Slowly, the flames subsided. Out of its midst, the red glow died out of the wood. In its place a new glow appeared, the radiance of gold, unmarked by burrowing holes, without spot or blemish, no pests or parasites anywhere upon it. From the base of the trunk, the glow of gold spread upward through the branches, gold growing up and out to the leaves and to tips where new life sprouted everywhere!
The fire had consumed only the parasites of evil. The tree was more alive than ever with gold and green and life eternal. I saw that the fire had been needful, indeed imperative. In no other way could every parasite have been burned away and destroyed. The tree had been saved by fire.
And I knew that I was like the tree, and that my entire being was consumed with parasites that had all my life been burrowing deep into my soul and destroying the essential created me.
Likewise was the fire imperative for my salvation and purification. But would I have the courage to endure it?
The heat subsided. Soon the flames were gone. Again I was alone. The Tree of Life grew before me—flourishing and alive, luxuriant with new shoots of life sprouting in massive profusion.
I rose from where I was kneeling in front of it. I had not noticed it as I came, but now I saw there was a path beneath my feet. I turned and followed where it led.
Fourteen
The Hill of Betrayal
Soon I was climbing a path up a rocky hillside. The peak of Sinai and the purified Tree of Gold disappeared behind me.
My way grew steep, the footing treacherous. I stumbled, then again. I felt as if I were carrying a great weight. It pressed down on my shoulders, an unseen burden bearing down upon me—a weight of wrong, a weight of unrightness… the weight of my sin.
In the distance, a huge outcropping of boulder loomed ahead. It was several hundred feet high. Gradually the shape of the great cliff struck me with wonder. The formation was roughly in the shape of an enormous human skull, complete with caves of vacant eye and nose sockets partway up the sheer face of rock.
I had no leisure to contemplate the strange sight. Coming down the path toward me, a man approached. His shoulder-length hair surrounded a full beard. He was attired in some kind of homespun robe. A subdued smile of greeting spread over his face. I had seen no other human in so long, the sight was a welcome one.
“I seem to know you somehow,” I said as he approached. “I am certain I have never seen your face. Yet you are familiar to me.”
“You have no doubt heard my name—Iscariot.”
A tremble swept through me.
“Have you been here so long—for two thousand years!—and still not reached the Mountains!” I exclaimed. “Or are you one of those who—”
Suddenly I stopped, realizing what I had been about to say.
“Do not fret, my young brother,” he said with a smile. “It is impossible to hurt another’s feelings here. We are all far beyond that. Even those on this side of the Mountains do not worry about what other people think. True, with some it is for the wrong reasons. But you were about to ask whether I was one of those doomed to an eternity in hell without hope of escape.”
I nodded.
“I deserved nothing less,” he said. “But the love of our Father surpasses what we may or may not deserve. He loved me and I was his son, no matter what I had done. He forgave me even before I knew to ask him for it. To answer your question, I long since passed through the Great Furnace of repentance and purification.”
“Do all go through the fire to reach the Mountains?”
“I do not know,” he replied. “Many relinquish their wills and become sons and daughters as they were intended to do while yet alive on the other side. Those who yield their wills into the Father’s on that side of the Portal do not need the same remaking here as I did, and as you now do.”
“Christians, you mean?” I said.
“Not necessarily,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t forget, I was a zealous believer. The ones I was speaking of are those who yield their wills into the will of the Father. Those who do not do so there—as I never did—must learn to do so here. My sin was great. I required the fire. I wanted the fire. There are others who have been here for aions and have not yet felt the fire. Still they resist.”
“But you are here now?”
“I came from out of the Mountains to tell you what I was singularly able to explain—that we all betray him in different ways. Most betrayals are more subtle than mine. But they are betrayals nonetheless. You did not even know him—”
Suddenly as I stared ahead, I knew where I was, and what the Place of the Skull signified.
“—yet you too betrayed him,” he added.
With the word, a hot knife plunged into my breast. I cried out in terror, with pain more excruciating than could be imagined. I fell to my knees, clawing at my chest to remove it. But nothing was there. The pain was internal, as a blade of white-hot fire piercing my heart. I writhed on the ground for what seemed an eternity. I saw into myself—that I had myself betrayed him as surely as if I had personally nailed him to the cross.
I remembered my first moments in this place, when he had met me and held out his hand. I looked up and now saw him again, bathed in white, approaching from down the rocky path, as if he had emerged out of the skull. There was no smile on his face now, however. Blood seeped down his forehead and cheeks from a crown of thorns pressed into his head.
He came close. His eyes bored into mine. Again he held out his hand toward me. It was a hand clean and strong, the wrist unscarred. This time, however, his hand was not empty. From it he handed me two great iron spikes and a massive hammer. Unquestioningly, I took them. The hammer was so heavy I could scarcely lift it. Then he lay down.
To my horror I saw that he had laid himself out upon a huge wooden cross. He now stretched his arms out across its two shorter members and closed his eyes. I knew what he was waiting for.
“No!” I shrieked. “I cannot!”
“You must,” came the voice of the despised disciple behind me. “You must know what you have done.”
