by Неизвестный
In effect, Jonathan made a fateful synthesis of Teilhardian evolutionary doctrines and Teilhard's idea of Jesus. And he permeated it with a deep humanism and had a knowing eye for the yawning indifference now gripping traditional Christian believers.
In Jonathan's outlook, “religious” belief became easy again. At one pole, one could accept the currently pervasive idea that man evolved from inanimate matter. At the other, one had no need to aim at believing in an unimaginable “resurrection” of the body. Instead, there was a return “to where we came from,” as Jonathan used to say: a going back to the oneness of nature and of this universe.
All this allowed the clever use of the full range of vocabulary and concept about “salvation,” “divine love,” “hope,” “goodness,” “evil,” “honesty”—all terms and ideas that were already so comforting and familiar to his congregation. But all these terms were understood in a sense completely different from the traditional one: minus a supernatural god, minus a man-god called Jesus, and minus a supernatural condition called “personal afterlife.”
Jonathan's congregation was never very large-never more than about 150 people. But he drew deep satisfaction from it all; for in his mind, all this was a preparation for the glorious New Time which was just around the corner-at the Shrine of the Loft.
But there were deep consequences for Jonathan. As time went on, and the spring of 1969 approached, he found more and more that, in the literal sense of the words, “he was not his own man” any longer. Outsiders—his flock, his friends—noticed no difference beyond that he had let his golden hair grow longer, that he wore exotic clothes, and that his language became very exalted.
With the passage of time, however, Jonathan's “movement” seemed to be in danger of petering out-before the New Time started! He was getting no new followers. His doctrine and outlook did not easily accommodate the more flamboyant upheavals of the 19605. He was no revolutionary in the political sense. The Shrine of the Loft was clearly on the wane before it had really taken off. He needed something new.
Meanwhile, Jonathan would wake up in the middle of the night and find his mind full of strange impulses coming from that “remote control.” He kept finding himself packing a bag and preparing for a journey. He spent long hours alone in his Shrine; and later he did not know what he had been doing there all that time. The “remote control” was inexorable in its domination. He had to wait until he was told what to do. While waiting for that order, he performed marriages and birth celebrations for his few followers. He held weekly services. He dreamed constantly of starting a new priesthood and a new church that would sweep the ranks of Catholics and Protestants.
Toward the end of the summer of 1969, Jonathan's “instructions” started to come in earnest. He was invited to spend three weeks in the Canadian wilds with a party of friends who annually went there to hunt and fish.
Jonathan knew the moment he received the letter of invitation that this was it. Some inner voice kept telling him: “Go! Go! You will now find your mirror of eternity. Ordination to the supreme priesthood is at hand!” When asked if he heard an actual voice on this occasion, he denies this. It was an inner conviction coming with the same firmness of all his other “instructions” and exercising the same irresistible compulsion, far beyond the effect of mere words.
With Jonathan, the hunting party numbered 12 people. They lodged at a base camp. Each day they split up into groups. Each group departed for two- to four-day treks in the wilderness.
Apart from some fishing, Father Jonathan busied himself with painting and writing. But after the first week, he found himself venturing alone farther and farther from the base camp. He was looking for something or some place. When he came on it, he would recognize it, he knew. His walks always followed the course of a river on whose bank the base camp stood. He could easily find his way home by retracing his steps along the river.
It was on one of these forays that he found his place—as he called it later. That name, “my place,” has now a grisly significance for Jonathan: there his final immersion in demonic possession was accomplished.
One day after lunch, he had been walking for about three hours in a southerly direction along the river. For those hours, the course of the waters had run fairly straight. At a certain spot, however, Jonathan noticed that the river entered between two high ridges of ground and that within them it described an S-shape. When Jonathan reached the farther curve of the S-shape, his whole body and mind suddenly became electrified with a sense of discovery. He stood stock-still, one Latin word-sacerdos (priest)-ringing like a clear bell in his ears. Sacerdos!
That was it! This was the place! Here he would be ordained truly as priest of the New Being and Bishop-Leader of the New Time. This was it! He felt full of gratitude.
The place was beautiful. The water in that corner was not more than a few feet deep. The center of the riverbed was a soft, shifting carpet of sand as white as salt. On each side, like rows of attendant black-cowled monks, there were tiers of boulders and rocks, rounded and smoothed by the overflow of water during the yearly flooding of the river. In the corners of the S-shape, on each bank, there was a small, shelving beach of that pure white carpet of sand sloping up out of the water to a rim of blue and black pebbles, then ferns and grass, then the pines, alders, sycamores, chestnuts. Everything burned in the sun, and silent shadows gloomed over rock and sand and river to make a patchwork of green half-darkness in the yellow light.
Jonathan could see a hundred summer suns mirrored in the green-gray water, and each of them gave off a fire that dazzled him. The river moved slowly, but not sluggishly, all the while singing a pervasive refrain of calm and constancy.
The place was Jonathan's “mirror of eternity,” an opening in nature through which he could glimpse the strength of eternity, its softness and cleansing power, and the boundless spaces of its being.
