyond words. I caused this. I caused this and I had no idea how to un-cause it. But not only that; I knew two things. One, my daughter was hurting. Not just hurting, she was suffering. Suffering is when the emotional world is burning, is being destroyed, is left uncared for and abandoned. Suffering is aloneness, distrust, abandonment. Suffering is darkness, untouchable-ness, fear, death. And I knew this: she would blame herself. Wasn’t SHE the source, read cause, of this hurtful feeling? Didn’t the feeling overwhelm her? Yes it had! Her SELF was guilty. All guilt carries a  price. Guilt doesn’t go away until the price is paid. This is our nature. But nature doesn’t abandon us, nor leave us without talents to rectify our hurts; we abandon nature when we make our hearts hard and pretend we are not the other, the one that hurts. In other words, I reject my nature. My daughter blamed herself for her suffering because suffering is her nature and she was guilty only of having her nature, as each of us are. But she didn’t understand this. I did though, standing in that kitchen with my heart breaking and knowing I was the cause and it was past and I couldn’t undo it and I was damned and so was she. That was where I began.”

“When you were with Mark,” said Thomas, “you mentioned to him some idea you had about what you called man’s corrupt consciousness. That is what you meant, right?”

“Yes, but at the time I couldn’t put this idea into words and it kept floating in and out of my mind. A corrupt consciousness arises out of un-expressed emotion, emotion that is too strong and powerful. The individual walls it off, separates from it because it seems intent upon our destruction. This is how death entered the emotional world. Put out of consciousness, but is it really ever, this emotion sits on the body like excess fat. It distorts the natural functions and dulls the senses. It separates and isolates the individual from the present and makes fabrication mandatory. Why? Because contact with the present, which is all sensual, is no longer possible. A person’s time is consumed by the demands of these old dormant emotions of hurt and fear and loss and as long as they remain walled away and hidden that person will be dead to life. Life is always present and ‘here’; but until the past emotions are released and expressed, the person will experience only estrangement. That person will have no eyes to see, no ears to hear, no nose to smell, no tongue to taste, and no hand to feel. Un-expressed hurts make us go away from nature and we become lost.

“Now, looking way back to this time when my daughter entered my real life, she gave me the key but I had no door to put it in. She was crying her heart out under the water of her life and this allowed her to function with this great rift buried in her ground, but her tears only relieved the pressure of the immediate situation. The history of division in each of us is long which means the emotional residue is unusually large, like a lake that the lord is always motoring across because the two sides are so distant. I could see my daughter’s life was just so divided between the love of opposites that had separated right before her eyes and that she would have a long road to go down like most all of us do. And I could see what this division had done to her. It had seriously hurt her. Division is a serious hurt.”

“Hey, brother, you are telling me!” smiled Tom. “I know where all the evil demons come from, where all the evil empires reside, and the table where all the enemies of the world get their food. We want it to be ‘out there’, right! That way I don’t have to face my own shame and guilt and my own hurt and sorrow, right! My own death sentence! Wow, that’s scary!”

“Tom, of course you’re right. But at the time I didn’t know what the cost was. I didn’t know what being alive felt like. I didn’t have a clue. Just the absence of fear alone is a lightness of being beyond anything I ever could imagine. The real sorrow of life is not the suffering, though it is so bad and so extreme that it does provoke intense anger in me, but the real sadness is what we are missing. What we don’t have, yet. We, you and I, have been doubly blessed. Let me go on.

“I couldn’t leave my daughter like she was. I was the guilty one and I knew it; but I was also totally devastated. When she came out of the shower she was recovered and my wife and I lived together until they went away back east. My daughter’s experience of my divorce somehow stayed with me through all the hell that the coming years brought home to my house and I kept my responsibility close, even if I was about as able as a dead worm on the sidewalk of life after a flood. I was waiting, about all my able-ness allowed. But I was beginning to practice. I was learning to take my sorrow and depression into the personal side of me and using my mind to remember or imagine some hurt or sorrow and cry over it in the privacy of my own house. This helped, though at first it didn’t seem like much. When my daughter’s life came apart, I was still waiting but now more able and very willing to bring her into my house and father her like I didn’t do when I was married. When I was married I was the most divided individual around town; but I didn’t have a clue. My wife divorced me because I had been divorced all my life and she couldn’t help me except by letting me go. It was the only way I might possibly wake up. You remember, Tom, the fear woke me up. Getting out of bed in the morning is only the beginning; the real question was how to proceed and towards what?

“I can’t claim any credit here. The first couple of years she lived with me were hell, on both of us. She was angry and sore, hiding everything from me and sleeping more hours than she was awake. I was ready to be the drill sergeant at basic and whip her into shape, just like my mother before me; but I was wrong. If it hadn’t been for my ex-wife, who stayed by me and encouraged me and loved me and supported all my efforts, if it hadn’t been for a counsel woman who did the same, and if it hadn’t been for my daughter herself who gave me all the signs of wanting support and encouragement and trust and respect and at the same time respecting her own boundaries and refusing harsh treatment and totally rejecting my sullen and silent, withdrawn, cold shoulder temperament, I would not have grown into the father that my cock long ago had made me because I thought that was love and man did I want love. The love and trust and support I gave to my daughter was mimicked by her and returned to me a hundred fold. And the way this came about was by gentleness, care, respect, and openness concerned with truth; and it came from both sides. But you know, Tom, you have been through it all with me and you have encouraged and trusted and loved right along with me and in that process we have become glued once again together. I love you.”

“Well, Paul, do we go find Jesus now and listen to what he has to say to the twelve before he vaporizes into the clouds?”

“Yes, we need him more than ever now. We need his creative powers if we are ever to find our way into this life that surrounds and embraces all of us. We need all of our kind together imagining a life without destruction and violence and consumption ruling. You and I were united by this desire to be creative and supportive, but we cannot continue without creation supporting us nor us supporting creation. We need our kind to become of one mind, one body, one life with one goal, to live. We need the inspiration of the mothers of all those who live. We need the inspiration to become one love under the guidance of our creative faculty. We can’t  -

“Paul, shut up! You can stop preaching, others will understand. Jesus can’t be killed, you didn’t die, there is plenty of time for you to get on the band wagon later. I’ll even make you a little raised platform that you can take to the corner, if you want. You got too much of Paul the Apostle in you.”

“Well, I guess,” I said as I felt the blood flood my face.

“So let’s go!”

“OK, Tom, let’s do it! But you know we have to hide if we want to get in on that conversation, cause history don’t record us as being there.”

“OH, Paul, we are good at hiding,” he said, and we laughed and laughed.

Tom and I settled into the hair of Mary, we were gnats. She had just imagined Jesus and was totally elated. The three women had gone to the tomb of the dead and all they found was a ghost who said Jesus had woke up and left. This had scared the three and they fled that empty hole in the ground and had each wondered as they wandered their separate ways. It was Mary of the seven spirits of childhood that saw Jesus first and she was off to tell the twelve boys not to worry. She now totally believed that no one could kill his or her creative faculty, that it would always raise or sink or shape change or shift sides but that it could not be destroyed. Besides, she felt great, alive, empowered.

She entered a house and went down a narrow, dark stairwell. I could hear moans and wailings coming through the walls. She entered a room full of boys, each crying and weeping like their mothers had slighted them and hurt their feelings in some inextricable way. More like pouting.

“He is not dead,” she said. “I saw him.”

Her smile was radiant. Tom and I had flown into a corner. Light came from around her face. But not one of the boys would allow her to comfort him. Each was too overcome with their personal sorrow to bother with her. Tom and I decided to leave, the tears of others is still hard for me to know how to deal with. I thought, though, good for them! It will make them feel better when the sorrow dries up.

Tom and I went to Jesus. We changed into the form of zero because we knew nothing wouldn’t get his attention and watched. We saw the two coming down the road. They were twins living in one body, like Tom and I, and the locals never suspected that this individual had a split personality. We watched Jesus appear to them, but he had reverted into a form the twins didn’t recognize. The two at this time were walking through the countryside, holding hands and intercoursing.

I had a theory about why they, at first, didn’t recognize him. They were walking in their nature, that is, were in the country. He fell in with the two and thus made three in one body and the naturalness wasn’t evident since it was most natural. When the two had come into the city he split off and the un-naturalness made them realize how natural their nature was and the absence of the naturalness impressed the idea of him being risen and with them all along. Immediately they recognized his absence as the surest sign of his past presence. They were elated also!

They went and told the other boys. Tom and I became tear drops on the cheek of Peter and were shocked when Peter didn’t believe. Peter almost crushed us trying to wipe us away. We thought he was trying to hide his tears in front of the two.

“Popes don’t cry, do they?” I asked Tom.

“I don’t know,” he answered.

Anyway, none of the boys believed the two.

“That’s two,” I said to Tom. “I guess God is anxious to bring about un-belief and impatient for everyone to admit it.”

“What are you mumbling about?” asked my brother.

“Oh,” said I, “I apply the dreams of Pharaoh and the words Joseph told him to everything in our sacred stories. You know how impatient Joseph said God was.”

Tom smiled and gave me a big hug. Boy, did that feel good!

Later, Tom and I took the form of plates so we could get the news from the immanently arriving Jesus without disturbing the food of the eleven at their night time repast in the basement of their minds. We had read Mark’s account and had no doubts about his coming. My Tom was past doubt.

He burst through the door. “What the hell you doing down here in the basement?” asked Jesus. "It's been two thousand years; and I'm fucken back! There is a war going on and it should be in each and every country; but OH NO! We're going to clean up the world first: Make it safe from ME! You say 'for' me because you still don't know me and now I'm back to embrighten YOU. I'm no terrorist, that's my dad! He is pissed at what you guys are doing to your sons and daughters, and to His helpmate - woman. Clean up your own countries first, and let's let me in every country do my own job. Later on John is going to tell you to love one another; right now I'm telling YOU to begin with respect and let love come on her own terms.  But, this is a BIG BUTT, you can't do it when you're in the dumps. So what are you guys doing?"

“Hiding!” answered Peter.

“We were hungry,” said Thomas.

“We heard you were about,” said Simeon. “But you told us not to listen to those who said that he is here or he is there. Can we have it both ways?”

“I blame MEN with their violence and greed and fear as the causes behind the distrust of nature. I blame men for the loss of feeling in the hearts of all. Distrust and abuse and blindness are the seeds of destruction. Did I not send my spirit to comfort you? Did I not send the two to inform you? The imagination cannot be coerced into conformity. Why do you not understand and believe?”

And he said to the eleven brothers: “Go into yourself and find the Good News offered to all men. Know this: all who live come from woman, I mean your spirit who gives you life. You don’t need a bottle or a needle or the pharmacy, each of these should tell you that you are lacking spirit. Nor do you need another body so that you can possess it and hid from your sorry self. That solves nothing, nor does it quell aloneness. And your body is not sorry, maybe just sore. Believe me and learn from the two Baptisms. One, when you hurt, be natural, cry. And it doesn’t have to be your finger, it can be your soul, which is the earth and all its living inhabitants. Cry! Damn it. Two, when you don’t get your way, and fear and terror overwhelm you and your anger arises, nail it down in you and keep it there until you find out WHY? Isn’t that what Job did? That is the second baptism and Life is trying to give you a bountiful gift. Stay there. Believe it. You will find peace. The suffering of those who won’t or can’t do this will kill them anyway, then they will be OK. That is, if you guys can make it against the law to kill. I thought that was an old commandment already? I could be wrong, though.

“Here are a few signs that will go with those who are twice immersed in the fire and water of their feelings. Demons will shape change into companions and friends and all fear will dissolve. The baptized will use their tongues to talk of their own experiences, their shame and their failure, their fears and evasions, their hurts and their lies. They will stop blaming their wives and their mothers or fathers and society and government and business; they will blame their critical judge, their HE WAS WHO HE WAS, for terrifying their little self and setting them into a nose dive towards self destruction. They will see the only Truth they can comprehend as a little subjective “i”, though very worthy of this life and with every guarantee of experiencing it if life is shared, and a much larger Truth that nature only works on the basis of love and trust. Force and control is alien to nature and its alien to me. They will see others who are different, every other, but once below the surface the forces of nature are all self-similar. And the twice baptized will have the know-how to touch the sick and their touch will heal, because the log that blocked their vision will have been consumed in the fires that never go out.

“Last, and maybe of the most import, they will see and experience this earth and heaven as the same place and the home of the living, worthy of every care and all nurturing and understanding because it is the home of life. Heaven and hell will pass away, but I will not.

“I am going to where your storehouse of good charges are and take my place beside my mother and father. I ask you to do the same.” And he was gone.

Tom and I saw him change form and disappear. We waited until the boys washed us in the waters and put us in the rack to dry. We watched as all the dirty spirits went out with the Tide. We don’t know what happened after that, since we went back to being Paul Thomas and the eleven disappeared into a century that was about to change into something no eye has seen nor ear listened to. Paul lastly said: Amen! And faintly we hear a choral echo of the same.

 

 

 

 

TRAVELS WITH MARK

A GOSPEL ACCORDING TO PAUL THOMAS

AN INTRODUCTION

 

            When I assented to take this assignment, I didn't know how killed I might get; but at the time it wasn't an issue. Having said this, I need to add a few journalistic notes before I start my story. I introduce Mark talking with John in the first paragraph. Mark talks about John slash Jesus. For anyone who knows the oral tradition of the Hebrews this is no problem. The problem is that all of us, at least most all, don't know diddly shit about any traditions, period. So I will briefly explain.

            In the beginning, a little after the beginning started and all the way to the end of the beginning, every person who was not a real person was made two, like one plus one. Every son of man had a twin; one was older than the one younger. The first out of the womb was the older. It makes sense, if time is started with the first breath of life. Birthing is synonymous to awaking to life. An individual awakes to two kinds of life. The first is the body, when he’s a baby. The second is the emotion, when she awakes. He may never awake to the second. Some people seem to don't. The second born, in the bible myths, is the youngest.

            The inheritance rights went to the younger; this was God's plan but it found no favor with mAN. I don't care about favors; it is just the oral tradition. Mark told me first off that his account was not about real men. I didn't argue; I figured he was going to tell me the Gospel truth. I also figured that was the reason my boss assigned me the job of interviewing Mark. My boss wanted me to find out all I could about this 'son' of man. That was my assignment.

            Mark begins his account with John coming out of the desert. I know someone will want to know why he was in the desert. The answer lies in the work of an englishman named Elliot. (He was english cause that's what came out of his mouth.) Elliot was a banker, but his treasure wasn't in the vault behind where he worked. His treasure was in his poetry making. Elliot said man lived in the desert. He was born there and he lived there and he wanted to get out of there. The oral tradition of the Hebrews affirmed what Elliot told us around the time of the second great world war.

            John lived in a wasteland. He was a desert traveler. His means of transportation was a camel with a hide halter. Camels could live without water. John discovered he was not a camel and the desert was killing him.

            I'll never forget the first words I heard Mark speak. These words endeared him to me for life. I recognized immediately the word mAN from the tone in his voice. I knew what he saw in his mind. I saw it too. John was a very short man. This is the account I filed with my boss: On Account Of Jesus Christ!

 

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

LIFE AFTER THE FLOOD

 

            "What the hell took you so long, mAN!" Mark asked. John was so wrapped up with crying he couldn't speak. Mark and I figured it was all them locust John had been living on, along with having to wash them suckers down with honey. Honey don't wash nothing down, never; consequently them locust 'trapped' in your mouth! The idea made my stomach begin to leap like a soil compactor does as the engine revs begin to come up. Come up was what my stomach said. Quickly I diverted my attention to John. He was still crying so Mark began preaching. Mark said John slash Jesus was the offspring of woman. He didn't get detailed. He asked the crowd, a crowd had been following John, to think back to the first woman whose offspring was Cain slash Abel. I noted everyone was thinking. John was charged with a duty, said Mark. That duty was to get in every mAN's face.

            I had a flash back. It was good, old Noah, naked and drunk in his tent. His son, Ham, saw him so. I had pondered what might have caused this demise and what exactly did Ham see? The demise was easy; Noah had come un-connected with his mate. In order to compensate for no spirit Noah had turned to drink. He called it jug spirit and it wasted him. Noah’s mate had gone to work, drying up all the water that killed all of life, in the form of a black raven. The story is long. Ham, on the other hand, saw a problem. It was his father, now lost and powerless. His passion had dried up. His penis was no longer a staff, like Moses had. Moses was well hung, but not Noah! I remembered the metaphor I used at the time, a mAN studying a worm he picked off the dead sidewalk. My recall filled me with disgust. I remembered that man; before he studied his worm he had a woman in his face. But a man in my face; the idea made my penis suck up. A shudder ran up my body. I looked at John and found he was still crying.

            Mark continued preachen that John was preachen to make the Lord's road straight. Mark said what John was saying was to stop making the Lord climb into every volcano and to keep the Lord from playing around on ocean floors. Give him a break, Mark said John said. John was still crying so I assumed Mark was reading his mind.

            John would baptize mAN in the water, said Mark. It was everything I could do to keep from laughing.

Look around you, Mark; I wanted to say. You see any water? Stinking desert went in every direction, as far as I could see. You’re reading a dream, Mark.

            John was still crying, and since Mark was dreaming I figured now was a good time to study John. The first thing I noticed about John was the cut of his clothes.

He killed the fucking camel, said I. No wonder he's been out there so long. He's lucky to be alive.

In wonder I turned back to Mark, who was still preachen for John.

            "He who is born after me is more fit to live than I ever was. If it hadn't been for him I would have never learned to tie my sandals. I baptize you with THE water. You better learn.  The one who comes after me will take you to the volcano.”

            Now Mark had stopped making sense. Why keep our Lord out of the volcanoes, Mark, if when he grows up he's going to go there anyway? Mark didn't hear my question so I dropped it. I barely noticed the sound it made as it splashed into the sand and was covered.

            I know everyone will say Mark was putting words in John's mouth, but John just couldn't get a grip. I figured John was wailing over all the things he did in his past to make himself feel good with the end result of the opposite effect. Anyone who kills his camel in the desert is very mixed up; so I didn't study very long on John. Mark preached John had a valid point, and rinsing one's sorrows in THE water would help healing. The whole crowd was now crying and I was starting to get nervous. I couldn't see what the point was.

            Mark kept right on preachen; I think he was getting into it. He preached John preached that the problem was our fathers. They are too busy, preached Mark, competing for survival to be able and qualified to help their sons get through pre-adolescent syndrome disorder.

Pre-adolescent syndrome disorder? I said.

I looked at the crowd and they were wailing like babies. I knew not a one heard Mark's twisted interpretation of John's childish idea. "Say it in plain words, damnit!" I shouted at Mark.

            Mark looked puzzled. He studied the crowd.

We're crying, he picked it up again, to get the pressure off. We want our hearts to turn the fathers who we haven't become towards the children that we are so that our childish hearts may turn back towards the fathers we are becoming in understanding and respect, lest the great and terrible Yahweh comes again like he did to our fathers before us and strikes the land with a curse.

If Mark had a point, I thought the easier route would be figuring out the wasteland syndrome disorder. I saw that John had stopped shaking and my attention dropped what Mark had muddled.

            "Fathers," John said, "Help your sons, talk to them and try to understand their feelings. If you don't, you will sure as shit drive them into the desert. And let me tell you, it’s one mean, hellish place. If you doubt my words, study the life forms that live there."

            Jesus had just walked up and retied one of John's sandals. I recognized him immediately because of his promise. Like Samson Jesus had not cut his hair and those who understood knew that everyone from Nazareth had made a vow to their father. Jesus hadn't cut his hair because his vow was yet incomplete. John called him brother Jesus.

            I smiled when I heard John call him Jesus, because it made me sad. I had this urge to cry. I couldn't, and I don't know why. Everyone around me had stopped crying. They had all gathered around Jesus, all of them speaking and cooing and consoling him in the only language they knew, Aramean. John spoke Aramean. Jesus was an Aramean word. Jesus had made a vow to open the door of his imagination and lead all God's children through the door of death. I saw Jesus was afraid. He was crying. I could see him working to give free rein to his emotions when his head raised and his eyes opened wide.

            There was a sound like the roar of an F-4 Phantom and a bright light like the flash of an Adam Bomb popping and a great voice that laid flat the hairs in our ears: "I love you, my son, and I am pleased." Something inside of me broke and tears poured down my cheeks. I felt it and couldn't believe it. The whole crowd seemed shocked. Every face was looking at me. I felt terribly ashamed, wondering what I had done. No, they were not looking at ME, their eyes were staring past me. I looked over my shoulder and saw Jesus being lead into the desert. I was stunned.

            "You don't have to be stunned," said John. "It's a trip and since I was there he had to go also. It's just the way it is. I hope he makes it OK. You heard the voice. I want all of you to go home and tell what you heard to your sons and daughters. Say it every day to your children, so the desert might leave this earth." Everyone was crying again as they wandered off. I made a note in my journal; Arameans were the first race of mAN.

            Mark and I watched as Jesus was pulled into the desert. I noticed that something was wrong with the way he walked. It was like his right ear was leading him. I knew that walk! The lead was on his right foot, his head was turned left and his chin was too high up. His gait was halting. Then it hit me.

Mark, I said, have you ever watched a child who is being pulled by its ear?

Though we never discussed it, we believed it was Jesus' mother who was leading him into the desert.

            "He's gonna take a test," spoke a voice. "It's being given by a liar!"

I didn't look at Mark. I'd bet my typewriter he never looked at me.

The voice continued. "He'll be out there one day for every year his ancestors wandered in the desert after losing faith with their employer Misraim, who was the opposite twin of the Promised Land. He'll live with the wild animals and the angels; but neither will eat him nor drink his blood. That will frustrate him to no end and his anger and resentment will drive him out of the desert."

            A dust devil stirring up the sand made Mark and I cover our faces and when the agitation was over - we found ourselves alone in the empty desert.

Mark, I said, why'd you call him Jesus? Even I know Jesus is the Aramean word for the Hebrew Joshua.

If I'd called him Joshua, answered Mark, his Hebrew brothers would all say he was a liar. They know how long Joshua's been dead. He'll have a hard enough time as is, especially when he pops off things like: before Abram was I was. Or: Don't any of you think I was born yesterday; I've been here more thousands of years than you have toes and fingers. So I called him 'Yahweh saves' in Aramean to avoid people hating him before he was old enough to crawl.

Mark, I said, the people that know - hate Yahweh -; he killed all their fathers. They would be more comfortable crawling into bed with the bubonic plague.

I know, said Mark, that's why I named him Jesus Christ. God can't save mAN; but Yahweh sure can make living HOT. Mark smiled at me.

            The next thing I knew he was in my face. He wanted to know why I didn't mention the Jordan River when he was preaching for John.

Mark, you know how literal people are, I answered. Next week we'll hear of some Yahoo preachen all God's children, he won't call them people, can be saved by putting their swimming suits on and standing in some friggin river. I can see him now, Elmore Gantry. What a great name, Elmore! Good thing you didn't call him Elmore Christ; but it doesn't ring. Can't you just see it, Mark? Burt Lancaster standing on the bank, dressed all in black and his face shining like the sun, veins in his neck standing out like pipes and his white teeth like ivory dominos filling up a smile as wide as the grand canyon, praisen the Lord and watchen as the children all drown. I thought having everyone bawling was more to the point.

            Mark fell out of my face. We just stood there with our hands in our pockets. The time for talking had passed. Neither of us had a real job so we just waited.

            We heard that John was locked up. When we got to the jail we found out he had been betrayed. We were in the alley interviewing some bums and having little luck when the back door opened and Jesus walked out. Mark and I followed, but the bums didn't move. I don't think they could see him.

Jesus went into Galilee, which I thought was a neat way to say the clan of mAN. When he had everyone's attention he started telling the Good Story. He seemed cognizant of the Lottery System, knowing full well that everyone was impoverished including the Chosen One.

He said: Time is running over the cup. Can't you see it? Turn off the water, if you don't want the kingdom of the Good drowning for a second time. Turn around from what you are doing and listen to the Good Story. Churchmen all live in the desert. Even if they wanted to, they can't tell you anything. I've been to the desert and you don't need to hear about it from me. I'll tell you this much, I saw beside the church house the state house, full of sons and daughters of heroes. None of'em were gardeners; so don't let either tell you which row to hoe. I can tell you: both groups have a deficit of clues.

            He went down to the Sea of Galilee, where few fishes still swam in the water. He was looking for drowned men in living bodies. He saw Simon, who was a good listener, and his manly twin, Andrew, casting their nets for a few lively thoughts. They were fishermen.

Jesus said to them: let's go catch some men. Men have more ideas than anyone can shake a stick at!

Simon slash Andrew said: What a thought!

And they followed him. Five steps later Jesus saw Jacob named James, son of the one called "if the boy is endowed, his father is a Rock." Others said the boy's father was Zebedee, enjoying the breath vibrations the sound made as it twisted and turned to get into the world. With James was his brother John. This was the same John as the one betrayed; only this John kept his thoughts to himself in another body. John, slash brother James, was working on his mind in hopes of getting the thing to hold an idea long enough to eat it. Leave it, called Jesus and they did, along with their sweet sounding father and his hired mind-struggling men all in a boat shored up on heavy blocks floating on dry air over the barren land. James slash John followed him.

            They pulled into Capernaum, Mark and I along for the ride, drove right up to the sabbath, and walked into a church. He taught and they were flabbergasted. He wasn't like any psychologist, no expository discourse flowed from his mouth like a professor, he quoted none of the media thinkers or literary authorities, but his words were sweet and so refreshing that none bothered the mind to obstruct it from the good feelings that filled every body. The scribes had a bitch of a time note taking. Distraction had never been more comforting. Everyone woke up to a man in the middle of the church - picking his nose.

            It was evident the man leaned on a dirty spirit. All his weight was on his left leg and his cross-eyed effort to guide his blind finger in its job had left him unaware of the following he had so immediately gathered. His mother was a washerwoman for a local politician and his father sold Smith/Corona typewriters in a section of town whose literacy rating was under the national unemployment numbers. His father balanced his frustrations by exercising his intelligence with fists and verbal abuse with his loving family after the sun had gone home. The sweetness of the church had turned disgusting. Someone shuffled. The man's cross-eyed lids slowly rose. Mark's mouth had fallen open. I saw that mine was open too. The man's eyes swung left and right and then focused on the face of Jesus. He was staring directly at "Yahweh saves". His face had fear on the left side and doubt on the right. Then he cried out: What is there between all of us and you, Jesus with the long hair?

            I thought it was a good question. One, I couldn't see a thing between them. I wondered why he asked. He could have been hallucinating and seeing something none of us saw at all. Two, he flatly acknowledged that on the inside of him he was not alone. I researched his mother and father later, but at the time I didn't think of them.

            He cried again: Did you come to destroy us?

The man seemed a bit paranoid; then I reflected on how I might feel being found picking my nose in front of an audience. It was bad enough in my car at a stoplight, being caught by the car beside me, but the green gave me permission to drive away. The man is only on the defensive. He is ashamed and can't hide it. His dirty clothes are a dead give away anyway.

            A sneer crawled on the man's face: I – know - you, I – know – who – you – are, you – are – goodie – goodie – two - shoes!  You’re better than us! He ran the last words right at Jesus' face.

Shut up, said Jesus looking directly into the man's eyes. LEAVE HIM ALONE.

The man collapsed like a downy laundered rag as a shriek bounced off the rock hard walls of the church.

            I watched the awe grow on the faces of my fellow churchers as they reached out for the shoulders of other gathered believers and made a huddle, murmuring among themselves: What is this? Is it voodoo? Is it a new teaching? Did anyone get it? That dirty spirit got it. Can only dirty spirits hear his voice? Didn't we hear his voice?

            The last question stopped the murmuring and I watched as Rumor broke from the huddle and was out the door. No one helped the clean rag still piled on the floor. Mark and I went out and stood in the sun, but we didn't say a word.

            Later Mark and I followed the two sets of twins to Simon's house. Jesus came with us. Simon's wife's mother was all hot and in a fever. "Well, I guess!" Said Mark and I at the same time. We looked at each other and laughed. Jesus looked at us with that look. You know, not smiling and not frowning but all serious. It was a tired look. He looked like my mother at the end of a day when I wanted to play, all put out. Jesus looked at his watch, then at us and asked: how long?

Jesus, he had a way with metaphor.

            Jesus went and took his mother by the hand and her fever left her. She got up and served us all. It was evening. The sun was gone. Darkness was everywhere. People began coming out of the night with their ill and their dying, carried by demons with their sad stories. It seemed like a vast city waiting at the door of the complaint department. He fixed them all; even the demons who wanted to talk. He told the demons to keep the stories to themselves; and they did. Early, long before the light was due, he disappeared.

            Mark and I listened as the pair of twins discussed and debated where he might have gone and having gone what he might be doing when he got there. Pray: said Simon. Mark and I looked at each other and agreed Simon would come up with that. Simon needed to pray all right, on account of how badly he liked denying. Someone else said: let's go see. So we all walked out of the house and began stumbling around in the night.

            We found him. I thought it was a miracle.

Simon said to him: Everybody is looking for you.

Hey, Simon, I wanted to ask, how can you say that?

But Jesus seemed to like Simon's words. He said: Good! Let's go somewhere else. It's like life; when you have lost something, looking in the same old place ain't worth a shit. Let's go where no one is looking. I'll show others what they have lost.

What have they lost? asked Simon.

Their minds, said Jesus, and it makes them mean and stupid.

How did that happen? Continued Simon.

Their minds got scared by my Dad and went into hiding; but they separated from their perfect bodies and are now lost. Jesus answered and patted Simon Peter on the head.

            It turned out I followed that group into all the tribes of mAN. Mark recorded it differently, which is a valid prerogative of every journalist. He wrote: He went into all of Galilee.

What chapter are we in, Mark?

We're still in the first, he answered.

Damn, I said, I’m getting tired of this typin. I was never cut out to be a journalist.

            Here comes a leper, said Mark.

I turned to look. I immediately wished I hadn't. My mind asked my attention if it wanted to compare the leper with the contents of my stomach. If I kept looking it promised to bring an example before my eyes. I couldn't look as the leper walked past Mark and I. I no longer doubted the Victorians. Any imagination that saw the evils of the flesh as I just did would invent layers of protection and make them law so that contact was a hard day's job to even get close. Fortunately desire is twice the man repulsion ever was!

            The leper walked over to Jesus, on whose face I let my attention rest. My gut reaction had caused my attention to spook and shifting it towards Yahweh’s boy was like Pepto-Bismol coating my agitation. Jesus' face remained calm; his eyes gently studied those of the leper.

The leper spoke: If you wish, you can make me clean.

I couldn't believe it, but the countenance of Jesus remained fluid and soft as he reached out and touched the white, fingerless hand of the leper. I wish it: he said.

            The guy went clean! I mean; I don't know what the hell I mean. His skin, his hands, even his clothes; I mean he was everyday, just like Mark. But the voice of Jesus turned hard:

Tell no one. Go to the priest; go right to the priest. Show the priest your skin so he can see how clean it is. Show Jesse Helms and Jimmy Baker. Make the offering that Moses prescribed so the priest will understand how you once believed you were nasty, you were untouchable, you were alien. Tell the priest he is wrong about the flesh. The flesh is a sign about how wrong he is about woman. If anything, the flesh is the most long-suffering of all victims.

            Mark and I heard the man had other diseases deeper than his skin. He was deaf! He never told the priest. He went blabbering all over the town. After we had talked it over Mark and I reached a consensus. The man really wasn't deaf, he was happy. Why tell a priest, would they believe it? Freedom is a terrifying word for those who have never left Jail. We had to leave though: now that the ex-leper had everybody searching for Him. So we went into places where no one had ever gone before. We were wrong, these places were terribly overcrowded and people were coming out of the ground like seeds that finally got some water.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

CAN’T GET NO SATISFACTION

 

            So we drove back to Capernaum. It was good to be out of the crowds. Jesus hid out in a house, and we got to hide too. It took a few days for word to get out but then the crowds appeared in the street. Jesus stood in the door and talked about opposites.

They are here forever, he said. But you can live with them; they are not out to kill you and you won’t kill them. If you try long enough, if you live with what opposes you without beating it up or letting it beat you up, if you do only that, then you have done the bare minimum. That’s a good beginning but try and go farther. Try understanding the opposite viewpoint, to the point of wearing its shoes, and don’t let anyone laugh when the heels are three inches longer than you normally feel comfortable in nor let yourself turn red in the face when the opposing pants you crawl into are one legged with a single cuff like a barrel hoop and children laugh because they say you are in a dress, they are only children and always wanting to play. Smile and play with them. One day those opposites will take off like a bottle rocket. You will be outside the twin engines. You will be the pilot. Wow!

            I recorded 'wow' on all the faces in the crowd. It was Mark who noted the four men coming up the street carrying a board. I noted Mark needed glasses. I told Mark to put it in his account as a man who was stiff as a board. The men saw they couldn't fight the crowd so they came up the alley. They climbed on the roof and removed the skylight and lowered the man down like he was a piece of lumber. When Jesus saw their determination and what good carpenters there were, they didn't tear up the skylight removing it, nor knick the man like a careless carpenter can do handling those precious planks of wood all day; Jesus said:

My child!

            His words reminded me of Glorine, my black southern nanny exclaiming over some artwork I did to win her favor.

            Jesus went on: What you did as a child was not your fault. The way I see it, your childish actions bear no culpable fault. I forgive you!

Notetakers were in the crowd and I could hear their hearts say: He acts just like god almighty. We personally resent someone acting like he is the almighty. Further we resent looking higher than our heads when we have to take notes, especially when the person who we are noting is a low life scum not on the ecclesiastical elevator rising to holy-Dom with us. Besides, the note takers complained, we have been taught that only God can forgive.

            Mark whispered to me that notetakers were bitter. They had no courage, not even a little. They wanted to quit school but were afraid of what their teachers would say. And without a degree who would hire them. So they had to praise a system they actually hated. They were in a cage and had to play like it was home.