“But I cannot do it!” I cried. “I want to be clean.”
“To be made clean, you must know what you are.”
His voice spoke with finality.
As if playing out a horrible dream I could not control, I knelt beside the cross, still contorting with the pain of the invisible knife in my chest. I felt myself setting a spike to one of his wrists. I lifted the great hammer high above it, tears streaming down my face, then brought it crashing down with a mighty clang. Blood spurted everywhere. I felt his body tremble, but he did not cry out. I stood and stumbled over his midsection. As I did, I beheld his face. Tears poured from his eyes mixed with the blood from the thorns. I knew they were not tears of physical pain. He was not weeping for himself. He wept for me… and for the pain I must endure.
I knelt beside the second hand. As the great clang of another blow from the hammer echoed in my ear, a terrible wail of agony rent the air. It was my own voice. Where the words came from I do not know. They rose up from the depths of my heart, as if from a deep well of eternal beginnings. It was the sound of my own guilt for what I had done.
“Father, forgive me!” I cried. “I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am not worthy to be called your son.”
With my cry, the cross and the Man who had willingly laid upon it vanished. Red stained the ground beneath it. I collapsed where it had lain. I wept and wept and could not stop the flow of tears.
How long the blade of fire remained in my heart I cannot say. Slowly by degrees I felt the white steel pulled out of me. As an unseen hand withdrew it, I felt as if my deepest self was ripped out with it.
At last it released me. The pain subsided but I was exhausted.
Judas knelt beside me. He had beheld all and wept with me, casting upon me a sad but tender smile of purest love.
“You have begun to see,” he said. “It is the great agony—beholding one’s own betrayal. Now you see what I did a
nd what all have done.”
I abhorred what I had done. But I knew I had already done it figuratively, many times, a thousand times, in all my years of denying him.
“Come, my brother,” said the disciple. “There are other aions of your journey toward readiness, and further agonies through which you must pass. You must continue on this path.”
I could not get up. I wept for what seemed like ages. Finally, my head fell senseless on the path.
When I awoke, I was alone. I lay in a great stain of blood on the rocky ground beneath me. I knew that it was my blood and his blood together. I had spilled his blood. Though the knife that had been plunged into my depths was not one I had been able to see, somehow my blood had been left behind. For the first time, I knew that his death had all along been meant to be my death as well, the death of my own self into his.
Again I wept. I perceived that another aion was complete. I began to know the magnitude of what I had done. I also knew it was a mere beginning.
I had betrayed God himself. I had betrayed my Maker.
“Forgive me,” I repeated in a whisper. “Forgive me, Jesus.”
I climbed to my feet. I was no longer standing before the Place of the Skull.
Fifteen
The Sea of Burnished Souls
The high hills through which I had passed after the desert disappeared behind me, as did the huge rock face, the Place of the Skull.
As I descended from them, I found myself walking through air that felt surprisingly moist. It reminded me faintly of a time long ago in childhood. After my trek across the hot dry desert, the sudden humid climate refreshed me with pleasurable nostalgia. I knew how elephants and other animals could smell water from enormous distances. That same sensation came over me now. I not only felt the moisture in the air, its far-off fragrance penetrated my nostrils and lungs with the sense of something remembered and also with the distant hope of life to come.
I continued as the terrain slowly changed. I felt the beginnings of a crisp wind meeting me as I went, and I could detect the aroma of salt on the breeze. I realized that the shrubbery growing about my feet had taken on the wiry characteristic of sea grass. An occasional tree grew out from increasingly sandy soil, gnarled and windswept—cypress and juniper mostly, bent in the direction of the prevailing wind. I was not therefore surprised when, an hour or two later—to speak as if time were relevant in this place of timelessness—I arrived at the crest of a moderately high dune and beheld a vast expanse of blue water in front of me.
The temperature had by now dropped at least twenty degrees. After the desert I must say it felt wonderful. A persistent breeze from across the surface met my face with the unmistakable aroma of salt spray. Gentle incoming waves splashed on a wide sandy beach that extended along the shoreline to my right and left. I had come to an ocean that stretched into the unseeable beyond all the way to the horizon.
I ran down the slope of the dune with a feeling of exhilaration. What a positive delight was the tingle of warm dry sand on my bare feet! I could scarcely contain my joy. Reaching the wet sand at the water’s edge, I turned and continued running parallel to the shoreline, in and out of the foamy inflowing remnant of waves. I was a child again, playing at the sea!
The beach of white sand seemed to extend forever. Never could I have imagined such an exquisite beach! The sand was not mere sand, it was pure sand. This was the ultimate, the perfect shoreline and beach, of which all other beaches were only dim and hazy reflections.
Perhaps I had arrived at the outskirts of heaven! The way I felt as I scampered about… it was heaven!
The air and sand and breeze and sound of gently breaking waves, the gorgeous color of sea and sky and beach, continued to fill me with a happiness I could scarcely contain. What more than a perfect beach on a perfect summer’s day could draw up into it the very essence of the joy and optimism and hope and energy of childhood?
