Bless the Child (29 page)

The Reverend Mother looked thoughtfully at the young girl. “You converse, then, with the Goddess?” she asked. Mim, assuming that all those training for the Great Mother’s mysteries did so, said yes.

“We will speak again,” Reverend Mother replied in a sepulchral tone, like that used in ceremony. She shut her eyes to commune with the Inner Planes, and Mim could see the audience was at an end. She turned to ask her father’s leave to go, but the High Priestess spoke again.

“You are the friend of Karaden, are you not?” she demanded abruptly.

Mim answered yes.

“Beware!”
The Priestess warned. And that was all.

Maggie stirred restlessly on the bed. She wasn’t quite asleep anymore and the dream lay heavy on the periphery of consciousness. Senuset . . . Karaden . . . Why were these names so redolent of emotion? So familiar, and so full of pain.

She tried to remember the details of the dream, but it was already fading like mist before the sun.

She thrashed about in the covers, seeking comfort, and finally drifted back to fitful sleep.

E
llie smiled a good-bye to her last customer, and motioned Maggie to sit down. As soon as the woman was gone, Ellie locked the door behind her, and pulled down the shade.

“How are you doing, kiddo?” she asked, as she sat down near Maggie.

“I’m wearing pretty thin,” Maggie replied honestly. “I’ve been having those weird dreams that I can’t quite remember. They seem to take place in Egypt, or some other ancient place, I can’t be sure. But they’re powerful dreams, Ellie. The one I had last night seems to be hovering just beyond my grasp. As if I
need
to remember it, but can’t.” She shook her head in consternation.

“And I can’t get through to Cody . . . I still phone every single day, but that’s just a waste of time, so I spend my life thinking something awful may happen to her before I get there . . .” She shrugged her shoulders to say it was far too overwhelming for explanation. “And there’s something about these dreams that’s really bugging me.”

“Enlightenment isn’t painful,” Ellie answered, “but the process of getting there is a real pisser, isn’t it?” She looked thoughtfully at Maggie for a moment, then said, “I think we’ll know the date of the Materialization within the next day or so, Mags. Peter and I seem to be headed toward the same conclusion. I think he intends to check with that Egyptian at the museum, to see if he agrees with us. Have you figured out what you’ll do once you know?”

“All I’ve figured out is that no matter what date you two come up with, I can’t wait very much longer before I try to get Cody out of that hell-house.”

Ellie frowned. “I’d really like you to do some kind of past-life regression, before you attempt that, Mags,” she said seriously. “There’s a great deal happening here that we don’t yet fully understand. Every time I meditate on what’s what, I’m told that
you
must unravel the scroll, before I can interpret it.”

“Look, Ellie, I’m just not ready for that. It’s hard enough as it is, to keep my feet planted firmly on the ground, without regressing into never-never land.”

“Knowledge is power, Mags,” Ellie insisted quietly. “And I’m convinced you’ll have to find power you haven’t yet imagined, to save Cody. Those dreams of yours are probably your subconscious’s effort to give you the information you need. Just promise me you’ll think about my suggestion.”

Maggie nodded noncommittally.

“And one other thing . . .”

“Yes?”

“Promise me you’ll try to have some fun, nutty as that sounds. Or at least a little laughter. It’s a question of balance, Mags . . . all negative emotion will weaken you, make you ill. Even in the worst extremity, you have to attempt to find a little joy. Even if it’s momentary.”

“How on earth could I do that, knowing the danger Cody’s in?”

“Sometimes, it’s necessary to compartmentalize, when you’re besieged by Fate . . . to allow yourself small pockets of laughter or pleasure, despite the tragedy raging around you. Because those little pockets balance the scales some, Mags. Without a bit of joy, the human heart withers . . . and without balance, the whole system goes down. ‘The mind lives on the heart, like any parasite,’ somebody said. Somebody wise.”

Ellie looked pointedly at Maggie. “Let Dev take you out to dinner—or Peter for that matter—and talk about something other than Cody or theology,” she added, with a soft smile. “Mr. Wong would give you the same advice, if you asked him. The Chinese understand the body/mind/spirit link better than anyone. Think
balance,
Mags—and don’t you dare feel guilty about it, either. Hanging crepe twenty-four hours a day doesn’t do a dammed thing for Cody. Remember, if you go down for the count, she has nobody.”

