“Are you saying that all of these gods are just bits of a larger god, the way this water is a bit of the larger ocean?”
“No,” said Noah emphatically. “What I’m speaking about is what people call things, not what they are.”
“I’m lost,” said Paul.
“I can call my cup of water the ocean, and may even be able to convince some people it is. Particularly those who have never seen the ocean. Right?”
“Probably.”
“But it’s not the ocean.”
“Nope.”
“Yet a thousand different peoples are all pointing to their particular gods and saying, ‘These ones are the ocean!’ Or, ‘This one is the only ocean and all the other oceans don’t exist.”’
“But there is only one God,” Paul said.
Noah nodded and pulled his eyebrows together, his nose flared momentarily. “Tell me about this One God.”
Paul looked at the water, picked a piece of grass from beside him, and began to tear it lengthwise. “He’s a jealous god.”
“And this god’s name is?”
“Jehovah, I think.”
“But the scriptures say that His Name cannot be pronounced. There are only the four consonants, but no vowels. Nobody knows how to say the Name.”
“Ok, so we don’t know His Name,” Paul said, rubbing the side of his hand where he scratched it pushing the little girl out of the way of the truck.
“You know what the One God said when Moses said, ‘Who are you?”’
“Something like, ‘I am me’?”
“He said, ‘I am that I In other words, ‘You can’t know who I am.”’
“Why not?”
“Can a cup hold—and thus understand—the ocean?”
Paul looked at the sun, now a deep crimson, halfway below the horizon as shadows stretched and moved across the land. “I get it,” he said, feeling for the first time an understanding and identity with the God of his childhood, the God of the Bible.
“And what does He look like?” Noah said.
Paul rolled up one of the scraps of leaf and dropped it on the ground in front of him. “A burning bush?”
“Actually, the message Moses got was that nobody could look at Him and live.”
“That’s pretty drastic.”
“If you interpret it literally. Again, though, I’d say that the message was, ‘I cannot be fully seen with your senses, nor described with your words, so don’t even bother to try.’”
“Like radio waves,” Paul said, the insights piling one atop another, his heart racing as he saw how it all fit together, clearly heard the message, felt the reality of it.
“What do radio waves have to do with it?” Noah said.
“Well, radio waves have been around forever. Neutron stars emit them, for example. They’ve always been here. But we don’t have sense organs for them, so to us they seem not to exist. If you tried to tell the people of Nippur that with a small box in the palm of my hand I could pull out of the air the voice of somebody thousands of miles away, they’d say that I was crazy. If I did it, they’d say I was divine or a wizard. It wasn’t until radio receivers were invented that we realized there was something there. The radio waves. So we have no receiver for God.”
Noah pulled on a bit of his hair that fell over his left shoulder. “I wouldn’t make that assumption yet. Which was invented first, the radio receiver or the transmitter?”
“Geez, I have no idea,” Paul said. “Assuming you mean the man-made transmitter. That’s an interesting question.”
“So how could we summarize what you now understand and know?” Noah said.
Paul thought back on Enlil, on the goddess in the house, on what he’d read in the Bible, on his own experiences of knowing God was real but being totally incapable of describing that knowing. “I’d guess that it would be something like, ‘Anytime you try to describe God, you miss Him.’”
“Him?”
“Or Her?”
“Actually, both are ‘descriptions.”’
“Ah, yes!” Paul said, pulling his notepad and pen out of his pocket. “But most languages require a gender for pronouns. And the description of God we most often use came out of a male-dominated culture.”
“Does that mean God is a male, or a female?” Noah said.
“I’d guess neither. God is beyond gender. Or do gods each have different genders?”
“Only gods like Enlil,” Noah said. “Otherwise, it’s ‘I am that I am.’ So you could say, ‘Any god you can describe is not the Creator of the Universe, because the Creator of the Universe is bigger and vaster than anything that can be described by humans.”’
