A Novel by Samuel F. (Skip) Parvin

Prologue

The most boring and vital twenty minutes in a worship service are the twenty minutes immediately following its end. People line up to shake hands with the pastor and business is “attended to.” It’s perhaps the only time a pastor sees this many of his congregates in the same place and at the same time.

The movers and the shakers press their agendas. The complainers complain. Whiners whine: “Why do you always have to be so liberal?” Those who like the sermon (and, after all, he was an excellent preacher) tell you how they enjoyed today’s topic and all the new stuff they learned about the Bible and Christianity.

Since he was divorced, the sweet little old ladies shuffle by with their maiden daughters, nieces, and cousins hoping against hope that the pastor might be attracted to one of them. “Pastor Jude this is Emily, my sister’s youngest daughter you two have a lot in common.” And really, not being cruel, nothing could be farther from the truth. Not that there was anything intrinsically wrong with the women. The problem was with him.

Simply put, he was a wasted and depressed man. He was progressive but served a mostly conservative church that thought he was a socialist (which he actually was but the way they said it made it seem like they were identifying a disease). He had just come off disability leave for serious back surgery from which he had labored to recover in order to return to serving churches only to find that when he did come back, the church no longer valued him.

They had sent him to a dying little church at a pay cut of over 25 thousand dollars. He was being paid just five thousand dollars over the minimum salary for his denomination after almost thirty years of service fixing broken churches, building sanctuaries, and eliminating debt.

He was at the stage of his career when he knew several of the District Superintendents on the Bishops cabinet and thought of them as friends. In fact, one of his closest friends was the District Superintendent who had allowed this to happen to him. How could someone who professed love for him, knew what he could do in church leadership and had told him many times how much he valued his intellect and skill in consolation and pastoral care allow the Bishop to disrespect him this way? How could others who knew him well and valued his company allow him to be forgotten this way?

Yes, he was bitter, but he believed that he had earned his bitterness. The bishop himself was a pompous pseudo-intellectual who quoted the early patristic fathers like they were old drinking buddies. When he heard the bishop speak, he wanted to pull his hair out by the roots due to the patronizing and condescending tone with which he dispensed rambling, incomprehensive, logically unsound (not to mention tedious) theological arguments.

As he shook hands and smiled at the people going out, his mind wandered, and he saw himself as the pathetic, used up man that he had become. Alone. Desperately alone. Without any source of consolation for himself. His wife of 26 years had asked for a divorce long before he went on disability, but they had agreed to stay together until their boys had graduated high school, and they almost made it. They agreed to end things a few months into the disability leave so that the new church he would eventually be serving would not have to deal with the divorce itself. Nothing tears a congregation apart like going through a pastoral divorce.

As the line lulled for a few seconds, he reached into his pocket for a Zoloft, a Wellbutrin and a couple of painkillers. Comfortably numb. Isn’t that how Pink Floyd had phrased it? The price he had paid for divorcing earlier than planned was missing his son Ryan’s senior year. And he sensed that Ryan, even if only subliminally, resented him for it. Ryan had been a lacrosse jock in high school and took two girls to prom. However, when Ryan, a defender, had scored the only goal of his career, Dad wasn’t there. It is incredibly rare that a defender scores a goal in lacrosse and Ryan was one of only four guys in the history of his school to do so. But Dad wasn’t there. He had wept that whole night after Ryan’s excited call, unable to sleep, smothering in his sense of loss.

The two girls Ryan took to the Prom? He had met them briefly on a visit to watch another game, but the night was summed up for him in one picture sent over a smartphone. Another night of long hours spent futilely attempting to choke back tears of resentment and grief. His oldest son Issac was pursuing a Ph.D. in organic chemistry and they talked almost every day. They would often watch the same football or baseball game and share a text conversation commenting on the action. But when the game was over, it was back to reality. He was alone once again, the text lingering in the ether like a forgotten spirit.

He and his wife were on friendly terms; what had Bobby Kennedy said? Friends and brave enemies? They were congenial. They were civil. William Hurt’s character in Altered States actually summed it up eloquently. They were both preferred to live with the senseless pain they inflicted on themselves to the senseless pain they would otherwise inflict on each other. Yes, Eddie Jessup was so right. The purpose of our suffering is only more suffering.