            Jesus was looking around. There was no doubt about the feelings filling the room. Like a man who mixed pintos with dried figs six hours earlier (yum, yum), bad odors were down casting people's eyes and making everyone feel shame.

Why do you think that way? Asked Jesus. Which is easier? To forgive a person or to heal a person?

            The scribes understood that healing a person was hard. It was not hard; it was impossible. Healing was a matter of body and soul, an individual thing. Another individual could not do that for anybody. Healing was personal.

Jesus smiled.

The notetakers put it in their notes; but they didn't note that he smiled at them. They were angry. In his own reasoning each scribe saw that for him to forgive another was more impossible than healing, cause they couldn't forgive God! - How could they forgive his or her self?

            You don't know me, said Jesus, and all your thoughts are like bastards you propagate over some enslaved land. But so that you may know that any man who is a son of a man has authority to forgive the actions of another man on this earth - he turned and addressed the man on the floor imitating how his father before him had allowed others to walk on him - he said. I tell you; your shame is forgiven. Don't accept it. Loosen up and go home.

And the bored man did. The man picked up his bed and walked out of the house. I thought he still looked a bit stiff.

Come on, said Mark.

I agreed the improvement was a miracle.

            The crowd went bananas. Monkeys everywhere were dancing. Gloria’s were being flung in every direction. Some of them hit even God. Some were like pins in the doll Voodoo. By general consensus it turned into a party, and THAT impressed everyone.

            After getting that board straight Jesus went down to the water's edge and from everywhere they came. He told them stories. As Jesus was pacing back and forth, I noticed his eyes fall on Levi. He seemed intrigued by a patch Levi had on the butt side of his pants.

            Mark, I said, you tell a magical story.

Shut up, he answered, and tell me your impressions of Levi.

I laughed, seeing Levi sitting in a tollhouse collecting tokens. It seemed obvious to me that Levi had left the priesthood in lieu of a job with a real income. Praise the Lord, said I, which were the words from his mother's mouth when Levi came out of the hole above Leah's knees. Leah named her third son Levi because she had manifested God's trinity in the world and she hoped her husband would love her.

            Her husband, Jacob, most loved Leah’s little sister, but it wasn’t Leah’s fault.  The fault was with God.  What God caused was Jacob’s reward.  Only Leah suffered and this mostly was in her mind.

            Mark, I said, you did a real good job naming the father of Levi.

I saw Mark blush as he asked me what I meant.

Tell me, Mark; if I take a word like heel or supplanter in Hebrew and make it into a proper kind of name and then get some help in translating that name into Arabic and then take it to some Greek scholar for his help in making it a proper Greek name so I can use it in an Aramean story, who would you call Jacob.

Alphaeus, Mark said.

Thanks Mark, I said, you are my kind of journalist.

            Levi had been given the job of serving Yahweh at His altar on account of whispering into the large ears of his brother Simeon that killing was OK with God. This came about at Shechem because Shechem (You remember that Shechem was actually from the place of Shechem, right?), a grandson of Heth, had kidnapped and held Justice, the only daughter of Jacob, because she was the most beautiful woman Shechem had ever seen and he wanted her in his town. What Shechem wanted was outrageous to Levi (Justice, MY daughter!) and he and his brothers had killed - all - the males of Heth (I like the name Heth. Heth is the silent letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Heth can't make a sound.).  This action on Levi's part earned him the right to be a priest and a killer at Yahweh's altar. Levi was to teach his brothers, it became ritual, the internal consequences of mishandling a charged child, in other words, acting on the impulse to kill. Few seldom make such personal connections and many only saw their favorite animals being slaughtered by Levi (Not just their favorite - THEIR perfect). It wasn't a good job.

            The job carried other beneficiary rights. The most important was no inheritance rights, which meant the employee got nothing from those who came before them. How this translated in the scheme of the transmigration of talent, it didn’t. This was good.  The priestly tribe had one talent, slitting the throats of animals that had no blemishes. They killed the perfect. It was a dead end job. It was assumed that the employee needed nothing, because Yahweh would provide everything. Levi sitting in his own personal tollbooth was his self-expression that he didn't buy it.

            Mark and I watched mAN's son walk up to the tollbooth and say: Follow me. Levi got in line with the rest of us and from the back gave directions to his house. We went to Levi's house to eat because the money was not only leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth we weren't getting nourished. I was starved.

            Levi had a huge table and sitting around it were many tax collectors and shinners.

Sinners, Mark said.

I looked at Mark and told him I wasn't about to argue; I didn't know any of them from Jacob. The way most of'em were decked out they struck me as shinners. At the table also were many disciples of the mAN's son. I figured it was a sign of the times. My attention followed many people, but it was truly rare when my mind desired to go home with any of'em. In fact, at this point in my journey it hadn't happened.

            Notetakers were there too; whom I found out were employed by the leaders of the one-world-sacred. A notetaker told me: it is what we believe. He told me also the one-world-sacred was NOT where he and I were having intercourse. I felt I had missed something; but my mind found no curiosity to explore and the connection came apart.

Other notetakers were mumbling about the mAN's son eating with the shinners and tax collectors and finally one said to a son's disciple: Why does he eat with sinners and tax collectors?

            See, said Mark, that notetaker called them sinners.

Mark, I said, just study who their employers are!

            mAN's son answered for his disciple: A weight lifter doesn't need a president for his muscles to grow; all he needs is hard work and a big plate. I didn't come to summon those who have plates large enough to hold the pig's share, but those shinners who underneath aren't getting enough food.

            Mark gave me that look. You know, the one that Jesus sometimes wears. A big plate was served me and I forgot all about Mark's pouting. I ate enough to last me three days.

            We were back on the street. Mark and I were comparing the skinny followers of John with the skinniest of those who follow the one-sacred-world leaders. Mark called the latter Pharisees.

What's that mean in Hebrew, I asked Mark?

To divide, he said.

What? I asked.

The notetakers won't say, he said.

Watchin' skinny men everywhere milling up one side of the street and being blown by the wind down the other I got a real funny feeling. It wasn't funny so much as it was odd. There were no women.

Probably because they've never studied math, laughed Mark.

Huh? I blurted out.  Had I missed something?  I felt alone and estranged.  I felt naked in this crowd of skinny men, like my spirit had dried up and been blown away.  I didn’t like the feeling and let my attention drift back to Yahweh’s holy boy.

            He sat listening to a group of starving men.

Why don't your followers go hungry like the rest of us? asked a man. Don't they like to suffer?

Jesus answered them: No! My followers like me and I feed them. Have you ever seen members of a wedding party not eat as long as the bridegroom is with them?  Let me answer for you, you have not. When the bridegroom leaves with his mate; then the party will be over. They will feel their aloneness. But until then, I feed them and they don't get skinny.

            Yahweh’s boy continued.  The way men study the Bible is like a cowboy who saddles a dead horse. He finds his task is a difficult one and doesn't find no cowgirl to tell him he's missing a connection. If the bitterness of the past catches up to you, enrolling in a right thinking course will only lead you wrong. And if a blind man buys a new car after escaping the wreckage of his old one, he only guarantees the success of his final demise.

            I noticed the faces on John's followers reminded me of washed blackboards and I made a note on my computer; but I didn't comment on it. What could I say?  You either got it or you didn’t.

            Another day Mark and I were following our lord in the midst of a large crowd. No one called him Lord because his hair was too long and the sunlight didn't reflect off his face. His face was just dark enough to leave us followers uncertain. The uncertainty principle was the cause of so many followers. He was leading us through a farmer's field, it was the lord’s day but I never heard him claim any ownership, and everyone was grazen. I was feeling some concern for the farmer and his crops but my fellow followers voiced other issues. A body of one-sacred-world leaders voted in a unified voice:

Your crowd is worken on the Sabbath. It is forbidden! Why do you let them?

            He answered: David did it. He was hungry. So were those with David. So David went into church and took the show bread that only those in the state of grace were to eat and he and his men ate it. Didn't you ever read that? Listen: he told them.

            I listened and the sound was like locust feeding after seven years in the ground. I was impressed. Mark kicked my shin. Hey, Mark, I'm a journalist. Remember.

            The sabbath was made for the sake of mAN - remember?

            I watched the wind play with mAN's son's long hair and thought it reminded me of a fair maiden. I closed my eyes so I could listen.

            He continued to dissertate: It is a reminder. It was a day set aside in hopes that man would look way back into the earliest accounts and remember that Yahweh rested after God created a good, workable creature they agreed would be called man.  Remember, it was Yahweh who killed ALL the fathers, Moses included, on their way to the Promised Land.  Remember, Yahweh will rest when men start caring for and nurturing nature, which in the earliest account is named The Garden. Man was created to participate with nature, not to go to church on Saturday or Sunday.  When man begins to do this, then he will find rest, then he will find his peace.

Jesus had definitely ruined that party, but not before the party had ruined the farmer's field. Everyone went home feeling bad and I imagined the farmer felt the same without going anywhere.

            Mark said, we're coming into chapter three.

I hardly heard his words. Pieces of care had been coming off me from the close of chapter one like snake skin on a rock and recognizing this skin as mine was making me giddy with freedom. I was growing and that old skin had been holding me down.

 

 

 

CHAPTER THREE

KINGS ARE PEOPLE

 

            Mark and I had followed Yahweh's young son into a church and standing smack dab in the dead center was a man with a dehydrated arm. Rumor had it the man was once employed by Maxwell to process coffee. He stayed in church because no one would give him a job on account of how ugly his deformity was and the man couldn't disagree.

            Notetakers were along the edges of the church pretending at scribbling but really their eyes were looking over the edge of their papers. Each and every eye was glued on mAN's son.

            Mark, I asked, what day is it?

The sabbath, said Mark.

I thought as much, from the looks I saw on the foreheads of the notetakers. Their foreheads looked like abandoned washer boards that had rusted and gone black. I thought their looks were like hope hoping the mAN's son would work, making the ugly man change his mind over the image it had grown there. Then they could accuse Yahweh's boy of Sabbath tinkering. Notetakers seemed to get a charge when they discovered someone breaking the law. The charge sometimes made a notetaker bear down so hard that the point on his pencil snapped, or made another tear a hole right through his sheepskin, which registered increased pleasure on each face.

            Another observation, from my long and diligent study, slammed its insights home; the notetakers stayed in church all the time. Were they ugly too, in some less obvious way but not unlike the man with a sixth of an arm? I doubted my reasoning, those notetakers were proud to call the church their home.

            Another idea struck, were they scared to go outside? Well of course they were, argued a voice from the opposing counsel. My voice, but the issue was so complex I couldn't even begin to imagine the depth of my own fears.

            Yahweh's little boy addressed the man with the little arm: Come out. Don't be ashamed to stand in the midst of other men.

            I could see the man was nervous, but Jesus had everyone's attention by the fact that he was glaring at the notetakers. He spoke right at the backside of the papers they held up before their faces as protection.

            Is it permitted to do good or to do evil on the sabbath. Is it permitted to save a life or destroy it?

            I saw it was a hard question and that no one was prepared to dissertate. I understood the first problem that had to be cleared up was the legality of working on the sabbath. To move a muscle was by some standards considered work. So it depended on how work was to be defined. If work was broad enough to entail muscle movement, as many considered it was, then there was the immediate question of which muscles came under the law and which were out of the individual's control and therefore exempt. An exception would have to be the heart muscle; a man's heart was totally out of his control. On the sabbath or any other day it went where it went, who could control it. The lungs were a different muscle, they lived naturally or a person could hold them back if for some reason they wanted to stop the breathe of life from coming in. Naturally when a man was exploring under the water he didn't want to take in the breathe of life and it was work to keep from letting what was natural happen. If, then, it was work for the lungs to choose whether the breathe of life was to come in or whether he had to wait another day I was onto why the law was such a convoluted busy-ness and even years of discipline and study were paltry for obtaining a doctorate with a minimal of understanding. I empathized with the notetakers for not opening their mouths.

            I glanced at mAN's son and was immediately afraid. His face was red.

What's with him? I asked Mark.

Mark seemed exasperated with me; but he whispered that the hearts of the one-sacred-world leaders didn't beat with any concern over the poverty of their brothers. My attention was trying to focus on the man's little arm, but it was hard to see. Smoke seemed to be gathering in the air, making the breathe of life undesirable.  I attributed it to church tension. Yahweh's boy said to the man: stretch out your arm. He was still glaring at the notetakers.

            The man's arm was coming into focus for me. It was amazing. I thought of a balloon filling with water. It wasn't just the man's arm that grew, but his tunic also. Someone had made the man a special tunic, one sleeve was short and narrow that encased the man's little reach but looked exactly like the other that reached long. The tunic grew to leave both sleeves identical.

            I remembered!

Mark, I said, you know the man's name?

No, he said.

If you had I guess everyone would have called you a liar, I continued. That man was once a king, Mark.

Mark's forehead looked to me like a washer board, but he had a smile on the other end of his face.

The man's old name was Jeroboam. A man of God had told him a son would be born to the house of David, called Jesus and he would kill the priests on the Altar of God. This Jesus would restore the charges Yahweh put on Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It's a long story but the import was that Jeroboam put out his hand to stop the man of God and his arm dehydrated. The man of God made his arm right again but the king was set in his ways and it didn't do no good. At that time everyone in the house of Israel was impressed, but the houses between Israel and Judah were divided.

            I noticed the Pharisees were of one mind, for all around me these one-sacred-world leaders and their employees were storming to get out of the church; leaving it to us who were not comfortable there in the first place. Rumor ran in from the outside and joined Mark and myself to conspire over some recent developments on the outside. Rumor had it that church and state made a pact and was plotting to destroy him. “What”, said Mark. “Else”, I answered. “Is”, read Mark. “New”, I ended and we both laughed. We saw Jesus smile as the whole motley crew walked out of church. The beer was good that night.

            The next day Mark and I found our selves on the shore of a vast sea.

It's the lake of mAN's clan, said Mark. It's called the See of Galilee.

See! I said to Mark, it looks more like the remains of a great flood.

I figured no one thought of it this way on account of how long the water had just stood there. The fathers before we came had learned to fish in it and no one questioned what the fish ate in order for them to grow so large and become so many. Everyone just understood it to be another ordinary miracle. Mark and I had followed the mAN's son to this same shore one other time and to us it was just old hat.

            A mind boggling crowd had tagged along. It stretched out before us like a huge hunk of taffy. The crowd had people from the tribe of mAN, people from Judah's clan, people from the healing city of the whole body, called Jerusalem, people from Jacob's twin brother's tribe called Esauians and people from the twin cities (sister towns of Sodom and Gomorrah) of Tyre and Sidon. These people were the easiest to recognize, being covered with tar-like scabs and smelling of burnt hair. They came when Rumor spread the word of what he was doing.

            Mark, I asked, since you wrote it, what was he doing?

He is erasing dysfunctional family childhood disorder syndrome, answered Mark.

Well, I said, you could have put it in the text. You would have won great praise from the scholars if you had. They would have been able to footnote its questionable meaning and generations of their children could argue over its linguistic origins.

Mark's left hand had reached up to rub the whiskers on his chin, but I couldn't see what he was thinking.

            I heard mAN's son tell a disciple to cop a boat for him. He looked like he was worried the crowd was going to push him into another flood. The son had been occupied healing people left and right. The more he healed the more those in the back pressed forward for a little of the feel good he was laying out. Everyone was anxious for some feel good. Dirty spirits were no exception. When one got close, it flung its host into the dirt and proclaimed the son to be God's only child. But Yahweh's baby charged them not to tell others what he was doing. The way I saw it he didn't have to worry. No one had a clue. Everyone felt there was a difference; and it had suddenly just happened.

I feel different: every ex-dirty spirit I interviewed said these same three words. Big smiles had grown on many faces in the crowd. If I was reporting on Woodstock in the sixties I'd have swore the whole beach was stoned. But the air here was clean.

            Finally Yahweh’s boy went up the nearest mountain. No one followed. The climb was not only a bitch; everyone knew how dangerous mountaintops were.

Lightning, you know: said a man at my side.

But there are no clouds: said I. From the awe on the man's face I deduced my words made little difference. Stories had kept the spirit of Exodus alive and the way the mAN's son went up that hill must have stirred old pictures in the crowd's mind of how Moses looked. When he got to the top we heard names come floating out of the blue and each body that was codified under the sinking name took itself up the mountain. He picked the number twelve and....

            Wait, Mark, I said. What do you mean he picked the number twelve?

You know, said Mark, there were twelve apostles.

I know that, I said, but why twelve?

Well, for the twelve tribes.

Come on, Mark!

OK, for the twelve sons of Jacob, Mark answered.

Mark, I said, it's older than that.

The twelve types of men, answered Mark. You satisfied?

Well, I said, sorta; but even that doesn't get quite personal enough.

The way I see it, I said, is that these twelve types are representative of ALL men, taking into account the statistical analysis much older than our Jewish traditions. I see mAN's son choosing as messengers every man, not just some handful of preachers who most often are suffering severe distress from lingering dysfunctional disorders that stimulate them to fool others in more convincing ways than they fooled their selves. Every man must teach his self, which will never be found in a preacher's audience. And his self must teach every man that his man is every self and that man and self are like pupil and teacher and that who’s who is a test.  Something like that! 

OK, said Mark, can I get on with it?

Sure, said I.

            I returned to my beach umbrella and set down. The sun was a bitch. Rumor was running about telling anyone who would listen that the ozone had a hole in it but his english didn't make sense to this crowd of beach worshipers. I noticed their volleyball games were in a foreign language, though the ball looked just like the kind I played with.

            The twelve were called by mAN's son so that he might be with them and he taught them how to talk with all the different voices each carried inside and he gave them authority over the bully voice that was in the house of every one of them. He then made a firm commitment to remain with each one, never leaving any. After that he gave them names.

Simon he named the Rock. James and John he named after Jacob and Esau and called them the sons of thunder, in honor of the best parents the Bible ever recorded. Father Isaac was the first man to bring laughter into the world and Mother Rebekah was the first woman willing to carry the water to nourish a wasted land. They are the sons of rolling thunder and replenishing rain. Then he named Andrew the strong, manly one and Philip for his love of wild horses. He named Philip because he loved powerful movement. And Bartholomew he named the plowman, the one who cared for the earth. Matthew he named the offspring of Yahweh. One of the men was doubly doubtful and he praised him with Thomas because he saw Thomas would be doubly rewarded. He named Jacob the trickster who was the son of a trickster because Jesus always loved good magic. He named Thaddeus the great-hearted man. Simon he called the big eared Buddha. Simon would one day hear his reward. And Judah he called the princely, even though he knew better than any writer where he came from.  Judah was born in Iscariot. None-the-less, Judah was a prince among men, and that will never change.

            Iscariot was a bad town; it carried a curse. It seemed ever family in Iscariot had twins. The older brother of every twin sold his younger brother into the labor pool of the town's work force. That was not the worst of it. The worst was that the fathers of the town lived off this labor pool. They cheaply lived off this pool, and that was the worst. The most they paid was minimum wage, and they paid only that when they could get away with nothing less. They had no guilt about their transactions, on account of the men they employed were foreigners from a strange land. You see, the fathers didn't recognize their own younger sons. Each father only saw their one son, and they each trained their son to inherit the business. Scientists had been studying this town for over a hundred years, and they still didn't have a clue. Some said it was genetics and the blindness was transmitted by blood. No one was actually sure. When I had finished typing this brief report, the beach was empty and no one was on the mountain.

            Mark and I found him the next day. It wasn't hard; all we did was go looking for a crowd. We began by wandering the streets in mAN's son's neighborhood. Initially we found the place deserted. It was as unnerving as going into a graveyard in the night; neither of us had seen anything move. We hadn't even seen a cat. We weren't alone though, as we found when we turned a corner at the far end of some street. The crowd was so tightly packed together that the bread his disciples clutched in their hands was unable to make the trip to their mouths so they could feed. As Mark and I arrived from one end of the street we saw Rumor running towards us from the other. He whispered to us that mAN's son's family had heard that the crowd had gotten so corralled that no one could eat and they were on their way to take control. His family was very apologetic and blamed the problem on their son misplacing his mind and then completely forgetting when and where he might have done such a thing.

            Some notetakers in the crowd had another story. These notetakers had come down from the get-whole-quick city of Jerusalem. They speculated the Lord of the Flies, the comptrollers of scavengers and parasites who fed on people's denials, had taken control of the son's mind and that it was through this master bully that he drove out other waste collectors.

            Mark and I watched as the mAN's son called the notetakers over to him and put a chinese mind puzzle in their ears: How can a liar drive out a liar? And if a sanitation dump is divided against itself; what's gonna keep it from encroaching on the city? And if different rooms of a house are not connected to each other; what's gonna keep the rooms hanging on? And if a master liar stands up to his mirror, after having fabricated two of the best stories he's to date imagined; one story is not gonna be told. Look at it this way. If I ask you to steal Mike Tyson blind, in his jail cell; I'll get no volunteers. But if I ask the warden to throw him into solitary; shit, anyone would steal from his cell then. This is true what I'm gonna say. All men's sons shall be forgiven their mistakes. Hey, mistakes is the way the imagination learns; it works by trial and error. Cursing and blaspheming and screaming are all part of the process. That's no problem. Here's the truth: anyone who says woman is the problem, who puts blame on her or harms her, that person is a coward, besides being a chickenshit liar. There is no forgiveness for that kind of behavior, and his guilt will have no end. If a man even believes it in his heart but never talks about it; his life is fucked. Man and woman both have a hard roe to hoe; but the problems are older than they are. After Jesus had finished talking he spit off to his left, where there was a hole in the herd.

            Mark whispered to me that the cause for Jesus' speech were the implications some notetakers were making.  They were implying that beneath Jesus’ tunic resided a dirty spirit.  They were saying his mother was evil.

Mark, I said, isn’t that the consequence of eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil?

            It sure is, said Mark.  Everyone who knows good verses evil is a diseased individual and they are estranged from the living. This estrangement brings its own ideas, like women are to blame for the illusions of the world and like the flesh is unclean and corrupt.

            Mark, I asked, what does Mary mean? 

Corpulent, answered Mark, like rich and fat and all body.

            I was musing on what Mark had just said when I felt him touch my shoulder. 

What, I said and then saw that he was pointing. My attention followed his finger to the crowd’s furthest edge.

His mother, Mark said.

            I saw a beautiful woman with auburn hair and skin whose tone and color deceived my sense of certainty. I saw chocolate and then ivory, when I looked again I saw red and then butter. Stop it, I said. With her were twelve handsome boys, all about the same age. I turned back to Mark.

Impossible, I said to Mark.

No, it's true, he answered.

A couple of the boys had red hair, others had brown or blond or black; one boy's hair was green.

Mark, I asked, who is the father? No! I said before Mark's mouth could move, I don't want to hear it. I saw one boy from the group move and make his way to the mAN's son.

            At the same time the crowd seated around the son spoke as with one voice: We - are - looking - for - you! <

What's going on, I asked Mark?

It's a game children play over here called hide and seek. I think the people believe Jesus is playing it with them and he's cheating because no one can find him.

He's right there, Mark, I said.

You and I are on the inside, said Mark. Sitting where we are we have no trouble seeing him, but those on the outside can't see a thing.

            Son of mAN said: Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?

There was silence. I was beginning to wonder about the things Rumor was saying about his mind. Neigh! He acted like the healthiest man I had yet seen.  I thought he was making a point.

He went on: My mother is right here. So are my brothers. So are my sisters. Anyone who acts like God in the first creation myth in our Book of Recorded Stories is brother, sister, mother of mine.

I turned and looked at the woman with the twelve strapping sons and my mouth must have come unhinged because she gave me the most radiant smile. I didn’t notice the first time I looked but did now. Twelve incredibly strong and vibrant girls were there too.

 

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

FARMERS ARE PEOPLE TOO

 

            The next day Mark and I met on the shore of those old flood waters. I told Mark I figured the flood had reached some kind of equilibrium because they didn't appear to me to be receding any longer. Together we moved out on a pier. I had brought my binoculars and was checking out a TV crew three quarters of a mile down the beach. They appeared to be filming a prize catch some mANerfish had hauled from the lake's bottom. It looked to me like a live man. I thought they had the man all wrapped around with chains and ropes but from this distance I wasn’t sure. I made a note to catch the six o'clock news. Then I turned my attention back to the increasing drone coming from the fast growing multitude. Beside the pier set mAN's son in a boat, teaching.

            Mark, I asked, why hasn't anyone else come out on the pier? We were alone, sitting on the dock, looking down on Jesus in his boat. I say we were alone; there was one exception. Sitting further out on the pier was a very old man in a wrinkled tunic with hair and a beard so long he was using it as a pillow to sit on.

None of these people have ever seen a pier, Mark said; so I imagine they are a bit un-nerved by the idea of walking out on the water.

            I wasn't disappointed. We had a great seat and the spectacle was awesome. In front of us the beach was covered with people as far as my eyes could see. There were peoples of every color and shape, and the lapping waters of the deep washed right up to their feets.

One section of the beach had naked peoples; it was like a dirty brown spot in a sea of colors. That section was a bit boring. Not so with the rest of the beach. The variably dressed, multicolored peoples lining the shore added spice to the warm sun of this new day. My whole body tingled and itched. I was jumping with excitement. The gathering made me so happy I almost fell off the pier. Being so near to all these people gave me hope that one day I’d find my home. I don’t know; I was in a good mood.

            Jesus was teaching the crowd parabolas; but from the look I saw on his face he knew the math was hopeless and so he turned to another discipline.

Let's talk of farming: he said.

The frowns disappeared and it was incredible how the multitudes settled down. The only sound was the rhythmical licking of the deep up against the beach people's feet.

Listen! He enjoined.

I closed my eyes for everyone. We were all now blind and listening.

            Behold a farmer coming out of the barn.

I saw myself coming out of the barn.

He hasn't been long from his bed and sleep still itches his eyes.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and felt the truth.

In his somnolent state he had filled his bag with last years ideas, never noticing that his bag had a hole in it.

I didn’t care on account of the itch that still lingered in my eye.

            He began his journey out to his fertile garden.

            I could feel the soft dirt along the path.

            Some of his thoughts fell along the path and the birds riding on his shoulder dropped off and had their breakfast.

            I felt a lightness lift my shoulders and realized the birds were probably vultures.  I was glad they found something to eat.

            Some of his thoughts fell onto the hot asphalt and shot up quickly because they couldn’t penetrate the tar and the heat made them stay on the surface and were immediately run over by intoxicated drivers who had no where to go but had to keep moving because they were afraid they were lost.

            My eyes shot open. I thought this was going to be a safe trip. I didn’t realize Jesus was taking me into traffic. I thought the farmer lived in the country. I had imagined THAT.  All sleep had suddenly disappeared from my eyes.

Some of the farmer’s thoughts fell behind the outhouse and the outhouse smells grew along with his ideas and together they refused to bear any fruit. The farmer finally got to the fertile field and having rubbed all the sleep from his eyes he looked into his bag and was pleased to find some fine ideas there and he put them into the ground and they had babies at a phenomenal rate.  One wife had thirty, another had sixty, and one as black as midnight had a hundred.

            I smiled. For a minute there I was beginning to worry for that sleepy farmer.

Listen: said mAN's son.

I waited.  No sounds came.  For a moment I believed my ears had ceased working.  I relaxed when I saw that Jesus was playing with us.

Again he spoke: I want everyone to take their hands and hold them before their faces. See them?

I couldn't speak for anyone else, all I could see were my hands.

Now put them over your ears, he said.

I could see Mark and he had his hands clamped across his ears. So did I. I scanned the crowd and almost laughed, we all looked so silly. Then I looked at the mAN's son in the boat below me and I saw his mouth moving, but all I could hear was the ocean in my ears. By the time I let go of my ears he had stopped talking and his followers were rowing him onto the flood waters.

What did he say, Mark? But Mark and I were in the same boat, the question was useless.

            We were already well into chapter four when Mark and I joined the twelve.  I was nervous about what he might have said when we had our hands over our ears.  I think some of the others felt as I did, because someone began the conversation by asking about parabolas.

Anyone can study math if he so desires: he said. It is a safe area of inquiry, and very profitable if enough effort is put into laying a fertile ground. The work is laying down a firm ground. It will take years of solid and diligent persistence.

BUT, he said, if man, in the personal, is your inquiry; you're in for a trip! All the work’s been done, and you are living in the Kingdom of the Good. It's a secret; so keep it to yourselves.

Take time! I'll say that and you will hear it, but the voices in you will divide and confuse the meaning and you will want to ask what I mean. I can't tell you. You must forgive yourself for not having the answer. Knowledge of right and wrong divides the not divisible. Each of you is un-dividable. Unfortunately, long before you were aware, you were chopped up and divvied out by the wicked troll of the west.

Then he said to us: Did you not read this parable? Then how shall you understand all the parables?

I took Mark by the arm and walked over to one side.

            Mark, he's not making sense. I said. He asked us if we had not read the parable. What did he mean ‘read’?

Mark answered that he was talking of the need for literacy programs the world over. I was beginning to see how catchy the thoughts of Jesus were; now Mark too was not making sense. I thought backwards to the mAN's son's family and saw their declaration of belief that he had lost his mind as possible fact and necessary stage on the road to getting out of childhood. Anyone who continued to grow probably lost the ability to think in circles and paths that warped backwards; and it was for that reason Jesus first addressed the crowds about parabolas.

Come on, I said to Mark, let's go back and hear what he has to say about parables. And Mark, a notetaker on the beach told me what Jesus said after he told everyone to cover their ears with their hands.  He said, anyone who has ears to hear, then listen!

I knew something was going on, but I just didn’t know what it was. 

            I put it in my mind to look up the word "read" in the dictionary, to see where the word came from. That triggered some earlier data I had put there to remember; but all I remembered was remember. I couldn't. That made me wonder if I wasn't losing what I worried that others had lost and that this whole charade wasn't some exercise in futility. I felt like I was trying to catch some falling star. Catch triggered my memory, it was the evening news I wanted to see and glancing at my watching I noted I only had an hour and twenty three minutes to get to a TV set. Jesus was dissertating to the twelve and I only hoped he kept his lesson short.

            OK, he said! I am going to give the kingdom to you.  Others I give parables.  I give them parables because their eyes only see one kind of image.  I give them words because their ears don’t know what the words mean.  They believe they know what everything means.  Knowing what everything means gives them no means to convert.  This keeps them estranged from what they were given earlier.  So their knowledge prevents them from being forgiven.  Look the word up in the dictionary and find out from where it comes.  Then you might see the Kingdom.

            But for you I will explain the parable.

            The farmer was sowing seeds, he said. Every word in the dictionary is a seed, each has a power to create a whole new language of its own. That's why literacy is so powerful, it enlightens the mind about the feeling world it has created. Poor blind mind, he lamented; but that's not the point. You asked about nature on account of being bored about math and nature I will turn to. The parables are about mAN nature; though the blind see the parables as about agriculture. Don't be deceived. And please, don't say huh!

            The first ideas that fell from the sleepy farmer's mind were eaten by the birds. Birds lie; they tell man he can fly right off to heaven. They tell him he's not attached to the ground. That's just bullshit. Now there's a real natural word, bullshit. Don't eat it. Also, don't listen to bird words. Some of the ideas fell on asphalt, and they caused great joy. A man dreams about cars, and the TV makes his dreams very vivid, and how fast he can go in a new one. How exciting, especially because with a new car he can pick up a ripe new woman. Un-used like his new car. Then the gas runs out or he loses his job because he's always out driving, or the transmission goes or someone out there makes ugly faces at him and all of a sudden he finds himself standing fast, along with all his flights of fantasy. So much for the thoughts that spring from black highways.

Next comes the outhouse idea; you think nothing could be more fertile. The word "rich" comes to mind and the mind turns towards the sweetness of large bank accounts and the enticement of what perfumed bodies money can buy and you work to jump in and you succeed; then it hits you through all this glamour and wealth a lingering, stomach wrenching rottenness that mildews your old ideas and there is no fruit at season’s end. Your mind is repulsed by the stench and no offspring will ever come to play.

I don't want to talk about the good soil. What is known is the negative.  Who knows of the goodness of life?  It seems that the goodness, with each passing year, gets thinner and there is less of it.  Who are working to keep it here?  Who are the ones replenishing it?

What is wrong with us? Why can’t you understand? This parable is about one individual. Any individual.  Every individual.  If you work in your own ground, you will be rewarded.  Period!

            The flood waters – we’ve been laboring over them together, back and forth – are the tears God has shed over the loss.  Keep in mind I am talking – individual-.  But where are those who understand?

            Take another example: No girl turns on a flashlight to hide it in her chest-of-drawers, or a boy to stick it in the water closet; unless they want to laugh and play. I tell you, nothing is hidden that doesn't push to be found nor concealed that doesn't crawl to get itself recognized. That which is hidden will one day, on its own, burst into the light. Listen to your ears! When you are looking with your eyes hold the picture longer than the camera does for commercials. They don't want you to THINK, to SEE, to HEAR; but I want you to do just those things. For yourself.

Hear this: what you give out is gonna come back to you. I guarantee it! And more besides. The converse is true. When you give nothing of yourself, even less comes back. If a man has a little, and he uses it, more comes of its own nature. That is nature. We're like dirt, nourishment is innate. You plant an idea, it is going to grow. Even when we eat or sleep or make love, things are growing. It can't be controlled. That's the kingdom. But, when it ripens, gives its yield, and the fruit comes home, we know the growing season is over and the living season is upon us.

Whether we get to spring or not depends on how much nurture we put in our barns. That's life, in or out of paradise. Let's compare the kingdom to one idea. Let’s say this is a good idea, that nature and life are good, intrinsically; but deep down and hidden.

In the beginning was the muster seed, tiny and bitter. Throw it into the ground and take a three-year sightseeing cruise around the world. Come back and you find all the birds of paradise living in the shadows of its branches and their ideas don't even bother you, because that tree is grounded in the dirt. That's life.

