I’ve been a fool. I’ve forgotten what really matters. I’ve been so obsessed by these petty torments that I’ve lost sight of one simple truth: God does not turn on his children. God does not abandon His own.
But test them — yes. God tests us all the time. Did He not strip Job of all his worldly goods and leave him picking his boils in the dust? Did He not tell Abraham to kill his own son? Did He not restore them to His sight, once they had proven worthy of it?
I believe that God rewards the righteous. I believe that the Christ said Blessed are those who believe even though they have not seen. And now, at last, I believe that perhaps faith is not the obscenity I once thought, for it can give strength when one is cut off from the truth.
I am not abandoned. I am tested.
I send for the bishop. Somehow, this time I know he’ll come.
He does.
“They say I’ve lost the Spirit,” I tell him. “They’re wrong.”
He sees something in my face. Something changes in his.
“Moses was denied the Promised Land,” I continue. “Constantine saw the flaming cross but twice in his lifetime. God spoke to Saul of Tarsus only once. Did they lose faith?”
“They moved the world,” the bishop says.
I bare my teeth. My conviction fills the room. “So will I.”
He smiles gently. “I believe you.”
I stare at him, astonished by my own blindness. “You knew this would happen.”
He shakes his head. “I could only hope. But yes, there is a—
strange truth we are only learning now. I’m still not sure I believe it myself. Sometimes it isn’t the experience of redemption that makes the greatest champions, but the longing for it.”
On the panel beside me, Trajan burns and is not consumed. I wonder briefly if my fall from grace was entirely accidental. But in the end it does not matter. I remember, at last, where I once saw a scar like mine.
Before today, the acts I committed in God’s name were pale, bloodless things. No longer. I will return to the Kingdom of Heaven. I will raise my sword-arm high and I will not lay it down until the last of the unbelievers has been slaughtered. I will build mountains of flesh in His name. Rivers will flow from the throats that I cut. I will not stop until I have earned my way back into His sight.
The bishop leans forward and loosens my straps. “I don’t think we need these any more.”
They couldn’t hold me anyway. I could tear them like paper.
I am the fist of God.
Afterword
Contrary to what you may have heard, God isn’t everywhere.
The only place He reliably hangs out is in the temporal lobes — at least, that’s where Vilayanur Ramashandran found Him when he went looking in the brains of hyper-religious epileptics at UC-San Diego. You’ll never find the Almighty slumming in the parietal cortex, judging by radioisotopes Andrew Newberg tracked through the heads of a meditating Buddhist monk at the University of Pennsylvania. Most spectacularly — and controversially — Michael Persinger of Laurentian University claims to be able to induce religious experiences using a helmet which bathes the brain in precisely-controlled electromagnetic fields.
We begin to understand the mechanism: Rapture is as purely neurological as any other human experience. With that understanding, inevitably, comes the potential for control. Religious belief — that profound, irrational disorder afflicting so many of our species — may actually have a cure.
Of course, a cure is the last thing many would want. Religion has been a kick-ass form of social control for millennia, even absent any understanding of its neurology. It seems likely that these new insights will be used not to free us from the rapture, but to tweak it to maximum effect — to make us even more docile, even more obedient, even less skeptical of our masters than we are now.
Today we’re just taking our first steps down that road — but what if we’d taken them back in the third century, instead of the dawn of the twenty-first? That was the time of Constantine, the Roman Emperor who legitimized Christianity after a religious vision promised him victory in battle. It’s not much of a stretch to posit a subsequent expedition to the Holy Land, in search of ancient miracles.
I see a vein of magnetic ore in the Sinai hills. I see it speak to Constantine’s pilgrims as it spoke to Moses, sixteen centuries earlier. I watch it seed a renaissance in neurotheology — inevitably, in all manner of electromagnetic physics — and then I jump forward a thousand years and tell you a story…
It’s an unbelievable gimmick of course, a natural miracle filling in for Persinger’s God Helmet. But given that conceit, the social consequences seem more than plausible; they almost have a ring of inevitability to them. Perhaps, in all these stories about parallel universes, we’ve focused too much on chaos and too little on inertia. Perhaps it doesn’t matter where the butterfly flaps its wings.
Perhaps human nature pulls all timelines back to same endpoint.
Originally published in ReVisions (2004, J. Czerneda & I. Szpindel, Eds.) pp162-181. Daw Books, NY.