Excerpt from Fifth Gospel: Water and Wine

‘What do you see?’ His eyes held hers.

To look at him near blinded her and so she looked away. ‘I don’t know what to tell you…I see a dazzling glory!’ she looked again, ‘Praise be God! I see…’

‘What?’

‘I see the Son of God!’ Immediately she put a hand to her mouth as if she had blasphemed.

‘Don’t be afraid, you have committed no wrong…’ he said, ‘trust in your heart.’

Tears came into her eyes. ‘I feel joy!’ She lost her balance and he steadied her and held her face close to his.

‘This is heaven expressing itself through you, for this is the first time my mother in heaven sees the Son who long ago departed from her…she sees Him who is in me through your eyes!’

Again she felt she would faint, and to forestall it he held her with one hand and took the cup of water and brought it to her lips. ‘Drink this,’ he said, ‘it will sustain you.’

When she took a sip she was full of confusion. She looked into the cup trying to decide whether she believed it.

She said, ‘How does this taste of wine Jesus?’  

Jesus nodded. ‘It is only water…but what lives between you and me can make even water taste of wine.’

She had heard these words before, they echoed the words of the Anchorite in Egypt, spoken so many years ago.

‘This is a mother’s love for her son,’ she marvelled.

‘And a son's love for his mother,’ he replied.

Before she could say more the storm of light that had surrounded Jesus ebbed away. So swiftly did it go that she wondered if she’d seen it at all.

Returned to those eyes was the calm expression she knew. 
‘You look tired…’ he said to her, ‘Tomorrow is another busy day.’

She hesitated, ‘I have been saying fare-thee-well to you all your life Jesus, and now I find myself not wanting to leave you, lest you disappear into thin air!’

Jesus let his face open in a smile, ‘I know. But this is a new season, and we must not say fare-thee-well, we must say, Shalom! Shalom, mother…shalom!’

He hugged her and she hugged him back. Embarrassed, happy, she closed her eyes, settling the word into her heart.

When the moment was over she took the pitcher and cup and walked out of the workshop, feeling the swelling of a love so great, that she could neither contain it, nor properly express it.

The Painter and the Shepherd

The painter had chosen the church because here the light was the most pure and the darkness the most profound. Without light, colour had no language with which to express its sentiments. Without darkness light could not find its forms.

His father had taught him how to use both.

After his father's death he had been sent a long way from home to become an artist under the wise guidance of another master whose skill he soon surpassed.

He had learnt many lessons. But one lesson his master could not teach him was the one lesson he needed to learn for himself.

He ate a sparse meal under the stars, listening to the lapping of the ocean. The stars told him of his spirit home. The sea told him of places far from Italy and the Urbino of his youth.

Tired from his travels he cleared a spot inside the old church and lay down. Looking at the darkened ribbed vaults he soon fell asleep. 

In the morning he awoke refreshed and began making ready the colours and set the linseed oil in a pan to cook over the little fire. He liked preparation, which to him was as important as the execution. While he organised himself he remembered Florence, where he met Leonardo the great painter, who already an old man, had taught him of darkness and light and the problem of the human skin. The great master too had a problem with faces. At Santa Marie de la Grazie he could not find a model for Judas and for years had worked to understand how to paint the darkness that was the absence of light inside Judas’ soul.

He did not achieve it.

The painter stirred his oil now, peaceful and composed. He was not a scientist like Leonardo who loved him, he was not a tortured man like Michelangelo who hated him. His life was simple and uncomplicated. He was loved and he loved in return. He owned no man and no man owed him. He had a belief that if God had chosen Him as painter of his works then he would also show him how to express his face through the language of light and dark. 

He would wait. 

The day was mild.  He took out the lime and made his way to the beach. He brought back sand to make the mortar. He sifted two parts sand with one part lime and wet it until it was the right consistency then he let it stand while he swept the walls. When they were clean he watered them down thoroughly and after that working the mortar with a trowel he plastered the mixture on a section of the walls to the right of the door. A small amount to begin with to get the plaster flat, then adding more to make it uneven and rough. 

When it was dry he took the charcoal in his hand and stood a moment thinking on what to draw when a figure blotted out the light coming through the door. 

It was a man, tall dark though he could not see the face. He came into the church and looked around. The painter could hear the sound of sheep moving beyond the gaping mouth of the church. 

The man sat down with his back to the ruined altar as if to peruse his art. He took an apple from a canvas bag and polished it on his clothing.

“You are like the Greeks you have no models,” he said.

The painter was puzzled and amused. He set down his charcoal and frowned coming nearer to the man. The light from the door fell on his face and the painter observed him more clearly. It was symmetrical, open, with almond shaped eyes, melancholy in their depths, framed by well-shaped brows, dark like his hair and beard beneath which full lips spread in a smile.

“The Greeks did not use models?” the painter asked the man.

“No.” The man said chewing, “They knew the laws that rule form and movement - the forces of life. They had a memory of the origins of balance and rhythm. They looked to the stars, the moving planets and knew from them concerning the heights. They looked to earth to the heaviness of the bones and they knew the depths..."