He stopped for a moment to hug one of the ladies who had just gotten out of the hospital to welcome her back after a month’s absence from worship. He admired her dress, told her how lovely she looked and went on about how much they had missed her. Would she like him to stop by to share a cup of tea one day soon? She smiled, and said, “Why of course, pastor,” shyly basking in the warmth of his attention. That was a big part of his job, making other people feel loved even when he didn’t feel loved himself.

Norman Amos, his board chair, strode up to him with a big grin on his face and said, “Well, tomorrow starts the big vacation.”

“I prefer ‘holiday’ Norm, but yes, it’s my first trip to Israel” he replied.

“Yep,” Norm went on, “the first trip to the Holy Land is special. Walking where Jesus walked. Golgatha, Gethsemane, Massada, every step is full of spiritual electricity.”

“Maybe for you Norm,” he thought, “but not for me.” However, what he said didn’t betray his thoughts, “Yes, I’m really looking forward to it. Thank you so much, Norm.”

“De nada,” he replied, “every pastor needs a chance to visit Jerusalem once in his life. See you in a month, bro” and he turned to walk away.

Norm had arranged for the trip as a gift for Pastor Appreciation month. The congregation was so glad to have a great preacher with so much experience that they believed he might actually be able to raise their little inner-city church from the dead. It wasn’t going to happen of course, but they wanted him to stay as long as he could, so they put together the funding for this “Holy Land Pilgrimage” as a kind of friendly coercion. The company that provides the tours is called MEOW, Ministers Educational Opportunities Worldwide (their mascot was a cat in a clergy collar, really?). These guys make their money getting pastors to promote Holy Land journeys for which parishioners pay top dollar. If you con fifteen congregates into traveling with you—jackpot—you travel for free.

Norm had discovered another church in town whose pastor wouldn’t be traveling with their group and got MEOW to sponsor him as their clergy advisor. The secret he and Norm shared was that the other tour group didn’t really need a pastoral presence with them, so he would be free to do whatever he wanted during his month in Israel. He seldom took any vacation because with paying his wife’s alimony, making the payments on her new car, and used cars for him and the boys, keeping the boys afloat in college and all the other bills, he just couldn’t afford to. Norm had solved that problem for him as well. The congregation took up a love offering to provide him with spending money for the trip.

The saddest thing was that all he thought about these days was money. Money, money, money. With the cut in salary, he was now making much less than he did when he was being paid by disability insurance. Often these days he thought he should have stayed on disability and continued taking money for not doing anything. Every payday was an abject exercise in futility. He was constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul and had even settled into the “payday loan” cycle (or loan sharking lite as he preferred to call it). It didn’t seem like much at the time (fifty-one bucks over a month on a five hundred dollar pay advance) but when you did the math it turned out to be over two hundred percent interest. But it kept him afloat. He had sold nearly everything he had to sell but still couldn’t break even. The legend is that Willy Nelson sold the rights to “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” for fifty bucks. “Blue Eyes” is one of the most covered tunes in country music history and would have made him millions had he kept the rights. When he was asked why he sold it so cheap, he replied, “I needed the fifty bucks.” Yep, sometimes you just need the fifty bucks.

As the crowd finally thinned he picked up his cane, put on his hat and started the long painful walk to the car. Despite the miraculous results of his surgery (if he hadn’t taken the risk he wouldn’t be walking today) he was still in serious chronic pain almost every moment of his life. It drained him. He could barely walk two blocks without having to sit and recover. He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t get out of the house. He had isolated himself from nearly all of his friends because he just couldn’t bear the pity anymore. He was diabetic, hypertensive, clinically depressed without Zoloft, adult ADD without Wellbutrin and lately he had noticed that he was beginning to lose his memory. His mother had died just over a year ago from complications due to Alzheimer’s. Seven years she had babbled her way through life, nearly incapable of even feeding herself and not recognizing him, his father, his sisters, or his brother. He would not allow that to happen to him.

His mind was the only thing he had left, and he refused to lose that as well. Which brought him to renew his resolve for what he would really be doing on his trip to the Holy Land. Recently he had watched a Discovery Channel special about a guy who claimed to have discovered the actual tomb shared by Jesus and his family. The special had given enough specifics to make the tomb easy to find and even though the Israeli authorities had covered the entrance with a concrete lid, he was pretty sure he could devise a way to move the lid enough that he would be able to get inside and lever it closed behind him. And that’s just what he intended to do. Once he had actually located the tomb and authenticated that it was what he was looking for, he would turn on a headlamp, quietly pry open the tomb, crawl inside, close the lid behind him and work his way down to the main compartment. Wouldn’t that be a kick? Getting the chance to be one of the few to ever be inside the actual tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family? Then, once he had soaked up the energy of the experience, he would lie down, take an overdose of painkillers, fasten a plastic bag over his head, and fall into a deep, carefree, painless sleep.

