Excerpt from Fifth Gospel: Leave Taking

Lea fell quiet. Her words were spent.

I went to the window, for I could see the sun was rising, throwing a gold mantle on the world beyond Montsegur. 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, and 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 and said, ‘The greater the light of goodness, the darker the shadow of evil. Wars will continue…there are dark times ahead, and it will grow darker still, for you see pairé, 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, pairé. 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 again: 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 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...I had been in the company of Wisdom all along... 

Sneak Preview of First Chapter of Fifth Gospel

1

MEETING LEA

Montségur, 1244

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 by what I know by way of ignorance, and what I possess is mine because I am dispossessed. That is how I have arrived at who I am – by sacrificing certainty.

But who am I?

I am old. I do not imagine myself old, no, but when I look at my hands I see they are veined, when I feel my face I know it is full of creases, and when I walk I am reminded that my joints are not always prepared to follow. Alas! I have lived long enough, near fifty years without mishap, and I dare say I should have lived many more had destiny allowed it, but it has not, it has set me upon this difficult path and it will lead me on it until I reach that place which you shall know in the end.

Yes, I am old, and growing old means I have had to watch my friends die one by one, the foremost of them being my socio, Guilhabert de Castres. Oh…I miss him as I would miss a leg or an arm! I can still see him so vividly: a short man with small hands and feet, a rounded face that wrinkled when he smiled, close, sharp eyes that saw only the goodness in everything, and a jaw that jutted out as if it were made of steel, a signal of his strong will. A will so determined that even in his later years when I travelled with him all over Languedoc, on our nocturnal rides to secret meetings or on journeys from one village to another, he never tired. He walked always with a certain rhythm, his back as straight as a rod and his head pointing the way. In those days I was tall and muscular, and yet I was ever amazed to see him climb the steep and arduous path to the pog of Montségur with ease, smiling and joyful to arrive at the top, while I puffed and grumbled with every step and trailed behind him, red faced and fatigued.

I think now as I descend that same path, keeping my mortal appointment with God, how fitting it is that Guilhabert has missed this end of ends! When I think of it, tears fall from my eyes. They are falling now and I wipe them with a hand as I pause to look up. The sky is yet dark and I am looking for the sign. It should come from the summit of Bidorta if all goes well. Indeed…if all goes well! I feel a pang in my heart to think on the alternative when the bee that has been buzzing around me for some days comes again to cheer my spirit. That little sun creature leads the way that descends and winds over the frost covered stones. It reminds me of my promise and helps me to sew into my soul the happenings of those days and to weave everything into a song; a song which you shall only know after I have died and returned again to sing it.