“But you are a shepherd. How does a shepherd know so much about painting?”

“When I see a rainbow I do not see colour but the sufferings and joys of light!”

The painter was spellbound. He sat down and fell to smiling.

“Yes...yes...and what is God?”

The other man finished his apple, “God is colour poised between darkness and light. When the sky is red it is His wrath which pours over the world, He knows our sins, our evils. Red is the judgement of God. In the trees the grass, the meadows, the verdant colour I find strength, it brings new life, health to the animals and calmness to the world. I feel Him within myself in green. In blue on the other hand He moves away from me. I want to follow Him to heaven. In yellow He radiates his warmth and life-giving power...He is like the sun ...”

Something moved in the painter’s heart. The man’s voice echoed in sympathy with his soul.

“Do you wish to understand how to paint God, is that it?” the man asked.

The painter nodded, “Yes. I want to paint how He is between darkness and light!”

“Then go to your wall. Begin.” 

“But...how shall I start...what shall I paint?”

The Shepherd made to go and looked behind his shoulder. "Start at the end...and paint Yourself!"

Some Words of Wisdom from History...

History is dressed in resplendent colours. Moving through the ocean of everything that has been she comes upon the chariot of her consort Chronos. She passes with a thunderous roar and a stirring of god-dust and as she does she glances into the weaving of my soul. With her ice-like clarity she sees all. I must be content with only a portion of it.

“What is time?”


Her voice is breathless in the air.

A mirror. 

“What is the past?”

What lives behind it. 

She smiles now, rubies and diamonds, waterfalls and age-worn rivers, a dread beauty full of strife and love, pregnant with the misery of war and the coming of age; the waxing and waning of creation. 

O Man you cannot understand history if you look only to that which is written and falls from pages. Look to what is recorded upon the rarefied airs of my soul! Break the mirror!

"Will I see what I am?"   

“You shall know what you have been as the seed of what you are, and what you are as the flower from which will come the fruit of what you will be!”

Excerpt from Fifth Gospel: Scorpion

The sun entered Scorpio on the night of his birth. That night, in a dream, his mother saw that her boy child would be the agent of three betrayals: he would kill his father; he would marry his mother; and he would bring about a disaster so great that it would taint his name and stain the blood of his people for all ages to come.

The father wanted to rid himself of the child, but the woman, desirous not to kill the new-born for fear of committing a sin, convinced her husband to have the boy taken from Cariot in Judea to a far distant land, to avert his maleficent destiny. This is how it came about, that in the night, the child was spirited away and taken by merchants to a community of Diaspora Jews on the Tigris, near Seleucia in Parthia.

This was a quiet, hidden community, peopled by a community of Mandeans, who had brought together the mysteries of the Persians and combined them with the religion of the Hebrews. Within this community, there lived a wealthy, childless couple known to the Jew merchants. They brought the child to this couple who, upon seeing the tiny innocent creature, grew warm with love, exclaiming to one another that here at last was a son delivered to them by God! Gladly, they paid the merchants thirty pieces of silver for him, and raised him as their own.

They named him Judas.

The Wisdom of Akhenaten and the Twilight of the Gods...

This day the Lord of the Sun arrives on a long curved ship. I will read to him from the books of Thoth: he who has won knowledge of all; who saw all things and understood all things and understanding had the power to disclose and to explain. For what he knew he hid, keeping silent, so that every younger age of cosmic time might seek for them.

I will admit the Lord to the Temple. He will wash his face, hands and feet with fragrant water. He will bend forth his raven head and I will expound the sacred text. In darkness we shall descend to the inner chamber of stone where I shall give him the cordial and chant the words from the Book of the Gates to guide his ascent. He must know each sky before he can be an Akh, a spirit transfigured by Aton: Akhenaten.

In the boat of Isis, sailing upon a river of souls, he will be carried through the gates of Duat. He will see Orion and Sirius as the rays break over the celestial horizon and strike the Sphinx that points to Leo. Isis will show him what has created him and he shall gaze upon her, who is light, and warmth, and life. She shall speak forth the cosmic word that is Osiris and he will hear the choir of glorious spirits, the Akhimu-Seku, sing the glory of Aton, and he will know, that Osiris the Sun has made all things, that he setteth every man in his place, that he distinguishes skin and separates speech. Osiris will rise in his heart and his heart will burn and begin its journey.

After three days have passed he will know these things. He will know also that the time has come for darkness to descend upon the eyes of the priests and kings. Darkness shall come. He will know that Osiris is the Cosmic word, that Isis works from the regions beyond time and creates the womb from which the infant Horus will descend. A deed that shall mark a new age.

Later, I shall be thrown into the pit of snakes and my Lord who has seen these things shall have his name erased from the list of Kings and from the sacred texts and his face shall be struck from the reliefs of stone and no man shall utter his name. He will be remembered only as a heretic.

Aum...Aumen...This shall be so...