He walked through the building to his office, gathered his things together and opened the back door that led to the parking lot. He was greeted by an early thundershower typical of a Florida summer afternoon. The parking lot steamed as the rain quickly evaporated upon hitting the hot asphalt. The smell of the cool vapor was a distinct as Florida itself. He walked leisurely to his car, as he didn’t mind getting wet. Rain was his favorite weather. It was refreshing, and the lightning and thunder always invigorated him. He hoped it would rain all afternoon.

These days the only time he got any restful sleep was during a rainstorm. Most nights were a fitful mix of dozing and dreaming, mostly nightmares. He opened the car door, sat on the edge of the seat, and painfully backed his way into the driver’s seat. He spun to face the steering wheel. That simple action itself was like a checklist for his body pain. The arthritis in his ankles as he spun, the joint damage in his right shoulder that wouldn’t allow him to lift his arm above a forty-five degree angle, the gnarled fingers so inflamed with arthritis that he could barely close them to grasp the steering wheel, the neck that crackled like popcorn in a microwave as he turned his head, and then, there was the six-inch scar on his back which was the locus of the excruciating pain that ran down his legs and made them numb. All this was the residual gift of a twenty-year career in competitive softball.

He turned the key and the car came to life suddenly and settled into a rumbling hum. He had been lucky with the car. He had purchased it and a small Chevy truck for his son for just over $10,000. As part of his divorce agreement, he had also purchased a brand-new Nissan Altima for his ex-wife. His car was a ten-year-old Mercury Marquis that had fifty-five hundred miles on it when he bought it and had just recently topped 120,000. He was grateful for how well it ran and how little maintenance it required. If something ever happened to it, he probably would not be able to find money to repair or replace it. Little anxieties like that weighed on him from time to time.

As he drove home he once again settled into introspection about his miserable excuse for a life. He had no real friends in town. His best old and former friends were all miles away up and down the peninsula and in other states, and he was terrible at keeping in touch with them. He had no inclination toward romantic relationships at all. In every way imaginable he was broken in body and spirit. He had nothing to offer. He feared that he could never find a way to love again, so in his mind, it wasn’t fair for him to even try.

All his relationships with women had been failures and he didn’t completely understand why. He was weary and just too damn tired and hurting to offer himself up to rejection again. The only thing he had in his life that gave him brief windows of joy was his boys. That would be the only part of this life he would truly miss. He was one of those lucky parents who was thought of as a friend by his sons. He knew that his leaving would break their hearts but his work with them was really finished. They were both adults, brilliant and capable, beginning lives that would be filled with happiness and success. Of course, neither of them could see that yet, but eventually, their lives would open up for them. He thought back to the time when he was their age. He punched up Everlast on his iPod and listened to the refrain that summed it up for him:

“I’m broken like a promise
I’m shattered like a dream
I’m broken with all my pieces scattered ’round for you to see
I’m broken like record
I sing the same old song
I’m broken like the heart of a man that’s run away from love too long”

That described it. Nothing existed for him but the pain he felt as he glimpsed over the edge into the void. There was no fear involved. After making the decision to end it all, he wasn’t afraid. No, fear had never been a part of this process. Simply put, he was relieved. He smiled softly as he realized that, other than his sons, the only thing that brought him any peace at all these days was the thought of ending his existence here in order to find out what was next.

He didn’t have to stop at the parsonage because he had packed a small bag the night before. He wouldn’t need much luggage for the trip he was planning. The old Merc lumbered onto the entrance ramp from 275 to I-4. After that, the Orlando airport was just a short jog away.

Flight

He boarded the plane and quietly chose a window seat near the back. He slipped his one carry-on bag in the bin above him and waited for the takeoff. He didn’t want to listen to an audiobook, as he hated the idea of missing his last time to see Florida from the air. Once the plane lifted gracefully from the runway and looped back in a big sweeping arc toward the Atlantic, he could see much of the peninsula below him. It was a magnificent sight—thousands of lakes and rivers that shimmered like sapphires in the afternoon sun connected by emerald and lime green strips of land. He loved Florida. He wouldn’t have chosen to live anywhere else. It amused him that the strongest sense of loss he had felt to this point was for his beloved home state. Soon, as the plane picked up altitude and gained velocity to rise above the cloudbanks, there was nothing more than an endless run of deep, black, ocean below. The next land he would see from the window would be France. It was just over 6,500 miles and almost 14 hours to Jerusalem.