Maggie replayed Ellie’s advice in her head for several blocks, then instead of going home, she went to Mr. Wong’s house.

The
old man greeted her warmly. It was customary for students to drop by to speak with their Sifu at random hours, and since his wife’s death he lived alone.

“Your friend is wise, Maggie,” he said, when she’d repeated Ellie’s words. “A good friend shields you from the storm. You already know from your martial arts training what happens when the harmony of your qi is disturbed. Your spirit weakens and your power dissipates.”

“I understand the importance of balance, Sifu,” she said earnestly, “but realistically, how can I control my emotions? How can I
not
be afraid for Cody and me? How can I
not
be angry over all that’s happened to us? How can I
not
be heartsick in the face of all this?”

He smiled a little; the parchment-wrinkling at the eyes and mouth made him look curiously elfin.

“You cannot stop life from happening, Maggie. Trees may prefer calm, but the wind will not subside! And, you cannot change your nature. Rivers and mountains are more easily changed than a man’s nature. What you
can
do is see your pathway clearly, and work with the energies of your life to meet its challenge.
See
your anger . . . find what is useful in it, discard the rest.
See
your fear. It has no value to you. Let it go.
Accept
your sorrow; it is appropriate. Then leave it behind, for it, too, has no value in your plan.

“What you cannot balance in yourself, you must bring to those who can help you . . . I will treat you today, to bring your energy into harmony. But, then you must plan for tomorrow. My master would say to me, ‘Do not wait until you are thirsty to dig a well.’”

Maggie lay down on the small bed Mr. Wong used for his acupuncture treatments. She knew the Chinese believed the body to be a vast electrical system, with intricate circuitry that could be adjusted to bring the body, mind, and spirit into balance and health.

He had taught her a great deal about traditional Chinese medicine over the years, in fact. About its five-thousand-year-old roots, and its sensible philosophy. She knew that the meridian lines and points shown on an acupuncture chart were renderings of the energy grid that carried life-force to the organ systems, and that Mr. Wong knew the ancient secrets of how to tinker with the circuitry to heal and to strengthen.

Mr. Wong took Maggie’s left wrist in his strong hand and “listened” with his sensitive fingers for the nine pulses that would indicate for him the condition of her heart, liver, and kidneys. She felt his knowing fingers probe her energy at different levels, until satisfied, then she felt him move onto her right wrist, which carried the message of lung, stomach/spleen, and triple burner, a large energy grid that had no counterpart in Western Medicine.

Maggie knew that based on what he found, Mr. Wong would select hair-thin disposable needles, and insert them at half a dozen or so points on her body, to drain or tonify, according to the needs he perceived in his examination. She also knew that the acupuncture would be painless, and so she let herself drift into the relaxation the treatment always produced, as endorphins flooded the system with relief from pain and anxiety, and complex short circuits were rerouted into balance.

As she drifted into reverie, Maggie saw the image of a slender dark-haired child float into sudden sharp focus. The girl was walking in a stately procession of some kind down a long temple aisle; holding tightly to her parents’ hands.

The parents, she somehow knew, were priest and priestess as well as father and mother. Maggie felt herself meld with the child in the reverie, feeling her tremulous emotions and exhilaration. It was hard not to be frightened, but it was a great honor to be chosen.

She had been in temple training since she was three, and now she was nearly seven, so Mim-Atet-Ra well knew the rules of the ceremony. But up to now there had been home and family to rely on; after today she would be left here at Saqqara, the great Pyramid Complex of the Gods, all alone. Years would pass before she would be allowed to leave, and even then, she would no longer be the child of Senuset, the artisan, and Niyohma, the Seeress of Mennofer. She would be the priestess-designate of Holy Mother Isis, her every thought and action watched and judged for worthiness.