            I was tired. I found those parables had worn me out. Mark must have found the same since we were holding each up as evening was coming towards us from the east. My strength was waning fast and I believed at any moment Mark and I would fall right down when Jesus said: Let's cross over to the other side.

The other side, I asked?

It was the furthest concept I had of the possible. I had no desire to even try. I knew my compliant was hopeless.  If my travels had taught me anything, I had learned you didn't argue with mAN's son. Not even demons did that. So I never opened my mouth; I just climbed into the boat and watched as others told the multicolored pebbles that it was time to get off the beach. Their words made no sense to me; I just wanted to go home. I didn't want to cross the waters.

            Mark poked me and said: Cross the waters!

Yeah, I said, I don't want to hear it.

Cross the waters; think about it! he said.

Mark, I answered, can't you see I can't!

I tired to get a feel for the oar but felt I was more true to myself disguised in the role of the tired farmer. I thought my hands were gripping a worn plow.

            No! Seriously, said Mark. Remember Shem's son who crossed over so he could deny the other side? Remember division, another of Shem's offspring?

I heard what Mark was saying but his words were too hard and I was too tired. All I saw were hours of rowing, and for a farmer it was hard to relate. I wanted to experience again the itch in the farmer's eye. I didn’t want to remember my beginning, even if it was a Shem; I just wanted to sleep into my next life.

            Jesus got on board just the way he was and there were other ships with him. He went to the stern and got out a pillow and went right to sleep. I blinked my eyes. I couldn't believe it. He pulled the pillow right out of the air. A - how'd you do that?- question rose to my lips but he was asleep before I got up enough wind to ask. And that just pissed me off. I couldn't believe he could sleep that fast when the rest of us had to go to work.

            That woke me up and, with the rowing, my tiredness moved away from my attention. Mark and I were at the same oar and so I asked him: What did you mean when you said Jesus was just the way he was?

            Mark looked at me. I could see he was thinking and so I didn’t rush him. Well, he said, this is not easy to express. You have to think about yourself. Do you have secrets? What goes on in your mind? How solid are your metaphysics? How honest and true is your presentation? The way I see this young man we are following, there is no duplicity. What we see and what he gives is who he is. That’s what I meant.

            No light came to my eyes but Mark seemed satisfied with his explanation. This made me nervous and I was still confused so I said: Well, what about those other boats?

            I almost said, Said Mark, that Jesus said there are many boats in my father’s house and they will all do just fine in bad weather; but who would get it?

            I couldn’t disagree, I didn’t even get it; but unfortunately there was no time to ponder what seemed the imponderable.

            The wind hit us like we were the bird in a badminton game and the ship began popping up and down and scuttling around on the water like we had rowed into a washing machine. I glanced into the stern and saw that Jesus was glued to his pillow which must have been nailed to the back of the boat. The strands of his long hair which fanned across his pillow were not even ruffled and I truly imagined that he had the power to stay in his own dream.

Mark and I would have been tossed from the boat if we hadn't buckled up. I was glad Mark had insisted before he allowed us to motor off the shore. As calm as diamond cutters I watched his disciples reach into their bag of expressive faces and remove each their own personal face labeled – panic! Finally one found enough courage to scream: Wake UP!

When the screamer had recaptured his breath he pleaded: Master, do you not care whether we perish?

            I watched as the eyelids of mAN's son rose and behind those curtains I saw eyes filled with compassion. His dilated pupils floated over the faces of my fellow voyagers and then constricted as he looked straight into the face of the storm.

-Silence-: he said. -Be still-.

His voice was not loud. He talked like he was addressing a distraught child. My stomach floated up like it always did at the start of a fast elevator ride going down and then flattened on top of my hip bones as I hit the bottom. Dead calm! I thought that the storm scared me but now, at this low level in that dead sea, my fear rose five hundred feet straight up to heaven and a scream fought its way out of a big round hollow black hole the size of a cave. For the second time I was glad to have my seat belt on because my body was shaking like an aspen leave in a winter wind and only it kept me from vibrating right out of the boat.

            Why are you frightened: asked the mAN's son?

I had no idea how the others were preparing to answer; but the last thing I had on my mind was to study why.

            His second question was: Do you not have any faith?

Immediately I felt ready to answer that one. No! I said, though of course I kept the answer to myself. No one on the ship raised his hand to dissertate, so he let us out of class and returned to his job of sleeping. But he certainly understood how to generate questions in his students. Questions were stumbling among the rowers like agitated sleepwalkers in a pinball machine. I put a few in my mind for later recall.

            Who is he? Who is the wind? How about the sea? Why do the wind and sea listen? How can the wind hear, especially when it’s roaring? Since it obeys, who gave it a choice? Why does the sea have a choice and I don't? Who am I?

            I thought they were all hard questions, harder than anyone not in a boat in a storm in the night would ask. And yet, it didn't surprise me. I had already done enough time studying myself to see the pattern. When there was no pressure, I could help even Einstein through whatever he found relative; but let me be real and I fell apart. I was a Shem and as divided as every highway in America. I was glad when the boat Mark and I and the Buddha rowed crashed into a crowd of multicolored pebbles. I remember being glad when that boat ceased to float on the waters, but it didn’t last.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER FIVE

DEMONS ARE PEOPLE ALSO

 

I think this is chapter five, said Mark.

Gerasenes, said Jesus as he stepped from the boat.

I put in my two bites worth, I said it looked like a fortified graveyard. Out of a castle of a tomb came a giant of a man. Besides his largeness the most outstanding feature of his countenance was the quantity of dirt that had accumulated over his body. He was big and dirty; and he looked like a weight lifter. I decided that I didn't feel comfortable being on the other shore.

Mark whispered to me: He’s got a dirty spirit.

He's a wild man! Said Jesus. My faith returned to Jesus; I didn't think he was lying.

Jesus went on: no chain in the world can hold him. He can eat speeding bullets, run faster than satellites and leap volcanoes, and he's stronger than the Queen Mary; but he doesn't bother others. His fight is with himself. He hits and curses, cries and screams with the stones. He's a masochist and very comfortable with dead. It goes without saying that he is not social; but I'll say it anyway. People are afraid and they stay away.

            When the man saw mAN's son he ran to him and bowed down at his feet and in a great voice screamed right into the ground: What have I to do with you, Yahweh's little offspring? I adjure you as you and I stand in God's presence; please don't torture me.

            I watched as mAN's son talked to the back of the giant's head, telling the dirty spirit he needed a little baptizing. Watching I felt my heart rending when it came home to me how stuck on each other the two of them were. From the look on his face I understood that Jesus was aware. I could see the mother of the son of mAN working and wasn't surprised when baby Jesus changed his approach.

            What's your name? Yahweh's little boy asked.

There are a lot of us in here like Jacob had when he went down to meet his son Joseph in Egypt; only none of us are very lovable so we go by Legion. But my son, please don't make us go into the country. The countryside has too many wild things and they scare us. People are the most frightening. If we have to leave our mAN, let us go over to those pigs. We like pigs. Right, guys?

            The head of the wild man went to bobbing up and down and drool was leaping from his large lips. I thought I detected a smile.

The solution you purpose seems fine to me: mAN's son replied. The air was instantly filled with yips and yaahs like gnats given a human tongue as the wind swept them away.

            Both Mark and I turned our eyes on a vast herd of pigs snorting and rooting up a distant hillside. Our waiting watch held us like prisoners.  It began happening!  The animals nearest us began agitating.  It’s hard to find the analogies.  Imagine, would you, a huge pool of ping pong balls tightly corralled on a green carpet; or a herd of the best dressed executives all in the finest gray suits pushing at the auctioneer in the stock yards of wall street in a buying frenzy with unlimited moneys. No, ping  pong balls are better. The closest to us are first to begin popping up and down and like a wave the energy activates others rolling outward until the whole herd is poppin'. Standing in place and pinging to get into the game, a shot is heard and the whole mass starts climbing that hill all the way to the top and then drops right into Noah's flood.

            I felt a deja vu with last night's storm. The silence was awesome, but it was short lived. There ensued an immediate ruckus from the stampeding herdsmen rushing to town to be the first to sell the story to the local news network.

            My musings were interrupted with a question. How many pigs were in that herd, Mark?

I bet two thousand, said Mark. I got a question for you, though!

Shoot, I answered.

What did you mean back there when you said you saw the mother of the son of man working?

It's just a metaphor I used, I said to Mark. He looked to me like he was thinking, or more like listening. He was trying to answer a question, how do I get unstuck from this wild man? We know Jesus is not alone.  With him are mom and dad, even though they are hidden from our view.  I used his mother to indicate that Jesus was spirit reasoning. I got another one for you, I said to Mark. What's the moral of this story?

            He looked at me and laughed. Five pages from here we might still be in chapter five if we go into that question, he said. Still smiling, Mark said: How about “don’t be a pig?”

I knew that he was kidding and I was determined to hear what he might say. My fingers had grown a few calluses and I was more resigned to type this to the end so I didn't care.

Well, he said, it implies a homeless street person might be more moral than our best executives. It implies that within any individual the motives which drive him or her to the top can be as large as a herd, and as dangerous and destructive. It says a lot about restraint, how it can turn on itself and suck the life of the individual away from its emotional body at a cost to its physical one. The story nails down the cause of all actions, though, which is the individual's imagination. The imagination doesn't belong to the individual, it is a child of the good and the creative force of nature. Respect your father and mother, Mark said to me. He smiled and I thought his smile looked just like the one Jesus sometimes wore.

            People were beginning to come out from the town to see what had happened. They came up to Yahweh's little boy and looked at him. Then they studied the big wild man. He had had a bath and his clothes were freshly laundered and softly tumble-dried and his long hair was in a ponytail. Three rings shone from his right ear. I could see the town's people didn't know how to talk, or maybe they had yet to fill up on looking. I thought they looked scared.

            Rumor was running circles around the town’s people telling them how it happened, extrapolating here and there with exorbitant detail, drawing their fears into tighter knots. The wild man was sitting as quiet as a church mouse during a Sunday's sermon. It was because Jesus had personally dressed him in his right mind. Finally the town's people formed a unified mass and moved up to Jesus and begged him to go to some other territory. I was amazed. Since my travels this was the first time he had let himself be found and no one wanted him.     

Yahweh's boy seemed to understand and he got up. We all got up too and followed him back into the boat. The big guy wanted to go, but Jesus said: No.

Then mAN's son said: Go home to your people and tell them what the lord of your mind did for you and how he took pity on what you were doing to yourself. The big guy appeared to understand and his head fell forward until his chin slammed against his chest. He answered: OK.

Jesus told him not to be ashamed of his past.  Plus, he added, your struggles with undoing the sins of your father without passing them onto the world at large was admirable. 

That got his head back up and we saw a smile grow on the man's face as we buckled up and backed off the shore. The strong man turned and headed for the ten lost brothers of the tribe of Israel and we were impressed. Mark said to me: Hold on, boy, we're gonna cross over again. I glanced at the Buddha but he seemed used to it.

            Arriving at the other side I poked Mark in the ribs. When he looked my way I smiled. I liked coming out of myself. One side in, the other out, I knew opposites were forever and so was change.

We're still in chapter five, he said.

Yeah, I said, but it is only three paragraphs later and I feel good. Jesus had his boat with him and so I looked at the Buddha. I knew there was a difference between the two but I couldn't put my finger on it.

Damn, said Mark, have you already forgotten what John said about his brother Jesus?

I knew I had missed the evening news with its hooked live man story that I knew would be there, but John was just too long ago.

Jesus is not afraid of fire, Mark said.

I remembered; but what came to me like a punch delivered to my stomach were the words of Madonna, Jesus' mother. She told an interviewer somewhere that she would rather walk through fire than walk away from it. No wonder Jesus didn’t mind fire; he got it from his mother. Damn, I thought, what a woman. I wished I were her child; I had a lot of envy growing in me and hoped those seeds might fall on the asphalt highway and be run down before I got to the fertile ground. Envy did me no good.

            Yahweh's little boy was standing on the edge of the flood waters and peoples of every color and description crowded around him. A man was pushing his way through the throng towards him. I thought the man must be one of the one-sacred-world leaders, he was dressed in black and someone said he lived in a synagogue. I had seen a number of those houses on my trip and thought they ought to have named them holy castles; but as crowded as I always found them I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to live there, much less calling one home. I found them too big and gaudy to be a comfortable home.

            The man's name was Jairus and when he got close enough to see Yahweh's boy he fell down and implored Jesus to follow him. I thought that was a twist. I leaned into Mark and put my mouth next to his ear.

Mark, I asked, what does Jairus mean?

Mark took my head in his hands and as he answered I felt the warmth of his breath tickle me in my ear. It means ‘whom he enlightens’, said Mark.

            Jairus said to mAN's son: Follow me home. My little daughter is at the point of death and you can help her. Please come that she may recover and live.

            So we all went into town. There was quite the crowd. An aerial video would have revealed a glob crossing the plain and then funneling down a street like a great vacuum in the town's center had us under its suck. Everyone was pushing and shoving and we seemed bound together by a giant rubber band. It was the weirdest group I ever traveled with. I thought I had walked into a straight jacket. Beside me was a woman. I noticed her as she brushed up against me. I was shocked; I had come to accept the fact that women were not allowed. I just saw so few of them. An even stranger fact was the trail of blood she left along her journey.

Later research into this woman's past revealed she had begun her period twelve years ago and it was still dripping. Every doctor she consulted, after the second week of bleeding she had started to worry, told her it was all in her imagination. She had used all her money trying to find a doctor who would acknowledge the blood on the ground under her legs as real blood. And her blood! But she succeeded in only running out of money as her blood ran down; she had not found a doctor in the land who understood blood.

            She had heard of Jesus and dared to imagine that if she could only touch his skin her touch would penetrate his heart and the damn leak would dry up. Her contact as she squeezed beside me was the most pleasant I had had since chapter one. She bumped against mAN's son and I saw a beam around her face come on like a light. I know he felt something because it stopped him in his tracks. He turned around and looked in the face of the guy behind him.

He said: Who touched me?

I think the whole crowd would have laughed but for the little air we had in our lungs; they were having difficulty working just for life. I thought the mAN's son saw his error in that he poorly formulated his question in light of the crowd's IQ. He didn't let his mistake stop him from scanning the faces around him.

            To me it was obvious. Here's a crowd of dark, exasperated, bearded faces moving like a herd of black sheep. Suddenly an arc welder touches bare metal and as quickly pulls back, leaving in its wake one soft white face with eyes veiled in its downward posture. I did it: said the woman and crumpled before the son's feet as she wept.

            I was so ashamed for her I turned my back on the whole scene. I heard her words as she revealed the whole truth. I had my doubts about that! I not only had my doubts I hated this crowd of men who could watch this spectacle with their unshaven faces. I had this impulse to smash my fist into the nearest face of my fellow follower. I was so angry!

            My daughter!

I recognized his voice. Those two words calmed me. I thought he was angry when he stopped the crowd so he could rebuke someone for getting too close to him.

            It was your courage and your trust in your womanhood that saved you. Spoke Mary’s grown son. Be easy with yourself and at peace and be healed from what ails you.

            As he was talking some notetakers came to tell him not to bother with healing the religious man's girlchild. She was dead. Then these same notetakers turned on the one-sacred-world leader and told him to stop bothering the mAN's son. I was appalled at the manner the notetakers took to deliver their message. I thought: My God, what have men done with their feelings? The crowd seemed indifferent. Maybe not indifferent, for the news was exciting and Rumor worked the crowd like blood in a chicken house.

            Jesus took Jairus by the shoulders and looked him straight in the face. Don't let this disturbance change you, he said. Keep the resolve you had when you first approached me on the beach. Then Jesus turned on the crowd and said: Go Home! The only thing that held us all together was a rubber band and when he said go home it broke. People fell down and crawled in every direction, not one had a clue which direction home might be. It was all too sad. I knew every one in that crowd had a story but my assignment hadn't been to study any of them. I thought the crowd looked like termites exposed to the sun after a bear had torn open some dead log, they groped up against buildings and moaned for each other to hold their hand. I was getting sick when Mark pulled me away.

            Yahweh's little boy had taken the Rock and the sons of Thunder with him and that would have been all if Mark hadn't begged. He allowed Mark to come along and Mark had pulled me in also. Jesus allowed it. We entered a small house behind the holy castle with wailings and lamentations ricocheting around the room like a racket ball beaten by experts. I noticed a man grinding his teeth in a corner. My eyes went back to the face of the mAN's son; it shone like ruby quartz.

He spoke: Why this tumult and weeping? The child has not died; no thanks to your teaching. You have only put her to sleep, after wearing her out to the point of death.

            My face fell like pancake batter on a cold skillet; they started laughing. But their mouths were twisting and slobber was dribbling off their lips. Their eyes got pointed and from the red color of their ears I understood they were angry and were savoring their truest emotion. They tasted mean! They didn't like to hear that the girl was not dead. They believed all women ought to be dead. They thought women were the Cause, or was it the Curse? They seemed to like dead.

Get Out: said Yahweh's hot boy and they went like slugs in the morning's first light, before the Eye nails them in their lies.

            He took the father and mother and went into the girl's room. Jesus spoke to the parent's daughter: Little girl, it is I who say, Awake. At once she got out of bed and walked about.

How old are you? Jesus asked.

Twelve, replied the young girl.

My eyes met Mark's and between us dawned a light. A woman who had bleed for twelve years was suddenly given back her creative powers and a girl stood up to join the human race. I felt a tear roll across my cheek. God, I thought, why are we so mean? But I didn't need God to tell me the answer. It was because I felt so badly. I had not forgotten how good I once felt, but I remembered how long ago that was. And it made me angry. Mean was just the way I had of dealing with my anger. I had lost my friendship with the animals that lived inside of me; I had never tamed them, never mastered my fear of them, never learned to trust them nor even see them. It had nothing to do with those that lived on the earth. I never learned to care for and nourish the living ones that roamed within me.

            Jesus was telling the parents not to tell anyone and to spend more time feeding their daughter, because girl children are just as hungry and desirous as all children and their food has been sorely neglected by the religious status quo. Then we left that place.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER SIX

NO ONE KNOWS MY NAME

 

 

            We were on the road again, heading south southeast. Mark said mAN's son was going to his own country.

Where's that, I asked?

You'll hear, answered Mark. So I waited, all ears. The only sounds were the fading footsteps as everyone walked away from where I was waiting. Damn, I said to the wind, Mark tricked me again. The rest of the journey I allowed no questions to interfere with my walking, I just followed.

            We got there and I found nothing new. I wondered how Mark distinguished his country from all the other countries. It was all the same to me. The land was dry, wasted, impoverished; the people everywhere were starving and the animals looked like bone preserved in shrunken skins. But it was Sunday and mAN's son went into one of the castles so he could dissertate.

            His own country, thought I as we walked into church!  Well, I guess.

            Most of the people attending the show were amazed. Mark and I had reached a consensus over the dominant expression worn on most people's faces. We agreed it was amazing. I followed Mark's finger as he pointed out examples. That one there, said Mark. See the knots in his jaw, the pencil line lips and how his eyes look like Indian arrowheads.

Yeah! I said. I liked the suit he was wearing.

Not amazed, said Mark.

I thought we were studying amazed, I objected.

We are, said Mark, I'm only pointing out the contrasting examples.

So we used that man's facial characteristics as a reference and searched out some more quote unquote not amazed. That turned out to be too much like work, and it being the sabbath and all, we inverted our attention back to the quote unquote amazed.

            We agreed to look for exceptional examples only and once again Mark had his finger on one. I was a little nervous about Mark's conspicuous finger turning in the crowd like a weather vane but everyone had eyes only for mAN's son so I relaxed.

See how big his eyes are, said Mark?

Yeah, I said, definitely big eyes.

And that one, see how his chin appears to weigh a ton. It's like he has no muscles to hold the sucker up.

Mark's words made me smile, that's what the man looked like. His face was so stretched it appeared his hair was the only thing keeping his jaw off the floor.

He's just relaxed, said Mark.

            The man was wearing a Wal-Mart tunic so my eyes went searching round the room comparing amazed faces with their substantiating clothes. Most had on Wal-Mart tunics but there was no hard line between amazed and non-amazed dressers. Some amazed had on suits and a couple of flint faced had what I thought must be K-Mart tunics. I guessed the K-Mart brand was camel hair, but I wasn't certain. Mark asked me if I was still all ears?

All ears, I asked?

            My eyes were telling me the show was over because everyone else’s had come back into their heads so they could walk out of the castle. I got Mark's point and instead of looking I began walking with the crowd and put my attention in my ear so I could listen.

            Where does he derive all this?

The question threw me for a loop. I hadn't been paying attention to Jesus on account of how interesting the audience was; so I was confused over the man's words "all this?" I didn't have a clue until I got the next question.

            What wisdom, asked a man, was given to him?

I thought I could deal with that one. What wisdom, thought I? Then the question got out of hand. The more I asked what wisdom, the less I felt I knew. Then suddenly I realized that I had no ideas, and the word wisdom seemed as alien to me as what Eskimos might have each morning for breakfast.

            What about the powers, I heard beside me, that are in his hands?

The question took me away from wisdom and again I felt I could breath. His hands were powerful. When Mark first introduced me I knew that from his handshake. I could tell he was a carpenter, the nail on his left index finger was shattered from a hammer blow, I assumed, and there were calluses crawling all over his palm. Mark came up beside me and said: Will you be quiet and listen!

            Is this not the carpenter? Is he not the son of Mary and the offspring of Jacob and the brother of Joseph and Judah and Simeon and the other nine? And are not his twelve sisters here too?

            These are hard questions, said Mark.

W e l l:  I   g u e s s! said little me.

I had no idea those three words would come out of my mouth, they just did. I knew where they came from; a songwriter had put them into one of his songs. He was some famous Hebrew guitar player, but his name wouldn't come.

            Finally the Son of a mAN spoke for himself: I'll tell you why it's hard. You guys think you know me. You think you know where I came from, who bore me and who gave me nipple that I might suck a little on my way to growing up. You think you know my mother. I'm going to disappoint you; I'm going to tell you what you think. All your thinking leads you astray. What you know is strangling you and only pulling you down. You think I came out of the place where you stick your fun in. Let me tell you, I didn't come from there. Instead of going to holy castles on Sunday, you'd be better off going to the movie house. Identify with the principle character when his wife is stolen by trolls and taken into the lava flow. Stay one with him through the last scene when despair and loathing have him wandering across an interstate where he finally meets a semi high on cocaine who never slows his progress and leaves the hero a wet spot on life's highway.

            Wow, I said to Mark, our mAN's got a lot of anger.

I know, answered Mark, but you would never guess why.

Why, Mark? I said, tell me.

He is angry because he couldn't use his power and he's burning up with love.

I had seen Jacob's little nephew heal a few sick people, but they were very few.

            Going back that night Jesus came up to me and took me off to the side. He'd never done that before and I was a bit intimidated; but he only said: I'm supposed to marvel at stupidity; but frankly, I don't understand it!

            In the following weeks we went round and round the villages. He was dissertating. Frankly, I had gotten quite dizzy. One day he seemed to notice and he brought the twelve into the center. He divided them into pairs. He called each pair a natural born twin and instructed each on how to glue the divided world into a new earth. Into the hands of each twin he put a cup of Tide. I thought the amount was too much; it overflowed to the ground. He gave them power to clean up dirty spirits.

            It's only a ritual, he told us. He was preparing to send them OUT. Here's what you will need on your journey, he said. Make a list.

            Take one staff. You'll need it on account of it's symbolic power. That'll be two for every twin. The staff will remind you of Moses; it's the power. It represents desire, the child of passion. Tide stands for passion power; every twin now carries two. OK, everyone has at the top of his list –staff! Now! Put no bread, no bag, no silver dollars. You can carry your wallets but before you leave here I want everything out of them. Your wallets are to be totally useless. You don't have to carry them if you want; but I know the feeling when it’s not in my pocket.

            Put on your list: cover your feet. I don't want any of you picking up no dirty spirits. And finally I want you to put on your list: no clothes.

            I heard an undertone of mumbling and saw that one face on every twin was bright red. I looked at Jesus and saw that he had his hands in the air.

Quiet, he was saying with a big smile on his face. Wait, you misunderstood me. You wear what you have on; I only meant that you are to take no extra.

Those blushing smiled and their twin laughed and everyone quieted back down. I thought he did that on purpose because everyone had been so tense about going out; but whatever his intentions were that certainly eased everyone's feelings. I noticed the smile lingered within me.

            Yahweh's little boy continued: When you come to a brand new environment and go into a house, stay in that house. You got that, no house switching. Everyone nodded. If a place doesn't like you and everyone sticks their fingers into their own ears, just take off your slippers and beat the dirty spirits out of them in their faces. If they jerk their fingers from their ears so they can use their hands to hide their eyes, tell them Tide gets the whole house clean. Only don't hang around to dissertate.

            I was assigned to a twin and it went west southwest. I followed. From their double mouth came the message to turn around and see what is following you. It drove the demons crazy. All their hiding places were seen out and it got scarcer and scarcer for them to follow. The ones that persisted got beat up by the twin staffs. I hadn't had more fun since before chapter one. I admit every chapter was better than the one before it, but this was the most.

            We were pouring a lot of oil around and having a blast watching those old sick clunkers hit it and go sliding totally out of control; then just being holy amazed when we saw the look of excitement and glee on the faces of once dead people as they climbed out of the best ride they'd had in years. We healed them and knew it had nothing to do with us. We were just spectators next to those old wise men playing checkers under the overhang on the porch sitting in a chair watching those old jalopies lose control and go for the slide of their lives.

            We’d gotten the oil idea from that old trickster Jacob. Actually Jesus had instructed my twins but at the time it just didn't make sense. Also we were reluctant to use it, with the liability and all. We were also afraid of the local constables and just everyone in general. You know going OUT is scary! Jesus had instructed my twins that when things were not going or everyone was bored to pour a little oil on the imagination.

What's the imagination, asked my twin.

Don't you know? asked little yahweh.

No, my twin answered, it’s way too big to imagine.

Listen, he went on, it's the road we move on.

That's how the oil finally got on the street.

            My twin remembered. They'd been trying it on people's heads and it worked OK, but we experimented with this and that until we tried it on the street and then WOW. On the street it made people really move. We had the whole town in stitches. Everyone was relaxing under the overhang on the porches playing checkers beside black spitting wise men and comfortable as penguins on an ice pack and just waiting to watch some old crippled desert wander come screaming into town and then lose it and be saved. Everyone came to town eventually when their nature turned sore. Of course a few died from stroke, but my twins just raised'em from the dead and made'm cry for a while and then they soon joined some checker game and learned to laugh with the rest of the community. The laughing came naturally when they had dried out from all the blisters the hot desert sun raised on their sensitive skin. We never told anyone they needed to be baptized with water, but we certainly let'em learn to cry. It might take years, but one day we understood it would turn to laughter.

            It was a sad day for me when I had to leave my twins; but Rumor had found me and told me Herod had heard.

Heard what, I asked?

All he would tell me was to follow him. He pushed the right button; I had been trained to follow.

            When I arrived at Herod's holey castle, which I thought looked as uncomfortable as the Sunday one, I found out Herod had heard. Jesus had been getting a reputation as a trickster and practitioner of Voodoo; and that reputation had gone out ahead of him. I looked at Rumor and pulled him off to the side; since Mark was on assignment I figured an interview with Rumor was the best I could get.

Let's begin with Herod, I said. Who is he?

            Son of a hero, answered Rumor.

Any relation to Shem, I asked? From studying Genesis in preparation for the assignment my boss had given me I knew that Shem was the very first man of renown. In fact, the name Shem meant son of a hero, or something like that. Noah had called him after himself, though it would be a hundred years before Noah became a hero. Noah had had a premonition about himself from the time he was a boy.

No relation, Rumor answered, Herod came from animals.

I see, I said.

            What about the Baptist, I asked?

Dead, said Rumor.

Dead! How did it happen, I asked?

Herod cut his mind right off the top of his shoulders, he answered.

Wait, I said. The story was getting too far out in front of me and I had to go back if I wanted the pieces to stick to one another.

            What had Herod heard? I asked.

Jesus, he said. Only Jesus, and the word is he's very nervous. Not a person in the castle has seen a body to pin the name on and I had been telling anyone who will listen some of my theories.

What theories, I asked?

Well, I told some he was John come back to laugh.

            Rumor had spread the word that the outlying towns were laughing their heads off at the lack of control they were experiencing. Then theory speculated that the consequence of removing a dead head was an immediate surge of power. Correlating John's dead head with the sound of the word "Jesus" had Herod experiencing new revelations of divine guilt. That's only the castle news, said Rumor, there are news from the other side.

            I didn't realize there was another side until Rumor told me what they were teaching at Sunday school. They had their own theory why the outlying pagan regions had contracted some disease that was causing hysteria. Personally I knew it was on account of people beginning to finally feel good about themselves; but I understood the need in the religious mind to dogmatize events before being swallowed so no one ate poison. They were leery of feeding each other bad medicine. Rumor said the word was the ancient God El. The Sunday schoolers were saying El was the cause. It was El who was behind the first seven days in the Book of the Beginning. And El had returned in the body of Peter.

            You mean the Rock? I asked.

No, not Peter, said Rumor, I mean El-ijah.

Oh, I said, what does that mean?

It means the Rock is El, he said.

You mean Peter is El? I tried again.

No, mused Rumor, but it might be Jesus?

I thought that was clear.

But that's the point, said Rumor; the classroom was divided. Elijah had worn out his own name and El was too old a God for anyone to remember. The word Rock just didn't any longer make sense and Yahweh was someone everyone wanted to forget. So others were theorizing that the cause is some baby prophet, the son of one of the big ones. The debate in school got so hot that the students spilled into the street with their arguments. That is where Herod heard it, said Rumor.

            Herod had his own mind, Rumor continued. His mind wasn't like the one-sacred-world leaders' mind either. I heard Herod myself, Rumor told me. He said to himself: This is John whom I beheaded. He has risen.

When Rumor told me that we just looked at each other. It came to me that Rumor was waiting, watching me; and that I was waiting, watching Rumor. Somewhere time had stopped. We were waiting, and I think we came together, to the same conclusion, could it be and yes. We were both incredulous; Herod was a believer! We hugged each other; then I asked Rumor how it happened?

            It's a long story, said Rumor. I'm not real good at getting all the facts straight. I'll try.

I could see Rumor was tired so I took his hand and we starting walking away from the castle. I was in no hurry; there seemed to be nothing going on in Herod's kingdom. In fact, I knew time would be the victim and I was often glad to see that sucker suffer. It had sure caused me enough.

            This is the story Rumor told of John and Herod. John knew what was wrong, but he had no idea about the right. You know how fate often brings two travelers on the road together and they immediately strike it off. Well, John and Herod were on the road; only they were headed in different directions and neither had a clue. John had been preaching a practical solution; if you hurt and your only idea for a solution is a prohibited one, then don't do it and learn to cry over the frustration that leaves you. Cry your hearts out, said John. You'll feel better and might even get some new ideas. I recalled how John practiced his preaching. I knew he had a good mother, though in Mark's time it had yet to be talked about. John had begun to extrapolate on his principles, reaching out to draw deeper conclusions. Somehow Herod got added to his conclusions and was used as an example in his preachings. John was never one to leave diseases alone. John said Herod was wrong.

            Herod hadn't stayed in his own house and had moved in with his brother. His brother moved out, but he left so fast he forgot his wife. Herod took her for his. That's why John said Herod was wrong.

            I was amazed, on account of the time difference and all. Jesus had warned about house switching. Then I wondered if there was a time difference between when Jesus told the twelve about staying in one house and John telling Herod that it was wrong not to. Jesus' words came back to me: Get all the dirty spirits out before you go on. Herod probably moved because his first house had more dirty spirits than he could handle. My reasonings had lost their point. I returned to Rumor's tale of John.

            Well, that extrapolating ended John's preaching. Herod put John in a house just like Potiphar, the governor of Egypt in Jacob's time, did to Joseph when he was messing with that man's wife. Joseph didn't mess with no man's wife and because Joseph refused her she blamed him like Herodias did John. The reasons were not exact but the end product was the same, jail. I saw that the theory side of a man is what gets other men into trouble, no matter how different the withers might be rubbed.

            Herod used to visit John in jail. They liked to talk. Herod didn't think much about what was wrong; that was why he liked John. It's all John talked about; and everything he said was new to Herod. Sometimes it gave Herod a headache, but at the same time it gave him pleasure. Pain and pleasure together were exciting for Herod.

            My God! I just remembered! I interrupted Rumor. Herod had a good basis for being a believer. My head had spun three hundred and sixty degrees so that I was looking directly at the beginning. Jesus had come out of the back of John's jail. Had Herod beheld that? I pondered the idea of Jesus raisen John or maybe John raisen Jesus; one of'em pulling the other up by his other's boot straps and the inverse. Whatever the mystery was, Herod's words were haunting.

Then Rumor said: Telling a long story shortly is not my forte.

            John had Herod all wrong! Herod loved John. John reminded Herod of his younger brother Philip. Herod had moved into Philip's house because he wanted to make up for what he had done to his brother when they were boys. Philip loved horses more than anything. He lived to ride fast. Herod, being the older and bigger, ridiculed him to no end. He told him it was a girl's game, a waste of time, men didn't ride horses, men practiced with swords and footballs at taking other men's heads off and running down the field using bodies to keep their feet from touching the ground. He shamed his younger brother, drove him from his father's house, and put a wall between himself and his brother as high as heaven. Herod couldn't see it as a boy and his father was no help. Actually his father had an eye for walls and was a master mason. The genetic traits found in Iscariot were known to have infiltrated a wider gene pool. Old habits are hard to decipher; but when Herod moved into his brother's house and saw the dust going over the horizon it was not hard for him to read. Philip still loved to ride. So he took his brother's wife just like the Hebrews do when a brother dies. He figured his brother might just as well be dead. He accepted this because he hoped Philip's wife would give him a son just like Philip. Then Herod might undo on him what he did to Philip. Fate hardly every plays out wishes; it seems to have some other kind of mind. Herod only succeeded to make a daughter, and she acted just like her mother wanted. Now I come to the long story I wanna shorten, said Rumor. He looked worn out.