The cliché was that just before you die your life would flash before your eyes as if you were sitting in a drive-in theater. While he thought that was probably not actually the case, he did find himself reassessing his life history as he stared down into the depths of seemingly infinite blackness below.

He had been born in a small town called Kirtland, about forty-five minutes outside of Cleveland. For the first few years of his life, he had been raised on a small acreage family farm. He was an autodidact and had taught himself to read when he was four by matching what his mother spoke as she read him stories to the words as she ran her fingers across them on the page. One night, according to his mother, she came in to find him reading stories to his two-year-old sister Brandi. Then one night, late in his fourth year, his dad had come into the bedroom just before bedtime and told him he was leaving. He was sad, he said. He loved him, and he would miss him, but he didn’t want to be with mommy anymore. He told him it would be a long time until he saw or heard from Daddy again, and it was. In the meantime, after being divorced just a couple of months, his mother had met and fallen in love with the man he thought of as his real father. He was visiting his parents on vacation from his job driving a cement block transport truck. The courtship lasted only two weeks and at the end of it Brandi and he found themselves in the back seat of his “new dad’s” car with four new brothers and sisters headed for Florida.

The eight of them lived in a 1,300 square foot Florida Cracker house with three bedrooms. The neighborhood was poor, but he was able to make some friends. The state didn’t allow six-year-olds to start school unless their birthday fell before a certain date, so, despite the fact that his was reading at an advanced level, they didn’t let him go to school. When he did go to school, there were no gifted programs, magnet schools or advanced placement, so he was viewed like a freak of nature and often quarantined to the library where, of course, he read all day. The smart teachers would treat him like a teacher’s assistant but if they kept him in class with nothing to do he became a behavior problem.

When he was eight he began riding his bike up to the library to read the World Book Encyclopedia, which so impressed his dad that he scrimped to be able to afford a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica, so he could read it at home. He read the classics for fun because nobody had explained to him that they were supposed to be boring.

He won the top prize in the countywide sixth-grade science fair by designing and building a seismograph that was sensitive enough to detect trucks driving by on the road in front of the school. In seventh grade, he won his first writing award. Every year the Fire Safety program had an essay contest. His essay had won for his school, the countywide Junior High School division and the combined countywide Junior and Senior High overall award. The prize was a fifty-dollar savings bond that he immediately cashed to buy his first typewriter.

He could pinpoint his first sense of what would later become known as “his calling” to August 28, 1963, when he was nine years old. His parents had sat them down to watch Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have Dream” speech, and he was fascinated. All those people listening to someone who wanted to change the world in a peaceful way. He remembered thinking, “Maybe one day they might listen to me.” It didn’t turn out that way. At Melbourne High School he became a “band geek” as well as an “all-purpose geek” who read science fiction insatiably, could write in the Elvin tongues of Middle Earth and speak Klingon. Then he began plugging into the counterculture, discovering the mystical benefits of organic herbs, and, following the advice of Timothy Leary after reading The Politics of Ecstasy, began turning on, tuning in and, ever so gradually, dropping out.

He discovered that he could make A’s and B’s completely stoned without ever going to class as long as he showed up for tests. He read The Teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality and Journey to Ixtlan, and Carlos Castaneda’s mythical Yaqui shaman Don Juan became his new spiritual mentor. And he had quite a few friends along with him for the ride. They were growing up in the shadow of the moon, and Melbourne High School was packed with the best and brightest sons and daughters of the rocket scientists and engineers that ran the space program, so even if the classes, the conversation never did.

In his junior year, when he turned 17, he was swept away by his first love, a beautifully cute little 14-year-old who was much too sexual for her age, and he was too afraid to act. She terrified him. Here he had what every young man was supposed to desire, but he was paralyzed by the fear that he might get a 14-year-old pregnant. Even back then he had more ethics than common sense. She remained relentlessly assertive and after a while, he had to break up with her even though he was deeply in love because she made him feel like a coward for not being willing to explore sexuality with her. She eventually hooked up with an asshole football player who abused her and publicly humiliated her. He would see them together and imagine how he could hurt the dumbass jock for the way he treated her. Leaving Bo was his first true regret in life.