It was not that Mim railed against her fate; she had been born with the sacred caul covering her face and was thus destined for the Goddess from her earliest breath. And she was a docile child who wished to please her parents, whom she loved, and her Gods, whom she both loved and feared. But the training would be increasingly rigorous from tomorrow on.

One could not be accepted as a candidate for the order of Melchizedek, unless the right was earned. Not Pharaoh himself could buy entry to the Greater Mysteries. Many students were accepted for education in the Lesser Mysteries, for every temple needed priests—but the Greater Mysteries were the province of a secret hierarchy that answered only to the Gods. It was acceptable to fear, her father had told her, that would pass with the years of training. But it all stretched before her at this moment, endless as the desert wastes outside the great Step Pyramid’s gates; endless and frightening and unutterably lonely.

Who are these people?
Maggie wondered, as she lay in the half-sleep of the relaxation produced by the needles.
Who are these people and why do the dog my dreams?
She slept for a little and awoke refreshed.

She felt revived by Mr. Wong’s acupuncture treatment. He was a skillful doctor, trained in the old ways by his master; medicine and martial arts went hand in hand in China.

It always amazed her that balancing her body’s energy could give her clarity of mind as well. He and Ellie were both right, she had become terribly imbalanced because of all that was happening.

M
aggie put down the New Testament she’d been browsing through with a thud. “This story of Martha and Mary has always made me furious,” she said, rubbing her temples to stave off a headache; she and Peter had been working for hours.

He looked over at her, and grinned despite his fatigue. “You’re in good company. It annoyed Kipling, too.” He was sitting in his favorite chair by the fire, as if he belonged there. It unnerved her somewhat that they’d slipped into such an easy closeness.

“Here, we have Christ dropping in for tea whenever he’s in the neighborhood,” she pursued, “and there’s Martha cooking, cleaning, sewing, sweeping, and God knows what else, while Mary does nothing but sit on the floor and listen to the Master’s stories. Then, when Martha asks for a little help with the dishes, the Lord reprimands her for not taking ‘the better part.’”

“And that bother you, eh?”

“Yes, it bothers me! I am unquestionably descended from Martha’s side of the family. And, I thought the Lord was supposed to help those who helped themselves. If we just sit back and wait for the Lord to save Cody, will He do it?”

“I think the Arabs have the most practical theology,” Peter answered, amused. “’Trust in Allah . . . but tie your camel to a tree.’”

They both laughed, and Peter realized with a pang of regret, that being with this woman was now, the great joy of his life. He had come to mark the hours of the day by her presence and absence . . . missed her oddly reverent irreverence, and the camaraderie she seemed to feel with God, that had nothing to do with dogma.

“When you talk to God, Maggie,” he asked suddenly, “what do you talk about?”

“Oh, I don’t know, exactly. Whatever seems appropriate, I suppose. “Hello, God, Maggie, here. That’s a lovely tree You made,’ or, ‘Great work on that sunset, thanks for letting me see . . .’ I like to check in when I’m not asking Him for anything, so He doesn’t think I’m just a fair-weather friend.

“Sometimes I carp, of course, she continued. “I’ve had a few things to say about all that awful handshaking and kissing strangers at an English speaking Mass. I loved the Mass in Latin, Peter. It had such stature . . . mystery, drama, high pageant. The English Mass sounds clunky and flatfooted to me. Language exalted as cement. It’s like trading in the cathedral of Notre Dame for a cinderblock prefab.”

Peter laughed aloud, as Maggie had hoped he would; it was such a good thing to have someone to laugh with. “I can just imagine your conversation with God on that subject, Maggie,” he said, mimicking her speech pattern. “’Listen here, God. You’d better keep an eye on what they’re doing to Your Church. I mean, I don’t like to tell You Your business or anything, but who could take it seriously anymore?’”

“Peter,” Maggie said softly, suddenly needing to know more, to understand this unfathomable man who had become tangled up in her life, in so strange a fashion. “A long while ago, you told me you once turned a corner, and never could find your way back . . . “

He nodded. It was only fair of her to want to know . . . the corner . . . the turning point . . . but did he himself even know the truth of where he’d wandered?