            I was beginning to see how Rumor could go on, without end, never coming to resolution. He had to. Rumor would never come to resolution. They were like ships in the night. Resolution looking and Rumor running. Rumor lived on the flood plain, if he came to resolution he would die. My fingers were getting calluses right below the nails but I felt the work Rumor was doing was most commendable and I gave his hand a squeeze.

            Philip's former spirit changed as fast as her ex-husband's horse ran over the horizon. I believed it was in her from the beginning, but what she looked for in her earlier life had yet to reveal itself. She liked power and understood it to be the road to riches. She defined rich with the words Jesus said fell behind the farmer's sleepy outhouse. Herod was her revelation and she was anything but slow to change. Immediately she began calling herself a diminutive of her new mAN. Her new dress became known as little Miss Daughter of a new Hero.

            Rich was who she married the second time and the contract in her eyes was a definite step up along the road of corporate ascension. She carried a grudge against John because he was a possible stumbling block for her unsure new husband. If Herod listened to John long enough she feared her impractical husband might experience a mind change to the extent of re-writing his dictionary. He might find a new meaning for the old word –rich. The possibility seemed implausible but she was one to gamble.

            Rich was part and parcel of her nature. She believed her nature was confined by the undulating curves and round mounds that rolled across her chest and curvated round her hips as the unwary traveler made that sensuous journey on his way down. Men have to pay: she told her daughter. She was an exhibitionist, repressed of course! It was her dirty spirit; but under her regal robes it wasn't just the king who didn't have a clue. She didn't either. It was with difficulty that she saw beneath her skin; though she kept running into recurring deja vus.

            It happened on Herod's birthday. He threw a big party and everyone came. There were noble men, army men and busy men; also everyone who was a mAN from the high echelons of the tribe of mAN was there. The daughter of Herodias danced for the men.

            The mother began wondering who she was as she watched her daughter dance. She had moves her mother never imagined. She had eyes her mother always wanted. She had rhythms that made even her mother hot. She was twelve years old. It made her mother blush; she was so proud.  Herod, he was proud too.  And the men!  Well, I guess.

            The king said to the girl: Girl, you Got it. Ask me your deepest wish and I will give it to you. Then he swore. (Oh no! I thought, swearing is a bad thing in the presence of children!) Half my kingdom I will give, I swear, or anything else you want.

            The girl went out and said to her mother: What shall I ask for?

The head of the Baptist, she answered.

The girl ran in and said to the king: I wish you to give me, and make it fast, the head of John here on a platter. Then she dusted her hands, like Jesus told his twelve to do with their shoes, and re-turned to walk back out.

The king felt impaled between the horns of a dilemma. On the one hone was the oath he made in front of his guests. John, whom he really loved, was on the other. He weighed love and felt it to be of less value than the consequences of calling down a bad oath on his head. So he ate his oath and threw out his love and sent the guardsman to bring in the head.

            Rumor continued his tale: The guardsman went out the door and then the guardsman came back in the door with a head on the plate. Between the going and the coming of the guardsman, I found nothing to talk about. The room was perfectly photogenic; I could have opened the shutter and closed down the aperture and even after those twenty long minutes still gotten a clear picture. Nothing moved, not even the flies.

            The girl got the platter and took it to her mother. Her mother put it on her lap. She never looked at her daughter; her gaze was riveted to the plate face. I thought she hesitated, lingering; her face was as empty as the twelve wallets. A light came on; I had no idea what it meant and my head spun like a weather vane hunting the center of a whirlwind. It was futile. My attention went back to her face and on it I found a plastic smile. The crowd seemed to come unglued from the still life someone had nailed to the wall and the party went on. Later I found out a party of skinny men showed up outside the jail and claimed the mindless hunk of meat in a body bag tagged John and put it in a cave.

            I've got my theories: Rumor said. There were rumors. One had it Herodias saw Herod's face in the plate. Deja vu again; but they are only feelings. Nothing was ever clear! She did what she did for her husband; she knew it was what he really wanted. Only guilt wouldn't let him say. She understood he would worry about his younger brother. She was sure of that. The voice that worried him out of the dark cell in the jail of his visitations, she now wondered if she hadn't made a mistake and would it not had been better to have only John's tongue removed. Too late to worry now, she assessed. Guilt is the killer; but she learned two can play that game. As far as Herod's stampeding wild horse nightmare: it wouldn't be John anymore who led her husband down the wrong road. Herod had to be protected and she was the good wife at that. She loved her daughter also.

I'm going home, Rumor said, suddenly I feel exhausted.

Yeah, I said as I released his hand.

            I was thinking as I trudged across the wasteland on my way to the agreed upon meeting place of the returning twelve. My best estimate was five degrees north of dead east, but I didn't have my compass and was only trying to distract myself over directions on account of getting nothing done with my thinking. I knew it was there but everything was disturbed. Words are the last thing to show their faces when my feelings are confused; and I felt all cut up inside. I was thinking two women, under the guises of commercial power. And before them there were the two powerless women, under dogmatic spirituality. All I saw was suffering in both houses, the house of rigid spirituality and the one of power politics and exploitative commerce. Theory though is never as powerful as faces on living people. I saw the girl of twelve and the wife of Herod, coming into a world the same as the other two but with a difference only in the decrees laid down in laws to survive. I saw the laws in a new light, how the laws of survival lead the unwary to demise. Ruined as surely as glamorized cars whose souls are for show. Collingwood's words came home: the problem with mAN is his corrupted consciousness, which dims his awareness.

            What does that mean, asked Mark?

            OH MY GOD! You scared me, Mark, I said.  Where’d you come from?

            Over there, pointed Mark. I saw you coming and walked out to meet you.

            I must have been dreaming. I hadn’t noticed Mark at my side until he spoke. 

So what does it mean? Mark asked again. 

What? I asked. I had no idea what he was talking about.

What you were thinking, he said. 

What was I thinking? I asked Mark.

You were thinking that the consciousness of men has been corrupted, said Mark. 

I was, I answered? How did you know that? 

I don’t know, said Mark. 

Then I guess I don’t know either, said I.

            I felt like I had lost my mind, or someone had stolen it.  Mark had so startled me that I couldn’t find a single thought and even the one he put there didn’t stick. I had a feeling, though, and it made me feel like my legs were made of rubber. I was glad when Mark took my hand and led me.

            He and I rejoined the apostles. The apostles had rejoined with Jesus and were reporting all they had done. Everyone was talking, comparing miracles and sharing notes, dissertating on their experiments and explaining procedures, when Jesus interrupted.

Come with me, to a very secret place. Only you. You need rest.

            Mark said to me: it’s on account of the crowd. Peoples were coming and going like Macy’s before Christmas and I saw the bread that some of the twelve carried in their hands had grown mold. I realized why my legs felt like rubber. I was hungry. The thought renewed me. I felt that I still worked, if only a little. You can’t know how much that raised my spirit. 

            I watched as the twelve were boarding Jesus’ private boat and noticed Mark off to one side talking with Jesus. He waved his hand for me to join them and when I came up to Mark I asked: What’s up? We can go too, said Mark. I felt privileged, raised up, culled out and elevated, until Mark said to me that Jesus was resigned to the necessary evils of the press. I was hurt but got into the boat anyway.

            We motored out and turned south paralleling the beach. The crowds drifted south along the beach with us, all eyes were following us like Basset Hounds. There was slobber on the lips of many beach peoples. They looked so sad. We were idling towards a fog bank that appeared to be idling towards us. 

            Fog? I said to Mark. 

He only smiled. It was a trick. There couldn’t be fog on a desert lake, I thought as our boat was shrouded in a white cloud and I heard the motor revs come up. The boat took a sharp re-turn and powered up the lake like a bat out of hell. Jesus was taking us to a secret place, one that was deserted and where no man had been before.

            Jesus was wrong again.  When we came out of the cloud and ran right up on the beach we bout near slaughtered six people. The place was packed. They had come out of the cities and must have run all the way. Many of them were still trying to get their breath back, bent over with their hands on their knees and all red in the face. Jesus had that Basset Hound look as his eyes surveyed the multitude, but there was no drool around the corners of his mouth.

God, he said, they look like a herd of sheep that have wandered away from their shepherd. They have no one to guide them.

At that, he climbed out of his boat and began dissertating. He dissertated for a long time until his disciples noticed how tired the sun was getting because they saw it sneaking toward the western rim, knowing it wanted to drop out of sight and go to some other planet.

            It is really getting late, commented one of the twelve.  Judah picked it up and took it to Yahweh’s son. 

He said: This is a lonely place we have created and Peter says the time is running out. (When did the pope say that? I asked Mark but he put his finger over his mouth for me to Shut Up!) Send these peoples away to get a job as farm help or factory workers so they will have some money like people the world over do and can buy themselves some food.

            Yahweh’s little man answered: You give them something to eat.

            The twelve answered back: What are we to do? Buy five hundred dollars worth of bread? And then feed them like good people do pigeons in the park? Get real; we ain’t got that kind of money.

            He answered the twelve back: How much dough you got? Get together and look.

            The twelve huddled and when everything they had was in the middle where usually the leader sat; they saw how little they had. It came to seven. 

They said: We got five doughs and two fishes.

            Yahweh’s little man gave these orders: Divide the peoples into parties. Have the parties sit on the ground. Make the parties either fifty peoples or a hundred peoples.

            Long ago that’s the way it was done. Then Yahweh’s little man looked into the sky and over the five doughs and two fishes he performed a ritual.

            What’s a ritual, I asked Mark. 

It’s an act on imitation, answered Mark, were the master at the ceremony fits together the two worlds in a display that reminds the audience that all time and every space are one and that man’s domain is wider than his eyes can read. It brings before the faces of the audience what normally can’t be comprehended. 

Thanks Mark, said I. I still didn’t have a clue.

            He broke the doughs into little loaves and the fishes he made into minnows. The twelve spread them around and everyone started eating. The parties ate and ate until their jaws tired of chewing. Everyone was satisfied. Mark and I watched hunger disappear over the western rim, leaving the sun in hunger’s dust. If the race had gone the other way, Mark and I would have known hunger was lost in the night, without any light to help it find its way home. Hunger can be a motherfucker, but this time we saw it get its satisfaction.

            The twelve cleaned up, with Mark and I helping, and we collected twelve full baskets of loaves and minnows. And those that ate were five thousand. 

Mark, I asked him, what does it mean?

            Well, he answered, if the parties each had a hundred people it means there were fifty parties. Now if every party had fifty people, it means there were one hundred parties. Exactly what it means can’t be determined, on account of the lack of accurate information. But the meaning can be put between limits. The number of parties partying on this particular day fell between fifty and a hundred.  Mark smiled at me.

            I smiled back. 

How about this? I said.  The parties going on canceled out the numbers in each party.  What was going on was an illusion, well thought out by the teller of the story.  Let me return to the beginning.  Jesus took us to a secret place, and allowed no one to come except the twelve.  The twelve types of brothers, remember?  Then he asks us how much food we have.  We had seven pieces, which is what Joseph told Pharaoh was the number of years Pharaoh’s people had for food growing.  Then Jesus did a ritual and had everyone sit down.  How many men were there?  Well, to begin there were twelve.  Now, Mark, how many personas were in the man named Legion?  Don’t answer, I will.  He had two thousand starving persons.  We had five thousand.  And we all ate.  In the end we picked up twelve baskets, which would be enough to feed each one of the twelve for another week.  I am only guessing; but that is the way I see this party.  The point is: it is the imagination, that anointing dreamer of the Jacob story, which feeds every one of us.  I could add a period, but it doesn’t make me proud!

            I saw the hair on Mark’s head stretching to hold up his jaw, but we didn’t have time to dissertate on what I had said because Jesus was driving us into the boat. He was sending us to the other side, a place called Bethsaida. I was beginning to get a feel for the oar, but it was hard. Two things disturbed me about this piece of wood in my hands. One, my hands were out in front of me which was very dissimilar to the workings of a plow.  Caring for and nurturing the garden with a plow had my hands down by my sides and allowed my body free rein to float between their twin pivotal points. The second issue was the most disturbing; I didn’t have the butt of a mule to guide me. I felt lost in a boat, or at least uncertain about destination. But I was learning; learning to work at going backwards and to trust the truth I floated on to take me where I couldn’t see I was going.

            I watched Jesus disperse the crowd as we oared out onto the flood plain. The men appeared to be rising into a mist and vanishing, but I told myself it was a visual illusion due to the fog along the shore. This wasn’t a dream, said I.

            Mark, I asked, where is Bethsaida? 

It’s the territory that houses hunting and fishing. 

Why are we going there, I asked. 

I believe Yahweh’s little boy wants us to learn how to feed ourselves. Mark answered. 

I see, I said, as my eyes fell on the Buddha two rows back from where Mark and I worked and wondered how he felt about all this rowing across the waters. He looked resigned.  No!  He seemed more like he was in some deep meditation.

            Why didn’t Jesus come with us, I asked Mark? 

I believe he wanted to go to the mountain to pray, said Mark.

What do you mean pray, I asked; I thought people went to church to pray. 

Not Jesus, answered Mark, he talks to his father in nature. Jesus remembered what Yahweh (you know that’s his father, don’t you?) said to David after David told Yahweh he was going to put Him in a brand new house. Yahweh told David he didn’t like the idea and not to bother; Yahweh preferred to live out on the land outside of town. Since David’s time, with the encroachment of men’s towns taking up every habitable place on earth, Yahweh moved to the only solitary space available, on the top of mountains.  Jesus often goes there to get his head straight.

            I mulled this over, rowing, mulling and time passed, a long time.  I asked Mark, where are we? 

Look around, Mark said. 

I looked over my shoulder and saw sea ahead of us. Looks like we’re in the middle of the sea, I answered my own question. We’d been racing the sun all afternoon and as I looked into the face of the wind I saw the sun had won. I imagined its mother tucking her son into bed as darkness came upon us like a blanket pulled over my eyes. I never like the feel of night, especially now that my bed rocked up and down like sea saw. This felt too unstable. I felt scared and alone, feeling the night isolating me from the others in the boat I could no longer see.

            Jesus was in the land and he too felt alone. He didn’t like the feeling and so in the fourth watch, after sitting through the other three trying to make up his mind what to do about it, he cut across the waters to be with his brothers. I guess we hadn’t gotten very far; the wind had beaten the back of our heads as flat as pancakes. This was better than plowing in a sand storm, I thought, hoping to distract my mind from sea sawing, since my teeth weren’t full of grit. The analogy of gardening, though, had long ago lost all meaning since everywhere was desert. I granted to those who know that the desert analogy had not yet reached a consensus with those in authority. Authority, I spat off to the side. The kids on the street were just plain angry; they didn’t have any special reason.

            I was pulling away on my oar when they saw him. A scream came out of the boat that made my heart jump straight up. If I had bitten the thing I found in my mouth I would have committed suicide. That’s how shocked I was! I saw him off the starboard; he looked like he was trying to sneak past us. But when the whole flood plain cried out he smiled and stood up straight on the water and sauntered over to where we were working.

            He put his elbows on our bow and leaned in, like we were in a taxi and he was looking in the window.  He said: Take heart, it is I.

            I wondered if he was addressing me. Did he see where my heart had gone? Was he asking me to look at what I had almost bitten in half? But his eyes were on the twelve. He didn’t even see Mark, or me, not even the Buddha.

            Do not fear, he said as he climbed into the boat and went about touching each of the twelve. Some of them were crying. I understood but being a spectator made me very nervous so I let my attention crawl outside the boat and was immediately cognizant that the wind had gone home.  The water was like it had been laid over with oil and I remembered older times in my now ancient history when I used to ski on such water. It was like being pulled across a velvety soft substance, gliding in a dreamlike state, where all effort and resistance had vanished and a peace filled my body with magical, loco- motion. 

            Mark touched me on the shoulder and my meditation vanished.  I could still hear faint sobs.

It is because they didn’t understand the loaves, whispered Mark next to my ear. 

His breathe was warm and in a way soothing.

Their hearts are like rocks, he breathed; no other possibilities have a place to enter.

            We hit the other shore and I tumbled into the lap of the guy behind me. I had taken my seat belt off when Jesus got into the boat and with calmness everywhere I had not buckled back up. I forgot. We were at Gennesaret and I recognized it because of all the headstones and tombs. Mark had told me earlier that Gennesaret was a revision for the Sea of Galilee. I could buy that, on account of the graveyard that marked the places where so many men had drowned. Mark informed me that before it got that name it was called the garden of the prince. It was the most fertile region on earth. Wow, I thought, Heraclitus had it right about change, everything does.

            When we disembarked – I thought that word sounded interesting so I retrieved my pocket dictionary and looked up ‘bark’. Just what I thought, it meant to growl. When we left off growling, which literally meant to get out of the boat – people recognized him and the whole countryside was run over with people bringing their afflicted. Wherever he was they came. Wherever he went, whether it was a village or town or farm, whether private or public, they dragged their sick and injured and begged to only touch his tunic. And those whose courage didn’t fail them, were healed.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

HOW LITTLE DIRT IS CLEAN ENOUGH

 

            Pharisees gathered to him also and with them came the notetakers from the get-whole-now city of Jerusalem.  It was the notetakers from Jerusalem that noted his disciples ate with dirty hands, not washing them first as the Divided Ones did and did also the followers of Judah.  These Judah followers were not from Iscariot, but they did follow the custom of washing their elbows down to their hands in a vigorous fashion reminiscent of the most assiduous surgeons the world over.  And this especially after they had returned from the market where men bought and sold each other at dirty prices, thus purifying themselves before they ate their pig.  They had other customs also, like making sure all their eating bowls were washed in Maytag dishwashers with bio-eating detergents.

            Both notetakers and Pharisees wanted to know: Why do your students not buy into the system proscribed by our grandfathers, but enjoy their bread without giving a thought to the hand that carries it into their mouth?

            Yahweh’s kid replied: Isaiah was right when he said you criticized from a dog’s perspective.  He wrote: many religious people do me honor with their lips, but they keep their hearts for their own concerns.  The boat of their honor and esteem is vanity and their theoretical reasoning is the musings of society ladies. There is no commandment of God here but only the initiation into a dog’s pack bent on fleecing sheep.

            He said to them:  You do well to reject the commandment of God so that you may keep what little you have.  You earned it and God knows don’t let me take it away.  You deserve the house you live in.

            Moses gave you two injunctions: Give due right to your mother and father.  And, let him die who speaks badly to his father and mother.  You guys have a clever way of avoiding responsibility; you passed a law.  You say that whatever is due from you to your mom and dad is a quote unquote ‘gift to God’, thus making all contact with your parents null and void.  You divide the worlds because you can’t deal with responsibility, and use your laws to cover your cowardliness.  You never talk about real issues because you are not Able and your guilt and shame shine forth like soft charcoal.  Study your dresses if I lie.

            The son of mAN called the crowds to move in close and said to them:  Listen to me and understand.  Let me say a word about eating and purity.  Nothing can go into a man’s mouth and defile him.  What comes out from the end that opposes his mouth does not defile him either.  Just because it smells bad to our delicate noses doesn’t make it full of shame; stop being ashamed of being like everyone else.

            Then he vanished, along with the twelve, along with Mark and I, and appeared on the inside along with every one of us who vanished with him.  I understood it was us who vanished because it appeared to me that it was the crowd who vanished along with the outside.  What appeared was the inside along with the twelve, Mark and I, and him.  We were inside and the twelve all had washer board foreheads.  One of the twelve put a dress on the thoughts we were all wearing: Them parables that you keep talking about are tough.  Can you dissertate?

            He asked:  You don’t understand?

            It was Matt who responded:  I’m not sure of the question.  Why is it that what a hand carries to its mouth and then what the mouth eats does not defile a man?  Is it because it belongs to the man’s hand?  Is it, queried Matt?

            Absolutely correct.

            Matt was all smiles and I noticed how his answer relaxed his whole body.  He sat before us, all comfortable and easy with a rosy glow covering his face.

            What a hand feeds a mouth doesn’t go into the man’s body, it goes into the hand’s body and passes out the hand’s asshole.  Then the hand wipes the body that processed it and cleans up whatever mess is left over.  Every body does this, I hope.  Man is not a hand or whatever the hand brings to feed hand’s body.

            Mark leaned over and whispered in my ear:  He just made food clean.

            What do you mean -clean-, I asked?

            Mark didn’t answer, but I could see the question startled him.  Finally he said to me:  damn if I know.

            It’s not what a man eats that makes him dirty, though he may get fat and dirty on account of never having the time to bathe and allowing his hand to always reach for a BIG MAC.  What defiles a man is not what he sees going for his teeth but what he denies coming out of his actions.  It is man’s desires that lead him into defilements and whispers in his ears that his heart has a deep sickness.  Here are a few examples: He has no thoughts.  That is the biggest indicator of defilements. Or all his thoughts are poor and wretched, or unpleasant and objectionable, maybe unpalatable.  He thinks of the disgusting and smiles. I am not talking about children; in children this is health. Or he may dream of masturbating and become so lost in his desire that he runs red lights without ever noticing. Or copulating with his neighbor’s wife or his boss’s girl friend or even his mother’s grandmother.  Something is wrong with his internal workings. When he’s at work and his mind distracts him into musings after his real desire all he imagines is fucking.  Fucking is a desire to work at a task that pleases him, which is contrary to the work he does for pay. Or maybe he plans strategies of how he can possess his boss’s Supra or the college preppie’s newest mountain bike locked in the back of his mind. Or maybe he wants to kill his co-worker, though his fellow laborer is in the same boat and probably is planning to kill him but that imagining couldn’t come under ‘his’ defilement.  That would come under the good things that might happen to mAN. Group orgies and sleazy drug deals are on the list that defiles a man; along with Vegas sweepstakes, being a card shark and endless vacations surrounded by the rich and the naked.

            Another attribute of a defiled man is he doesn’t care.  He exhibits unconcern and is negligent and remiss.  He acts loose and is neither easily retained or controllable, like diarrhea. He may have a mean eye and a vituperative tongue but thinks he is the greatest.  He has no restraint or discipline; and he understands he is bad.  This gives him the best of feelings.  Man food is his fantasies, and making them matter.  He is a creator.

            Don’t get me wrong; these things are good.  Prime time TV makes big bucks portraying these types and this is good.  The audience sees and laughs and understands this is human. When a man has been defiled his actions reward him accordingly and it is through the rewards that he understands what he does to his self.  Defilement catalogues priorities.  Defilement was done to him and each day he lives out the consequences.  Defilement is what he owns and a gift of the Gods; and he does a disservice to God if he doesn’t give it back to his parents.  Understanding doesn’t come easy; it is easier for a man to put his frustrations on somebody else.  The other body gets his reward and he gets what bothers that other body; but he can’t relate to other people.  That is how he was defiled.  What goes around comes around, don’t any of you understand compassion? Compassion ain't no bleeding heart, it is the two passions that drive us in opposite directions. It is the engine!

            Mark, I said, I am totally confused.  Yeah, Mark answered, I am just like you.  Yahweh’s son had disappeared.  I thought he might, seeing how uneasy understanding was.  What chapter are we in, Mark?  Seven, he said, we are at the end of the week.  My typing spirit must have gone to church, I had lost my desire for note taking.

            We found out later he was hiding in a house in Tyre.  Tyre was a pagan city occupied by burnt spirits and dirty demons.  He wished no one would recognize him, but his hair was too long to keep it all hidden.  Mark and I arrived at the same time a woman arrived, immediately after he was recognized.  The woman had a dirty spirit who possessed the house her little daughter lived in. The woman had heard of him and coming up she threw herself down at his feet.  She was a Greek woman, by birth she came from the Fire Bird City along the coast of Syria where her ancestors dreamed of sailing into heaven across the sky blue waters which remained after the great flood put out the raging fire that destroyed all life.  At the moment she had more pressing needs; she was sick with worry for her daughter.  She begged him to still the demon who abused her girl.

            Yahweh’s boy said to her:  The children have to be fed.  I wander everywhere across this land and I find children starving.  Can the leaders not understand this?  All that the people do is feed their own faces and the dogs grow fat.  It is not good to take the bread that belongs to the children and throw it to the dogs.

            Yes, Lord, answered the woman.  I know I am not one of your people.  I know my own people lord it over the economic world and have the power to kill all those who disagree.  I know you think we are dogs.  You think only of the children, and that is what prompts me also.  I think of my daughter.  I am under your table, Lord, and with my child; let some crumbles from the children you burn to feed fall to my daughter and me, though you may see me as a lowly bitch.  My heart is for my daughter.

            My throat constricted and I felt a tightness across my chest.  The spirit of woman always impressed me, making me ashamed of my own poverty.  Over and over I kept running into how wrong I have been.

            He looked at her, sweeping the hair from his face.  A light revealed a hard countenance and he spoke directly into her eyes: Because you say so -go-.  The demon is gone from your house.

            Mark did a follow up on the woman and reported to me that it was so.  Mark said the woman had a fine house in the suburbs along the coast.  She persuaded her husband to turn their resources into programs aimed at breaking the economic cycle which perpetuates the transmission of demons from parent to child.  Though Jesus wanted to feed the children, she told Mark, it did them no good if a demon had won over the child before the girl had gotten to the table.  Mark told me he thought Greek women were very intelligent but wondered why they couldn’t enlighten their husbands a little more concerning where power and security reside.  Security, said Mark, resides in cared for and nurtured children; if that were the reality we would have no conflict when they reached adulthood.

            Yahweh’s little boy left the wasteland of Tyre and traveled through the ashes of Sidon near the sea of the drowned race of mAN and in and out of the ten lost tribes of Israel, which each tribe had made into a town and lived there because nature was just not worth having a bowel movement over.  The crowd that followed brought to him a man who had no idea what he was hearing and all he was able to articulate came out in a whisper. 

Only buzzing, the man mumbled; all I hear is buzzing.

            The crowd wanted mAN’s son to lay his hands on him.  Jesus led the man away from the multitude and let no one follow but Mark and the press.  I was the only press.  This was at the time there was little electricity in Iraq, no TV, all the trees long ago had disappeared and the few computers they had were only as good as the TV and not a newspaper was to be found, plus Saddam Hussein allowed no Western reporting, since they had a reputation of distorting everything.  So the press entourage was no big deal.

            The first thing the son of man did was stick his fingers into the man’s ears.  They looked into each other’s eyes and Jesus asked: Hear anything?

            He’s kidding, I said to Mark.  We knew the trick; he did the same thing to Mark and me on the pier.  Only he tricked us by having us use our own fingers instead of his.  The man’s eyes never blinked.  I told Mark I’d bet he didn’t hear a word Jesus asked.  Mark kicked me for the second time since I had been with him.  Shut up, he said.

            Jesus took his fingers from the man’s ears and spat.  Off to the side.  With his left hand he took the man’s tongue and pulled it.  I saw the man’s eyes grow bigger and he almost coughed.  Then Jesus looked into the high air and moaned and groaned.  I was getting uncomfortable, it was like Jesus had become some kind of sorcerer and was practicing Voodoo.  Then he said to the man: open up.

            Relax, Mark said to me.  Right now you don’t see how the imagination works.  It has to express exactly what it experiences, see its motivation so it can enlighten what shames it in the dark. Speaking and hearing begins with moans and groans and grunts.  Look at the animals, they are no different than us.  You, Mark said to me, are afraid to go to the bottom and begin working because you are too proud to sink so low.  You think you are more able than that, so you avoid work because somebody might recognize how disgusting you are.  You are ashamed of yourself; which means you have some things in your past which you failed at doing for who knows how many right reasons but made you loose trust in your very self.  This man, though, is on the bottom; he has no care for shame.

            I saw a smile grow on the man’s lips.  He was looking at Mark.  What you say about the people on the bottom, said the man, is true; but what you just said about me is not true.  If it hadn’t been for that crowd bringing me to this man who touched me, I would not have come.  I was terrified and have been all my life. Isn’t that why the first man in our story of mAN covered himself when he failed with his woman and ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  That knowledge condemned him and he was ashamed and so he covered himself, because he was terrified of dying for his failure if it were found out.  Shame is more powerful than death; is it any wonder it’s always darkly hidden?

            The man had spoken to Mark in a normal tone of voice.  I heard a sound at my feet and looked down to see my notebook.  I had no sensation of letting it slip out of my hands.  I didn’t even feel it.

            Jesus did a poor job of charging the man not to speak about what he did.  Maybe Jesus didn’t really fix his ears, but his tongue was certainly working.  He was using it everywhere, and loudly, because the news spread faster than Rumor could have done. It pleased the crowds.  Word got out that everything Yahweh’s little boy with the long hair did; he did well.  Deaf people can hear him, word said, and those without tongues in their mouths still thought thoughts and had deep feelings.  Everyone said that life with Yahweh’s little boy was miraculous.

            Mark, where are we? I asked. 

The week is over, we move into chapter eight tomorrow, he answered.

            I was glad the Christians moved the day of rest to the first day of the week instead of the last; I wanted a day to rest.  I’d been doing a lot of typing and not much eating.  I thought tomorrow I would eat up.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

MORE HOPE, A NEW WEEK

 

            In those days, when once again there was a great multitude: said Mark.

            Mark!  What’s happening? I asked.

            We’re starting chapter eight.

            Oh!  Alright!  The way you started startled me.  I said.

            And they didn’t have anything to eat.

            Jesus called all of us to him and said:

            I have pity for the multitudes.  I can’t help it, on account of I have to live with each and every one and they moan enough to make me physically sick.  It has been three days now that they have stayed with me and they have nothing of their selves.  If I send them home hungry, like they have a home, they will drop like flies in a drought.  And some of them have wandered a great distance to reach me.

            All of his disciples spoke with one voice:

            Soooooooo!

            You are asking us?  Remember when you sent us on that trip to the house of hunting and fishing so we might learn to trap our own food, we never got over the water because the wind was resisting us without pity.  When you finally showed up we were still in the middle of the flood plain.  Did you take us to teach us to hunt and fish?  Nooooooooo!

            Did you mislead us on purpose, to teach us some lesson?  Are you doing that now?  Where shall we find enough bread in the desert to feed these peoples?

            All serious and stoical, mAN’s son answered:  How much dough you guys got anyway?

            The twelve didn’t even look at one another but said like they’d rehearsed it:  Seven.

            He told everyone to settle down; find a spot on the ground and be cool.  He took the seven doughs and said he was glad and broke them into small loaves and told his followers to set the loaves in front of the multitude.  Someone also had a couple of fishes and he took them and again said he was glad and broke them into sardines so they could be easily swallowed and his followers served everything that made the mAN’s son glad, up.  Everyone ate and put their leftovers into baskets that numbered a whole seven and then they counted off from one to the last man who was three thousand nine hundred and ninety nine.  Four thousand was there but he had gone to sleep.  When the count was over he put us all in a boat and rebarked towards a place called the “overhanging branch” and those parts.

            Rumor got in the boat beside me but no one noticed.  You guys are going to the useless branches so he might lope off a few, said Rumor.

What are you talking about, I whispered to Rumor? 

Dalmanutha, he answered. 

I see! I answered, but all I really saw was Jesus dispensing the multitudes.

            He was driving everyone away from the waters; telling them to stay in the desert because they were so water logged that to take any boat trips would place them in mortal danger.  No one argued. Vapor rose off the vanishing crowds like winter manna in the morning sun, until the rising fog erased all sense of landscape.

            Everyone but the twelve, Mark, and I he sent away from the water. I had Mark as my partner, the twelve kept to themselves, and the Buddha was a permanent part of the boat so if I don’t include him in my ordinary reporting he’s understood.  He’s always with the boat.  He looked like Ulysses and I understood how glad that man must have been when he took his oar inland and buried that sucker forever in the ground.  We were on the water again, crossing over.  Jesus seemed never to tire when it came to water travel; but I could see why.  He never did any rowing.  That’s not to say he was a slacker.  Some evenings he took his exercise by striding along side the boat as we rowed; but the twelve didn’t like to talk about it. 

            Mark, I asked, what’s the import of this last miracle of dough and sardines?

            Hey, wise guy, you tell me!

            Wow, Mark, what’s wrong, I asked.

            You certainly take all this with yeast, he answered.

            I know, Mark, I answered, but you don’t know how long I have lived in a way I have loathed.  My world makes me so angry because I feel rotten and want to change; but I can’t.  I just want to get in a fight with some holy person and beat his nose flat.  I just want to experience the release of these frustrations in some brutal way of ruining the whole mess that I am. But I’m afraid. It’s not the holy person outside of me I want to smash, but my inside one, my holy teacher, my holy idea of some ideal me. You know, Mark, the last fight I was in was when I was six and it went on for what I seem to remember to have been like thirty minutes.  I was in the first grade.  Some older kids instigated the whole fight between me and another first grader and then got in our faces so we might hurt each other more so they could have greater fun watching.  Finally a nun broke us up and the two of us had to sit on a bench together for thirty more minutes.  I feel mean because my world is so far removed from me and I don’t know how to get in.  I want in, God damn it!

            Sure, I know the import of the “miracle”; but so what?  I know where it fits in the context of Genesis and why you added it in your Gospel.

            Mark interrupted:  So tell me!

            You don’t need telling, Mark.  I answered.

            I know, but there are others who care and truly want to know.

            Do they, I asked?  I doubt this whole effort, and even the promptings of my boss I know I have only made up.  At the time I began this I was feeling such pity for this sorry me, but I was so tired and depressed I didn’t know what else to say.  I just wanted to cry.  These feelings periodically sneak up on me like a murderer; it is the woman who lives within me and she makes me so lonely because I have always been too weird to keep one who might live outside of me. 

            Thomas, Mark interjected, please shut up and tell me how you see this story.