Late in his junior year, one of the friends he grew up with invited him to play on a softball team and he discovered, much to his surprise, that he had a real talent for baseball. At six-four two-twenty he played mostly catcher (which he loved) and some first base. He was an excellent catcher, but his real value to a slow pitch softball team was his ability to crush the ball over the fences 280 feet away. There was nothing like the feeling of connecting with a ball and knowing it was gone. Nothing. Over twenty years playing on highly competitive teams, he estimated he had hit over 500 home runs. However, in addition to the home runs, there had been at least two hundred collisions at the plate (most of which he had won). But those days were long gone except for the pain of a broken body.

He graduated forty-ninth in a class of over 900 at a school where there were twenty-one 4.0 averages in the day before weighted scales. He was disappointed in the 1450 he received on the SAT (he had expected to be perfect, but, what the hell, he was stoned out of his gourd the Saturday morning he took the test and arrived late to start the math section). However, that score plus his grades would get him into any school he wanted to attend. What it couldn’t do, however, was get him the money he needed to attend those schools. Having been a National Merit Scholar honorable mention came with no money as well. Still, he received acceptances to Harvard, Berkeley, and Stanford, but turned them all down and told no one because he couldn’t afford to go. He resolved himself to attending the local community college full time and working full time.

All he did was work, go to school, and play softball. Any thought of being a pastor faded away into the purple haze of the next few years. Then, one day, on the Cocoa Campus of Brevard Community College, he met a woman who captivated him. Her name was Jenny Braggs, and he was fascinated by an answer she gave in a world religion class they shared and followed her as she slipped quietly out the back door as if she were sneaking off to her next class. She walked quickly with birdlike motions and it was obvious that she was deeply shy, as she almost never looked up as she hurried along. It was almost as if she feared someone might catch her. When he sidled up beside her and said “hello” she was startled and looked around frantically to assure herself that he was actually speaking to her.

They sat down for a conversation that became an intimate dialog and they talked for so long that they both missed their next class. He remembered thinking that this was the first woman he had ever met who was actually as smart as he was. Her father was the provost of the community college and a retired full colonel who was MacArthur’s logistics officer. Her mother was a retired major and an army nurse who was one of the few women awarded the Purple Heart during World War II (few people knew that she was wounded when one of her patients shot her in the ass while she was head of nursing on a hospital ship). These days she passed her time chain-smoking, mainlining Valium, and polishing off vodka by the quart.

He was a longhaired hippie and the perfect boyfriend to send her parents through the roof. They fell in love and were married by the lake at the Cocoa Campus of BCC complete with Mexican wedding dress, Mexican wedding shirt, garlands of flowers and a hip young preacher in sandals. Her parents were aghast when they exchanged toe rings. After finishing BCC, they headed off to Tallahassee together. Jenny was going to study history and he would study literature and religion. During that first year, Jenny began to withdraw, suffered from a series of health problems, and would have probably flunked out if he didn’t write her history papers for her. Their sex life shriveled to nothing and Jenny started going out on her own most nights, insisting that she be given her space.

Then one day he arrived home early due to a class that was canceled and found her in bed with another woman. She explained to him that she believed that she had always been a lesbian and that her heterosexually was, how did she put it?—acculturated. She decided to switch her major to English with an emphasis in creative writing. Not bearing to spend time in the same department with her, he dropped out and signed up for a cabinetmaking program at the vocational-technical institute across town. He had always wanted to learn to work wood. Jenny asked him to file for divorce and so he did. She also asked that he add a name change request so she could bear the name of her Scottish great-grandmother Effie Rona Mackenzie.

After the divorce was finalized, she headed off for the Stanford graduate writing program and was now the head of the creative writing department at a prominent mid-western university. Once she was gone, he found it easier to complete his undergraduate degree and ended up graduating with honors. When he received his diploma in the mail he remembered thinking, “What now?” Plans to go to divinity school were the furthest thing from his mind. He had no access to woodworking machines or shop space and didn’t want to make a living just slapping up cabinets for housing contractors. He’d rather not work wood at all if that were the only option. He was working 20 hours a week at the FSU library and the third shift busing tables and washing dishes at the local Jerry’s Restaurant just to survive.