Jonathan fell stunned and crying on the beach. Stretched out full length, face down, his hands digging into the sand, he kept shouting: “Sacerdos! Sacerdos! Sacerdos! Sacerdos!” His cries ricocheted off the rocks and the trees, each echo coming back fainter and fainter as if traveling away with his petitions and hopes, until he found himself listening silently.
The wetness of the sand soaked into his clothes, and the sun warmed his back. He began to feel a buoyancy all through his body: some mighty hand held him on its palm. He heard himself saying almost plaintively: “Make me. . . make me, please. . . make me. . . priest. . . priest-make. . .” Every word was spoken into the white sand beneath his face.
Now thoughts, emotions, imaginings, all seemed to be under the control of that hand. And he began to feel an emptying sensation. His past was being erased; his entire past, what he remembered and even what he had forgotten, all that had entered into the making of what he had been up to that moment, was being flushed from him. He was being emptied of every concept, every logical reasoning, every memory and image which his culture, his religion, his ambient, his reading had formed in him.
Then, under some inner impulse which he questioned no longer, he rose and went slowly into the water. He stood in midstream looking at the sky for a moment. Obeying the inner voice, he bent down; his hands groped at the base of a rock and sought to reach to where its roots went deep in water. The river swirled caressingly over his shoulders and back. His chin now was almost level with the surface.
“I was reaching for the veined heart of our world,” he told me in one of our conversations, “to where Jesus, the Omega Point, was evolving and evolving, and was on the threshold of emerging.”
It seemed to him that “only this world was forgiving and cleansing,” it alone had “united elements.” He had the impression that now at last he had “broken through,” and that the revelation of all revelations had been granted him: the real truth, the real god, the real Jesus, the real holiness, the real sacrament, the real being, and the new time in which all this newness would inevitably take over.
He lost count of ordi
nary time, of the sun and the wind, of the river and its banks. The wind was a great rushing bird whose wings dovetailed into the green and brown arms of the trees on either side of him. The rocks became living things, his brothers and sisters, his millennial cousins, witnessing his consecration with the reverence that only nature had. And the water around him winked with gleaming eyes as it sang the song it had learned millions of years ago, from the swirling atoms of space, before there was any world and man to hear it. It was an irresistible ecstasy for Jonathan.
He began to chant to himself: “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” Then this became “Lord of Light! Lord of Light! Lord of Light!” Once again he had no control. Every fiber and sinew in his body and mind was flooded with a dusky power. Now he was chanting: “Lord of Light! Lord of Jesus and of all things! Your slave! Your servant! Your creature! Your priest!”
He felt a soft relaxation throughout himself; he had now no trace of tension, no anticipation, no forward-looking thought or emotion. All was wrapped up and contained in the now, the here-present.
He rose to his feet in the shallow water and faced the bank; his hands, bleeding from his efforts to dig for the bottom of that rock, hung by his sides. He looked at the scratches and tears in his fingers and palms, loving the gleam of blood in the sunshine on the background of his clean skin.
Slowly he walked up the beach. For no reason his pace quickened. He started to trot. Once past the sand and on solid ground, he ran zigzagging through the trees, propelled by the force within him. The ground sloped upward. Still running, he was out of breath as he reached the top of the slope. He began to falter and stumble.
He reached out for support. But on every side the tall, rough bodies of the pine trees, their branches many times his height off the ground, their heads lost in the sky, were the only things near to him; and they gave no help.
Through the haze of his sweat and weariness he saw on the ridge he was approaching a small tree with branches near the ground. He stumbled, fell, got up, and labored until he fell against the tree trunk, his outstretched arms falling on the short branches sticking out on either side. He leaned there a while, his cheek against the tree, his armpits resting on the branches, catching his breath and sobbing half syllables, waiting for his strength to return.
But he became aware that his face was lying against something smooth: this was no rough pine bark or knotty sycamore skin. He opened his eyes slowly, easing himself to a standing position and drew back from the tree wonderingly.
With a growing horror he could not control, he now saw it in clear outline: a bare tree trunk, stripped of all its bark, severed to a quarter of its original height by some force—a lightning bolt, a random axe, some accident. It was a withered tree trunk with only two stubby arms. Blood stained the putty-white surface of those mute cross-pieces and its withered trunk.
He was standing in front of a cross, he thought with a fierce horror and revulsion. There's blood on it. My blood? Or whose blood? His blood? Whose blood? The questions were hysterical cries of fear in his brain.
He started to shout. “Curse it! Curse him! Curse that blood! Curse that false Jesus!” The “remote control” was pouring the words into his brain, and he was echoing them with his lips. “Destroy it! Break those arms!” The instructions tumbled pell-mell.
He stretched out his hands, gripped one arm of the tree, and began to pull while he shouted. “Curses on you! Curses on you! I am free of you! Lord of Light! Save me! Help!” The arm of the tree broke. He seized the other arm with both hands and started pulling and shouting. It gave without warning, and its release sent him flying backward, tumbling down the slope toward the river, his world now a careening tunnel of lights and blows and bumps, until he fell against a tree trunk and lost consciousness.