“Such a complex story, Maggie dear,” he said with sudden sadness. “I’ll try to find a beginning . . .” Peter was quiet for a long moment, then began again. “I was an anthropologist, as well as a linguist, as you know. Both professions gave me the opportunity, not merely to travel to exotic places, but to live with other cultures for extended periods, close to the people and their belief systems.

“In my wanderings, I ran across recurrent information that there were
avatars—ascended
beings of some sort—living in the world at this moment in time, and I determined that I would seek them out. It didn’t seem an odd thing to do—just an extension of my comparative theology studies. Would you not seek out Christ, if you knew where to find him? I asked myself. So, I began my search.”

“And did you find such remarkable beings?”

“I found two, although I’d been told there were five on the planet, currently. Then, I created a premise that demanded I spend time in their company. I couched it in theological language acceptable to the Church’s new leniency toward ecumenism, of course, so that, while my superiors may have been wary, they did not attempt to deter me.” He paused, uncertain how to express the magnitude of what this rebellious action had unleashed.

“As I told you when we met, I have lived in places where our paradigms of reality have little validity. For example, there’s an Indian tribe in the Amazon, in which only that which is dreamed is deemed to have substance—waking life, they feel, is too absurd to be given credence. My experiences were beginning to alter my perceptions, nearly that radically.

“I met the first of these avowed Avatars, and he became my obsession. I studied him as if he were an anthropological specimen. I was determined to test him, to expose his flaws, to convince myself that he could not be what he seemed.” Peter smiled enigmatically.

“Instead, he cheated me of my goal. He challenged me. Humbled me, Changed me. ‘You
are in the web of God,’
he told me.
‘It will end in ecstasy.’
He was the first to bring me flashes of a shift in reasoning that my Church would consider heretical, and I would consider the beginning of wisdom. I thought I had found the Grail.”

Maggie said nothing, and Peter continued. “I had always had a mystical bent, Maggie . . . this teacher opened my psyche to the Unseen Universe that I had only glimpsed before. I began to have clear visionary experiences . . . perceptions of the order of God’s creation. Lightning illuminates, and I was split asunder by visions of mankind in an upward spiral that led to ultimate communion with the Godhead. One lifetime or one thousand lifetimes . . . however long it takes us to get there, I saw that we were going home. The curtain had been lifted, and I had seen what the ego forgets, but the soul remembers. The Sea of Light of all Mystics, in all time.
Shunrata
to the Tibetans,
The Face of Glory
to the Sufis,
The Omega Point
to Teilhard de Chardin . . . my life had been shattered open by spiritual lightning! I had seen the great unfurling of Divinity.

“When I returned to the United State, luminescent with the Light that had been shown me, I published—or rather, circulated without benefit of Imprimatur—the book that made me famous and infamous, simultaneously.

“I was lauded by the intellectual secular press, and vilified by the conservative elements within the Church. I was reprimanded by the watchdogs of the faith, but because of the intense secular notoriety I enjoyed at that point, I was give a second chance to save my soul.

“I was put on a very short leash by my superiors, and sent to the spiritual Siberia of an impoverished parish, upstate. The chastening they chose for me was very wise, although of course, I didn’t know it at the time. Peter Messenguer, boy genius and proud intellect, became a lowly curate in a redneck church. I was to be humbled and overworked . . . there would be no time left for intellectual pretensions. And, I expect they thought there would be no one in this particular parish with either an IQ or an education that could provide me an occasion of sin.” He chuckled.

“They were entirely wrong. For six years, I labored among the poor and illiterate and desperate . . . and they taught me what it meant to be a priest. That, my dear Maggie, you cannot learn in theology school, nor in the Roman corridors of ecclesiastical power. Only the
people,
God-seeking and long-suffering, can give you that particular gift. In the beginning, I was angry, humiliated, anxious for release from my purgatory. After a while, I understood how God had worked his wisdom in my life
despite—
and even
through—
the small-mindedness of my superiors.”

He paused and sighed deeply.