Paul nodded and scribbled in his pad, Any god you can describe is not the Creator of the Universe, because the Creator of the Universe is bigger and vaster than anything that can be described by humans. “I can understand that. And it’s getting dark and I’m getting cold.”
Noah clapped his hands, and they were sitting back on the two sofas in Paul’s living room in New York City.
Chapter Five
Even the Dogs?
“Hey, how’d you do that?” Paul demanded, picking up the wineglass he’d left on the coffee table. He took a sip and the familiar tang made him salivate, the moisture fulfilling the deep thirst he’d developed in his hours in the desert. The familiar sun outside was setting beyond sight of Manhattan’s buildings and the familiar clock said it was 5:36. They’d been gone eleven minutes, if that, and Paul realized how important familiar and normal were to him.
“You mean the hand-clap?” Noah said.
“Yeah, what happened to the portal?”
Noah stood up, brushed himself off, and said, “It’s the old Star Trek thing. I’ve gotta do it for people of your generation.”
“Star Trek?”
“Yep. You expected to see a portal or doorway to some other dimension, right? I gave you one. Plus I wanted something that included the ability for you to choose to go or not go, and that worked as well as anything.”
“You didn’t need the portal?”
Noah walked out to the kitchen, vanishing in the ordinary way beyond the wall between the living room and kitchen. “I don’t even need this body,” his voice said as Paul heard the refrigerator door open.
Noah returned with a glass of milk in his hand. “If you were an Apache, I’d have appeared as somebody totally different.” He put the glass of milk down on the coffee table, and so fast that it appeared visually seamless to Paul, Noah changed into a large yellow-brown dog. “This is Coyote,” the dog said, reaching over to drop its long red tongue into the glass of milk. It made a messy slurp that splashed milk on the side of the glass and the tabletop. “Oops,” it said, licking up the milk from the glass tabletop.
There was a fast rap on the apartment door, and Paul jerked up, alert. The rap repeated, and Paul recognized it as the signature of Rich, from next door. He looked at the coyote, then the door, then back at the coyote. It sneezed, and before the sneeze was finished the coyote had vanished and Noah stood before Paul, this time dressed in a brown tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, dark brown wool slacks, and battered Hush-Puppies shoes. He held an unlitmeerschaum pipe in his right hand; his hair and beard were neatly trimmed, and he looked every bit the role of a professor from the nineteenth century.
Paul felt his muscles tense, as the image of the street preacher telling him he’d burn in hell sprang to mind, unbidden. “This is truly weird,” he said. “Are you some kind of demon?”
“A matter of definitions,” Noah said, as Rich rapped on the door again. “Can you imagine how your Christian or Muslim or Jewish priest would react if I appeared to him as a talking coyote? To him, no matter what I said or did, I’d be a bad god or under-god. They all have a very specific definition of a very human-like god, and of the good guys who hang out with Him, and they all know that once the era of the institutional church began, the era of the supernatural ended.”
“You rather cont
radict that,” Paul said, stepping back towards the door.
“Yes. As soon as you try to define the Creator of the Universe, you have missed, like trying to catch radio waves in your hands. When St. Francis met me, he knew I was his friend, that I am working on behalf of the Creator of the Universe and on behalf of humanity. So did Brother Lawrence, and Meister Eckhard, and Saint John of the Cross. A televangelist, of course, would only think well of me if I gave him a big donation.” Noah looked at his pipe and laughed. “Answer the door. I’m acceptable now.”
Paul watched him, wild and conflicting emotions rushing through him. Seeing the talking coyote had shocked him so deeply he was wondering if he should grab Rich at the door and run out of the apartment. Noah saw the expression on his face and smiled in a friendly, reassuring way.
Paul walked to the door and opened it: Rich was standing there, wearing black slacks and an expensive yellow silk shirt. “I just talked with Bob…” he paused in mid-sentence as he glanced past Paul and saw Noah. “Who’s the old guy?”
“Just a friend,” Paul said, standing in the doorway so Rich wouldn’t just walk in, as was his usual habit. He always expected Paul to wait to be invited into his apartment, but always just walked right into Paul’s, as if he knew he was part of the aristocracy and Paul wasn’t.
“Hello,” Noah said in a loud voice from the living room.
Rich pushed past Paul and walked over to Noah, his hand outstretched. Paul closed the door, feeling offended by Rich’s habit of seeing every human in the world as a potential contact who may someday, somehow need a lawyer.
“Pleased to meet you,” Rich said to Noah, holding out his hand. “I’m Rich Whitehead, the attorney. Just dropped by with a job offer for Paul.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Noah said.
“And you are?” Rich said, letting the last word hang.
“You may call me ‘Professor.”’
“Professor? Professor who? And of what?”
Noah looked out the window for a moment, as if he were searching for an answer, then said, “Faust. Ethics.”
Rich laughed. “That’s a good one,” he said, but then caught himself when he saw that Noah wasn’t laughing with him. “You serious?”
Noah replied in a slow, serious voice. “You’re a lawyer. Didn’t you learn about me when you undertook your profession?”
Rich smiled. “I get it now. Paul told you about me being a lawyer…”
“No, you did. Are you here to sell your soul? If so, I’ll have to call somebody else, as I work on, as they say, the good side of the street.”
Rich turned to Paul and pointed a thumb at Noah. “He’s great, you know that? Really great.”
“Yeah, great,” Paul said, wondering how Rich would have reacted to the coyote, wondering what he’d say if Paul even tried to tell him about the events of the past hours…or minutes, depending on which world you were referring to.
“Listen,” Rich said, “I’m on my way out with Cheryl, and then I’ve gotta head back to the firm. But I called Bob Harrell, he’s my boss, and he said that as a matter of fact they could use a good writer, if you’re willing to work free-lance. Probably twenty or thirty hours a week, and they’ll only pay forty dollars an hour, but it’s a start.”
Elation and relief filled Paul. “Forty dollars an hour! That’s more than what I was making at the Tribune!”
“Yeah, well, now you know where the money is,” Rich said, his tone implying that he’d just thrown a bone to a mongrel. He reached into his back pocket, pulled out a card, turned and handed it to Noah, saying, “If you ever need a good law firm, we do everything.”
Noah took the card with his right hand, holding it with the pipe, and looked it over. With his left hand, he reached into the pocket of his white shirt and pulled out a business card, which he handed to Rich. “And if you ever decide you want to forsake evil for good, give me a call.”
Rich gave him a smug expression as he took the card, which, as he touched it, burst into a flash of blue flame. “Hey!” he yelled, jerking his hand back and sprinkling a bit of black ash.
“Apparently you’re not pure enough to touch my card,” Noah said in a dry tone.
“That’s not funny! You could have burned me!”
Noah nodded. “And then you’d sue me?”
Rich’s eyes narrowed. “Damn right.”
“Americans pray to their doctors, ‘Save my life, good sir.’ The new high priests of life. But they live in fear of their lawyers. ‘Please don’t destroy me, sir, or take my home.’ You are one of the modern-day demons.”
“Careful,” Rich said. “The law is an honorable profession.”
“Have you ever helped the poor?” Noah said. His tone of voice trembled with a very Noah-like righteousness that caused Paul to hold his breath.
“No,” Rich sneered. “They want help, they can go to law school like I did.”
“Got it all figured out, don’t you?” Noah said.
“Are you trying to say something?”
“Sir,” Noah said, his voice a whisper, “are you interested in riches and power?”
Rich glanced at Paul as if to ask if he was being ridiculed. Paul let his breath out and shrugged, wishing Rich would drop it and leave.
“Yeah, of course,” Rich said, using his how-dare-you lawyer tone. “Who isn’t?”