Then one morning he was sitting on the front steps of the English building reading and waiting for his friends to get out of class, so they could go for a beer when Doctor Ted Danielson, who was the head of freshman English and a Hemingway and Dickens scholar, walked up to him and asked, “What the hell are you doing Jude?”

He looked up and replied, “Well Ted, I’m sitting here on the steps, reading a book and waiting for my friends to get out of class so we can drink some beer.”

Ted looked down at him disgruntled, “No, you dumbass, what are you doing with the rest of your life?”

Jude thought for a minute and then replied, “Well Ted, I’m sitting here on the steps, reading a book and waiting for my friends to get out of class so we can drink some beer.”

Ted was forced to chuckle and then said, “No, you are not. You’re going to be teaching. The freshman English Committee just met, and they asked me to save a teaching assistantship for you. Four of them want you to study with them. Callahan and Thomas want you to consider becoming a Pynchon Scholar.”

He was surprised, but suddenly teaching seemed like the most natural option. He was overwhelmed with the sense that this was what he had been waiting for all this time. “How much does it pay?” he asked.

“Full tuition waiver, $17,000 a year stipend for teaching three Freshman Comp classes a quarter, and more money if you are chosen to teach in the summer.”

He heard himself saying, “Where do I sign up?”

Rather than settle for a straight degree in literature, he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in humanities. That way he was able to consolidate his intellectual obsessions in one general framework. Melbourne High School had been one of the last high schools in Florida to offer Latin, so he already had that as part of his repertoire. Florida State had one of the best small religion departments in the Southeast, so he was able to study Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic while indulging his insatiable pursuit of contemporary American Literature. The joke his professors made was that when he wasn’t studying 2,000-year-old classics and biblical texts, he was majoring in the literature of the last 10 minutes. It made for an odd combination, but they indulged him.

He taught three classes of freshman composition each semester. It was in the second semester of his first year that he met Melinda. She was a student in his Introduction to Literature class. The first time he walked into class and saw her sitting in the back, he was smitten. She was older than her classmates as she had already had a career as a legal secretary. She was studying early childhood education, and after she had finished with his intro class he immediately asked her out. After the first date, they saw each other almost every day. She asked him to stop smoking pot and he did. He had fallen in love with her and wanted to make her happy.

There was only one problem: He had begun to feel the gnawing sense that he needed to be doing more than just studying humanities. He was beginning to think about divinity school again. Without telling Melinda, he applied to Duke and was accepted. He would be able to finish up a Master’s degree and then head to North Carolina. Melinda, on the other hand, had two more years to complete her undergraduate degree. If they got married, they would be spending the first two years of their relationship 650 miles apart, and only see each other during breaks and the summer. Despite the challenge, they decided to go for it.

Melinda finally moved up to Durham for his final year at Duke Divinity. At Duke, he was able to continue to study biblical languages while also preparing for life as a pastor. After graduation, he had begun his service in the Florida Conference. As the associate pastor of First United Methodist Church Ft. Lauderdale, he had started a dinner theater ministry that raised thousands of dollars for local missions. Three years later at St. James in North Miami, he had founded a trilingual preschool program (English, Spanish, and Creole) to serve the diversity of the community. At Winter Springs UMC in Orlando, he had overseen the construction of a state of the art two-million-dollar worship facility. At Isle of Palms in Jacksonville, he retired over $800,000 in debt and remodeled the sanctuary for the 21^st century.

His career was impressive, and it looked like he would be rising into the upper echelon of Florida churches, but there were two huge problems. After the boys were born, Melinda began to grow more distant and asked him for a divorce. If that wasn’t enough his back began deteriorating to the point that he was in so much pain, he could barely walk. The surgeon determined that if he didn’t have surgery, he would gradually lose his ability to walk. He couldn’t have the surgery and continue to serve the church effectively, so he had to apply for disability.

After the surgery, he spent almost five months on his back only getting up to use the restroom and work with a physical therapist that came to the apartment every day. After that, it was three months of three-day-a-week physical therapy sessions at home. Then it was six months of intensive outpatient physical therapy five days a week. All this time all he could think about was getting back to serve a church again.

During the second year of disability, he and Melinda finalized the divorce. After two-and-a-half years, he had left disability and made himself available to be appointed. To his shock and disillusionment, the bishop and the cabinet saw him as damaged goods. They appointed him to the small inner-city parish in St. Petersburg that he was serving now.