            OK, Mark, I said.  There are two accounts of the miracle of loaves and fishes because of what Joseph said to Pharaoh when Pharaoh had two versions of the same dream.  Joseph told him that he had two versions because God was anxious to make it happen.  God is still anxious, anxious that people begin using their imaginations (that part of each of us which is Anointed) to feed on instead of beef.  This whole account makes sense only if the listener understands the Joseph and Pharaoh dream story.

            Genesis proposed a solution to the human dilemma of suffering and destruction at the close of the story.  Talking through the dream sequence of Pharaoh, Joseph saw where the problem arose.  It was in the raising of children.  Their minds are extremely fertile in the first seven years of life; and besides being loving and caring, parents were to take the time and make the effort to ensure that their children use their minds each day at some creative tasks which the children or child wished to work at. It is called education by the parents, really the only way a child learns how to get out of his or her own darkness. Parents educate children, a professional hardly can. A child needs tasks and duties, and it really doesn't so much matter what those might be, what matters is the efforts the child puts forth and the encouragement to do better with each new day. It all came to be law in Egypt called Joseph’s law.  In the first seven years a child had to give back to its creator (it is some internal process that creates all of us) one fifth and this was to be stored for the child to use in the next seven years as food for its survival. The second seven years were called the famine ones and many who teach young adolescents know how hard certain kinds of concentration are for these children growing through those transitional years.  The processes of concentration have so little stamina since most energy is going into bodily growth, pushing the individual towards bodily adulthood.

            The parable you just told, Mark, illustrates the hope and belief that God’s only son provides seven full baskets for the child of the first seven years if it is only helped to feed.  And it is not just for the child.  Was it not that radical Paul, the apostle who was number thirteen, who said: “not I but the imagination in me?” Anyway, that’s the way I see it.  Going back to children, if a child is helped in this way, for the rest of its life it will have a job which rewards it and a consciousness that is motivated to enjoy creative work.  It will have a connection to its own self and won’t have to rest one day a week because nothing inside of it will be against the child's self.  Rest will be the work it practices in every waking moment of its consciousness.  I’m talking of an ideal, but for some people it is close to real.

            Mark smiled at me and I knew I was going to start crying.  He dropped his oar and put his arms around me, which I wanted to resist.  Sometimes I am so divided I want to slit my throat and I hate all the wise ideas my head has gleaned over the years of isolation and resentment.  I knew I wouldn’t cry and someday maybe I wouldn’t resist letting myself act without interfering. But that day had not yet arrived.

            I was glad to be on the other side. 

Which side, asked Mark?

Mark, damnit! I said; I don’t wanna hear any bullshit out of you.

I was glad to see some of the divided-ones of the one-sacred-world come up; thinking I could ask Yahweh’s man if I might pick a fight with one of them.  I wanted to get down and dirty.  I wanted a dirty spirit for a while.

            I saw my spirit must have gotten into those religious leaders because they seemed all hot and bothered.  One went right into the face of Jesus and demanded a sign, damnit. 

Do a trick for us, the man said, we don’t believe you can. 

One of the leaders compadres had donned a black robe and a white wig and climbed into a tall chair to watch.  Twelve of his friends had formed two rows of six and those in the front row were down on one knee.  They waited and watched.  Jesus had the concentrated attention of twenty-six eyes.

            Jesus, Jesus said, are you guys for real? 

No one answered and his spirit moaned like it was in ultra-unbelief. 

Let me get this straight, he went on.  You call yourself a club, right?  You go by the name of “generation”.  You are all over twenty-one and you want to see flying saucers come out of the sky?  You want me to bring them down?  You want proof?

            He started laughing.  He bent over and grabbed his stomach.  He fell on the ground and was kicking and rolling and raised such a dust I believed he was about to vanish.  He had climaxed and his laughter and vibrations were coming down, slowing, going towards stop.  The jurors’ eyes went round and gravity was pulling on their jaws.  Jesus rose and dusted the dirt from his tunic.  He acted like he’d just been thrown from a wild horse and was walking out of the arena.  He gathered the twelve and Mark and myself and walked us to the boat and we got in, motored off the beach, turned and powered into the breaking waves until we were right in the middle of the flood once again.  The Buddha was in the stern, the index fingers of his right and left hand were touching each other, like the painting in the Sistine Chapel, and on his face was nothing.  Not even a fly!

            I knew what he had on the backside of his mind, fly or no fly.  I thought he couldn’t hide it from me.  This Jesus was one crazy son of a madman.  He couldn’t make up his mind; he couldn’t decide where in the whole world he wanted to live.  He had something about fire and water that kept him constantly on the go. The Buddha, his eye and I were one.  I got this from the way his fingers touched.  I got this from my own mind.

            The boat was slamming into the wind and eating waves like the Lenten fast was behind us.  I was having a ball, riding in the bow on account of Jesus being at the helm, driving with a real motor. We’d thrown all the oars overboard.  Damn the oars, screamed I, we’re going now. 

Where, I was asked? 

I looked down to see Rumor clutching the keel; he looked pretty beat up.  He was hiding; but it didn’t surprise me. 

To the house of hunting and fishing, said I. 

How’d you know, he asked? 

Jesus is at the motor, I said. 

Sooo? He said.

It’s just a guess, said I.

            I looked back at Jesus.  His hair was waving over the motor like an American flag.  It made me proud.  I saw him turn and reach across the Buddha’s shoulder and do something with the engine.  I felt my back crash into the bow as the hum of the engine faded into the wind.  The boat went dead in the water and out of all the roar and fury of the moments past arose the steady slapping of a husband disagreeing with his wife.  So much for hunting and fishing, thought I.

            I looked around at the twelve and thought they had the same thought.  They were passing a handful of dough among themselves and on half their faces I saw hunger and the other half worry.  It was all the food we had onboard.  Jesus was sitting beside the Buddha, studying his hands.  His own were imitating what he saw.  That’s what I saw.

            His head raised and addressed the twelve: Look to it! Be wary of the yeast the religious leaders bake with and also the leaders of heroes.  I mean the politicians.

            I looked at the twelve again and noted how they were ‘looking to it’.  They stopped passing the dough and put it on the deck before them so each could do his own studying.  On a few faces I saw lips moving; I wondered if they might be praying.  One even had his eyes closed; but I thought he could be memorizing.  I was having a hard time seeing into the minds’ of the twelve.

            Jesus didn’t seem to have that problem.  Why do you talk about not having bread, he asked? Peter raised his hand but Jesus didn’t want an answer.  The only answer Jesus gave Peter were the wrinkles above his brow.  Yahweh’s boy dressed some more words and let them in the boat.

            Do you not see?  Don’t you have any feelings that you have made friends with?  Don’t your hearts let anything come in?  Do you have eyes?  Do you have ears?  What can they hear?  Let’s review.  You gave me five pieces of dough and I fed five thousand. The remainder was a number of full baskets.  How many baskets were there?

            The twelve answered as a class: Twelve.

            Then I had seven doughs and the crowd was four thousand.  We ate and then the remainder was how many baskets?

            Seven, they answered.

            Does that seem normal to you? He asked. 

All of them just shook their heads but no one dissertated.  Some of them shook their heads up and down, some from side to side and others lost control of how their heads wanted to answer, their heads just shook.

            He fired up the motor and the boat stood straight up.  I clutched the bow and got my first good look into heaven.  It didn’t last and as I was coming back down Bethsaida was rising into my view.  My teeth were chattering as the boat beat the waves like a machine gun and I watched the house of hunting and fishing coming at me like a satellite.  I gritted my teeth as Jesus parked the boat a hundred and fifty yards from the water and stepped out like he was some king arriving from a foreign land.  My teeth were still chattering but I smiled at the volley ball players whose game Jesus’ parking had brought to a complete halt.

            On the other side of the boat a crowd had come up with a blind man.  The crowd wanted Jesus to touch him.  He did.  He took the man’s hand and walked behind the beach clothes changing house. Mark, I said, how about the changing clothes beach house. Naw! He answered, I like changing beach clothes house.  No, it is clothes changing beach house. The crowd was watching volley ball, so Mark and I went behind the clothes house changing beaches and watched Jesus.

            The first thing I saw him do was spit right in the man’s eye. I thought it was a good thing the man was blind.  I had lost my desire to fight.  Obviously Jesus was growing one.  Then he laid his hands on the man, letting them float down gently until his full weight came to bear on the man.  I noted the blind man was slowly sinking into the sand like it was heavy mud. 

Do you see anything, Yahweh’s strong man asked him? 

I see what looks like laundry on a clothesline in the wind, or like a glob of phlegm veiling my eye.  I can’t tell, he answered. 

Jesus covered the man’s eyes once again and pressed the heel of his hand across and outward over each eye. Now what do you see?

            I see all things, said the man.  I see them clearly.

            Good, said Jesus, do you see that village over there?

            Yes, said the man.

            Don’t go there.  Go find your home.

            The man went away down the beach past the volley ball game but he acted like nothing was going on.  I speculated that he never saw a thing.  Jesus had given him eyes to see, not to cause him distractions.

            I made a note about the two men Jesus had healed.  Both were brought to him by the crowds.  One could not hear and consequently was unable to speak and the other could not see.  My mind returned again to the words that Joseph spoke to Pharaoh.  It came to you twice because God is anxious to make it happen.  Is God anxious to give man a great reward, as Jesus did with those two men?  My boss thought so and so did my wife.  That’s why I was on this assignment.  My job, it occurred to me, was to bring back some good news.  I understood that good news was not very marketable in my generation.  I could only hope to still have a job when I returned.

            Why did you come to me, asked Mark?

            Huh! I answered.

            Why did you choose me and not Matt or John or the lawyer? Asked Mark.

            Oh! I said.  It was my boss’s idea.  He said you were the first and if I did my work well I could write the other three without even meeting them.  I’m starting to see what he meant.  But it wasn’t my idea, Mark.  It was a job, if I wished to accept it.

            I was just curious, said Mark.  But we’d better get a move on.

            Move on? I asked.

            Yeah! Answered Mark.  Like a horse.

            Yahweh’s son set out for the villages of Caesarea Philippi.  He took the twelve with him. 

What do you make of the name Caesarea Philippi, I asked Mark?

It was the first name for political horse power, said Mark. 

I like that, I said to Mark as we came up on Jesus and the twelve sitting together around a rock. Jesus was asking them questions.

            Who do people say I am? He asked. 

Someone answered John the Baptist.  Another said he heard Jesus called Elijah and someone else said he had heard people say he was a prophet come back from the dead.

            Does this make sense to you? He asked.  Everyone agreed it did not.

            Good! He said.  Sense is not going to help you.

            We knew he wasn’t who others said he was; but who he was, our understanding could not sense. He’d just told us that but it didn’t help.

            He asked: who do you say I am?  I looked at the twelve and saw them all looking at their feet.  Then Peter looked up and spoke.

            You are the Christ, he said. 

Yes, Peter, he said; but do you know what that means?  Peter looked down, but then said: It means you are the one who has been anointed.  Yes, again, Peter.  For each of you to understand you will have to understand the first story our ancestors told.  Now, I do not think you are able; but later you will understand.  In the mean time, do not tell this to anyone.

            He started talking to us: The Gods created man, making men into male and female creatures.  The nature of every creature is freedom; but God cannot give to man this freedom.  Freedom is man’s nature.  Freedom is also his self-esteem, what makes every creature feel the BEST.  On the other side, man is like a sheep, timid and cuddly and afraid; fear is what robs man of his freedom. Fear will not stop mAN’s son.  The son of man is free and he must suffer his freedom.  He will; but the fathers’ of man’s sons will reject him and call him a liar and the priests and religious leaders will concur and they will kill him.  They are most fearful; in all time rigid religions are erected on the fears of their propagators.  Do not be shocked by this.  The son of man will rise after three days.  Each of you has the ability to recall the beginning story of your own life and put it beside the story told by our ancestors to find my meaning.  But, know this for sure, I will be killed in every one of you.  Don’t let it bother you; I cannot remain dead. This is the first article of faith.

            Peter objected to the things he was saying and wanted to protect him. 

No! Peter!  It is you who deny me, and you always will as long as you keep your following to protect yourself.  You are afraid of being alone.  You believe you are protecting the little ones from the big, bad, wolf; but really, Peter, is it not you who scares you?  You will deny it, all the time.  To cover your fear you will even come up with a world class religion for the betterment of man; but it is only a disguise.  You don’t know me even as you look at me; you are just like the men who rule in the material world.  Peter, you are afraid.  You are a subtle liar, purposely misinterpreting or not interpreting at all your own dogma so you can justify your useless and barren existence while you hide the shame of your own failure.  Shame is a good thing, Peter, but not if you keep it all hidden.

            The rock we were gathered around suddenly felt too hard and alien.  The twelve wanted, as did I, to move.  Let’s get to ‘horse power’, I blurted out; but only Mark heard me and frowned.  The crowds were still all about and so Yahweh’s boy called them to come near and then began talking with them:

            If there is anyone who wishes to have riches, let that one listen.  Let him question who he is and not just assume the best. Let him take up his bad feelings along with those that make him feel good.  With the bad and the good, let him come along with me. I am a rich man.  For the man who truly desires to save his life let him beware that his wish will take what little life he has away.  He will lose it if he comes along with me.  Don’t get me wrong; I tell you: Lose it!  When it is gone, let that man read the Stories of our Ancestors so he will understand his life when that life returns to find him.  What I say will happen.  Every man has choice; and on any day and each day he must exercise it.  Any man can gain the world, if he works at it.  All that is required is your life.  So go ahead and pay.  Hey, everybody pays so get used to it.  If a man follows the way I go, that man will get my life. If a man is ashamed of me and the words I speak in this world with its blind generation of speculators, of that man will the son of man be ashamed also when the son of man comes to the hallelujahs of his parents who created him just for that.  I tell you this cause I haven’t found anyone living them hallelujahs and that is sad.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER NINE

IS UP ENOUGH?

 

            Don’t be tricked by death.  Think about it, for sure.  Doesn’t it scare you?  Yes it does!  Good, but keep thinking until it don’t.  The only source of power for that which scares you is the power you give it.  Life is stronger than fear; trust me.  There are some who stand here right now who will not swallow fear nor taste it before they see the kingdom of the goodness of life come in all its power and hallelujahs.  You wanna be that one, then come the way I come!

            You have heard: in the beginning there was no death.  Have you not read: in the end death is locked away?  Probably not, death is something no one talks about.  Sooo, how do we get from the beginning to the end?  It’s not that hard.  Just stop solving problems by KILLING.  It not only solves nothing, it adds to the problem. We all know the fifth commandment: You shall not kill.  Do you think that applies to someone else?  No, it applies to you. Who has given man the right to take another life?  I will tell you who, no one.  Man has NO right or justification.  EVER!  Death will be banished when we stop killing.  Period.

            Let me say it another way.  Death is a double-sided idea; each of our two ways of perceiving has its death.  Just maybe neither side has any power.  So I say again, there are some who stand here right now who will not taste death before they find the good.  The good is all around us, but death blocks our vision.  This kingdom of good was set here in its place long before any of us began.  Your teachers from the time when you were small have deceived you.  I believe your teachers didn’t have a clue either. They were only your parents.  They probably never were read to either. But their fear was stronger and bigger than what you carry.  I will show you what I mean. Observe!

            We stood there for six days, neither eating nor drinking.  And we watched.  We were like a still life painting hung from the torch on that statue of liberty that guards the harbor of life’s comings and retreats.  That’s a woman and her name is Justice!  We watched it all unfold. No one spoke.  The picture we were in was huge and as quiet as an autumn’s morning sun in the desert.  And it was Good.

In the afternoon on the six day Yahweh’s boy took Peter who would lead the old, new church into the last stage and Jacob who was called James because people would believe that and Esau who was renamed John because he was still one hell of a fine man and led them up a very high overshadowing mountain.  They went alone.

            I watched as they disappeared and remembered the first visit Abram, our first forefather, had when God appeared at his camp.  Three men came into his camp at high noon.  Abram fed these men the cow and they devoured it.  They were on their way to burn up the men who exploit and use other men for their own economic success. They lived in Sodom, which once was the Garden of Eden but now absent of women and had turned rotten. The women had long before been suppressed and the garden was all thistles and thorns. This triad phantom that appeared in Abram’s camp was the image of God and promised Abram a son to complete the work first begun on the six day of creation.  Abram’s spirit, Sarai, was bitter, which made her barren, on account of the ways of men and her resentment was thousands of years old. She had refused to bring a baby into the mess of men. “What good does it do?” she had said, “They will only make it into the ‘spitin’ image of themselves!” If I remember correctly, then she spat.

            When my eyes lost track of the departing men in the morning mist there appeared before my face a personal TV screen on which appeared an elevated perspective of men going up the mountain.  It was Jesus, going up the trail, followed by Peter, James and John. I could see the sweat on the faces of the trio and was cognizant of how poorly prepared their bodies were for climbing in the wilderness.  Jesus seemed a born again outdoorsman.  As they neared the crest Jesus drew further and further away from the three, but the camera was focused on the men.  Inside my personal TV I felt like I was one with the three.

            We came over the edge and were walking towards the center when from the other direction walking towards us came the Sun.  My eyes went white, like the light on a glacier on a clear morning at 20,000 feet.  More intense, though, and into this light appeared a man like Schwarzenegger and a woman like the sun itself with red skin and dark hair flowing over her breasts and a boy of thirteen all in light and grace.

            Peter said he saw Moses and John said the woman was Elijah and Jacob swore the boy was his son Benjamin.  Their voices sounded to me like a recording until Peter spoke again.  His voice was rattling and stammering like his cognitive faculties were divided between speaking and keeping his bladder from releasing.

            Master, spoke Peter, I am sure glad to be here.  We can make three shelters to hide your faces from the public because anyone who might see you would surely die!

            Master, I don’t want to die, continued Peter and immediately fell down and was crying.  Peter’s hands completely covered his face and he violently shook.  But a cloud came and covered him and from the top of the mountain rolled a voice:  This is my son whom I love.  Listen to him!

            A roar came from the screen and I saw the trees shake and then become still.  The camera pulled back and rose above the scene and I saw before me John and James and Peter and with them in the center was Jesus.  They were seated and Jesus was passing out sandwiches and as the camera continued to rise I could hear the sounds of happy eating and amicable conversation.

            Later I talked with John.  He told me that as they came off the mountain Jesus made them promise not to reveal what they saw.

            So I asked John: Well, what did you see?  He promised to tell me as soon as the son of man rose off the ground. 

What’s that mean, said I? 

After Jesus discovers how dead he is, then I can tell you, answered John. 

I didn’t push the issue, but instead asked John if there was anything he could tell me.  He said there was.  So I said: Tell me!

            He told me what some of the notetakers meant by their prophecies of Elijah having to come first. 

I am Elijah, he said.

John continued: The notetaker meant John of the desert who was crying over his sorry self and what they did to him we all know.  Elijah is the spirit or woman side of God and crying when it hurts restores the scales of balance and justice. John was lamenting over the fact that there were few men who had eyes that could cry.  For this reason the son of man had to suffer; everyone denied that there really was such a thing as suffering.  It’s obvious when someone cries, but men too long ago passed a law making crying illegal.  Women are changing that and that was Elijah’s job also.  He did it for a while but unfortunately, as we heard, while pursuing his job they cut his head off so he couldn’t experience the benefits.

            I noted what John told me and then rejoined Mark as the guys off the mountain rejoined their follow followers as a crowd was congregating around a dispute some notetakers were having with those disciples left behind on the mountain excursion.  I asked Mark what was happening. Jesus is about to give an example, he answered. About what, I asked? The root causes behind defilements, he said. My face must have presented my perplexity because Mark said: It was for this reason the son of man must die. For what reason, I asked?  The reasons cannot be made clear because they differ in every person, but if you hold your horses and listen we may both learn something.

            As Yahweh’s offspring appeared the crowd was swept away and all arguments were left behind as the multitude ran to greet him. He asked: What were you discussing with the notetakers? Embarrassment turned the face of the crowd to stare at the ground, leaving Jesus and Mark and myself to wonder at the pelt heads of the standing herd looking dumbly into our faces.  One face out of the crowd appeared and it spoke: Master, I have brought my son. He has a speechless spirit. When this spirit seizes my son, it batters him, and he foams and his teeth chatter, and he wastes away.  I told your disciples to drive it out, and they were not able.

            Jesus looked at the man. I was watching Jesus. The lines on his face looked chiseled and his eyes refracted the sun’s rays like sparks. What have you done to your son, asked Jesus? Nothing, the man answered; he has an evil spirit and I have beaten him endlessly but the spirit just grows worse.  I told your disciples to get rid of the spirit; I told them.  I see they are as not-Able as I am.

            You come from a generation, my mAN, as blind as the fathers that put out your eyes and your son is your creation of another you.  You have made him as blind and as mean, maybe meaner, than you were made.  Your anger long ago lost its right mind and has diseased into hate, and that hate has corrupted your trust and belief.  Nothing within you is worthy of your esteem, you know it, and so you have none.  How long shall I be with you?  How long shall I endure you?  My friend, the answer is: not for long.  You might preach all you want, you might have the biggest crusades for God in the world, but I know it is all a sham.  You know who Sham was?  Probably not!  Bring me your son: Yahweh’s young man said.

            The boy was brought to Jesus and when he saw him the spirit planted by the father convulsed the son and the boy withered to the ground and foam sputtered from his useless mouth.

            The son of mAN asked the father: How long has he been like this? He said: Since he was little.  Many times his spirit has thrown my son into the fire and into the water.  His spirit tries to destroy him.  If you are Able, take pity on us and help my son and my self.

            Jesus said to the mAN: If I am Able?  Do you believe I am Able?  All things are possible to those who hold to trust that life is able.  My friend, you are not life.  You have done this to your son, not directly but through the bent ways you treat the wife of your life.  Is it possible for you to believe how diseased you are?

            The father of the boy cried out in pain and agony; the wife within the father wrung his body and gnashed his teeth until the mAN bellowed forth:  I BELIEVE. I don’t want to; it is not good to believe how badly I have directed my actions.  My belief terrifies me.  Can you help me understand?

            Jesus turned to the boy and spoke directly to his spirit: Deaf and speechless spirit: listen to me.  Go forth from this boy and never enter him again.  The mouth of the boy opened and a great scream came out of him.  The scream struggled and griped at the back of the boy’s throat and his lungs completely collapsed in dispelling every horror and abuse his father had laid on the body of his son.  Then the body lay lifeless in the dirt.  The crowd believed the struggle had killed the young body.  But Jesus reached out and touched the young son’s hand and the body picked itself up.  Jesus kissed the boy on the forehead and turned his hand loose.

            The scene vanished.

Mark, I screamed, why did the scene vanish?  Mark, you can’t leave it without some follow up. Mark took my hand and led me inside. He was there, inside with his disciples and they were talking in private.

Why were we not able to drive him out, asked his disciples?  Over all the time that I had been with Jesus he looked tired and wrung out, more than I had ever before seen. He answered: This cannot be made to go forth except by prayer. He looked at his followers, then continued:  What I say is enigmatic. Your prayers alone will not accomplish this; only the fathers of this generation can change this. Only their actions can change the patterning within their selves that can change the spirits they plant in their sons. They must take some chances, allowing growth to continue and trust in gentleness to reshape their hearts towards compassion instead of control.  This is a social thing, which is a community thing, which is a family and individual affair.  Yet it gets no support and blessing from the society at large; so it is a future thing.  Work and wait, there is a coming time when the pressures these deaf and speechless spirits will put on society with greater force which will in a future generation coalesce the divided individuals the world over into a new generosity and understanding to change the direction from disease towards community. There is an axiom, as enigmatic as what I said about prayer, which says it better than my words.  Hear this: that which hurts and scares you is the door to salvation.  Then he said: Let’s get out of here.  I’m tired of the inside.

            I could relate about the inside; I never felt like I wanted to meditate in that place for too long. I had too much past which was too disturbing and chaotic for me to be comfortable. I didn't understand this, it was just fact. The inside was the ground of my dreams, and rarely did anything grow there that affirmed me. Most of my dreaming told me how easily and often I was getting beat up or killed. These periods came in cycles and were balanced by their opposites. Mostly I was moving, from being hurt or killed to becoming on the run and finally to having my enemy literally attack me in my body of flesh. All in a dream but of late felt in my body. This thing would pierce my body, for real it seemed and I would come screaming out of my dream bed.  Even more strangely, I was beginning to grow something I long thought was dead in me: anger! I was starting to get really pissed at being hurt; and I didn’t care if it was a dream or for real.

            Will you come on, said Mark? I saw everyone going out and realized I really didn’t care where I was, inside or out.  Was I getting comfortable in my disease wherever I stood?  I didn’t know. I knew I didn’t any longer desire to be alone.  I was falling in love with my brother. 

            The twelve went into mAN’s land, which Mark called Galilee, and the mAN’s son led the way.  We passed through the land unseen. We had the cover of a fog cloud and he was able to teach the twelve without attracting the attention of others.  He wanted it that way.  He taught us:

            The sons of men will be turned over into the hands of their fathers and the older men will kill their sons. Don't ask questions; this has been going on for so long that your minds have grown to accept this as everyday existence. The pattern is very old. But don't fret. Three days after the sons of men are killed they rise up. It's only physics, but the ramifications have yet to be discovered.

            When our leader mentioned physics the faces on the twelve dropped and to my eyes was revealed the contents of their minds. Empty! and in place of what could have been was fear and shame. There was no understanding. As a consequence, in the group with which I traveled, we had nothing to talk about.

            We floated into Capernaum, stepped out of the fog and wandered without aim or direction here and there.  No one was talking but the twelve seemed to be studying the neighborhood.  It seemed to be agreed, this was the one, and all of us entered a house. He was inside.

I thought: shit, every one of’em knew right where he was. So what’s all this shit about the lost or absent Jesus? Everyone knows; but my thoughts were interrupted when he asked us:

What were you talking about on the Way? I looked around and again found the twelve studying their feet. What keeps making these guys ashamed, I wondered?  Then another thought struck me. Mark, I asked, what does he mean “on the Way?” The twelve are on the Way, answered Mark. They are, I asked? Can’t be avoided, said Mark. That is why Jesus brought them to Capernaum. Capernaum? I asked. It means the village of Nahor, who was the brother of Abram. Men have lost their home, and they would remember that if they just studied their beginnings a little more closely. The twelve are looking for a place of trust, a place they can call home. This desire of theirs is peace, rest, a place where they can escape the pressures and forces competing in the outside world carries.

Where do Abram and Nahor fit in, I asked? 

            Abram means ‘father of ram.’  Ram can be translated 'man' or the most high.  Either way, it is how men perceive themselves. Every one thinks she or he is the greatest. This is natural, in some ways. You get it don't you, Abram was 'father of God'. That was true but it was not Yahweh’s truth or his way. The pattern in Genesis is consistent; the second born or youngest brother was the recipient of the rewards of a good life and the rightful inheritor. Abram was the first born and the second was Nahor; but his name means ‘heavy breather’ or as I see it, sleeper! He's asleep!  He was totally at rest; call it deep peace if you like. Maybe men don’t want exactly that; but a little more peace and rest than what is available seems in great demand. The Boy has got to Wake Up! He is the one who wins the Lottery, by default even. 

            I didn’t know what to think of Mark’s dissertating on Genesis; but he told me more than that.  He said what the twelve had been discussing along the Way.  Every one had said to the eleven others: I am the greatest!

            I know what you were discussing, said Jesus as he sat down on the floor of the house.

            He told the twelve to gather around and bid them to recline. They listened to him like children.  He spoke:

            If you wish to be first take yourself to the end of the line and wait behind everyone else.  Be patient with yourself and don’t push.  When everyone else is in and then you arrive, there will be a party.

            He took a child and stood the girl in the midst of us all. I would have wondered where Jesus had gotten the child; but by then I knew Jesus.  Children everywhere followed him, no creed, color, or lineage ever blocked their access to his warmth and affection, and his magic. He embraced the girl and then raising his eyes to us, he said:

            Whoever accepts a child in my name, I mean every child IS an anointed one, like the one here before you, accepts me.  Anyone who accepts me, like this child is I, accepts not me but the creator of the child who I am.

            John raised his left hand and Jesus felt the love of this man reach out and raise him.  Yes, said Yahweh’s son.

            Master, said John, we saw a man driving out destructive feelings in your name and we tried to stop him.  It was to no avail, but he was not one of us and we didn’t understand how he could do this.

            Yahweh’s son answered: Do not worry yourselves over others, because there is no person who will exercise power for the good of others and then will speak ill of me.  For anyone not against us is not against us.  If anyone gives you water to drink because you are called anointed, truly the bearer of water will get her reward.  Does anyone here with us understand water and the thirst of a parched imagination?  Probably not. We have a journey to undertake. The journey leads backwards, into each our pasts. The journey doesn't go forward, at least not until the beginning of our past is found. Going backwards until we pass the beginning turns now our journey into forwards into right now, I with you and you in me.  A time will come.

            If anyone misleads one of these little ones, I am talking about every child, who has love and trust, it would be better for the misleader to have a great stone about his neck and that stone labored to the end of a pier and thrown into the sea.  The trouble this misleading causes the community and the whole earth is in every newspaper.

            If your hand makes you go amiss, throw that sucker away.  You will be better off and still have a good time even if you only got one hand.  At least the good one will not take you where your teeth will grind and your weeping will be inadequate to allay the fire that consumes you.

            And if your foot wants to take you where the big bucks roll or the pretty ladies play, take your car and park it on that sucker.  It is better that you don’t move than to walk into the grinding meat machine.  And if your eye leads you into the play houses of the naked and the beautiful, get real close and study the pores of their skin.  You’ll find some dirt where no one before has studied.  You’ll probably get a black eye, but it is better to go into another kingdom with one eye black than spend your life waiting for the next issue of naked ladies to raise your desire, which is worm eaten and starving for something to quell its burning disease.  You got older desires; only you have to find them.

            Desire is a good thing; it is the salt of life.  But if desire has died, with what can it be resurrected?  Recall just a little of how hurt you are and then sprinkle that across your mind, salt makes the senses sharper and the flavors jump forth (maybe not yum, yum!); but a little bitter! Do you want to be bitter all your life; no, you don't want that! Let your desire find the opposite; desire can find ANYthing; but sometimes it needs a little salt; but keep the sprinkling to yourself so you can be at peace with others.  Raise your own passion, but respect the rights of others to do likewise.  That is the way to keep the peace with each other; and you can be at peace with your inside other, also.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER TEN

I’M A BOZO ON THIS BUS

 

            After he had finished dissertating we all piled into a bus and Jesus drove.  He put it into reverse and backed away from chapter nine and Capernaum.  Everyone was talking among themselves how least and last he was, one telling anyone who would listen that he was so nothing he bet no one could even see him.  I thought his voice was bigger than the idea he was toying with and wished he would disappear like Jesus often did.

            Where did this bus come from, asked Mark?

            Oh, I answered, I created it out of the back of my mind.  I got the idea from my hometown, at the time when civil rights were being tested and only clean people were allowed in the front of the bus.  A line had been painted in the isle and this divided the clean from the dirty.  It worked for a while because the basis of the law was explicit by the kind of skin each person wore.  No dirty people could ride up front with the naturally white ones. My southern descendents learned it from Hitler.

            Never heard of him, said Mark. 

Then you have some learning to do, said I.

            The bus was rolling along in the direction our driver wanted to go and together we descended into a fertile valley and plowed across a roaring river.  It was exciting.  The landscape changed. Large houses and polished, shiny cars were everywhere.  People were outside building subdivisions in order to hide the other divisions and the land was growing row upon row of houses like some gigantic machine had plowed the ground in furrows and dropped dollhouses in its wake to have them come up like tomato plants in a truck patch.

            Where are we, I asked Mark?

            Judea, said Mark, on the other side of the Jordan.

            How did we get here, Mark?

            You really want to know, he asked?

            Well, I guess, said I!

            It’s a long story but I will try and make it tight, answered Mark.

            We have to go back to northeastern Iran.  Somewhere near the place Abram began.  It began before him.  Maybe it began long before the dawn of history; but all any of us really know is that his story and its beginning is our story and will continue until the problems are resolved.  After the Great Flood Ham’s last born had a curse put on his soul; but back then no one understood soul so they called his demise a plague on his land.  His land was named in honor of his great uncle, Cain.  Canaan was the second born of Ham and he was more like the living dead Able, oppressed by all the dirt that had been heaped on his mind.  He was what your times called depressed.  His land was south and west of where our story begins.  Israel now occupies it, on account of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  These three patriarchs treated the Canaanites fairly because this was Yahweh’s Way and his wish.  Later, this changed.

            Judah was designated the rightful heir of Israel, by default.  Reuben and Simeon and Levi did some things which lost them their civil rights, in the eyes of their father Jacob.  So did Judah, but his father never found out.  Judah caused Joseph to be sold into slavery; though it can’t be forgotten that Judah was opposed to killing Joseph.  Again, we are back to the curse, now on Jacob’s most favored child.  Joseph was taken across the Red Sea into Egypt, another name for the soul of Misraim.  Misraim and Canaan were brothers; Misraim being the first born.  The land was called Egypt Land.  It was there Joseph saved not only his brothers, his father, and his people; but laid down a plan for saving the land, I’m talking about soul, for future people everywhere.

            Egypt Land was secure, well run, holy.  Imagine it was, like you guys imagine America right now.  There was a problem, though. Pharaoh was having some bad dreams about people’s souls.  Joseph interpreted the dreams and told Pharaoh that the way to a long and prosperous life was to care for and nurture the children. This was nothing new, not really! It was Yahweh God’s idea and the only, let me say this again, the only injunction given to the first man in the land. “You must care for and nurture the Land!” If care is NOT exercised, then the land turns against us. This is what Pharaoh dreamed was about to happen.  Joseph only added more flesh and bone to the first injunction. He told Pharaoh that the fertile ground is the child in its first seven years and that the second seven years is harsh and severe but if what came in the first seven is stored and given back over the next seven then the individual could grow up strong and healthy and maybe even happy. Pharaoh could hear what Joseph had to say and he made it law, thus saving his people and Jacob’s people and any other people who can hear. This lasted for four hundred years.  Then the leaders in Egypt land forgot, if they ever actually understood.  Now, re-imagine America and Egypt. Your President thinks America is holy, right?

