Topic 22: Religion
Whether you're losing your religion, or finding your faith again, tell us, about religion.
*Notes written on several sheets, found in the study Prophet Five provided for Arvin Sloane in Zurich*
When they let me go to church to light a candle for Nadia today, I could not decide whether this is a sign of Peyton being less or more clever than I had previously assumed. If she did not believe me regarding the purpose of the exercise, she gave no sign of it. Nor did the ever so discreet "bodyguard" that shadows my steps since I arrived here. Now you would think that if there was one thing both Peyton and my current hosts know about me, one thing they are certain of, it is my faith. And yet, asking to be allowed to light a candle in a Catholic church, the same church which burned Milo Rambaldi, was taken as plausible request.
They really must believe me to be senile.
You're in a church, Arvin, Jack said when I told him Emily was haunting me for killing her. You came here because you wanted to confess. I lied to him them, of course, the entire time; my wife was alive and well. But I was in a church today, and my daughter is truly dead, and she is haunting me. It is a discovery I made only recently: all my lies are coming true. My visit in today's church being a case in point. It was a method to contact Julian Sark. But as I lit a flame and watched it transfer to the candle, it occured to me that Nadia, child of two followers of Rambaldi who left the religions they were raised in long behind, was raised by nuns and indeed a Catholic. And so the gesture becomes true. As for the confession, well.
What I am doing now is another case in point. I have decyphered the remaining mysteries of page 47 a week ago, but I still pretend to be working. When I am at sleep, my ever so discreet bodyguard goes through my daily notes. As they are written in a mixture of Tuscan dialect, Aramaic and a code so old that the only other person who remembers it is a continent away, I doubt he will find them very enlightening. Besides, he does not try very hard. The very fact I leave them out in the open indicates to him they cannot be that important. I knew my youthful fondness for Edgar Allan Poe would be useful one day, and so I sit here, writing purloined letters to myself. It is a way to pass the time when she does not talk to me. Tomorrow, I shall reveal what I found - what it suits me to reveal, at any rate, and make appropriate suggestions, including an official request for the services of our Mr. Sark. I do hope he'll have made preparations by then.
Thinking of Rambaldi and the Catholic church, I realize now what I had not understood before: that a period of heresy is necessary for every true believer. My own heresy started when I stopped my quest and tried to be what I was not. From the time Nadia returned to the time the impostor created by Yelena Derevko caused Sydney to ask me to return to Rambaldi, I had not looked on any of the artifacts, not those in the DSR nor the one still in my possession, the last one. Heresy, of course, is punished. The result of my abandonment was Yelena misusing the Muller device and Nadia in a coma. I still had not learned my lessons, however, and so while I tried to find a cure for my daughter and allowed myself to be blackmailed, Prophet Five flourished like an ill-mannered and ill-governed parasite of a plant.
When Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son, bible and Thorah alike tell us, his God intervened at the last moment and sent an angel. And here you have the difference between religion and a fairy tale, though it took me a long while to understand it myself. True religion does not accept substitutes and does not grant reprieves, and it always, always punishes betrayal. I had turned my back on my faith for my daughter, and so my daughter is dead.
Of course, everyone dies. And so we get to the core of the mystery, which I believed I understood and yet had not until I saw her blood on the half-burned manuscript which the Master himself had composed before his own body was destroyed by flames. Everyone has to die in order to live, and live forever. Not in a quaint metaphorical way involving wine and bland bread, and not in some kind of eternal youth, which is what my current hosts seem to believe. (Of course, none of them will ever achieve immortality, and this would be true even if I was removed from the equation entirely. They want it for the wrong reasons, they see it as the end instead of the first step, and above all, they do not understand the price they have to pay first.) Immortality is necessary because no human life span, however long, will be enough to affect true change, of either the self or the species. And we do need change. I half understood this when I used the formula in the water supplies, but I still it could be done quickly. Human impatience. Being immortal, however, one is no longer bound to human limitations, and shall have all the time of the world. And the necessary companions. The ties that bind us, the ones that made me abjur and yet now enable me to return: immortality can be shared, but only by the hand which dealt out death to the people in question before. That is, I think, what Rambaldi himself could not bear, and why he at last preferred the flames to continuation of his own physical existence.
(Naturally, I shall not mention this part to any of the Twelve before I rid myself of them. There was not much kindness in me at the best of times, and there certainly isn't now. I would not wish them to die with the delusion I might bother to bring them back.)
My own death first, then, as soon as all the ingredients are there, but not final, as I allowed myself to think during the days of my heresy, until so very recently. I really should have paid more attention to Rambaldi's great foe and killer.