I ran and ran, laughing and exuberant, never tiring. I might have run forever!
In the distance, I saw a woman at the water’s edge walking along the hard-packed sand. She was moving away from me, though slowly, wearing a sea-blue turquoise dress, her feet bare, a basket in one hand. She did not seem to be waiting for me or expecting me. She paused every so often and stooped down, apparently to pick something up from the ground and place it in her basket before continuing on.
Except for Lelia, no one I had met here thus far bore the slightest trace of age. In countenance and appearance, they were timeless. From where I watched her, however, I saw that this lady was different. Her hair, blowing in the breeze, was mostly gray, though enough black remained that I placed her in her sixties. That such a thought even occurred to me showed how different she was than the others. I wondered if perhaps she was not altogether here yet, though in a different way than had been my first hours on this side of the Portal. I can’t say exactly what I meant—whether she was still alive on the other side and to my eyes she was a mere phantasm or vision… or whether she was here on some kind of trial basis. I could simply tell that there was a strange difference about her that did not seem to be completely of this place and was unlike any of my other guides.
I slowed as I came up behind. Gradually, I fell into step beside her.
She glanced toward me and smiled—a quiet, almost shy, peaceful smile. Whether she had expected me or not, she did not seem surprised by my sudden presence beside her. Up close, she certainly seemed real enough. The expression on her face was sheer contented happiness. I knew there was no other place she would rather be. She was exactly where she was supposed to be, where she belonged. The instant the thought entered my mind, however, it also occurred to me that she was on the wrong side of the Mountains. How could she be so content and at peace and happy… on this side?
“Yes, this is where I belong,” she said in answer to my unspoken question. Her voice, like her countenance, was quiet and full of gentleness. “You will learn soon enough that there is no wrong side of the Mountains. As one becomes accustomed to the eternity of God’s home, place as well as time flows in fluid harmony with his purposes. You will find that neither are easy to define by mortal standards.”
Again she paused, stooped to the sand, picked up something between her fingers, examined it, then tossed it into her basket where it fell to the bottom with a tinkle. She moved on and I strolled along beside her. The cool breeze felt so good coming off the water. I drew in deep draughts of the sea air, thinking that I could not quite expand my lungs full enough to take in as much as I would like. The waves splashing to our right had a mesmerizing effect on my senses. Had I not been walking, I might easily have fallen asleep. As we went the woman was scanning the water’s edge.
“You’re collecting seashells, I take it?” I said.
“Oh no,” she replied. “Nothing so dull as lifeless reminders of dead sea creatures. I am collecting live souls.”
“Live souls?” I repeated in astonishment.
“Yes—look,” she said. She turned and held her basket toward me. I peered inside. Lining its bottom were a dozen or more stones, as I thought, of varying colors. Each one had been worn smooth from years in the sea and sand. Some were clear, some opaque, but each was rounded and polished. At first glance they appeared to be small translucent agates. Closer inspection, however, revealed them as only glass. Why she would collect broken glass, I hadn’t an idea.
“But it’s just… bits of glass,” I said.
She smiled. I recognized the expression. It was the same smile that had met me a number of times already, silently conveying, “You silly boy. You have much to learn about the true realities of the Land of Beyond!”
“Is that what they appear to your eyes?” she said.
I nodded.
“They are much more than that,” she rejoined. “But then your eyes are only beginning to see. It takes a long time to see with God-eyes. Only the pure in heart can see as God sees.”
I nodded. “I am learning many new things.”
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“As I said,” the woman explained, glancing down into her basket, “these are live souls. Some are here, some are still on the other side.”
Again she stooped down. This time I saw the piece of glass, a brown one, lying half-submerged in the sand. She picked it up, examined it, and felt all about it with her fingers. Then, with a brief, almost invisible movement of her lips, she let it fall back to the sand.
“Why didn’t you keep that one?” I asked.
“It wasn’t ready. It still contained too many rough edges.”
“I thought it might be that it wasn’t as pretty as the others.”
“Oh no,” she smiled. “I don’t collect them for their colors. Actually, I am very fond of the brown ones. I think many of those probably have the best stories of all to tell. But it’s not about the colors. Look—”she said, holding her basket toward me again, “most of them are clear.”
“I see that now. I didn’t notice at first. But why do you call them live souls?”
“Because they all represent men and women whose lives have been cracked, even shattered, yet whose broken and jagged edges have been burnished and smoothed by God’s sands and sea until they are ready for the Master’s hand.”
“Are all those people—or the people represented by the pieces—still alive, then… you know, on earth?”
She laughed—a wonderfully innocent, happy laugh.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I am not given to know. I have just been given to pray for them all, that God’s work will be done in their lives, and that they will allow God’s sea to tumble them, and the pains and trials and heartaches of life to smooth them and refine them and quiet their hearts in the swirling, agitating, churning, upheaving tides of his purposes. Life is a great tumbler, and they are being tossed about and ground and battered against other rocks and circumstance. Eventually the rough edges are worn smooth, burnished and ready to be transformed into what he has purposed to make of them all along. Then they come here and continue that transformation.”
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