I thought: it’s the impression he puts forth, for sure.

Mark continued: America is in the same boat today as Egypt was when God’s children were being oppressed by landowners, religious leaders, and business-marketing experts. The fruit of oppression is depression and depression is a good reason to prompt a return journey.  Moses (did you know Moses means ‘child’?) led the children across the Red Sea, Joshua led them across the Jordan, and Jesus just drove us across the Jordan for the second time because God wants it to happen. God wants the children to grow up!  We are now in the land of the religiously rich, though underneath lies Canaan Land with its dying curse, depression, and its life promising reward, justice.  Unfortunately, the same story is still being acted out, the top people living off the labor and oppression of the bottom majority. Is this right? And what is the driving force? Fear!  People fear death and continue to sell their very self to any other body who promises to prolong the confrontation.  I think it’s the fault of nature.

Mark, wait a minute! I interjected. You got fear, death, nature all crunched together and you’re telling me it can’t be helped?

Not at all, answered Mark. All of us have one common enemy and though I said I think it’s the fault of nature I didn’t mean it literally.  According to the first stories, man made death. Death is our common enemy.  Also according to our sacred stories, this enemy will be un-made and its power banished. Let me give you my thoughts on this. One, can you and I participate in this un-making? Yes, we can. You and I must stop killing, put the idea completely out of mind. Make it totally un-thinkable. It’s not an option. Man made death real when one man took some one else’s life, which is the Cain and Able story.  Man mustn’t even do that with the life given to him.  Two, can you and I do something in eliminating the cause of death being given access into the thinking side of us?  Before death was real it first was an idea. From where did this idea arise? It arose from division, the story of the first man and Eve in the Garden, from a split within each and every one of us, and the fruit of this division is the knowledge of good and evil. When the first man and the first woman came apart and were separated, divided, then into the first man’s mind came knowledge of why this happened.  This knowledge was the first experience of the trinity: hurt, fear, and death. You and I have to commit to joining back with our opposite, in heart, mind, and soul. You and I have to be equal partners with her and her’s. Opposites are partners in wholeness; this is forever.

This will un-make death. You can’t kill death. No one can. Death will die of its own accord. When this happens the Bible will be resolved and freedom will return. What is death? It is fear. How is fear overcome? In reality, meaning in your life and mine, fear disappears when hurt is healed and disability overcome. That is the Way.

I didn’t know what to think. Mark had really unloaded on me and what he said about nature was way over my head. One thing he said, though, I had no doubts about. Fear was not a desirable feeling at all; I feared fear!

            I understand, said Mark.

            How do you understand, I asked Mark, have you been reading my mind?

            No, he answered, I saw it on your face.  Yahweh’s little boy just drove us across the waters of our emotions into the land of the powerful.  That is Judah’s land.  Maybe we ought to listen to him.

            OK, I said to Mark.

            After the bus was parked and chocked so it couldn’t roll over any children, a crowd formed and our driver began dissertating, as was his talent.  I saw some Divided-Ones coming and was impressed by the cut of their clothes.  One side of their tunics was sparkling white and the other a glossy black with a demarked line running right from under each chin and plummeting straight into the ground. Each tunic mimicked the scales of justice, perfectly balanced between clear and blind, odd and even, day and night.  Is it legal for a man to divorce his wife, asked a scale?

            Yahweh’s man sidestepped the question and fired back his own: What did Moses tell you?

            He tells us nothing, one answered; don’t you know he’s dead?

            The crowd laughed and the judge smiled.  Jesus just waited.

            He decreed we could divorce as long as we put it in writing, another said.  After a man got it in writing he could then walk away.

            I saw Jesus nod his head.  He rebutted: That was on account of how ice hard your hearts have become.  If he hadn’t allowed this commandment you would have only abused your wives more.  But it wasn’t like this in the beginning.  Have you forgotten the beginning?  El made man, in the beginning, males and females.  Man was a whole being, encased in one skin.  OK, some skins had penises and other skins didn’t.  Granted, it was perplexing for little minds to comprehend; but it was as I say.

            Look at it another way.  A man at some point leaves his father and mother.  It seems he is separated by going away; but he has always been separated, from the very beginning, from the time he got his own skin.  The attachment was never there; the attachment is his mind.  In his one body he will always have his mom and dad because he was and always will be a creation of them. This is what God joined together, mom and dad, in this man’s one body.  And what El has joined together let no man separate.  Why? Because this is the nature of God in every man.

            I saw the sharp lines of black and white fade into grays as the crowd dispersed. I knew it was a mistrial; everyone was totally confused.

             Jesus, Mark, the twelve, and I went immediately into a house.  The twelve wanted to know more.  He said: He who divorces his wife and takes another is polluting the waters of inspiration and corrupting his first passions.  She who divorces her husband and takes another is doing the same.  I’m talking about one man here.

            Let’s put it another way. Take two men. Suppose two men like each other and decide to be partners.  Usually their bodies oppose each other (this is not always the case and really isn’t necessary) and when united this opposition allows a perfect match with their differences and they are at peace and the connection heals their alienation.  But this is only an interim stage and their duty is yet incomplete.  Now work is required and creation mandated.  They have to make a child undivided.  It’s their job. What goes around wants also to come around. Get it?

            OK, maybe another way will help.  Being partners and being married are not the same.  It takes two men in an agreed upon relationship to be partners.  It only takes one man to be married and each man is for life.  When he leaves his mom and dad he gets a voice; it is his or her voice and he must not divorce that voice for another voice he thinks will better suit him. Ever. If he divorces then he has broken the connections that could have led him into life.  He is avoiding work and mucking up any hope of ever raising his child from the dead.  You might ask: Who is this child?  Again, you might not; but anyway.  This child is me, this child is perfect, this child has the best of everything in both worlds, the worlds of mom and the worlds of dad.  Can anyone do such a thing like this?  Yes, mom and dad can.

            The twelve were pondering, working to raise some questions which might alleviate the discomfort and confusion of having men being partners with other men and of Jesus calling a man ‘her’ to boot.  While Mark and I and Jesus waited in the silence of perplexed minds they brought some children into the room so Jesus might lay his hands on them.  All of a sudden the twelve were agitated because they lost Jesus’ attention and they began scolding the kids.  The eyes of Yahweh’s young man got large as he glared at the twelve.  I could tell he was VEXED!

            Are you guys for real? He asked.  Your understanding must be on Mars. Let the children come to me. Never impede the free usage of the imaginations of children. Never separate them from me.  That is the foundation of the kingdom of the Good.  This is the truth!  The man who does not receive the kingdom of the good like a child may not enter into it. Don’t misunderstand me; acting like a child with one’s dehydrated imagination will not get you a reward.  My meaning is not experienced out of a performance.

            Then he embraced and kissed each child, laying his hands upon them.

            We were on our way out of town when a man overtook us by bursting into an impressive sprint. He fell to his knees before Jesus, blocking his path and said: Good master, what must I do to get my name on the list of inheritors for eternal life?

            Why do you say I am good? Asked the offspring of Yahweh. Did you also eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? 

            The man just knelt with his hands folded under his chin and his head slightly off tilt and his eyes weepy/smiley under his fluttering lashes. His mouth refused to operate.

            Only a whole man with his wife and her one offspring is good, and that’s as far as good goes.  When a good hits the wall of your experience it crunches into God and there is your reward. You want eternal good or you want to live?

            Live: hoped him.

            Don’t you know the commandments? Don’t covet what your neighbor got, neither his car or his wife.  Nor his job.  Don’t swindle anyone.  When you witness tell the truth, even if it scares you.  Don’t fondle with another man’s voice.  Don’t kill any life.  That’s a big one, cause when you do or even desire to, you are dead.  And last, honor and respect your mom and dad on account of how exactly like them you are.

            The man said: I do! I mean, I don’t. You know what I mean!

            Good, answered sweet Jesus.  He looked gently at the man and blinked his lashes three successive times and then continued: How much money you got, sir, and where do you live?

            I got enough money, said the man, and I live over there.  He pointed to a new house with a three-car garage and a sprinkler system going in the front.

            Put it up for sale and give the proceeds to Family Planning or Literacy Now and you will have treasure in heaven.  Then come and find me and we’ll talk.

            The man’s folded hands fell to the ground and bracing he pushed to his feet and sprinted back the way he came.  I figured he was just getting in shape and he needed a breather about the time he fell at Jesus’ feet. Jesus told us he had too many possessions.

            Was he possessed, I asked Mark? 

Didn’t you see how fast he peeled away, he answered?

I guess I hadn’t noticed, I reflected. But I did see how crispy clean his jogging apparel appeared, and his shoes had the Nike logo checked off; if he had a dirty spirit it sure kept him clean.

            Jesus was dressing the twelve:  Money don’t get you to the door of the kingdom of the good. In fact, money hides the way and makes it harder. Money corrupts your consciousness and makes all your ideas bastards. It can’t be helped. We all come from a mom and a dad. The seed of paper money and security is put there by them; we’re not even cognizant of that ole farmer. It’s not a bad seed, but more like a distraction and a thorn in the side. And all seeds, due sorely to the first law of biology, will grow when the rains come.

            What’s the use of going on living, Judah whispered to Peter? Peter didn’t have a clue.  Then what are we looking for, Judah whispered again to Peter?  Peter still didn’t have a clue.

            Listen, my children! Said Yahweh’s wife’s boy.

            Wait-a-minute, I said to Mark!  Stop.

            I had a thought that came into focus and I didn’t want to lose it.  I said to Mark:

            In that house back there it was only us who went in, right?

            Yea, said Mark.

            And when we were in there and waiting for the twelve to come back with a question you wrote ‘they’ brought the children in so he might lay his hands on them.

            Yea, said Mark.

            Who was ‘they’?  Mark, you know people ain’t gonna like me if I’m always uncovering some kind of trickery or another as I plow through his story.  You’re saying now that not only is mom and dad present in a man but all the children too?

            Yea, said Mark.

            It made sense to me.  I understood from my past that I was once in a child stage and then passed into a prepubescent stage and then found myself in an adolescent stage and finally got to the big boy stage of full grown manhood and then the married stage and now the old widowed stage of ugly old man and all those people that I was when I was struggling with each perplexing stage are still with me.  Yea, I guess it does make sense to me.

            Children, Jesus said, it is hard to enter the kingdom of the good.  Children, it is easier for a needle to go through the eye of a camel and come out its butt than for a rich man to get to heaven.  Wait, kids, I stand corrected.  I’m not talking about heaven right now.  I’m talking about the kingdom of the good.  Heaven is a barn, the kingdom is the animals the barn feeds.  The goal is well fed animals who have no desire to eat each other.  That’s the kingdom, kids.

            What Jesus said wasn’t going over well with the twelve.  They were stunned.  They were all trying to speak at the same time.

            Hey!  Who can be saved?  Hey!  What’s this about living with animals?  Hey!  Not fair!

            Jesus gave them the stone eye: Not a mAN, that you can be certain about. The good can be salvaged, because in the beginning there was only good.  Make this earth safe and you got the good.

            I noticed Peter looked especially worried and Judah defeated. Peter, though, had a determined side that bordered on granite. Peter said:  See!

            Everyone looked.  Yes, he was determined and getting up to dissertate.

            We have given away everything but money and the people at Planned Parenthood are not one with us and so we haven’t given anything to them; but still, we are now as poor as the mice in our hovels and we ARE following you.

            Pleads were in his eyes, little scrolls that covered his pupils and hand written in tinny letters was ‘please’; one was in each eye.

             Let me spell it out for you guys: K A R M A!  What you do for others come home to you!  Your self, the one you are responsible for and was given to you, created, is exposed before your very eyes in how you see your brothers and sisters.  There is no one who has walked away from his house or given up on his brother or sister or mother or father or children or all the property in the world for the sake of ‘Yahweh is merciful with the faith of a child’ and for the sake of THE ‘good story’ who will not get back a hundred times the number he let go of and in the time to come he will find himself on the list the runner wanted on, the list of long lasting livers.  He will discover hundreds of mothers and fathers and thousands of children and brothers and ten of thousands of sisters and worlds of property without end amen!

            The twelve promptly responded AMEN!

            One thing more, he said:  Many who are first will be last.  The converse applies too.  Many who are last will be first.  You decide; but before you do, study the question.

            I had been studying the question for some time, personally. I found myself losing it, no longer certain exactly what was being asked of me nor who was asking it.  I couldn’t decide what I wanted, whether I wanted to be first or last.  What was bugging me was the question that arose from the one I supposed I was pondering over.  I had lost the object; I could not clarify the line in which I was deciding where I was choosing to take my stand.  Where was this line going and why was I having to decide?

            Mark, I asked, where are we?

            Open your eyes, he answered.

            We were on a yellow brick road.  I thought that strange.  As my eyes rose from my feet I saw that the road also rose and that we were traveling up an incline and there, at the top, I saw Jerusalem. OH MY GOD! I said.  We were headed for the get-whole-now City, infamous because that city was exactly where everyone said healing happened but no one who entered ever came back the same. Jesus was leading the way.

            I looked about me at the crowds.  Every face had the same expression: wet from sweat, wrinkled from doubt, and flushed from exertion.  Each eye in every face was as round as a saucer.  We were afraid.  We were following him and we were afraid.  I had heard no one talk about this, ever.  Our lightness had gone, pushed upward out of our minds by the fear rising from our guts. I thought there must be something un-natural here; but I was not certain.

            Yahweh’s boy called the twelve into a tight huddle and began to tell us what he was going for: Behold! Our goal! We are going to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is waiting, watching for the son of man. It wants me. It needs me. I won’t be able to get there directly. I will be abducted by the hierarchical of the professionally tutored who guard the archives of man’s sacred stories so on one might understand them and by their notetakers and together they will pass judgment on me and find me guilty of undermining the foundations of their deceit and condemn me to solitude and death. They will not kill me as Simeon did his neighbors because they saw what happened to Simeon and Levi; but they didn’t see either. They will hand me over to Giants.  Do you remember the Giants?  The notetakers call them Gentiles and imply they are pagans, heathens, outsiders; the notetakers and hierarchicals are terrified of them.  The Gentiles are offspring of the original heroes of the old land, club swingers and one-eyed monsters who rule on account of the big guns they resolve their obstructions with.  They rule by elimination.  The Giants will spit on me and mock me and beat me with flogs and pointed words and then they will kill me.  Not to worry, though, in three days I rise like bread in a warm place.  Do you know what I mean, in three days I come up?

            The huddle was dead still, no one was breathing.  I thought a better quarterback would have encouraged and inspired his team a little differently.  I imagined the other team slapping each other on the back and butting helmeted heads. Or someone graveling to call up a louie and the phelem sound of phlegm being propelled out of the huddle.  In my mind I could heard the crack of crashed helmets and see delight in abusive word play. 

            After adolescence, Yahweh’s man continued, I will rise.

            The huddle broke and I found we were only on the yellow brick road.  The crowd about was just a following and no contest with pretty near naked ladies cheering any opponent while Pepsi toted its waters as the only solution to low spirits was in the happening. Something, though, had changed in me.  In the huddle with our leader laying out the situation, my fears had increased a hundred fold.

            I noticed James and John had taken Jesus off to the side and were kneeling at his feet with their hands folded.  How strange, I pondered, and walked over to listen to what was coming down.  James and John were the sons of thunder, and I believed they must have conceived the idea that they were the living offspring of Isaac and Rebekah.  I heard what they were saying to Yahweh’s young man.

            Master, we wish you to do for us whatever we ask you to do.

            He asked them: What do you ask me to do?

            They answered: Grant us that in your glory we may sit one on your right and one on your left.

            Jesus said to them:  You do not understand your wants.  Your request arises out of division, but in the beginning you were not divided, your mom and dad were.  Anyway, the right and the left is not for boys.  Never mind, you couldn’t image it anyway. I got a question for you, can you drink the cup that I drink and be subsumed in the baptism with which I am baptized?

            They answered: We can!

            Jesus answered: You will, if that is your desire.  You shall drink the cup of love that I drink, and be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized.  Do you remember the story of the chief cupbearer to Pharaoh and his chief baker, who were in jail with Joseph?

            They answered: No, master.

            Jesus said: It is no wonder you ask me such a question.  How can you know where you are going without knowing the stories of where you started?  You will remember, but the life of the cupbearer was saved because he didn’t waste the contents of his king’s cup.  You will drink the contents of your own cups; but to sit on my right or on my left, that is not mine to give.  It is theirs for whom it was created.

            I saw Rumor run to the ten. He spread the word like wildfire.

            The ten were incensed, I could see smoke rising from the pelts at the high end of their bodies.  Rumor told me what the ten were thinking: James and John were plotting to lord it over the ten, just like Judea did to his ten brothers after Joshua had gotten them into the Promised Land.

            But I remembered the Joseph story and how his brothers were irritated with him because he was the favored one in the eyes of his father and because he was a dreamer of good things.

            Jesus called everyone over and said:  All you guys know how the Giants act.  They lord it over their own people and their great men use their power to make their followers exercise.  They use psychological money bags to lead others into slavery or threats of sophisticated weapons to blow them away if they don’t obey.  It can’t be like that with you.  Each of you has to take responsibility for your own freedom.

            If you want to be great; then you must learn to see and understand the needs of others and serve those needs.  The first among you will be a slave for the needs of all; for mAN’s son came not to be served but to help eliminate servitude and to offer his own life for the release from the bonds of slavery the many.  I am talking about self-esteem and freedom. Most of all, though, DO  not  WORRY. When you find yourself disobeying this commandment, just smile! OK! Let’s go!

            We were on the road, now, marching. It felt good to be out in the air and sunlight, marching.  Jesus had parked the bus on the western bank of the Water and we were marching for the city where wholeness was a possibility.  I wanted, so bad I could taste it in my mouth, wholeness.  We marched into Jericho and I thought, my God, this is what it must have been like with Joshua when he led his children there.  I was pumped!  We came into the town and were on our way out when we were bombarded by the shouts of a man who failed at educating himself.  He had a lot of theories but couldn’t see his way through them.  His name was ‘son of a blind man’ and his father’s name was ‘blind man.’ Wow, people really used to get their names right on!  He was sitting by the road, begging.  I didn’t need an education to understand their plight; the way to wholeness was impossible.

            Mark, why the redundancy, I asked?  He smiled and said: The suppression of the stories was necessary for transmission, because the times were not safe for the truth to be boldly put forth.  We knew the times would change, but we also were just having fun with words.  I can’t remember who first came up with Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, the blind beggar; but when the idea was on the floor we laughed and rolled until I thought I was going to die with delight.

            There’s a huge freight of tension here, said Mark, and it was stories like this one that gave us some relief.

            I saw Rumor talking into the timid beggar’s ear and watched his mouth open in a shout: Jesus, the beggar screamed, Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.

            He was making a real ruckus and it pissed the seriously concerned off.  The crowd had been in a medicated mood and the loud noise made many grit their teeth.  Some were screaming back at the blind beggar to shut the fuck up.  This seemed to help the blind man to scream all the more louder: Son of David, he yelled, David’s little boy, can you hear me? You promised to serve, serve me!

            I thought I recalled that David himself didn’t especially like the blind or the crippled, thought they were a blight on the glory of God; but I wasn’t sure of that.

            On the other hand, Jesus wasn’t David’s son either. Jesus stopped and said: Call him.

            The crowd seemed pleased that Jesus involved them and in many voices they called out to the blind: Take your heart and gently squeeze it. He loves you. Then pick you butt off the dirt along the Way and rise up. He’s calling you.

            Wow!  I thought the blind, crippled beggar must have been faking it.  He flung off his mantle and sprung to his feet like he was sitting on springs.  He ran to Jesus.  I looked at Mark but he didn’t show any surprise.  Jesus looked at the man and said: How do you want me to serve you?

            The blind man answered: Master, take away my stupid.

            Jesus said: Go. Your desire has healed you.

            Two fish eyes fell at the feet of Jesus but he paid them dead fish no attention.  He turned and continued on his way towards wholeness and the man behind him used his new eyes to follow.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

WHAT NO EYE HAS SEEN

 

 

            We had followed the Way to the outskirts of Jerusalem, to a place called the ‘house of unripe figs’ and the ‘home of the poor and afflicted’ that was known as the ‘mound of anointing’.  The proper names used by the locals were Beth-phage and Bethany in the Mount of Olives.  Jesus had sent two of the twelve ahead of him and told them what to do.

            Go into the village that lies before you, he instructed them, and presently, as you go in, you will find a young colt, tethered, on which no man has ever ridden.  Untie him and bring him.  If anyone says to you: Why are you doing this?  Say: His master needs him; and his master will return him to this place at once.

            My mind was going nuts.  I was remembering Genesis, and primarily the Patriarch Jacob and his travels.  The anointing began with Jacob, with him blessing the stone that was his pillow and the awesome dreams he had in that place of fleeing.  I remembered what Yahweh had promised him and how those promises were fulfilled in Jacob’s life.  Jacob had his problems and these were passed on to his sons, the twelve brothers who followed this son of a carpenter now named Joseph.  Jesus was the offspring of Joseph (the name means: God, give me another son), Jacob’s boy; but I knew I would be hard pressed to find an expert witness who would attest to the truth found in those first stories.  I couldn’t, though, discount what the story implied.  Jesus had sent the two to find the colt.

            I recalled the promises Jacob gave to his son Judah, before Jacob was laid with his fathers before him.  Judah was to carry the ball, be the leader and rightful heir, because Reuben and Simeon had hurt Israel (Jacob after his ordeal with his brother Esau) by their actions in the past and both had forfeited their inheritance rights to Judah.  Reuben had slept with his father’s concubine and Simeon had advised and acted out the killing of others.  This left Judah as heir.  Jacob didn’t seem to be pleased with this transmission of responsibility but tradition couldn’t be passed over.  So Jacob had said to Judah:

 

Judah, your brothers shall praise you:

You grip your enemies by the neck,

Your father’s sons shall do you homage,

Judah is a lion cub, a puppy,

You climb back, my son, from your kill;

Like a lion that crouches and lies down,

Or like a lioness, who dares rouse her?

The scepter shall not pass from Judah,

Nor the mace from between his feet,

UNTIL HE COMES TO WHOM IT BELONGS,

TO WHOM THE PEOPLE SHALL RENDER OBEDIENCE.

Judah ties his young as to the vine,

To the root he tethers THE COLT of his she-ass.

 

            My boss wanted me to find where Jesus was coming from; and I thought Jesus was now telling me.  He was coming from the very beginning of our spiritual traditions.  I thought somewhere I had heard him say that he went all the way back to the beginnings of time, but I couldn’t remember for certain where I heard that.

            Someone nudged me and I looked down to see it was Rumor.  He said they found it. 

Found it, said I?  What now? 

The colt, he said. The two had gone into the village and had found a colt tethered by a door, outside in the street, and they untied it. Some men standing about had said: What are you doing with that colt?  The two answered as Jesus had told them; and the men didn’t bother them again. 

I saw the colt coming up the street with the two.

            The crowd was excited and began taking their clothes off.  It seemed to me like all shame had been cleansed from the crowd, like we were all King David dancing before his God. Some piled their clothes across the colt and Jesus got aboard and began riding his ass towards Jerusalem. Others strewed their clothes along the road and others cut palm fronds and laid them along the way.  Some were far in front of Jesus and others lagging long in the tail, tired and reluctant to make the journey but none-the-less excited and everyone crying out:

Save us, Lord!  Worthy of respect and esteem is he who comes like a healing power, like heavenly water, like pure inspiration. Worthy of respect and honor is the kingdom of our father David that is coming.  Save us into the highest.

            Jesus rode into the heal-the-whole-body city.  He entered it; but he didn’t stop there.  He entered the temple of the city, the most sacred place of every body. He stopped and looked around. He saw everything. He saw also how late it was, how little time there was.  Then he backed out of that holy place and returned to Bethany, the house of the poor and afflicted. The twelve were with him and we were sore from the long journey.

            The next day we followed him out of the house of the sore and the hungry.  Jesus also was hungry and I noticed him studying the trees for something to feed on.  He saw a fig tree in the distance with leaves and went over to get some fruit.  But it had only leaves and underneath he found no solace. It was not the season for making love.

            Mark put his hand on my keyboard and glared into my face.  I know, I said to Mark, but I felt the sexual element was your intention.  Was it not? I asked.

            Yes, he answered, but this is a very touchy subject.  The meanings here are white one day and black the following; love is a double-sided sword, like virtue, like vice.  Love is easily abused into the worst of diversions.  You have to be careful how you type this; people need to love and respect each other and there is no rule here, no law that dictates how, when and where. Love is what binds and connects the two worlds.  You sent up red flags with that last sentence.

            I understood what Mark was saying.  I understood how easily love is misconstrued.  I also thought I understood the imagery of the fig leaf.  The first man had hidden his failure behind the sweetness of the fig image.  His mate was woman, his other. Things changed, woman lost her status as mate and was demoted to slave.  After the man was expelled out of the Garden, his companion in travail was called wife. The man charged her with the burden of having babies so he could deny the work he had to do with his spirit to raise his dead feelings from the grave. These were his feelings from the beginning, before his life came apart. I thought Jesus was hungry for these old feelings and took us to the fig tree to teach us.

            Jesus was staring at Mark and me, as our discussion ended and my attention went back to him.  He smiled and then turned to the twelve and said, looking not at them but at the tree:  May no one eat fruit from you ANY more. Forever!

            We all heard him.

            Mark, I said, don’t you think you are a little strong with this?

            Keep in mind what we are after, said Mark.

            Then I remembered, which had been scaring me because my mind didn’t seem to function in the ‘memory department’.

            Wholeness, I answered Mark. Right?  Mark gave me a bright smile, not unlike Jesus.

            We entered Jerusalem.  Jesus went right to the most sacred place in the body and began throwing out the marketing experts.  I said to Mark that the place looked like a temple.  Mark told me, that for the people to understand, the director made the place look like a temple.  I watched Jesus turn over the tables that had stacks of money laid out like a bank displaying their newest wares.  Jesus ripped the cages open that held the animals and turned them free.  He stopped all temple traffic, allowing no one to walk around or carry anything.  Then he started talking:

            Is it not written: My house shall be called a house of dialogue and intercourse for all the peoples of all the different races?  Why have you made it into a den where robbery is acceptable?  Why do you prey off my poor?  Why do you charge them for being a member of my community?

            The priests and the notetakers heard him.  Everybody heard him because he was angry and loud.  The churchmen wanted to destroy him but they were afraid of the street people.  The people on the street loved the way he talked.

            When the sun had gone away, we went away from the city too. Jesus said it was useless to talk about wholeness when you couldn’t see your own body.

            When the sun came back we came out of the house of the poor and afflicted and headed back.  We saw the tree in the same light we had seen it yesterday; but it had withered like someone had turned a giant hairdryer on it, even its roots had pulled up out of the ground.  I noticed a smile on Peter’s face and thought:

            Peter is good with negatives.

            Mark, I asked, will Peter ever come around to a positive?

            Give him a break, said Mark!

            When he starts giving everybody else a break, I said, I will be the first to get off his back.

            Peter said to Jesus: Master, see, the tree of sexual love which you cursed is dried up. That’s not natural! I’m not opposed to sexual love so long as its natural; I mean, babies gotta come, correct?

            Jesus answered him and said: Have faith in the goodness of life. Stop trying to control things that don’t need your control. If you had any faith you wouldn’t need all your laws and decrees. Listen to me: If you said to this mountain: Rise up and throw yourself into the sea - and you didn't get into a dialogue within your heart over the best way this mountain could do that - but go about finding a job suited to your talents; you will find there ain't no mountain there. Believe it, and then do what you want to do. That's what your prayer is about. But when you are praying, forget anything you have against anyone; so that your mind in heaven may forget all the transgressions it has against you. It was your mind that put the mountains in your path in the first place. The mountains were in your past and they are longing to get connected with the you of your past too, which is in the dead sea. Believe it; and you will find a new beginning.

            We made a new beginning into the get-whole-now old city. We entered the temple and walked about.

Mark, I asked, I thought walking about was not allowed?

What I meant earlier is that a person wasn't allowed to be carrying any vessel about because the temple is a metaphor for the aspiring cripple who lives in the temple. It’s symbolism and not a matter for worry. Don’t let yourself be distracted by what you are doing because you want to pay attention to what is happening outside of you. You want to be watchful. And when you are in the temple being watchful outside of you is really watchful inside of you because the temple is the inmost place in your heart. Look at it this way.  When you’re in the temple look around at what everyone is doing.  That’s what everyone in your inmost self is doing too. See? Mark asked.

Pretty darkly, I said, my temple ain’t never had that much light.

            Still, I was looking around and what I saw had nothing to do with what Mark was dissertating on. Some very tall priests and well-manicured notetakers and some anciently old codgers came up to Jesus and spoke to him: By what authority do you do this?

            That was one of the questions I heard. I thought it was very vague. In fact I had no idea what that man was referring to. Then another said:

            Who gave you this authority, to do these things?

            Hey, Mark, I asked, did I miss something?

I think they are referring to tearing up the temple, said Mark. It could just be everything in general. I don't think the tall priest knows.

            I got a question for you, said Jesus. You answer me and then I will tell you the authority under which I act. Was the baptism of John from heaven or from men? You answer me.

            They went into a huddle and discussed it among themselves. Mark and I crawled in like we were a part of the team and no one knew the difference. If we say, they said, that crying comes as a gift from heaven and a means of dissipating the abundant pressure the emotions have laid over our dumb minds; then he will say: why did you not believe him?

Anybody got an answer, someone asked?

Personally, I don't know what to think, spoke one of the huddled mouths. The whole huddle grunted in agreement.

I noted on my pad that the huddle reached a consensus about not being able to think. Their reasoning continued. They argued:

But if we say: from men.

The discussion stopped. No one spoke. Everyone glared at the floor and I felt a tremor vibrate around the huddle. I felt fear. Mark felt fear. The tall priests and the notetakers and the ancient old codgers were all afraid of the people, who liked John and thought he was one hell of a fine person. The people also believed he WAS a prophet and spoke God's truth, crying would heal the fear. The huddle broke with a clap and as one body they said: We don't know.

            Stupid, said Jesus, but I can't play that game. I won't tell you, but I know my authority and I know the one who gave me that authority. You go figure; and while you’re at it you might ask where every child gets its authority.

            Mark, I asked, where are we?

What? Answered Mark.

Where are we, I said?

You ask me? Look around you! We haven't gone anywhere. We are inside of Jerusalem.

No, Mark, look!

            My hands had come up before my face and I was studying the lines across my palms. I noticed my palms had gotten soft and the calluses at the base of my fingers had migrated up to the tips, journeying across the three parts of each finger and re-growing under every nail. The work my hands had once done to secure me a livelihood had dried up and all my effort now resided at the extremes of my fingers. I was just not adept at this typing. I was tired. I was afraid Jesus was about to resort to parable preaching and fearful for my fingers.

            We're in the temple, said Mark. Inside that most sacred place inside of you; but we are still in Jerusalem. Why am I having to tell you this? Asked Mark.

No, Mark, I said; I don't mean that. I know that. Where in the story? Can't you see my hands? This work is killing me, Mark.

            I was begging and couldn't think of the words to tell Mark what I wanted. I wanted to see the end. Come on, Mark; tell me where we are.

            Oh! Answered Mark, we just walked into chapter twelve.

            Good, I said. I knew that Mark only went to sixteen and that I could live with twelve. I wanted to go home.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

PARABLES ARE HUMAN NATURE TOO!

 

            Jesus seemed right at home inside the inmost temple. Having put off the authority seekers, he pulled up a chair and settled down into parable dissertating.

            I want to return to the image of the farmer, he said. We all know who the first farmer was. He was the first man, having to take up farming on account of losing his wild paradise. Imitation is a natural law and every offspring follows its papa; there is some farmer in each of us. I understand that some can argue that our ancestors came from boat builders. I am thinking of Noah, but he too was a farmer and planted the vine and so the farmer is older than sailing out of here. Farmer is just a parable, a metaphor for mAN's deepest promptings. So let me tell my story!

            Jesus looked around and saw no objections. I wondered why he kept holding back. No one questioned his authority, especially after the tall priests were put in their place.

            One more thing, he said. There is something older than the farmer. There is the enjoyment of the jungle. Eating. Freely eating. Imagine just laying back and picking fruit! That is the original realm of mAN. Alright, now I’m gonna tell my story!

            I was thinking that it couldn't hurt Jesus to take a course or two on public speaking, but looking around at the contentment of his audience I figured it was only the over educated like myself who would figure that way. I suspected my boss would be disgusted with my journalating on Jesus' speculated psychological faults while I kept interrupting his fictive dream narrative in order to wear out my already tired fingers even more. I could imagine my boss screaming at me: GET OUT OF THE PICTURE!

            Imagine this picture, said Jesus. A man planted a vineyard. A vineyard is necessary if any of you know my father. The man ran a fence around the vineyard. He made an enclosed vineyard. The man dug a pit for the wine press. The man didn't want grapes; the man wanted wine. And last the man built a tower. The tower is very important. Don't forget to put the tower in the picture. We got rows and rows of grapes; let's say seven. We got a private garden with a skin around it. We got a press to make the sweet come out of the grape and we got a tower. Imagine the tower overlooking all of this. Without the tower our garden would not be complete. Then the man let his garden out to some farmers and left the country.

            When the time came, he sent a slave to the farmers to receive from the farmers some of the fruits of the vineyard. Let's say twenty percent like Joseph told Pharaoh would be adequate to get the farmers through the famine years. But the farmers took slave and lashed him and sent him away empty-handed. Imagine a child getting a whipping. Not just one whipping but seven. Imagine each whipping lasting for about a year. Imagine this as an extreme case. I was educated to imagine parable preaching as natural examples for extreme scenarios. This was the first stage within the individual's life. Older recorders called this stage generation one.

