“If you believe in the concept of life—the undeniable fact that humans are born from the love of two people, and from that coming together you were made flesh, each with hands and eyes and organs and blood and minds and hearts, then you do believe in the concept of life.
“The very idea of life itself is so complex that anything and everything that comes after the creation of life is simple. And ongoing.
“If you know life, you already know the unending wheel of life and death. You already know God. The spirit that is you continues with you and around you after you give up the shell of the human body.
“So I too will be with you and all around you. Just look and you will find me. I am everywhere. In the trees, the air, the sun. I return to the home of my parent, yet I will remain with you.
“I beg you not to fear what is coming in the next days.
“The gift of the earth, like all life itself, has a cycle of life and death. Has it been hastened by the hand of humans who corrupted it, polluted it, sickened it?
“Meditate on this: You took the great oceans and made them filthy and then claimed they were clean. You took the fertile fields and made them give up barren fruit. Instead of following the natural and perfect order, the fields were not allowed to lie fallow in rotation—even though by divine design, all things must be allowed to rest to renew—each on its own Sabbath.
“You developed chemicals and killed the mother that fed you. You have reaped the harvest of that death by growing obese while wasting away in mind and body.
“You took God’s very spark of life—the atom—and split it. It is as though you split your own child in half. Then when it became the monster that is destroying its own mother, the earth, by spewing Her with its toxic breath—radiation—you react with surprise and shock.
“You are still shocked at every nuclear reactor that melts down. Why? For everything there is a season.
“You refuse to believe that when you take you must give back or you lose it all. That is the law of all things in nature.
“Know this: My blood—the blood of Christ—cannot die. I shall, like my parent before me, rise again. And again and again—for the blood that made me lives as surely as does the blood that runs in your veins. So do not lose faith in the Lord, our God.
“The blood of my parent that runs in my veins and remains here on earth is the only measure against the end of days. It is all that remains to restore the earth to its former grandeur.
“So I implore you: Do not mourn me in the coming days. Nor mourn your loved ones who will pass. Instead contemplate the words of the Creator, our parent, and only then can you truly love God. Only then can you be saved.
“For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.…
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.…
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father
and the sister of my husband,
and he is my offspring.
I am the slave of him who prepared me.
I am the ruler of my offspring.
But he is the one who [begot me] before the time on a birthday.
And he is my offspring [in] (due) time,
and my power is from him.
I am the staff of his power in his youth,
[and] he is the rod of my old age.
And whatever he wills happens to me.
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.
“In love I came to you, and in love I leave you.”
The voice of the BBC announcer came on. “Those were the first and, by the sound of it, the last words that will be spoken by the thus-far-silent Demiel ben Yusef, the man on trial for terrorism and crimes against humanity.
“We have with us a panel of religious and political experts here to interpret the words of the suspected terrorist. Nut job or prophet?”
Maureen turned off the radio. “I’m amazed that he chose to recite that passage from the Nag Hammadi library. It’s called, ‘The Thunder, Perfect Mind.’ He knows how to manipulate the people enough to have used just some parts and not others.”
“Nag Hammadi—that’s where the Gnostic gospels were found in the 1940s in Egypt, right?”
“In 1945 to be exact. Fifty-two tractates about Jesus Christ that were uncovered by Arab peasant farmers, including one named ’Alī al-Sammān, at the base of the Jabal al-Tarif, a cliff near the town of Hamrah Dawm in Egypt. While digging for fertilizer near a giant boulder, they hit an earthen jug. They dug it out. Huge. Six feet high.