He was divorced and deeply in debt. He was being paid less than he had been making on disability. To make matters worse, while he was grateful that the surgery had preserved his ability to walk, he was still in intense pain 24/7 and had to rely on painkillers to function. It was in the midst of this deeply depressing reality that he had come to the conclusion that he no longer had any discernable quality of life left. What had Graham Greene entitled his memoir? A Sort of Life. That was what he was left with—a sort of life. Nothing had come out the way he thought it would. He just wanted it to end. No more pain. The Buddha had it right, to live is to suffer, and he wanted nothing more than to end his suffering and experience whatever was next even if it was nothing at all. As he contemplated the deep blackness of the seemingly endless expanse of ocean outside his window he fell asleep. He was awakened by the announcement that they were preparing to land in Jerusalem.

The Tomb

He had checked in to the Capitol Hotel and was attempting to unwind after the long flight. The hotel was situated on Salah Eddin Street just a few minutes’ walk from the old city walls and almost perfectly centered between Herod’s Gate and the Damascus Gate. The balcony of his room overlooked the new city and the view reminded him that Jerusalem struggled with the tension between being a modern international center and the heart of history and antiquity for three of the world’s living major religions.

As he sipped his coffee he thought about the tomb. He knew it wouldn’t be that hard to find. It was known as the Talpiot tomb based on its location in the East Talpiot neighborhood about five kilometers south of the Old City in East Jerusalem. A documentary by a Canadian filmmaker had aired on the Discovery Channel in 2007 and had initiated a firestorm of debate that raged even to this day. The documentary claimed that based on the inscriptions on the ossuaries found there, the tomb belonged to the family of Jesus of Nazareth. Construction workers laying the foundations for an apartment complex discovered the tomb in 1980. When preparatory demolition work accidentally uncovered the tomb’s entrance, work on the apartment complex was suspended so that archeologists could explore the tomb and catalog its contents.

The tomb was carved out of solid limestone bedrock and branched out into six burial shafts with shelves for the entombment of ossuaries. Ossuaries were stone boxes in which the skeletal remains of the deceased were placed. Bodies were placed in a temporary burial site until they completely decomposed, and then the bones were stored in these smaller boxes in order to save space. Archeologists discovered ten ossuaries in the Talpiot tomb one of which was inscribed with the words “Yeshua bar Yehosef” or “Jesus, son of Joseph.” Other ossuaries found in the tomb bore the inscriptions Maria (Jesus’ mother Mary), Jose (the nickname of Jesus’ younger brother Joseph) and Mariamne (the Greek form of Mary of Magdalene’s name). Another ossuary reputed to have been illegally removed from the tomb was rediscovered later and bore the inscription “James the brother of Jesus.” There had been a raging controversy over whether the ossuary had even been in the tomb to begin with much less whether the inscription upon it was authentic. All that recently had been cleared up when

[ . . . . . . ]

As he came to full consciousness he was aware that the interior of the tomb was crackling with intricately delicate webs of blue and purple light as if he were encased in a plasma globe. The light seemed to be pulsing with purpose in the same way it would if it were moving between two Tesla coils.

[ . . . . . . ]

A Trip to the Temple

The preparations for our final meal together followed the descriptions in the Gospel of Mark with reasonable accuracy. Earlier in the day, James and John had offered three paschal lambs at the temple for sacrifice. As the ritual demanded, the head and feet of the lambs had been removed and, of course, they had been skinned and bled. Law demanded that the lambs be consumed completely before the dawn of the next day. The women had spent the better part of the day roasting the lamb, baking fresh matzo, and preparing the bitter herbs that would be consumed with the lamb.

This was the third Passover feast the disciples would spend together. None of them had even a remote suspicion that it would be their last. They were anxious to find out where they would be celebrating together that night. Matthew, the closest the group had to a wine connoisseur, took the responsibility of procuring the best wine available as a sacred task.

James and John asked Jesus, “Where would you like us to prepare for you to share Passover with us?”

Jesus answered, “Go into the city and a man carrying a water jug will meet you. He will not speak to you, but you will follow him. Whichever house he enters say to the owner of that house, ‘Your Rabbi asks where is the guest room in which I can eat the Passover meal with my disciples?’ He will lead you upstairs to a large room that will be furnished and ready. Make the preparations for our meal there.’” The disciples and the women left immediately to make the appropriate preparations.