Wish it, resent it, long for it or deplore it, but there is always resurrection.
*Notes written on several sheets, found in the study Prophet Five provided for Arvin Sloane in Zurich*
When they let me go to church to light a candle for Nadia today, I could not decide whether this is a sign of Peyton being less or more clever than I had previously assumed. If she did not believe me regarding the purpose of the exercise, she gave no sign of it. Nor did the ever so discreet "bodyguard" that shadows my steps since I arrived here. Now you would think that if there was one thing both Peyton and my current hosts know about me, one thing they are certain of, it is my faith. And yet, asking to be allowed to light a candle in a Catholic church, the same church which burned Milo Rambaldi, was taken as plausible request.
They really must believe me to be senile.
You're in a church, Arvin, Jack said when I told him Emily was haunting me for killing her. You came here because you wanted to confess. I lied to him them, of course, the entire time; my wife was alive and well. But I was in a church today, and my daughter is truly dead, and she is haunting me. It is a discovery I made only recently: all my lies are coming true. My visit in today's church being a case in point. It was a method to contact Julian Sark. But as I lit a flame and watched it transfer to the candle, it occured to me that Nadia, child of two followers of Rambaldi who left the religions they were raised in long behind, was raised by nuns and indeed a Catholic. And so the gesture becomes true. As for the confession, well.
What I am doing now is another case in point. I have decyphered the remaining mysteries of page 47 a week ago, but I still pretend to be working. When I am at sleep, my ever so discreet bodyguard goes through my daily notes. As they are written in a mixture of Tuscan dialect, Aramaic and a code so old that the only other person who remembers it is a continent away, I doubt he will find them very enlightening. Besides, he does not try very hard. The very fact I leave them out in the open indicates to him they cannot be that important. I knew my youthful fondness for Edgar Allan Poe would be useful one day, and so I sit here, writing purloined letters to myself. It is a way to pass the time when she does not talk to me. Tomorrow, I shall reveal what I found - what it suits me to reveal, at any rate, and make appropriate suggestions, including an official request for the services of our Mr. Sark. I do hope he'll have made preparations by then.
Thinking of Rambaldi and the Catholic church, I realize now what I had not understood before: that a period of heresy is necessary for every true believer. My own heresy started when I stopped my quest and tried to be what I was not. From the time Nadia returned to the time the impostor created by Yelena Derevko caused Sydney to ask me to return to Rambaldi, I had not looked on any of the artifacts, not those in the DSR nor the one still in my possession, the last one. Heresy, of course, is punished. The result of my abandonment was Yelena misusing the Muller device and Nadia in a coma. I still had not learned my lessons, however, and so while I tried to find a cure for my daughter and allowed myself to be blackmailed, Prophet Five flourished like an ill-mannered and ill-governed parasite of a plant.
When Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son, bible and Thorah alike tell us, his God intervened at the last moment and sent an angel. And here you have the difference between religion and a fairy tale, though it took me a long while to understand it myself. True religion does not accept substitutes and does not grant reprieves, and it always, always punishes betrayal. I had turned my back on my faith for my daughter, and so my daughter is dead.
Of course, everyone dies. And so we get to the core of the mystery, which I believed I understood and yet had not until I saw her blood on the half-burned manuscript which the Master himself had composed before his own body was destroyed by flames. Everyone has to die in order to live, and live forever. Not in a quaint metaphorical way involving wine and bland bread, and not in some kind of eternal youth, which is what my current hosts seem to believe. (Of course, none of them will ever achieve immortality, and this would be true even if I was removed from the equation entirely. They want it for the wrong reasons, they see it as the end instead of the first step, and above all, they do not understand the price they have to pay first.) Immortality is necessary because no human life span, however long, will be enough to affect true change, of either the self or the species. And we do need change. I half understood this when I used the formula in the water supplies, but I still it could be done quickly. Human impatience. Being immortal, however, one is no longer bound to human limitations, and shall have all the time of the world. And the necessary companions. The ties that bind us, the ones that made me abjur and yet now enable me to return: immortality can be shared, but only by the hand which dealt out death to the people in question before. That is, I think, what Rambaldi himself could not bear, and why he at last preferred the flames to continuation of his own physical existence.
(Naturally, I shall not mention this part to any of the Twelve before I rid myself of them. There was not much kindness in me at the best of times, and there certainly isn't now. I would not wish them to die with the delusion I might bother to bring them back.)
My own death first, then, as soon as all the ingredients are there, but not final, as I allowed myself to think during the days of my heresy, until so very recently. I really should have paid more attention to Rambaldi's great foe and killer.
Wish it, resent it, long for it or deplore it, but there is always resurrection.