            Again he sent another slave. They broke the head of that one. I want you to hear this. They broke the second one's head. When a person breaks something it no longer works, right? The consequence of having his head broken filled him with rage and anger. Here imagine a boy being verbally abused for never doing the right thing. In a modern society that posits the ultimate goal as a full vault in the World Bank, the right thing is usually wrong. Children aren't stupid; or they usually weren't before they learned to do the right things. This is the second generation.

            He sent them another. This one they killed. He sent others and some they whipped and abused and others they killed. Here imagine all the crazies that teenagers do in order to avoid entering a society that they find insane. This is the third generation.

            He had one more to send, a beloved son. The son was the last that the owner of the land sent them, saying: They will respect my son. But the farmers said to themselves: this is the heir. Come! Listen to me when I tell you what they said among themselves: Come, they said, let us kill him and the inheritance will be ours. "Come" can be seen as a consensus to enact two things. They agreed to act and they agreed to move from some previously held position. They felt forced, though they couldn't see from where the pressure arose.

“Come” today is similar to “Let’s do it”, a plea from some one to some other.  It takes two to enter the dance of life and come! An exception is when the individual is divided and out of contact with his other, although such a perception is an error.  The error is imaginary, arising from the impaired loss of hearing making it seem like the world is empty and silent.  One can’t come; but it can fuck itself.  One also can’t intercourse; one has no ears to hear. Sorry for the interruption!

            The farmers took the son and killed him; and threw him out of the vineyard. This is the fourth generation, or where most people are today. This is the adult generation.

            What will the owner of the vineyard do? Will he not come himself and destroy the farmers. Will he not give the vineyard to those on the outside? Have you not read this scripture: The stone the builders rejected has come to be at the headstone of the whole structure. The structure was made by the headstone and isn’t it a wonder in our sight? Well? What do YOU think about you?  Are you or aren’t you?  That’s the question. And the headstone, where do I fit in your structure?

            Jesus stopped dissertating. I looked around the audience. I noticed the hands of some religious leaders were flexing in and out, making fists and opening them, like some mouth going open close.  I think they wanted to seize him but their hands were only grabbing air.  The heads of the grasping hands were like red granite, deeply cracked and crumbly. A face no climber would trust. Nor anyone else for that matter, I thought. They were glaring at Jesus.

            They’re afraid, said Mark.

            What are they afraid of, Mark? I asked.

They are afraid of people, he answered.

Why, I asked?

Mark answered: Because they know the parable was directed at them. Twenty-one years after time was invented, the professionally religious were instituted to understand and protect the wealth of the individual's natural nature. Most had already been seduced by the prestige and gifts and the food their fathers before them had received and they were only imitating those who raised them. Their forefathers had lost sight of their duty and were only abdicating their responsibility for understanding causes. They reverted to parasitizing the poor and the superstitious to ensure their personal survival. They live off the fears of the people and this makes them afraid that one day they will be discovered and condemned. They have sold out their brothers and completely ignored their sisters in the name of God and put life after death to hide their shame. They are thus proud of their profession but very ashamed of their selves. They live in an intolerable situation; and that makes them afraid.

            I noticed the ones with red and broken heads getting up and walking out of the temple. Five minutes later into the temple walked some of the leaders of the one-sacred-world that is not of this world and with them were some Herodians, who were the leaders of this world, which is not of the one sacred. The heroes of the two divided worlds walked up to Jesus. Mark leaned over and whispered to me:

They want to catch him out.

Catch him out of what, I asked?

Listen, Mark answered.

            They talked to Jesus: Master, we know that you can't tell a lie and as far as the man idea has progressed you have demonstrated that you could care less. You have treated us with no respect and have hurt our feelings but you seem honestly concerned about teaching the truth of God's way. So we have a question.

            I saw the mouths on the faces of both parties being pulled upward by little strings attached to the corners of their lips. An idea like a startled fish popped out of my dead sea of old memories and landed in my boat: each party was hoping to win some argument these two groups had been fighting over since the twenty-second year of time.

            Is it lawful to pay an assessment to George W. or not?

            God, I thought, what a suck-ass question. I could see the unconscious working for the almight's justification to get it all and not have to share with any. The leaders of the morally rich and the leaders of the armed heroes both wanted to forego their duty to pay their taxes like everyone paid because they were better than the un-worthies they served or protected.

            Shall we give or not give: they asked?

            I looked at Jesus. He seemed cognizant of the inquirers down-under-the-dog position and answered:

            Why are you guys bothering me? A two-year-old boy who has an alphabet of ten words could resolve your spoiled debate. Give me a dollar bill so I might study it.

            One of the priests got his wallet out and turning aside so no one could look, he pulled out A one-dollar bill and grudgingly, it seemed to me, handed it to Jesus. Jesus then said:

            Whose image and whose name are inscribed?

            George W.: they answered.

            Jesus returned the dollar to the priest and said: Give to George what George has worked out as a reward for having the most modern presses and the most modern army to protect it's most modern money making activity and to God give what God has worked out as the reward for having given you a head and body that work. And praise God if they do work.

            Both parties turned and wandered back the way they had come, wondering from the looks on their faces why they had wandered here in the first place. They looked to me exactly like wondering wanderers, forever on a journey whose goal was never clear from the day that wander and wonder were first noted in the dictionary.

            Mark leaned into me and whispered: the seducers are next in line. Mark, I said, they are not seducers but are called Said-you-sees. You say what you see, said Mark: I see seducers. They have seduced the hopes of the people. They preach that what got killed in childhood is forever lost. For them nothing rises. They live in despair and preach despair; that is why they smile so much. What their purpose is maybe God knows; but they are a grim group. They were all smiles as they gathered around Jesus.

            One posited this problem: Master, Moses wrote for us: If a man's brother dies and leaves a wife, but has no children, the brother should take the wife and raise up issue for his brother. That's what Moses wrote for us.

            Mark, I said, it's older than Moses. Judah told his boy Onan the same thing after Er ended up dead. Yea, I know, said Mark, but Moses made the first pen and it was Moses that taught writing for those who came after. That was why the seducer said it was Moses who wrote for them. They have never felt a need to learn to write their own ideas, thank God.

            Here's the test, said the see-you-said. Said-you-see wrote Mark.

I have here seven brothers. The first took a wife, and died and left no issue. The second took her, and died without leaving an issue also. The third did the same. So did the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh. The woman was finely worn out and died also. In the resurrection, whose wife will she be, of these men? For all seven had her as wife.

            Jesus smiled and said: If she has any smarts left at all, she would probably look for a real man. Obviously, that family of guys was fucked.

            The crowd loved it. They went hooting and howling right out of their chairs. But not the seducers, every one lost his happy face.

            Jesus said: Is this not why you go astray? You don't know the scriptures. Nor do you know the power of the goodness of life. Read the Judah and Tamar story; that is a good place to begin. But here is the root error of your assuming: when the dead rise they do not marry nor are they married but are as a persona of a triad body. And concerning the question that the dead can awaken, and they certainly can; have you never read in the book of Moses, at the bush, how God spoke to him saying: I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob? God is not a God of the dead but of the living. Who was buried in the cave at Machpelah in the first stage and the second and the third is not dead; the who that you are is only waiting for you to change your judgment. Your dogma is keeping you far from the living.

            Then I saw a notetaker, who had been listening to the discussion and who seemed to appreciate everything Jesus said, come up to him and ask: What is the first commandment of all men?

            Yahweh's boy answered: This is the first. Hear, you twelve sons of Israel and twelve types of all men, that the Lord our God the Lord is not Good and Evil but is one. What you call evil and what you call good, both of these come out of one. What your holy leaders call the Devil is a guilty idea of a terrorized mind. They have some serious work to do but keep whinning that their hands are too soft and tender to hold a plow. That could be; but that's no excuse for avoiding their Job.

            Now, you shall love the Lord your Good with all your want and all your power and all your ideas and all your ability. Your Lord is personal and one with what repulses you and one with what attracts you. The second is that you shall love your neighbor who is just like you and worthy of the love you give to yourself and needing the same self-respect that you need. This commandment, though two, is one as man's Lord is one.

            The notetaker, who was a humble scholar and a man of learning, listened in silence. He had read the scriptures himself and tested the stories against his own inner light; never finding them contrary to the journey across time his life had taken him. The stories had actually helped him find pleasure in his life. He said to Jesus:

            Well put, master! What you say is true. My Lord is one and I have found no other but him. For me to love my Lord with all my desire and all my understanding and with all my ability and at the same time applying my love to my neighbor as I work at applying it to me is worth more than all the sacrifices I make to attend church and all the money I pay to be a member of any group. I see now that the rituals and the burnt offerings and the sacrifices at which I officiated were plays worked out to inform me of real events within my personal past that victimized me into misunderstanding the wealth and beauty and life of the world I inhabit. If I hadn't loved that which hurt me I would never have understood what you were talking about. Nor would I have understood how much like me is my neighbor. His Lord is the same Imagination as mine, though we may see two entirely opposing worlds.

            Repose rested on the face of Jesus. He was still, like the words from the scribe were a table on a porch behind a mountain cabin in mid spring with the light about seven thirty in the morning and the birds hunting their breakfast as he and a guest partook of a new day in the quiet that came from the temples where each sat. He could rest his elbows on the scribe's words and enjoy the morning. I thought Jesus looked like that.

            Jesus answered the scribe: You speak with intelligence. The work you have done will protect your intelligence when the abomination of desolation sits on the altar of God in the inmost temple. You will see the Shem and understand. You are not far from the rewards and from the brotherhood of all men, which is the Kingdom of the Good.

            Three questions and no one dared to ask further. The first one was about wealth and the second about where this wealth resides and the third I thought was about right understanding. I believed the commandment Jesus spoke of was the charge put on intelligence; but where was I to find this intelligence he called love? The whole church was silent, like after communion when all of us had eaten the body and drank the blood of each our Lords who is the same Lord our God and the priest had taken his seat after the altar boys had cleaned up the bloodless sacrifice.

            In the temple of your inmost selves: spoke forth Jesus.

His words startled me until I remembered my musings. I thought he was reading my mind; but I was used to the answers coming in the quiet of my reflections long after I had posited some question. I saw again that the formulation of questions that naturally arose within me was the power underlying the glory of the good in life and the reward of work.

            Jesus began teaching: How is it that the notetakers say that the Anointed One is the son of David? I don't want an answer; I will tell you what David said. David was speaking under the power of the Motherly Spirit when he said and I quote: The Lord said to my lord: Sit on my right so that I may put your enemies beneath your feet. David himself calls the christ lord. Then how can he be his son? Only blind men say that. The christ is much older than David. In Genesis are the first stories of him told; so don't pay too much attention to preachers who tell you otherwise.

            The crowd was smiling as one body and people were whispering and giggling with each other. I think it was the first time I ever enjoyed being in church. Jesus still had the floor and went further than anyone before him had gone.

            Turn away from the notetakers and preachers who desire to walk a head higher than the common peoples in old black dresses, who desire the podiums at every public event and the kingly chair facing the people in every church and the first to be served when everyone sits down to eat. Turn away from those who eat up the savings of the widowed woman and steal her only house and who meditate long because they find nothing else they are Abel to do, like being a shepherd to their animal feelings instead of slaughtering them. These practices are the work they enjoy while they labor to be worthy of the best condemnation.

            Then he stopped teaching. He removed his chair from the center of attention and took it to a hidden place where he could watch the treasury. Pay here, said a sign above a slot with a big black arrow pointing down into a dark hole. The hole went into a vault someone had stenciled "heaven". He watched as many put dollars into the slot. There came a widow who wore a torn and tattered Wal-Mart tunic and she dropped into the slot two halfpennies. All she had was a penny.

            He called the twelve to him. Then he said to them: See that woman. We looked and I felt ashamed. That woman, he said, has put in more money than this whole crowd of Yahoo's with their middle class wages and their averagely secure assumptions about the way life is. Everyone but her has deposited from what they had left over and extra; but that woman has left the last hopes she had in that box. Her whole livelihood has gone into the church. I, personally, would think that the church would do something for her, seeing how poor she has become in her own self estimating; but nooooooo! The churchmen still persist in feeding her blame and relegating the hard work of blaming God to always the next generation. I am not happy with the churchmen! They don't know their scripture at all.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THIRTEEN IS A BAD NUMBER

 

            He rose from his chair and walked out of the temple. We followed.  From the temple he re-entered the church but he didn't stop there, he walked out of the church into the light. We followed. In the street Peter said to him: Wow, master, will you look at those stones! See those buildings! I love the grandeur! One day I'll live there.

            Jesus stopped and eyed Peter. He was standing near the Mount of Olives that is in opposition to the church Peter wanted to make his home.

Peter, Jesus said, what makes you desire to have such a weird home? Your mind, Peter, has some rock hard hold on your thinking. Listen to me and stop drooling over these great houses. They will not last, and no rock hard mind set will be raised up on other rock hard ideas. You are building your hopes on avoidance. Avoidance has its own built in self destruct system. It is always rushing, like Limbaugh, to expose itself.

            James and John and the manly Andrew took Peter and Jesus aside and inquired from him when the exact time would be. Yahweh’s young man told the boys to sit down. He paced back and forth, occasionally giving each the hawk-eye. But he didn't talk. He walked around and around. I saw Peter was now dizzy.

Finally, Jesus spoke: Don't let anyone lead you astray.

Then he shook his head and reached up to comfort it, taking his head in his hands and squeezing. With that done, he sat in front of the four and began dissertating.

            People are crazy, he said. It is not their fault. If you understood geology, you would know the fault lies so far removed in our pasts that it is a wonder we don't turn on each other like rabid dogs. The fault is old. This teaching I am giving you appears new, but it is not. You call me Christ; you know you see me here before you. You are right to think this, I am right to be here; but knowing and being are as transient as the wind.

            Others will one day come saying I am he, the anointed one. They will be crazy but not necessarily wrong. This will not only confuse the issues, it will lead people astray. You, too, will lead people astray by saying I will come in power and glory on some cloud. The problem lies in words and how the individual understands their power. Most people just do not have time or the temperament to bring a feeling up out of the dirt, let alone stand over it so they might study it and find out when they actually planted that feeling. So there will be wars and rumors of wars, because of fear and how people feed their fears. Fear is not a bad motivator, but war and violence are not good effects for assuaging fear. When you are afraid, try not to let it frighten you. These things must be, but when you find them within you it is not the end. You will not like the fear when it is in you but keep it there.

            Others will be unable to control their fear and this fear will cause nation to fight nation and neighborhood to fight neighborhood. Kids will be shooting each other and murderers will be let roam the streets because there are just too many to keep locked up. The fertile topsoil across the land will blow away and the rains will move to another country that can't use it. People around the globe will be dying like flies and this will increase your anxiety. What is happening is that YOU are about to give birth. Hear me here, YOU are about to give birth! Go see the movie JUNIOR; it is right on. You will want to stop it because somehow you are taking it personally, and you should be. If you could stop it you will die. Think of Rebekah and her twins, before they were born.

            Because you want to be the new religious leaders and think you know better than those who were before you, they will take you into the churches and before the councils of those in authority and want you to explain why all these bad things are happening and why we have no peace. You will want to point your finger at the power boys but you would be wrong. It is on account of you that the new born is wanting to arrive and this is only how all birth happens. Remember me, and say it is on account of me in you that these things must happen. When you say that they will beat you, only in reality they are trying to get at me who am in you. Others will deny it and say I am coming on clouds of power and glory so they might practice being irresponsible for me coming out in them. They don't want to admit that I just might be deeply waiting within them. Then they would have to experience being beaten also. They believe it would kill them.

            Jesus smiled.

            Don't you see why the Good Story must be preached around the world before we can get on with it? The Good Story says I, loosely defined as some imaginary being, am within every person of whatever race or creed or gender; and when I finish this story you will see how killed I got. Being killed I can't be in you or any other and that causes you to suffer, which is to have doubt and uncertainty and fear. Let me assure you, I am dead within you and most others; but, and it’s a BIG BUTT, I am not! Remember, opposites are forever. Life and Death. They are not two, but parts of one whole. You will discover me and like the little girl everyone thought had died, she had not. She was only suffering so deeply below the surface that nothing of the suffering appeared in the light. So am I! Discover me and you will experience this. It scares you, to put it mildly. Learn to live with it, because it holds a great reward. Where was I?

            Oh yeah! Because of me and how badly I will act within you, they - make up anyone who is against you - will hand you over and bring you to trial. Don't let it worry you, even if all understanding avoids you. I know that when you are alone you will have many ideas and make plans about saying this or that. Forethought and later thought are mostly good at berating yourself but in the present what comes from your mouths will be what your Lady Spirit (call her your wife!) puts there. That's the way it is so learn to live with that's the way it is. If worry keeps you awake at night practice speech giving in your closet or take a few courses at continuing ed. Use your worry if it hangs around and hang with it; but don’t go looking for your enemy with a big club. You got no enemy; you got me and bad enough!

            Brother will be shooting brother, which I already mentioned. I am sorry if this gets a bit redundant but it is repeated within every individual from when time started and will be forever amen.

            The four said Amen! I believe it was just a reflexive response from being raised up by church people. Amen always elicits amen from my experiences.

            Fathers will betray and abuse their children and children will return the favors. Everyone will be working death. And they will all hate you because of how the imagination works. Don't abandon it; it is the only thing that can clean up the past; but of even more import, it is the only thing that can create a new future, something never before seen!

            Here is the clearest sign of the approaching birth. Your intellect will be going nuts. You will be spewing forth justifications and rationales to beat the witch and many will put their ideas where God is reserved. What do I mean by “ideas?” I mean their monies and the power monies have to get ‘stuff’. "Stuff" will become their God's Goodness. When the most sacred thing in the world is the bank account, what can I say? This is the abomination that plows the earth with its seeds of desolation. When you see this happening grab the toilet paper and get the shit out, because no argument is going to do anything but increase the hostility and resentment.

            Woe to women and woe to children, woe to the women who are trying to nourish and nurture their young into something better than what the past keeps vomiting back up. Pray it is not wintertime, when the cold dead emotions demand the fires of sacrifice. Children don't need that shit.

            When these things come within you, you will believe you have never lived in such affliction and swear to God that nothing has happened to you like this from the beginning time when God made you right up to now, and you would be both right and wrong. If you ride it through you can be certain it will never come again. It will be intense and if the Lord, that’s me, had not cut short your days, no flesh on your bones would have survived; but for the sake of Job, whom God chose, God cut the days short.

            And then, if someone says to you: See, here is the Christ! See, he is there! Don't laugh too loud; they might stone you. Be understanding. You will not have to worry overly much about belief. It won't be an issue with you; you will have your baby and the reward that comes with the package. You will have JUNIOR.

            You'll see preachers and politicians rise up like promising anointed ones and they will market exciting spectacles of computer and psychological wonder, tempting even you if you didn't recognize the Shem. After you go through, laughter would be your only temptation if it weren't for the anger that now will be wanting water to grow. You will see these professed leaders as the real 'killers' of the living; but my dad and his army will take care of them.

            Be watchful, like Judah's first-born Er, for I have foretold you. In the days after the affliction, the sun will not impress you as having any light or the moon, and the stars will not hold the same praise and glamour and fascination they once had. They will be only people with a job and having as many and maybe more of the trials and problems you were strapped with. You will no longer want to be like them, nor like the people who rule by deceit and deception. You will see their power as a disguise for the fears and guilt which they hid and for which they too have a journey one day each will have to make and you will be glad that you are you and no other body. You see, finally, after forty years in the desert, self love is drawing near to you. You believed in the past that you did love yourself, but you were so far from yourself the two might have been different galaxies.

            Learn from the fig tree. When its branches are tender and it is just starting to feel the shame again and cover itself with leaves; the summer of your life has come home. You will be very tender and very sensitive, and at first this will cause you much suffering and hurt. Don't forget opposites are forever; read what Yahweh told Noah when he finally buried his oar.

            So when you see all these things happening, know that your lord is near, know he is at your door. This generation will not pass by before all these things are done. I am talking of the fourth generation, the so-called adults of this world. You will have to open that door to find your Lord, it won't happen without your consent.

            The sky and the earth will pass away, because you have never seen them, but my words will not. You want to know the time and the day? No, you don't want to know that. There is something old inside of you, that oldness is the source of all experience. Be like Er, watchful and wakeful. Pay attention to the things and persons you attend. You are each on a journey; remember it.

            There was a man who went on a journey; he left his house and put his slaves, there were two, in charge of it. Each had a task and he told the doorkeeper he must be watchful.

            Be watchful of what you do, for the man on the journey is the Lord of the house and you do not know the hour or the day of his return. It may be evening or midnight or at the time your cock gets up or midmorning coffee break; you don't want him to find you sleeping. What I say to you I say to all: Be ER, so that what happened to Judah's first born doesn't happen to you.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

PASSION IS VERY GOOD, EXCEPT WHEN IT'S CRAZY!

 

            Ritual time was fast approaching; my computer watch was warning me that I only had two days. People would be celebrating the Passing Over of the killer spirit and lamenting having to eat flat bread on account of how bland it was. It gave them little energy to reflect on why they did these rituals in the first place, let alone work at figuring out why one got killed and one appeared to be saved. The account was about twin brothers but most people believed the two were only children and so couldn't give too much thought to a story that made sense for someone they didn't or couldn’t remember as their very early self, though divided, and as such relate with. At this time people were kept busy just working to survive and natural twins were a rare phenomenon. Plus there was little grant money available to study what was almost impossible to find, how the first-born was mortally wounded when its second-born appeared to have been murdered. I thought of Cain and Able, but the thought was only running by and I couldn’t follow it.

            I was being paid to study priests. It was a sideline study, and my fingers ran out of money real fast when my ideas strayed.

            I saw tall priests and their notetakers looking around.

What are they looking for, Mark? I asked.

The way, said Mark.

Well, I replied, why are they acting like it's so hard? He's right before their eyes: didn't Jesus tell them that he is the way?

He hadn't yet, said Mark. It'll be later that another accounter will put those words in his mouth; but the tall priests aren't looking for that way. They want a way to stop it.

            They’re looking for a plan, continued Mark.

You mean they are thinking, asked I?

Yea! Said Mark. They are trying to come up with a trap. They're building a mental cage and searching for an idea that might lure him in so they can kill him. The Passover ritual has gotten old and stale; each year new blood soils their hands and they’re tired of being priests. They carry a lot of guilt and they want release; but fear covers them like a burial shroud. Fear drives them to kill.

            I pulled a cowl over my head and moved up beside one of the tall priests. They were talking amongst themselves and I became one amongst them.

            Not during the holidays, said a voice.

I couldn't see a thing because of the cowl.

Flat bread makes everyone mean, another voice echoed; and this little mAN is a bright spot in a dirty crowd. They love him. If we put him in a cage then the people will kill us. Plus the authorities would accuse us of killing the wrong victim. Symbolism is a very controversial issue. I don’t get it!

            I heard grunts coming from along my sides as agreement was reached over the issue of symbolism. I heard what I wanted to hear and turned the light at the end of my cowl around and followed it out of church.

            He had gone to the house of the poor and afflicted and was staying with Simon.

People wonder, said Mark, why Simon developed leprosy and how a leper could have a house and also be giving a dinner party for non-lepers. I have been accused of creating an impossible scenario. I don't mind that, what I object to is the poverty of story telling which has grown into everyday acceptance. People's hearing has been undermined and their own stories now fall on deaf ears. I make references and immediately everyone is lost. Don't people remember what Simeon did, with his brother Levi the priest? Don't people understand how dirty the flesh becomes within the precepts of the imagination when an individual kills another body? Without knowing the Genesis Story how can anyone be saved?

I don't know, I said to Mark.

            I had a question too. Mark, I asked, if a person doesn't know where she or he came from, how can any person know why they are going?

That's a good one, answered Mark, I like ‘why’.

            There was a woman at the dinner table. She wasn't eating; she was carrying a vessel of the Egyptian goddess Baste. I didn't know anything about this goddess, but I didn't doubt that she was an important deity. The vessel was full of ointment of spikenard, an aromatic plant with rose-purple flowers whose oil is extracted from the ear of the grain. It was very expense stuff on account of its purity and healing properties. It clears the canals of the deaf to carry nourishments to a starving mind.

            The woman broke open the jar and poured the nourishment into the mind of Jesus. The twelve only noticed how the woman wasted the precious oil by anointing his long hair. I heard the grumbling of some at the table: Why this waste: a grumbler said? The ointment could have been sold for the wages of three generations and the money given to the poor.

            Some of the men at the table were angry with the woman. This hostility directed at our opposing sex shocked me and I wondered if this resentment had festered from some long forgotten grief. They seemed to blame her; but I could not detect what her offense was. The incident made no sense to me.

            Jesus said: Let her be. Why are you hard on her?

            No one raised his hand to dissertate. I believe no one actually knew. It was just some old sore spot, one that had not healed and had festered for so long the cause had been lost.

            She has done a good thing for me, he said. You have the poor with you always. Whenever you want to, you can do much good for them. But for me, I ain’t going to be with you much longer. This woman has done what she could; I wish I could say the same for man. I cannot say that for men. This woman took the opportunity to anoint my body in advance of my going into the ground of your being. When each of you un-earths me you will receive a reward, on account of her act of sweetness.

            Hear this – this is true: wherever the Good Story is told in this whole world, what she has done WILL be told too. This was done to commemorate the goodness of woman, for she is the inspiration for me.

            Jesus' words must have hurt Judah from Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, because he got up and left.

You remember how Judah treated Tamar? Mark whispered in my ear. I didn’t hear the question because I was musing on the town of Iscariot and remembering how scared and mean everyone there had grown.

            It's complex, said Mark.

What is, I asked?

Why Judah did what he did, he said. One really has to get back to the beginning and re-experience it for understanding to reveal itself. Hurt is usually the first cause and up from this ground germinate the jealousies and the angers.

            I found out later that Judah went and betrayed Jesus to the tall priests. The tall priests, in turn, had taken off their frocks and partied. They promised to pay Judah. When I wrote this first account I didn't put the amount the priests promised, continued Mark. At the time I thought my references would be enough for others to make the connections, but later writers were more explicit. The priests promised Judah thirty pieces of silver, which means they sold out Jesus for the cost levied by God for a mature spirit, woman. An adult woman was worth thirty pieces of silver, God said, if it had to be equated in the current commercial value men used to buy and sell. The religious sold out their spirit and had to create an institution to disguise the lie that they were on her side. They did this by calling the spirit holy. But it was a he-spirit they wanted; they wanted nothing to do with her.

            After Judah had the priest's promise, he began looking for an opportunity to betray Jesus. He could not hide the truth of what he had done from his nighttime self, but if I told you now I would be getting away from my story. Just remember Judah took on the role of the female, but he kept that role hidden because it would have destroyed his maleness, which was everything he lived for.

            Now was the first day of that bread that never got up out of the pan. God, was it flat! It was the day the lamb got killed in every child.

We were in the street. Mark, the twelve, Jesus, and my self were standing with our hands inside our pockets; I wasn't playing with anything. I can't attest for the others.

            Where do you wish us to go, said all twelve?

            I knew a question had been bothering me, but I guess I was just stronger than the others since most of my life I had practiced standing around and meditated on stopping myself from running to all the places which distracted me from asking the hard questions of why I was so worthless. It never crossed my mind to ask someone else where I should go.

            But they continued: and make preparations for you to eat the sacrificed lamb in celebration of all the dead that the fly over caused.

            I changed my mind. I saw the question turn sour. I understood anew why I just stood around; fewer people seemed to be sacrificed with a decrease in my activities. Somehow I seemed naturally to blame myself for all the death in the world, though I have had shrinks swear that it wasn't my fault. I didn’t believe ‘em. Plus, it seemed to me, the mind of many shrinks had shrunk the world down to a size that didn’t include them, thus making them free from responsibility. Although; I was not sure about anything.

Mark asked me: Would you mind shutting up?

Not at all, Mark, I answered.

            Jesus sent two out. I winked at Mark and said two. I smiled but said no more. Jesus told them: Go into the city, and a man carrying a pot of water will meet you. Follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the master of the house: The master says: Where is my guest chamber where I can enjoy the lamb with my followers? He will show you a large room, high above the house, furnished and prepared. The room will be ready. There prepare for us.

            The two went out.

            You know where they are going, Mark asked?

Jerusalem, I knew.

Into your mind, Mark said. You know the gender of the water carrier, Mark asked?

He's a man, I knew.

It's Rebekah, said Mark. No one knows the stories. You know who the master in the house is, Mark asked?

Damn it, Mark, I said, I don't understand shit. Mark smiled at me and didn't ask any more questions.

            The two went into the city and found everything just like Jesus said. They found Jerusalem, and a man carrying a jug of water and he took them to a house that had a large room up high and the room was ready for them. They made ready for the Passover.

            Mark and I were waiting in the street, leaning against the building near the entrance. I had just put a match to a camel and was smoking like a chimney when the light of my life disappeared around a corner at the street's west end. I told Mark it was getting dark.

I guess, said Mark, it's evening.

Jesus pulled up with the twelve and went inside.

            By the time Mark and I had climbed the stairs everyone was eating. There were only twelve plates and me being a little gentile I wandered over to a corner and just ate notes. Mark was more at home and went about photographing the occasion.

            He came over to my corner once to tell me: second supper!

I thought about it and the next time he came around I asked: where was the first?

He smiled and kept popping bulbs until he got close to me again and said: Egypt!

I thought two. God wants it to happen and is anxious to make it so, remembering Joseph's conversation with the King of the House. I wondered if Mark had wanted me to answer Pharaoh to his silly question of which master owned my house? I heard Jesus talking:

            I tell you truly that one of you will betray me, one of you who are eating with me.

            Everyone at the table moaned and cried out loud. Jesus, I thought, he really knows how to hurt people! I felt safe, though, because no one had set a plate for me. I was glad to be a notetaker and proud of it! It felt good for a second and then was gone. I heard a whisperer address me: BULL SHIT! Fortunately the cries of the others were louder and my ears went their way. Good thing little voices are little!

            One by one the twelve went down the line asking him the same question. When it got to me, I just naturally asked also: Surely, I said out loud, not I? I looked out to see thirteen pairs of eyes glaring at me. I was the only son of a Gentile there. I felt like the Cyclops's son in the boat of Ulysses as he backed away from the stones falling from heaven after Jesus had poked my father's eye out. It was not a comfortable feeling, let me tell you. Then there was a big pop as Mark took my picture. Damn, I said under my breathe! I wanted to betray Mark and would've worked up a plan but Jesus' voice distracted me back to my job, which currently was supper reporting.

            One of the twelve! Said Jesus from the center of the table.

I couldn't believe it; Jesus with the long hair was sitting on the food everyone was to eat. Literally he was one with the dead lamb. It appeared to me that he was un-aware of his position on the table and continued his prepared dinnertime address:

My betrayer is one with the twelve who dip into the dish with me.

            The Son of Man goes his way. He can't go otherwise. That is why it was written that the son of man would do it. He has no choice, except avoidance. Either way, let me be clear here, woe will come to the man who bore him and then denied it. It would be well for that man if his father had aborted him. He would feel better if he had no feelings at all. Do you now understand why people give up their feelings?

            I saw what Jesus asked was a pop question; totally out of context and thereby completely missing its mark. The question flew right over the heads of the twelve and broke on the hard walls surrounding the upper room.

            The twelve were feeling hungry and this drove them to eat. They felt starved and there was little room for any other feeling, especially one that posited the assumption that there existed people who had no feeling at all. Someone articulated a huh! But the "pardon me!" was not loud enough to distract Jesus.

            Everyone was busy pulling pieces of cooked lamb from under Jesus and trying to chase their hunger away when Jesus took up a loaf of bread and looking towards the ceiling he smiled and crumbled the loaf into pieces and passed the torn body to his disciples, saying: Take it, this is I. For the second time I heard someone exclaim: HUH! Louder this time than before but still not enough to distract sweet baby Jesus. He was really into feeding his disciples.

            Next he took up the cup. It had Egyptian runes on it and had been a gift to him from his father Joseph. He looked again to the ceiling and said: Thank you! Then he passed it around and everyone drank. For some reason my attention was on Peter and after he drank, which I noticed was a bit spasmodically, he resorted to cleaning the overspill down his chin with the back of his hand. His eyes widened when he noticed his hand. He leaned into John and remarked: That is definitely the reddest wine I have ever seen! John only smiled at Peter as Jesus answered:

            It's blood. And it's mine. I promise you, unless you start drinking only my blood and eating only my body; you are going to die. I give it to you so that you can live. Use me! He said! Not to made a difference and divide you from your brothers, but to find similarities and salve sores!

            In the mean time, Yahweh's boy continued, and following after me, you will come to understand how mean time can be. I will be drinking no more alcohol, the offspring of the vine. Vine wine is a weak imitation. I'm going for the new stuff, and will be drinking another kind and if you eat me then what I drink you will experience, you along with your brothers and sisters in the sister/brotherhood of the neighborhood of the good life. You drank from the cup. So what I say now I promise will be then.

            One more thing, he said. Only time is mean, only time; but it will not kill you. You can live in it and with it. Only time is mean. Now let us sing!

            Jesus led us in the hymn:

 

            "The causes I sing: I AM WHO I AM has covered myself in glory,

            horse and warrior were thrown into the flood.

            Freedom Now (he sang) - sing it low!

We all sang it like the Memphis blues.

            The Rock is my strength, my song, Strong is my salvation

            Stubbornness holds me on my path.

            This is my Good, I praise her;

            The God of my father, I extol her.

            Freedom Now (he sang) - sing it deep!

We all sang it like Tibetan monks.

            The Rock is a warrior;

            I AM WHO I AM is my name.