I, on the other hand, had another errand to which I must attend. It was a busy day at the temple with literally thousands of lambs to be sacrificed. I made my way through the throngs of people and approached the entrance to the building where Caiaphas and the chief priests would be waiting for their Paschal meal to be prepared. When I approached the temple guards I was asked what I was doing there.

“I need to see Caiaphas and the other chief priests. I bring them important information they seek regarding a threat to the future of the temple and the sacrificial system.”

The head guard eyed me suspiciously and replied in a condescending tone, “On a day such as today no one sees the High Priest and the Sanhedrin. Come back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow will be too late,” I replied, “And I will make sure that the Council holds you personally responsible for their not receiving the intelligence they need to capture Jesus of Nazareth when he is away from the multitudes.” And with that, I turned quickly and began walking away.

The Head Guard pursued me, “Wait,” he said, “What is your name?”

“I am Judas of Kerioth, one of the 12 chosen to follow the Rabbi Jesus.”

“Wait here,” he said, “I will ask the Chief Priest if he will see you.”

After just a few minutes he returned. “Forgive me, sir, for being so abrupt with you. We have so many who wish to connive their way into the presence of the Council that we must be cautious, especially on the day of the Passover Feast. Please follow me. Caiaphas has granted you an audience and wishes to see you immediately.”

“I’ll bet he does,” I thought to myself.

I was led down a hall paneled with cedar and carved with beautifully intricate geometric patterns. Having worked wood all my life, I had to stop and run my hands over it. The guard grew impatient, and so I turned to follow him again. The hall opened into what resembled a banquet room with a cathedral ceiling. The priests sat at a huge table that looked to be oak, most likely transported from the Golan Heights. Caiaphas himself sat in the center of the group and rose to greet me as I entered to room. He looked regal in his robes and jeweled breastplate but put him in a three-piece suit and he could be the CEO of any one of a hundred small companies.

“Welcome,” he said, “The head of my guard says that you are Judas of Kerioth, one of the inner circle of 12 who follow the Rabbi Jesus. Is this the truth?”

“Indeed it is, your Excellency.”

“And you have information we can use to take him into custody when he is away from the throngs that follow him day and night.”

“I do, your Excellency.”

“Then please, Judas, enlighten us.”

“Tonight, the Master will share the Paschal Meal with the 12 at an undisclosed location after which he will retire to a secret place to find solitude and pray. Only the 12 will be with him in this place. If you arrive there just before the light of dawn you will be able to capture him with little or no resistance and no crowds present.”

While I thought I saw Caiaphas cringe a bit when I called Jesus “Master,” he seemed overcome with excitement at the news I brought. The other priests spoke to each other in animated, enthusiastic whispers with the exception of one. Nicodemus stared at me with stunned disillusionment. As he met my eye his face gradually transformed into disgust. I wished with all my heart to be able to tell him that Jesus himself had had asked me to do this for him. But he would never know. As I continued to meet his glare I thought, “Here is the first person to communicate the revulsion with which I would be viewed through all of history.”

After hushed and energetic conversations with several of the other priests, Caiaphas turned back to me. “Of course,” he said, “We will reward you handsomely for your part in apprehending Jesus. How does thirty silver drachma sound?”

“Payment is not necessary. I do this because I must. I have no choice.”

“Well,” Caiaphas returned, “We will insist on paying you for this service. But tell me Judas, how will my guards be able to tell which of the 12 is Jesus?”

“I will lead you to him.” It was hard for me to hold back the tears of my grief as I said; “I will walk up to him, greet him as my Master, embrace him and kiss him on the cheek. That way there will be no possibility of confusion.”

For a moment Caiaphas seemed to have trouble assimilating the audacious arrogance of what he had just heard. Then he smiled a broad smile and said, “You are a bold man, Judas of Kerioth.”

I glanced over at Nicodemus. He was shaking his head in bewildered disbelief.

“So where am I to bring my guard this day before dawn?”

“I will meet you here and lead you there. It’s a small garden of ancient olive trees not that far from the temple known by locals as Gethsemane. I’ll be here three hours before dawn breaks.”

“Thank you, Judas,” replied Caiaphas, “We will be waiting for you. You probably have little comprehension how significant what you do this day is for the future of Israel.”

“You have no idea, your Excellency, I know more than you can possibly imagine.”

And with that, I turned and left the room.