The search party found him there a few hours later, just before sundown. He was semiconscious and weak, his two hands still holding a broken tree branch. They lifted him to a sitting position, his back resting against the tree that had broken his fall. He was facing the ridge. The sun was setting, but its last red-gold rays flowed thinly around the withered tree, its cross-arms now splintered stubs, its trunk stained with dark splotches.
Jonathan did not notice it for a while until his vision focused. Gradually he became aware of tall figures around him, of voices speaking, of hands that were putting a flask of whisky to his lips, and of other hands tending to his bruises. He heard the sounds of branches being cut with axes. But his gaze fell on the tree. Alarm bells sounded in him. He began to struggle to his feet, his eyes fixed on that tree.
The red light of the sun was rapidly fading to blue-black twilight, and the tree was dissolving into the ridge. One of the men in the search party saw Jonathan struggling to rise and noticed the fixity of his stare at the tree.
“Don't worry, Father,” he said, “it's only a tree. A dead tree. It's all right, I tell you. Take it easy, will you, Father! It's only a tree, Father.” He exerted pressure on Jonathan and prevented him from standing up.
Jonathan slumped back wearily and muttered: “Only a tree. Only a tree.” Then he blacked out. They placed him on the makeshift stretcher they had fashioned and set off for the campsite.
The end was not far off for Jonathan; but he did not seem to realize it. After a few days' rest at the base camp, the party journeyed to Manchester, New Hampshire. Jonathan was taken to his mother's house.
He was extremely weak, suffered bouts of dizziness, had pains all over his body. He found it difficult to sleep at night and could not concentrate on reading or painting. The family doctor prescribed a two-month rest.
Jonathan spent the first few weeks in bed under sedation. He was tended by his mother and a day nurse. Gradually his strength returned. By October's end he was up and around the house. In November he was strong enough to walk around the garden, and he started to read and paint again.
His mother had been in touch with Father David at the seminary through her pastor. And the moment Jonathan (she also had to adopt his new name) was at all well, she telephoned David. He arrived one afternoon to see Jonathan.
The meeting was a disturbing one for David, but for Jonathan it seemed to be an occasion of new strength, an eerie triumph bathed him even in his misery. He addressed David as “my son,” using a paternalistic tone of voice that affected David in an unexpected way. It was the first time in all his years as an adult that David had felt real fear.
With this atmosphere as a brooding backdrop to their conversation, David and Jonathan chatted about Canada. The common report brought back by his companions had been that either Jonathan had been attacked by a wild animal, or that for some other reason he had panicked, taken to his heels, and knocked himself unconscious while running. After a few minutes with Jonathan, David was certain that something much more significant than a mere accident had happened, but Jonathan would not open up to him.
After a while, Jonathan succeeded in shifting David's queries away from Canada and the recent trip. He began talking instead about his new apostolate and of his plans for a New York “mission.” Then surprisingly, and in ways that seemed elusive to him, the conversation began returning to David himself. And once again David found that a whole part of his being was in total accord with all that Jonathan said. And again, in some other part of him, he felt a deep resistance.
Finally Jonathan rounded on him at one moment: “Father David, my son, eventually you too will find the light, and come out into the open and preach the New Time and the New Being.”
David's conflict welled up full inside him, a welcoming chord for Jonathan's portentous words, and a hard, gripping fright. Supposing he could not stop himself going all the way into exactly what Jonathan was doing—whatever that was. What then?
David recalls vividly the slow and deep nausea that built up inside him as he sat in that sick room surrounded by a quiet countryside. It was disgust driven with fear. He had had a similar but not quite identical experience once before, descending into a mass grave in Africa, at the
tomb of an ancient tribal chieftain. Over the piles of bones of people sacrificed to ensure a chieftain's safe passage to eternal happiness, he had felt the touch of independent and sovereign evil, almost heard its voice in the fetid darkness saying silkily to him: “Come into my domain, David! You belong here!” And it kept coming into his mind that those long-buried men had never known anything about Jesus or Christianity. Some obscure conclusions had started to run around his head as he had stood in the tomb. But his nausea had not permitted him to examine them clearly.
Now, trying to fathom the mystery, he looked at Jonathan. Who was possessed? Was either of them possessed? Was it all imagination? Jonathan, in spite of his illness, seemed erect, tall, the color back in his cheeks, his blue eyes gleaming, his long hair falling gracefully over his shoulders. All his strength and natural comeliness seemed restored. Facing him, David suddenly felt weak and puny and somehow dirty. A phrase of Jonathan's sent his courage reeling further.
“Not for nothing, my son, have I been named Jonathan. You are David. And in the Bible they were bound together in the divine work.”
David turned away helplessly, fighting the floods of weakness and fear that engulfed him. He was seeking composure, but Jonathan's voice pursued, triumphant, resounding.
“What happens to me, happens to you, my son. Don't you see? It is all foreordained. We have entered the Kingdom of the New Time and the New Being.”
David felt at the end of his resistance. The nausea was increasing. He was enmeshed in a trap he had not suspected. He went to the door, opened it, and spoke over his shoulder in a weak voice: