is to think that this was once upon a time: as some have said, the history of our first father and our first mother. The story is happening this moment . . . and this: the distracting fruit, our hand reaching out, our desire propelling our hand, the knowledge of what has been and, suddenly, the desire ever stronger of what might be! That desire, like a drug, makes us forget that here we are, in the garden, in this infinitude, made not to waste away, not to suffer or die, but made instead in the likeness of the divine to know Shekinah—the presence of the divine in this instant, the eternal moment that is without limit, and without death.”
My brother’s hand extended out as if holding the apple. He brought the hand to his mouth, poised as if to taste. His strongly colored, full lips, loomed in the close view to which the person with the camera zoomed. But the camera backed out. Josh dropped his arms and stood with his hands out and open at his sides, like a person on a beach, facing the sun, his body drinking in its heat.
“Desire, fills you with images of what you do not have, what has been, what might be. Desire is a thief, distracting you with his right hand as he picks your pockets clean with the left.”
“Brothers, Sisters, we have never left the garden. The old story tells it like a fact that we were cast out, a wall of fire placed behind us. That wall is there only in our imagination. The curse that we must labor and suffer in pain repeats itself over and over like a constitutional law, cancelling out everything else. But why?
“You were made by the Spirit to see the never lost, never absent, true and shining fact—that you are a child of the Spirit, an extension of the breath that gives each of us life, a living emblem of the Spirit before others.
“Jesus himself said there was only one unforgivable sin: to deny the Spirit. It’s in the Biblical gospels. Look also at the Coptic gospel, saying 44: ‘Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the Son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.’ That is why I stand before you, affirming her. I am her child. I’m an apostle of the Spirit. I am, and you are, a vessel of the Spirit.
“The Spirit, what Jesus in his own language called the ruha, is what was breathed into us at the moment of our creation. She lives in us in this instant, in this infinity.”
Here my brother stopped and closed his eyes, inhaling suddenly and loudly, “Spiiii,” holding the breath for a still moment before exhaling with equal noise, “riiiit.” He repeated this movement, the loud inhalation and exhalation of his breath. Then he opened his eyes again: “the divine breath—Spiii—riiit—Spiii—riiit—the breath in and breath out—from which the living Spirit, the ruu—haa takes her name.”
Since Mikesh only heard him whisper at the accident scene, he found himself mesmerized by Josh’s full voice. Mikesh was thinking about the weak flow of air he felt with his finger in my brother’s throat. He felt the last issue of what my brother was calling “the Spirit” as it left him.
“Ignorance distracts you with its idols. The Bible itself, for many of our brothers and sisters, becomes an idol to distract us from the message we were made to know, that the Spirit within us speaks with every breath, calling us with her name to remember, even now, breathing out and breathing in, who we really are, to remember our true name as it is breathed out to us by the Spirit.
“Brother Randy and Sister Maxine have asked whether I mean to call them away from their Christianity, whether I am the serpent who comes to separate them from God. No, that is not what I mean to do. I am here to do the opposite: to call them to the message . . .”
Mikesh’s screen froze and went silent. Over the top of the image a little clock dial appeared, the hand sweeping round and round to show that the signal had been lost, that the machine was working to reconnect. Mikesh explained it in his head as the work of soupy atmosphere between the dish that angled from the exterior siding of his house and the distant satellite that provided him with Internet. Just as he considered rising to bring his empty glass to the sink, the image snapped back into action, and the sound continued, “of Jesus, to perfect the promise he brought in his time by uttering it again in the present, in the here and now.
“Look in your Bible. Read what Jesus says about himself. ‘The son of man,’ he calls himself, a person just like you and me, but at the same time ‘the son of God,’ pointing to what you might call a higher kingdom, the kingdom of the Spirit that is ever at hand, ever at the edge of being born. ‘The kingdom of God is at hand,’ Jesus told his followers. And he would say the same today, if he was in this room, sitting next to Sister Maxine or in the chair behind Brother Randy, leaning forward to whisper in his ear. ‘The kingdom of the Spirit is alive between us!’”
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