“Then there is somebody waiting for a discussion with you,” Noah said. He put Rich’s card in his pocket, the pipe in his mouth, and turned around to look out the window.
Rich stood for a moment, dismissed, then walked past Paul toward the door. “Weird friend you’ve got there,” he said as he stepped into the hall and pulled the door closed.
Paul turned and Noah was back to his former appearance of long hair, beard, and white tunic.
“I don’t know what to make of all this,” Paul said.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have shape-shifted,” Noah said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I apologize for not staying within your belief structure.”
“It was pretty weird,” Paul said, some of his composure returning.
“And it is true that if you were an Apache, that would have certified me as a ‘real spirit.’ Although the Coyote doesn’t always have the best of reputations, and I suppose, in retrospect, college professors aren’t much better.” He chuckled to himself. “I could be a bear…”
“Don’t,” Paul interjected.
“Just an idle thought,” Noah said. “But the important point is that it all illustrates the final teaching I am here to give you from those many of the Wisdom School.”
“Which is?”
“Do you have a remote control for that TV?” Noah said.
“That doesn’t sound like a ‘teaching’ to me,” Paul said, glancing at the remote control on the end table between him and the closet near the front door.
Noah nodded at the remote control and said, “Toss it to me.”
Paul reached over, picked it up, and handed it to Noah, who pointed it at the TV and pushed the Power button. The TV sprang to life, two big-haired women punching each other while a guy waving a folding chair tried to hit them both.
“Right now,” Noah said, “for that TV set, the only show that exists in the known universe is this program, right?”
“I suppose you could say that,” Paul said.
“Do you see anything else?”
“No, but you’re the one with the remote control. And there are some TVs where you can pop another channel into a little window in the corner.”
“You know what I mean. We’re tuned to this frequency and it seems like it’s the only thing that exists. If you were to give this TV to somebody from a tribe in Borneo, and not give them the remote control and throw away the channel-changing knob, all they’d ever know existed is this one channel. You understand?”
“Yes,” said Paul, taking a drink of his wine and wondering where Noah was going with the TV metaphor.
“So the Creator of the Universe
made the creation out of what?”
“Hydrogen?” Paul was baffled by the sudden change of direction of the questions.
“That’s the smallest element, the smallest atom. But it’s made out of what?”
“Electrons, neutrons, and protons.”
“And they’re made of?”
“I dunno. Subatomic particles of some sort. Quarks and mesons and stuff like that.”
“And they’re made of?”
“I wasn’t a physics major,” Paul said. “I stuck with journalism.”
Noah nodded. “Which is part of why I’m here, so you can write this story. But back to the question. The smallest known particles exhibit properties of both matter and energy. In other words, all matter is made of energy. The amount of energy it took to make, for example, this remote control, is equal to the mass of the remote control times about thirty-five billion, which is the speed of light squared. E equals MC squared. And if you were to convert the matter in this remote control back into the energy it’s made of, the amount of energy that would be released would be about thirty-five billion times its mass. Atomic bombs and all that.”
“I remember this stuff now from high school,” Paul said. “Seems a little odd that Noah would be lecturing me about physics.”
Noah snorted. “Boat-builders have historically been at the forefront of science. Out of necessity. I knew geometry and trigonometry before they were named.”
“So you learned physics?”
“Actually, I can know anything that is known. And so can you.”
“Huh?”
“Just trust me on that one. One day it will be part of your experience.” He stood up and walked over to the television. “So, back to TV and physics. The universe is made up of a seamless spectrum of energy, from the most subtle to the most coarse, and of matter which floats in that energy the way ice cubes float in a bucket of water. You with me?”
“Sure,” Paul said, taking another drink of the Chardonnay.
“Maybe you shouldn’t drink too much of that wine,” Noah said. “I remember when Paul told Timothy to quit drinking water and stick to wine, but it’s not generally good advice, particularly if you’re trying to learn something that’ll help you save the world.”
The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century Page 6