How Stefan Rautter illustrates his Thesaurus and Fausto Experiences Blue...

Rautter placed before him a solid disc made of copper with ten divisions, each denoting one of Aristotle’s categories. A crank connected to a devise - a series of wheels within wheels - made the large disc rotate through inertia.

“You see the blacksmith at the village made it for me, it is very commodious.” He then brought forth a multitude of pieces of paper weighed down by pins, upon which the fundamental concepts were written.

“Ja! You see! Thesaurus!” He said proudly.

“But how does it work?” asked Fausto feeling disoriented and unwell.

“Of course it would take a lifetime or two, and I shall devote what is left of mine, in order to enumerate every substance, every quality etcetera. However I have spent many hours collecting several hundred upon which our little compendium is predicated. The wheel is the causa, or should we say, the motivator. Once it is set to a spin, as Raymon Lull your fellow countryman tells us, we must throw in our concepts, and allow them to fall where they will. This way they will be found, one on another. That is the secret mein silly fellow, the secret is this, then we read!”

“But that sounds nonsensical.” Answered Fausto flatly, feeling the effects of the arquaeous taken moments before.

“Nonsensical to you perhaps!” He thundered now in a bad mood. “But to those who are not chaotic senior, completely practical.”

He cranked, and the wheel started to spin, slowly at first, then faster, then the monk ceremoniously threw in a handful of fundamental concepts.

“Now senior, we see what we find……” He waited patiently for the disc to come to a standstill. “You see what poetry! For blue we have…..Melancholy cerulean speck of….backward liquid matter glowing outward momentarily together! There you see?”

“It doesn’t make sense.” Sighed Fausto.

“What doesn’t you silly, silly, fool?”

“It, your thesaurus, it is mechanical, awkward and….and it sounds absurd and not at all poetical!”

“Absurd!” Rautter flew into a rage occasioned perhaps by lack of sleep, and the wisdom of his neophyte’s words, and turning the handle on disc spun it around and around.

Fausto observed it with intensity, was he too spinning? He saw a mountainous cerulean blue into which his one eye dissolved, wishing to accompany it forever. In blue there was grace, devotion, and selflessness that sought to become larger than himself, to expand outwards to the stars and beyond to the great cosmic spaces.

He was lost, weaving and becoming, irradiated by inner suns out of a depthless darkness. Manifold permutations and combinations of existence he had been told, was measured by these principles but (alas!) he was illiterate! Form unrecognisable! Words dispossessed, weeping nightingales frowning in the sadness of an inner winter - blue. A light shot through a darkened soul illuminated a violet therein, observing the innocence of its uplifted face - blue. At once fused, then dispersed, curling, swirling being, positioning and possessing rainbows of hyperbole in a sky that was fading and becoming pale, shedding its dewy tears upon the earth - blue.
...

The Herbalist - Excerpt from The Seal

“Who are you?”

The man smiled a long straight row of teeth at him. “I am no one, and I am everyone!” he said.

This strangeness seemed less strange to him since he was without pain for the first time in a week. “Where are you from?” he asked.

“I spend my days in forests and valleys.”

“Do you not have a home? A village?” Etienne moved to find a comfortable place.

“God is my home,” the man said, simply.

The emphasis of these last words, made Etienne cautious and he chewed the remnants of the bitter herb in silence, tasting heresy.

“God is in that herb and in this blade of grass,” he said weaving the green things in his deft hands. “My soul creeps into the plants and it sees through them and I become one with them. In them I see how God rejoices. In the heart he is also to be found, but there he does not rejoice he is made sad by sin. When you find God you find the healing power in everything…I have found the healing in those herbs in your wound…God shall work in them and it shall not be the cause of your undoing.”

His eyes stared into Etienne’s a moment and in that stare Etienne observed the spirit of the blade of grass and the spirit of the tree and the spirit of the sky and cloud and river and all of it seemed to speak of wide spaces and heavenly distances, as if his life had only been a dream and only now was he awake and flying up to the heights to see it. All things lay spread out before him: the waves of cloud that gathered around the peaks of the high cliffs of the mountains throwing their long shadows on the world; the river running, foaming and rolling over polished rocks; the meadow covered in the first purple flush of Spring that stretched towards the line of fir trees. Here and there a little snow. Scarcely had he time to think on it than he saw himself a youth full of fresh notions and unspent years. In the old man’s eyes he observed it, therefore; the young man and the old man who looked upon him as he, now and again, observed Jourdain.

“No.” Etienne said to him and dropped a speck of a glance, a fidget of the eye towards the Seal, “The wound shall not be my end after all. I thank you.”

The man got up stiffly as if his bones were hinged and rusty and creaking, “I will go, for nature is old and revelation is young…” he said this and threw the item he had been weaving into Etienne’s lap.

It was a cross.

“The sword will be forgotten one day,” the old man said to him, “but the memory of the cross will live, not as it does now, the black cross of death, but a living cross entwined with roses…” He looked at Etienne, “Someday!” Then he took himself to his mule and went on his way...