            The whip and the gun, the Lord in my house,

            He has thrown into the sea.

            Freedom Now (he sang) - sing it sweet!

We all sang it like castrated boys.

            The chosen of his bullies lie drowned in the mud

            And the deep has closed over them.

            They sank to the bottom like stone.

            Your right hand, I AM WHO I AM, shows majestic in power,

            Your right hand, I AM WHO I AM, dissolves my oppressors.

            Freedom Now (he sang) - sing it high!

And we all sang it like innocent girls.

            So great your splendor that it blinds my foes;

            Give me your anger and burn away my stubble.

            Let your breathe dry out my drowned land

            and bank the waters of my sorrows out of my way;

            for in my heart the deeps of the sea had closed against me.

            Freedom Now (he sang) - sing it dry!

We all sang it with raspy throats.

 

            Thus saw my enemies and spoke as one voice:

            "We will give chase and we will overtake,

            we will divide the spoil and we will feast on the prey,

            we will take gun and we will destroy."

            One breathe of yours folded the ocean and the sea rolled in.

            My enemies like lead never breathed air again.

 

            Who is like you, the great and the terrible?

            Worker of wonders within the world never seen.

            You stretch your right hand out and

            the earth opens its jaws.

            By grace the ones who you lead do not fall and

            you take them into your whole-less house.

 

            People hear of it and tremble,

            Men are unmanned and find terror and dread;

            through the power of your arm they stand like stone

            like statues the poor pass by when on your way,

            the purchased poor you promised to redeem one day.

 

            You will bring them and plant them

            in a garden that you have prepared.

            You promised the children, the girls and the boys,

            that you would give them parents to protect their dwellings.

            A sanctuary, I AM WHO I AM, prepared by your hands.

            This Rock hard stubbornness will be king forever.

 

Then we left the upper room and went to the raised place of anointing, called the Mount of Olives.

            Yahweh's boy said to all of us with him: You will all be made to fail me. Get this straight; you will be MADE to fail me. Don't forget you were made to fail me and also don't forget that you failed. You must hold yourself blameless as you hold yourself a failure. Get this scripture: I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered. The scripture goes on: I will turn my hand against the weak. Not a good warning, but hang to the impossible. This will happen everywhere, it is I AM WHO I AM who speaks. Two thirds will be cut off, I mean killed, and the remaining third I will lead into the fire. Don't panic. I will refine them, the third, like silver and test them like gold. Then they will hear my name. It won't be some preacher saying Jesus this or Jesus that.

            Be cool, you guys will come through all right. In the mean time don't go getting into fights about who is Lord and all that shit. That is just an excuse for avoidance. When I resurrect it will be I somewhere in you who will take each of you back to the brotherhood of mEN. I will lead you.

            But Peter said to him: Even if all fail you; I won't. I cannot fail.

            Jesus smiled. Peter, he said, I'll tell you the truth. What makes you think you can stand up for the good when you have separated it from the evil? God is to blame, Peter, for creating wisdom so that each of you could care for and nurture this nature; but long ago you lost her and denied her and worst yet, called her evil. If you didn't fail, if you couldn't fail, there would be no church. Your denial is the reason you can't get out of church. Your denial is the reason you have to believe, your belief is grounded in the denial of how human you must become. I will prove it. In the darkness, which is your light, you will deny me three times, in every stage you will say that it is not I who leads you. If you can't admit this, your cock will never crow, and you will have to cover it with a dress and your un-man-ness will last forever. Think of the Judah and Tamar story, it is your story, Peter.

            Peter's face got very red and the pipes that checked the pressure in his blood that flowed upward through his neck throbbed as his words were forced from his mouth. Even if I have to die, Peter said, I will never disown you.

            His brothers were impressed and each tried to imitate Peter. I noticed that each of his brothers were not as able as Peter to make their faces as red or get their veins to stand forth as Peter's did but everyone of them said the same words.

            We came to the place called the oil press. It had a wooden fence around it and the ground was as hard as rock. We moved into the center. I noticed above us a huge gunmetal gray disc, but a disciple said it was just the sky. I reached up and felt it; it was metal. The same disciple who said the metal disc was the sky said also that the vat we were gathered in was locally known as Gethsemane. I knew it was the home of the Trappist. Thomas Merton had studied there halve his life but I thought it was in Kentucky. Wherever we were, it was too dark for thinking and the only objects visible were voices. The Christ’s now filled the vat; but the voice sounded different.          

Sit down here while I pray, he said.

            He grabbed the rock, the little one we called Peter, and the sons of thunder, Jacob and Esau, and after hesitating for a second, he reached out and took hold of my arm. I felt his hand shaking. I thought I must be wrong.

How could Jesus shake? I asked myself. We had moved to the edge of the press and enough light entered so I could see. What I saw made me very frightened. Jesus was a small boy; I thought he couldn't be any older than five or six. I looked at Peter and then James and last John, but all I saw on their faces was the same old tired expressions. James actually yawned.

            Jesus spoke to us: My soul is in anguish to the point of death.

            Even his voice was like that of a boy, I thought. I felt totally alone here. I could see no recognition on the faces of the three. I thought I must have eaten something at that last supper which was killing me.

            Stay here with me and keep watch, said Jesus to the three. He moved a little ways away from us and threw himself on the ground. I was terrified; I believed an evil spirit must have taken possession of him. Sweated poured out of my body and I was terrified to take my eyes from him. God knows I watched. But the three, I couldn't believe it, were asleep. I head him moan.

            Is it possible that this hour will pass, asked Jesus? I could see no one who he might have addressed the question to. All my eyes told me I was seeing was a small boy alone on the ground of his life. Father, this boy spoke, all things are possible for you. Take this hour from me. Not that I wish it, but this time is so long. Is this what you wish?

            But there was no answer. I watched and waited; alternately thinking I must have food poisoning and that my mind had finally turned against me. The boy got up; but again a fear overcame me. Jesus looked like he was twelve years old. He walked over to where the three were supposed to be praying but from the snores which rhythmically broke against my ears neither myself nor Jesus were fooled. The twelve year old spoke to Peter.

            Simon, can't you hear how you snore?

            Peter's eyes jumped open but when they focused on Jesus I saw that he didn't see who was before him. I wanted to scream at Peter, the man in front of you is a twelve year old boy. Can't you see that? Peter's eyelids looked heavy.

            The boy was still speaking: Were you not strong enough to keep watch for only one hour? Come on, Simon, listen up. Shake the sleep from your eyes, you are dreaming. Come to the test, Simon. The lady in you is eager, but the practical side of you is a chicken. You can't avoid the mother of all who live forever.

            Peter didn't hear a word, I suspected. As soon as the boy turned to go and throw himself on the ground again I saw Peter's denial close his eyes. His mantra returned, which was the steady, periodic vibrations of the hanging sack at the entrance to his breathe of life canal.

            The young man on the ground again spoke: Father, time is so long and the hot sun has dried out the land. Nothing is growing, father. I can't live here. Is this what you wish?

            Another hour passed and the boy got off the ground and walked over to the three. They were asleep. He just looked and then returned to where he had prayed now for two hours. I thought he just collapsed into a heap. I heard no more moans nor did I hear any words. The third hour passed and I saw him stand up. I looked at him as he approached and then took my fingers to scrub against my eyes. I looked again and confirmed it was Jesus. He was just like he was at supper. Whatever it was that the two of us passed in the last three hours was past. I felt better. He walked over to the three and spoke:

            So you are still asleep. You have been resting! It is enough.

            I couldn't tell if he was being facetious; but I thought not. I thought I detected tiredness in his voice, with a touch of anger. Whoever he was talking with obviously didn't wish that the children go through the time and experience Jesus was going through. Time is a motherfucker, I knew that much. And there is an awful lot of it in everyone's life; and it seemed to me that people were not working to curb its mean side. So little understanding seemed to be available for people. I think I once heard Jesus call it a dialogue of the two passions.

            The fourth hour has come; Jesus was talking to the sleeping three. Look, the son of man is betrayed into the hands of men who only know how to exploit. They use the son of man to steal the wealth from the world and in the process kill everything that strives to live. Rise up, you three and get your brothers, some day only you can change the ways of man by choosing for yourselves other options. But for now let us go: see, my betrayer is near.

            I hear a ruckus behind me and turned to look. I saw Judah who was one of twelve brothers and with him a crowd carrying swords and torches coming towards us. I started shaking. I couldn't control it. I had this déjà vu, an image of a young man being expelled from his delight and a fire and a fear being posted so that the young man would never go back. Mark was beside me; he put his arm around my shoulder. That helped. I had no idea why I was so deeply upset.

            The tall priests and the notetakers and them old wise codgers sent the armed crowd, said Mark. They want Jesus. Jesus scars them.

The men with arms scared me. I think I now believed I knew I had some deep guilt within me; it was the only explanation for why I freaked out around confrontation.

            The crowd was watching and waiting on Judah. They seemed to not know what they were doing here. I thought I could feel their discomfort, but I wasn't sure if it was them or me.

They were waiting for a sign, said Mark. Judah planned it with the priests in such a way as not to arouse suspicion towards him. It is like the busy world, Mark continued, the people in power give to those at the bottom work and then act like they are doing the poor a big favor. Favors are used to cover the suspension of other motives, but the pay is minimum and often the work demeaning.

            Judah had told the armed cohort the sign would be a kiss. A kiss, Mark said, can you imagine that? Jesus was to be betrayed in the same manner his mother showed her love, by the sign of the favors of the spirit.

I thought it was all too complex to ever untangle. The church on one hand talked of love and the spirit when spirit or love was the last goal it ever imagined. And the commercial world talked of wealth and happiness, money and riches, when in fact the wake of its success were the bones of broken peoples and land no longer viable for growing life and dried skins and desiccated bones of all the animals that once lived in the Garden of Eden across the whole earth.

            I looked at Judah and saw Jacob's fourth born boy about to sell his brother Joseph because all the brothers but one were jealous of his good experiences and the favors he received from his care-filled father. Judah went right up to Jesus and said: Master!

            Mark, I said, I once heard a native of America explaining what his people meant when they said that white men speak with forked tongues, but I think Judah's one word was a clearer explanation.

            Judah kissed him. Immediately the cohort laid hands on him and bound him. One of Jesus' supporters pulled out a gun and fired a shot into the air. Unfortunately for the slave of one of the tall priests the barrel was next to the slave's ear and the concussion took out the man's hearing.

He wasn't using it anyway, said Mark. It was a slave's ear.

Mark, I said, that is no excuse.

Yes it is, said Mark, now maybe the slave will be able to hear his own heart. Mark had a point.

            Jesus spoke forth: You come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as if I were a highwayman? It's not that I am not; in fact I am exactly that. I'm the highwayman. That's not the point. Here's the point. Day by day I was near you in the temple, teaching, and you did not seize me. Why? That's not the point either. The point is that you must die. You can't because it not only scares you but you don't see what good it would do. I have to show you. That is what the scriptures say I'm here for. That's why I am here. Take me.

            Standing there, listening and watching, I thought somehow I had gotten into the negative of a positive recording. I saw the eleven break and run. I realized the gun shot that ended the slave's hearing was not meant for him, but was the start of the zodiac race to avoid getting arrested for being with the wrong man in the right night. If it hadn't been for the flaming torches I wouldn't have known a thing.

            The cohort went the other way from the racers. I was picking at the end followers of the cohort to keep contact and with me was a certain young man. I knew him but couldn't come up with a name. He looked familiar. One of the guards recognized him also and made a big scream, getting the attention of others. I knew that scream also but the sound didn't name itself yet. Five guards jumped at the young man and I thought had him, but I was wrong. They got his tunic but I saw the white butt of his body sucked up by the night as he disappeared down the road.

            Mark, I said, that was Joseph. Remember the scream from Potiphar's wife after she found out Joseph couldn't be seduced. She wanted to use him for her own favors, to enjoy him on the side, as it was. She had leaped at Joseph but all she got was his tunic, and ole Joe ran away naked. That's why you added that, isn't it Mark?

            Mark, Mark? I was standing on a road, I believe. It was night. After the naked man had been eaten by the dark I guessed the delight of my discovery had left me musing in my private most thoughts. When I called Mark I guess I was coming from my inmost chamber into the present; but now that I was in the dark I was no longer sure that I had gotten into the real world. It was just me and the dark. I closed my eyes, rolled over on my left side, and felt with my toes the warmth of the deepest recesses of my bed. I wanted to sleep, but in the bottom of my bed I found my shoes and my tired feet took me on down the road.

            They had taken Jesus to the tallest priest. I slipped into the chamber, using my press pass, and set up my typewriter in a remote corner. On the table I put out my coffee cup and ash tray and told my secretary to hold all calls, I figured it would be a long night. The room was full of tall priests and wrinkled wise men and a whole class of students with fistfuls of sharpened pencils.

            From my strategic position I saw Jesus mingling with the tall priests and Peter outside sitting alone and dejected in the courtyard. No one was talking to Peter. I thought he probably felt abandoned and maybe a bit jealous that Jesus was getting more attention than he was. Peter sat with the serving men, and if anyone has been around serving men, then they will understand how impossible it is to dissertate about metaphysics in their presence. It doesn't fly; the only responses one can usually get are huhs? All Peter had to do was warm himself by the fire, and that he was doing.

            In the main room I saw the tall priests, and those who took council with them, were on their knees crawling about the floor. They were busy shaking their heads from side to side while intensely gazing directly into the ground. I pondered what they might be doing. I sipped at my coffee and blew smoke up at the ceiling, but no idea came. My eye caught the attention of a student notetaker who looked bored from not having anything to work his sharp pencil against and flicked him over with a jerk from my head.

            What's up, I asked.

No one can find anything on the ground, he answered.

What have they lost, I asked?

Evidence, he answered.

What does evidence look like, I asked.

It looks like proof, he said.

            Now I wished I hadn't flicked my head because this boy, like many students do, was working a number on my head. I knew why I never wanted to teach; the task seemed worst to me than curing cancer. But I saw he was sincere and so I continued my probe for facts.

            Proof is hard to recognize, I said, but why do they want proof?

So they can kill him, he answered.

Who, I asked?

Jesus, he said.

I see, I said.

            I didn't, but I saw that everyone had gotten off the floor and were beginning to call witnesses. Many who were called were not chosen. They were classified as false witnesses. When they had given their statements, the council for the defense would ask if they were there. When the witness then said he was not, everyone shook his or her head and typed the witness as false. Not being there was the one solid consensus among the witnesses. I noted some of their statements anyway.

            Many said: He said: I will tear down this temple made by Built Better Temple Incorporated and in three days build a better one myself.

            Where every witness disagreed was which corporation built the temple in the first place. Everyone had a better idea who the original temple builder was than his fellow witnesses.

            Finally a real tall priest stood up and put this question directly to Jesus: Have you no answer? What is this testimony that the witnesses bring against you?

            Jesus didn't say a thing. I was not surprised; thinking of the questions the tall priest asked I couldn't myself see what his question was. His first question, have you no answer, only raised another question? To what? As to the second, which asks what the witness is attesting to; I believed the witnesses themselves didn't know. Why dissertate? Looking at Jesus I saw that he didn't believe he could. So he didn't.

            The tallest of all the priests tried again: Are you the Christ, the son of the one we all think of as Blessed?

            I thought the words the tall priest used were strange, so I got out my dictionary to see if I could comprehend his question. I knew what the Christ meant but the word Blessed threw me. I saw it came from the German and meant blood. A thing was blessed by a religious ritual that made it so. The ritual is what made the person or object worthy of respect and worship. So it was ritual that created God. Was the tall priest asking Jesus if he was the offspring of what ritual make? Or was he asking if he was the son of blood made holy by ritual? Or was all blood sacred? Was he asking if life was holy? I wished Mark was here to help me. I wanted to ask Mark if his question was: Is the Christ the only one Son of El, who is the deity in the first Creation Myth?

            I am he, answered Jesus. Like Daniel put it in chapter seven:

 

He is coming on the clouds of the heavenly treasure,

One who is like a son of man.

He came to the one of great age

and was led into the presence of this ancient One.

On him was conferred sovereignty,

glory and kingship,

and men of all peoples, nations and languages became his

servants.

His sovereignty is an eternal sovereignty

which shall never pass away,

nor his empire never be destroyed.

 

            Jesus' presentation of scripture not only didn't impress the tall priest; it made him furious. He ripped his clothes so badly he almost exposed himself. He looked like he wanted to kill Jesus.

            He screamed out: Who needs witnesses? You heard him quote the scripture. He equated that every son of man is just like the only son of God. He's got too much gall! What do you guys think?

            Come, the councilors of the tall priest concurred, let's kill him.

Wait! the tall priest said; we can't be killing no body (it’s LAW)! Let's only agree on the issue here. Does he or does he not deserve to die?

He deserves it: they shouted.

            Everyone started spitting. Some spat on him, others missed and hit a friend. But it was OK; they just covered Jesus' face and beat him, venting having been spit on by other selves. Then some used their fists and beat him more. Some wanted Jesus to tell them who was using their fists and who were not, on account of so many had no feelings left at all. I heard bones breaking in fingers and I heard laughing and fun. I wondered at the limits of being unconnected with one's own body. I noticed how out of shape the professionally blessed were when after thirty seconds of beating fun they were panting along the sides of the room. Fun immediately wasted them. But this was OK because from the courtyard all the serving men had rose to the excitement and wanted to vent their fury and frustration with their holy brothers and nothing seemed more attractive than the Son of Goody-Goody-Two-Shoes. God would have been better but no one had seen that sucker. Well, I reflected, not true. Only no one was alive to tell about it. Challengers in those fights didn't live to reflect. So here was the ideal target, not God but his son. (I remembered the farmer stories!) The serving men beat him until they were worn out.

            The time lasted for a mean while! I noticed Peter hadn’t moved from the dying fire. One of the little girls who were slaves to the tall priest saw Peter and said: You also were with Jesus of the long hair.

            Are you kidding, answered Peter? Daniel might walk into a lion's den; but I have never understood Daniel. My name is Peter! When you say "with", the word completely escapes my understanding. I with him?  Peter had his finger pointing at the man with a sack over his head that everyone was beating. Never seen him before.

            Peter got up from the fire and went further away from the truth. But the girl was persistent and began talking with all the other women. There were no men around Peter. Every man who was a man was inside beating up the son of their fathers.

            This is one of them! Said another girl as she touched Peter on his long sleeves.

            Hey girl, said Peter, you better watch your mouth! What's coming out of it is some bad shit and it has nothing to do with me. Hear!

            Peter was up against the furthest wall now and women were beginning to notice he was the only man not beating up the son of man inside.

            Truly you are one of them, since you are a man from the tribe of mEN. Why you out here then if you ain't one of them?

            It's cause I ain't a man, said Peter. And I don't know nothing you’re talking about.

            He felt himself getting an erection. What was he saying, he thought? What was he thinking? Why was he getting an erection? How long had he been blind? Why was he in denial? Then he heard the roster crow two times. Then he heard Jesus deny him three times. He felt a rift tear down the middle of his being. His soul was afire. He couldn't hold himself together any longer, though he was terrified about what would happen if he let go. But his terror broke as sobs and wailings washed his failure and doused the fire. Pity finally touched his body and got through to his soul and crying saved him from the rock hard beliefs he once held so adamantly.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

PILATE DOESN’T STEER THE SHIP, HE WORKS TO KEEP IT FLOATING

 

            Early the following day the troop moved to the other house of power. The tall priests with their wise old men and their notetakers met in council, after wearing themselves out extracting vengeance on Jesus. They couldn’t kill him, all religion is against any killing and they knew that.  It’s in the law and no extenuating circumstances are there for exceptions. Still, they knew he was the cause of all the trouble that has always plagued the holy and righteous. That was the consensus reached at the council. He was a rebel rouser for the discontent. That’s against the law and the only recourse had to be civil. They would give him to Pilate. So they bound him up and took Yahweh’s only offspring out of church, praying that he never returned to disturb the rest they enjoyed on Saturday.

            My Press Pass got me into Pilate’s wholy castle and I found Mark waiting for me. Where you been, Mark; I asked?

Sleeping, he said. I saw you go into church and figured I'd catch up on my rest before the big day.

Big day, I asked?

            Yea, said Mark, today is the feast of emotional release. It commemorates the death of our forefather's enemies who chased them when they refused to work any longer for slave wages. I call it freedom day. It is why the big priest brought Jesus to Pilate, who is the father of all freed slaves.

He is, I asked?

            Sure, Mark answered, see that hat he wears?

I did think it was a strange hat for a power politician to be wearing. It was yellow, with a duckbill sun visor and had a big M at front and center with the word "chicks" written across the M, just under where the V in M ended. To me it looked like a minor league baseball cap, and I told him so:

Mark, that's the kind of hat the Memphis Chicks wore when I was growing up as a kid.

Sounds Egyptian to me but I don't know about chickens from Memphis, said Mark. The emblem stands for a freed slave.

            Personally I thought Pilate sounded like a proper name for the captain of the great ship earth. His right arm was a javelin, just like the right arm of one of the first ten kings who each lived hundreds of years and ruled the tribes of mEN by sheer military industrial power. That was before the flood arrived and put their power deep in the sub-conscious. I knew I was theorizing and this was not the time or place. So again I set up my desk and writing machine and got ready to record.

            Pilate said to Yahweh's offspring: Are you the king of the Jews?

            He answered him: It is you who say it.

            Hey, Mark! I called. He came over and sat on my desk.

OK, Mark, why did you write the dialogue like that, I asked?

            Because of the promises, said Mark. God promised us kings to come from the descendents of Abram. You remember the record our ancestors left of all the kings that came and went? Many people were glad when most of the kings went. God didn’t have that kind of king in mind, but -

            Wait, Mark! I interrupted. How do you know what God had in mind? Are you trying to get crucified with Jesus?

            No, I am not, said Mark. I only make references. Again I lament the fact that no one remembers Genesis, which tells me there are few people still connected to their beginnings. God didn’t promise Abram’s people would have kings, but that his people would be kings. Pilate intuits this from his question. The question came out of his being and Jesus told him to listen to his own words.

            Allow me to return to Genesis! Continued Mark.  You remember this: “Let us make mankind, that means every new born baby regardless of sex, in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, a baby isn’t one but becomes three, and let every baby become masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild beasts and all the reptiles that crawl upon the earth.” That is the meaning of a king and Jesus is the first real example. He hasn’t killed his feelings, nor is he afraid of them. Why?  Because he made them and he knows them, he is master of them. Jesus is king.

            In literature and psalm and holy, inspired ravings, the Jews were incredible creators. And truth Sayers! Our spiritual traditions are the work of the Jewish mind and culture and they are here to teach us. And this they deeply understood: if we kill the king, then the Goodness of life disappears.

Mark had said too much and now the tall priests were yelling and screaming accusations at Jesus from the left and the right. I remembered none. I only remember them coming from every corner of the floor; I imagined it could be no worse on Wall Street during stock trading. I watched both Jesus and Pilate listen in awe. I was in awe.

            Finally Pilate called for quiet and addressed Jesus:

Have you no defense? See how much they charge you with?

Jesus only turned his awe towards Pilate, and I saw that Pilate was amazed. I could hear the breath coming in and going back out of my nose.

            Pilate re-turned to the crowd. He said:

It's Freedom Day. I'll give you a prisoner, any you want. And I'll let that man go free. Do you wish this?

            Yes, responded the crowd, release to us all that we wish.

            I can give you just one wish, answered Pilate.

            Mark sat down on my desk again and started telling me about Bar-abbas. You know who Bar-abbas is, he asked?

No, I said.

He is the son of the father, said Mark.

I figured as much, I said, from the name. Abba means father; that we all know. But what the hell is implied here?

            There was a riot, said Mark. A lot of people got killed. Someone in the crowd was a raving maniac and took so many heads off that the body count was a third the number of heads found. Some said it was the son of the father who had gone stark ravening mad. They said he was the wild man responsible for all the stalkings and mutilations and child abuse and women rape and muggings and murders and so on. Some people are thinking that all the crimes committed since people invented pencils is on account of the son of the father.

            Sounds like a bad dude, I said to Mark.

Believe it, Mark answered.

Pilate took the podium and put a proposal before the people: Do you wish me to release to you the king of the Jews?

            I think Pilate thought that the tall priests had brought charges against Jesus out of jealousies, just like the brothers of Joseph had done in the first story. I could see that the religious leaders had some rabid emotions mixed up with the charges they slung at him.

            After Pilate stated his proposal, the tall priests and the old codgers and some of the notetakers began stirring up the crowd. Each instigator carried a big stick and when in the middle of a group of crowders would begin turning the mess in a counter clockwise motion until the people were thoroughly dizzy and confused about the issues. I couldn't believe it. I thought of the Republican convention, and then I thought of the Democratic one. Then I thought of the children. Then I thought of the people's welfare in general. Then I heard the voice of America raising its stirred up voice to get its wish.

            Free the son of the father; we want the son of the father on our streets; we want him free!

            I heard Pilate say: Oh my god! in lower case letters! Then I heard him ask: Then what shall I do with the man you call the king of the Jews?

            The dizzy crowd was as one, all listing to the left as their eyes questioned the tall priest for what to say. Then they said: Crucify him!

            Why? Said Pilate. I could see he related to the prisoner. Only a prisoner can really relate to another prisoner. Unfortunately the captain of the great ship earth has to relate to his constituency if he wants to keep his Job. But Pilate was trying to serve both ends and hadn't yet given up.

            He said: What harm has he done?

            I saw it was useless. The priests had given the crowd loco weed to chew earlier in the festivals and most members of the audience had white foam dripping from the corners of their frowns. Sweat saturated their tunics and steam rose to fill the upper echelons of the castle. A chant was starting: Crucify him!  Crucify him!   Crucify him!  in harmony with a herd of stomping feet.

            I saw Pilate's face change as his wish went out to satisfy the mass and he told the guards to let the son of the father loose on the people. His countenance had set in hard and he directed the guards to pour hot lava down the back of Jesus' legs and then to take him out and nail him down and then raise him up.

Huh! Exclaimed a guard as another grabbed the king and the two led Jesus away.

Don't act so stupid! Said the guard as the three of them passed me by.

            I followed the guards. The soldiers took Jesus inside the court. Mark came with me. It was a good thing; I didn't know these old Roman palaces and was pretty much lost.

Where are we, I asked Mark?

The same old place, pretty much, said Mark. Inside sanctuary, inside temple, inside palace, the dresses are always just coverings.

Huh, I said?

We're in the holy of holies of the profane, he said.

I said huh again.

Use your brain, he said; we are just inside the person from the perspective of a worldly individual.

Forget it, Mark, I said.

            Wherever we were, we were with a whole battalion. Tanks and battleships were here too. Thousands of men were all at "fall out and light'em up." No officers were around. Everyone was cutting up and spitting. Jesus was led into the center and dressed in purple.

            It's the dress of the Canaanites, the color of royalty, said Mark, but actually it’s older than that. Remember what Cain feared?

I could remember and wondered how Jesus could even breathe; Cain was fearful that other men would kill him for what he did to his brother. The name, Cain, means forged in fire.

The Canaanite plight is the journey each man travels to reach the promised land, remarked Mark; but that kind of understanding never saw much favor in Christian terminology.

            What do you mean, I asked Mark?

Not now, he answered.

            One of the soldiers wove a wreath of thorns and rapped these around the mind of Jesus. Other soldiers caught the agitation, like the spirit of the outside crowd had inflected them on the inside and they became mock men, falling down in front of him and praising him like he was a politician or a pope. Some hailed him as: King of the Arts! Others called him: Mr. CEO of Business! or High Coach of the Vikings! or what can I get for you Mr. President of World Banking! or Hail to King Toyota! or Dear Dictator of the Republic of Bananas.

            It didn't last; the warriors grew tired of playing like servants and quickly reverted to beating him over the head and spitting in his face. Every soldier gave a lick or two, and most had enough resentment and scorn from their own plight to spit at least once. The mood was mean and most left the inner sanctuary after they vented their disease. When it was over the few removed his purple garments and dressed him in his own clothes and led him out to be tested. They loaded him down with ALL the emotion this world has made, which is un-imaginable! It was made from experience and it was rock hard solid. The imagination doesn't contrive emotion; it works with what is given to it.

            And it is a cross.

            We came out into the light. I saw Simon immediately, but he really didn't look like the Simon I knew.

Same Simon, said Mark, but lately he comes from Cyrene where he got some education.

You mean, I asked?

Yes, Mark answered, he was led out of the dark.

Cyrene was a very enlightened place, from the time of Alexander and even before, said Mark. Jews and Greeks lived together there and got along. It was the home of a famous Socratic school and a city of beauty, learning, and fellowship. It was an intellectual and medical center that taught and practiced happiness and fellowship as the greatest good.

            Simon was the father of two sons.

Twins, I asked Mark?

Of course, he answered, one was the defender of men and the other was red all over.

Red all over, I asked?

Yes, said Mark. It's the common color of those who are slaves of their passions.

I didn't understand.

Opposites are forever, Mark went on. Inside of every baby are two opposing personas. Don’t you see that yet?

Some things are hard for me to see, but I didn’t say any more to Mark.

            One of the soldiers pressed Simon into carrying Jesus' cross and he picked it right up. That father walked as upright as Mark or I and led the way up to the skull. Jesus could have never survived the track. Both worlds had beaten him up and it was all he could do to walk. But walk he did, bearing his pain and abuse right into his own mind.

            No one will believe it, Mark, I said.

You will, answered Mark.

I laughed, but it was on account of how bitter I was.

            They offered Jesus wine mixed with incense, to numb his feelings and to give his suffering the sweet smell of sacrifice. He refused. They nailed him to the truth and then raised him into the skull. They gambled to see who would win the clothes he wore. That was as close as anyone would get to his reward.

            I looked at my watch. It was the third hour. Someone made up a sign and tacked it over his head: The King of the Jews! It was as enigmatic as this whole journey I was on, but not inexplicable. For three hours Jesus had been subjected to the abuse of men, of soldiers and of power of the politically correct. I remembered his own words: the son of man will be handed over into the hands of men and they will create him. I thought of a child in the first seven years. Is this the way to plant a garden in the fertile ground of a child's being? A tear rolled across my left cheek but my face was like stone and my heart was bitter.

            On the left side of his imagination and on the right they crucified two robbers and raised them also into the skull. I literally saw the consequences of abuse and ignorance being created in the two worlds and remembered what Israel promised his sons of a slave mother. It was Justice with a butt: I knew there would be no justice because the good people were blinded by righteousness. When the imagination of the child is abused by its powerful guardians, the child is empowered to resort to trickery and deceit to win its survival, whether it chooses to work in the spiritual world or the one where matter is everything. Its power will be vengeance, though it would never call it that. It would call it pleasure and excitement, the elements that incite the individual to live and move.

            The hours between three and six were hard for even me to bear, hardened old story journalist that I had become. The crowd standing about the three dying men hanging from their pain and anguish was hostile and angry. It was like the crowd was on the cross and the object of their resentments was drinking marguerites and relaxing under a beach umbrella with pretty girls sitting in his lap while he causally let his hand play over an attractive curve of one of the girls. I saw the cool wind play with this rich man’s cropped hair and laid back posture in the shade under a hot desert sun.

            Why are you up there? Shouted a man. What did you do to win such a high place? Laughed another. Why do you do nothing? Why are you just hanging out? How are you gonna tear the temple down, let alone build another in three days, if those nails keep holding your hands to that cross? The speaker spat and jabbed his left fist into the gut of his companion and both fell down laughing.

            A team of tall priests came up to the cross. They were surrounded by notetakers. The priests wore black; the notetakers were in white. They looked like a bull's eye. The black hole in the center spoke: He saved others, can he not save himself? We threw Israel's anointed into a well, and nephews of Abraham got him out. Where are your nephews, King of the Jews?

            The bull's eye shook with laughter.

            Show us some magic and we will believe, spoke the hole. You ain't in no well, where your trickery can keep it all in the dark. Hey, we raised you up so come on down and, man; we will be your followers.

            The hole spat on its white apron and everyone in the center laughed. Even the two robbers laughed and abused him, but I saw there was stronger emotion underlying all this commotion. I saw it but my recorder could not nail down the appropriate words. I couldn't see beyond the sweat and blood, and the shallow pants of all the living.

            I looked at my watch. It was five till the ninth hour. I looked behind me and saw an adolescent boy watching from the hill off to my right. He was shaking his head and his cheeks were red and wet. The wind was blowing hot and dry from the east. In the west a black bank of clouds was still and smooth like a storm I once observed in southern Missouri. Everything was mixed up and I felt like I was going to scream. I wanted to scream. I felt sick.

            The partiers around the cross didn't seem to notice. Rich cars and people in fancy clothes were going about like spectators at a Sunday afternoon polo game. I thought these people had to be insane. Couldn't they feel the weather, couldn’t they see? The air hung still and sticky like the atmosphere in the eye of a hurricane. I thought of Noah's flood.

            I couldn't sit here and watch the sons of men being killed any longer. I was sick and my mind was not strong enough for this kind of pleasure. I looked to my right and saw the boy get up. He too looked frightened. He turned his back to me and walked away from the crowd. I felt so alone. I felt so homeless. The storm was coming; I could see it was moving though it appeared to just be hanging. The air didn't move. I knew this storm would ravish the land.

            I heard a voice from the cross. A man shouted: He's speaking! Someone screamed: Say it again; we didn't hear you.

            I saw Jesus high in the air. A man looking over my shoulder at my words said: God damn if that ain't true! I was too tired to glare at him. Jesus was looking intently at a young, light-skinned man who was standing beside an older woman. The woman was dark of skin, strong and radiant. "This is your mother." The words rolled like thunder out of Jesus' mouth. Everyone fell back. This was not the voice of a dying man. "Woman, this is your son." The world was growing dark. Others began to notice. An unease was scattering the people away from the truth. A terrible darkness was eating up the images that were once clear to the eye.

Suddenly, he screamed out:

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthanei?

                                                                                    And he died!