Fifth Gospel(148)
Lea fell quiet. Her words were spent.
I went to the window to watch the sun throw its gold mantle on the world. For a moment the entire Gospel stood before my eyes in the awakening clouds that were spread over the skies above the valleys and mountains, rivers and streams of the world.
‘Yes…it is magnificent!’ I said.
She pointed to the dawn and she seemed to grow tall, white and fair before my eyes. I trembled, for her voice was grave, ‘Look there! Do you see a world full of wonders and marvels?
I looked and I saw a twilight land of strange buildings and contraptions.
‘That is the future. Do you see, pairé, how there are castles that fly, carriages that go at great speeds without horses and torches that have no flame? In this future, pairé, the thoughts of men will travel like lightning from one end of the earth to the other and a man will be able to hold all the books in the world in the palm of one hand.’
‘All the books in the world!’ I smiled to think on it. ‘This is truly remarkable!’
‘Yes, but every light casts a shadow.’ She looked at me, cold and solemn. ‘The greater the light of goodness the darker the shadow of evil. Wars will continue again and again and lead to dark times. In the past men fought over their misunderstandings of Jesus and Christ, now they battle because they no longer understand the Spirit, but in the future the battle will be for the human Soul itself. It shall be more heinous and violent than any other battle that has come before! In those far flung days what is written in John’s Apocalypse shall come to pass: the woman with the sun in her belly and the moon at her feet shall come to give birth to the spirit of Christ in the clouds; the soul of humanity will give birth to the spirit and the dragon will try to kill it as soon as it is born in the same way that Herod tried to kill Yeshua. That is when this gospel shall be needed pairé; before the end of the fifth age.’
I was breathless, caught in the swirl of images, which she had shown in the sky before my eyes. Fear and dread entered into my heart and a sudden thought came. ‘Soon I will descend this pog, Lea, and what you have had me write down on those parchments,’ I pointed to them, ‘will turn to dust. It has all been for nothing! No man will know the Fifth Gospel!’
‘There is no accident in the universe pairé, nothing is ever lost. What you have written will come to you again, though differently and you will remember.’
‘What must I remember?’
‘Look at me, pairé, what do you see?’
Before my open gaze her face seemed to change: one moment I saw the evening star, the next she was Demeter the mother of nature, again she was Solomon’s bride and after that the lady who steals into the heart of every troubadour, the ideal woman, the good and beautiful and true in the soul of every poet. When her face paused in its transformations I realised with a sense of wonder and awe that I was gazing at a countenance that I had only seen in my imaginations, it was the face of Mary, the Galilean mother of Jesus. I realised that I had been in the company of wisdom all along, night after night! As I suspected she was the rose which by another name was Evangelea, the angel that carries the Fifth Gospel into the souls of men to make them evangelists and she was directing my gaze not to the future this time but to the past again. When I looked back I saw a hillock overhung by dark clouds on which stood three crosses. There was a man standing beneath them holding a spear in his hands and staring at me. In that fragment of a moment the two places were woven into the same space in life’s evolving stream and our souls could look upon one another, knowing the other as himself. Ah!
It was only an instant, but to me it was an eternity of gazing with wonder and awe at all that would pass in between: sorrows and battles, births and deaths, lifetimes. Just as she had said.
After that Lea lifted a further veil to show me other things, things that had passed and things that would come to pass, things I am not permitted to tell suffice to say that I understood now how this very moment was the culmination of what had begun long ago on that hillock called Golgotha, and that many who were here at Montsegur had been with me before.
And so it was that when I had looked into myself, I had found Lea, and now, miraculously in Lea, I had found myself.
77
THE BEE AND I
I am not a troubadour and yet I sing. I am a bishop and yet I do not belong to any church. I have come to what I know by way of ignorance and what I possess is mine because I am dispossessed. I am only here because I have sacrificed all certainty and yet, that is how I am certain that the end of my song is only a beginning.
It has taken me long to descend this pog and all the while you have listened to my song. I think you and I have always known how it would end, haven’t we? I am not sad for it and neither should you be. I must atone for all the lives which I have taken and all the mistakes that I have made. Those that have suffered at my hand are now waiting to pronounce judgement on me on that field below, this is the Wisdom of God and I bow down to it in freedom and choose to love even those whose task it is to carry it out.