“I remember one particular house call—there were dozens that could illustrate this same point, I suppose, but there’s always one that is the lodestar . . .” Peter’s voice had hushed to a kind of reverence. “I called upon a woman with a crippled husband, in a tumbledown shanty—she had asked for confession and Communion to be brought. When I asked if she had children, she showed me her nine-year-old twin daughters, who were afflicted with cystic fibrosis. Oh, Maggie, dear, how I remember their frail beauty . . . that strange luminosity that shimmers in those on the brink of eternity was already upon them. They were gentle and patient and courageous, and I saw in their eyes, the intimacy they shared with death.

“The woman spent her days and nights clearing their lungs of the phlegm that would ultimately strangle them . . . Hercules in the Augean stables labored no harder. They had almost no money, she told me, since her husband’s accident . . . she nursed him, too, of course. And with all that she bore, Maggie, still she had asked me to bring the Blessed Sacrament to her and hear her confession. What sin could touch a soul like hers’ I remember thinking, as I looked at her patient courage.” He paused again.

“Before I confessed her, she told me sheepishly that the question of birth control plagued her. She loved her husband, she said shyly, and there was little that gave him joy . . . but they couldn’t survive if another damaged child was born to them, and as they wouldn’t dream of abortion, they had no choice but to abstain from sex.”

Peter’s gaze was far away.
“The laity issues,
they were called within the halls of celibate men, Maggie. Responsible birth control . . . allowing homosexuals to receive the sacraments . . . divorce . . . the issues of frail, patient humanity, trying to stay close to God, despite the odds.” He sighed.

“She and I both knew that if she confessed to me that she used contraception, and had no firm purpose of amendment , I could not grant her absolution. So, she had chosen to raise the question with me first, to see where I stood. She seemed fragile as glass to me, Maggie.
Do not make me the instrument of adding one more burden to this woman’s portion,
I pleaded with God.

“Would You really damn these struggling souls, for so responsible an act?
I demanded of Him.
Tell me what to tell them! Help me to help your suffering children. Take me where You will and I will follow . . .
I left her house in a daze of question marks of conscience.

“She was the beginning for me. I went home to fast and pray . . . and it all began to coalesce for me. The revelations in African and India, the people’s need, my own conviction of the lovingness and justice of God, my intense desire for cosmic understanding—from all these, and from wherever that divine spark of inspiration originates, I evolved a hypothesis about our evolution toward God. Emily Dickinson said, ‘The truth must dazzle gradually . . . or all the world would be blind,’ but once the truth begins to dazzle you cannot help but see. The wild journey begins, Maggie, and you are then powerless to leave the roller coaster.

“I found myself in the frenzied clutches of a visionary experience beyond anything I had ever deemed possible. I worked for my ‘cause’ by day, and wrote by night. There were others in the Church who were questioning, too, of course. ‘The Burning Brand’ they dubbed me in the press, and I was indeed aflame, Maggie, for I truly believed I had been inspired by a vision that would change the course of humanity’s yearnings for God. And, I was so young! Oh Maggie, I still had the passion to support my visions. So, I wrote about that passion.

“This time, there were no cautionary rumblings from the diocese. No, ‘I hear you’re teaching some controversial things, Father, don’t you think your parishioners’ minds need to remain clear of such confusions?”

“This time, my work was not only never approved for publication, it was summarily banned.
‘Do not publish. Do not disseminate. Do not breathe this heresy aloud, on pain of excommunication.

“I was called before the Holy Inquisition, currently named the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. I didn’t even know I was being investigated on such august levels. I was warned of my shameful abuse of intellectual pride.
“Theology is the servant of the Church, Father, not a public forum for your arrogance.’

“There was, of course, no compromise position for me to take. I didn’t want to harm my Church, I simply no longer had any choice but to follow my own conscience. I was hung on a cross of paradox: Am I at one with God because I’m following my own conscience, I asked myself, in anguish . . . or is the sacrifice He demands of me that I surrender myself and my theories to Church discipline?
How do I serve thee?
was my crucifixion.
What is Thy will for me?
I published
The long Road from Calvary
in the secular press, not in defiance, but in desperate faith. I had to find God or die. I fully anticipated excommunication.”

“My God, Peter,” Maggie said softly. “You must have been torn to shreds by all this.”