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I'd
missed him by a day.
A single day. I'll never forgive myself. If it hadn't been for
that stupid deal when my father couldn't bear to lose a damn
rupee, I would have seen him again. There I was, riding like
a maniac. All for nothing.
More than three years had
passed since I last saw him. I missed him from the day that we
parted company. In Egypt. He was the closest friend I ever had.
As a matter of fact, considering the time I spend traveling,
he was virtually my only friend. And now he's gone. Dead. They
tell me the Romans executed him. Like a common criminal. Why
- Yeshûa wouldn't steal a crust of bread. He wouldn't hurt
a fly. Not the Yeshûa I knew. Could it really be true?
They've directed me to this
broken down hovel. A house, a shack really, on the back-streets
of Jerusalem. Mud bricks and a straw roof. The headquarters of
his followers. I just don't believe it. I can't. He was He wouldn't
let them Yeshûa where are you Yeshûa?
Don't listen to me. I am in
a state of shock. Wouldn't you be? You would, had you known him
as I did. If you knew him at all. Even if you had just met him.
I look
around.
My eyes fall on a stone
bench against the eastern wall. A mud brick wall like the house.
All around the courtyard: drab walls, drab bench, drab, beaten
down ground for a floor. Yeshûa was never drab. He was
rich beyond belief. He was the perennial giver.... They let me
sit here. Someone came out, told me what happened and went inside
again. I've been alone since. As usual. As he was. Had been.
This is where it had all started. At least
for me. On the outskirts of Jerusalem. This is where I'd met
the man who now is no more. I know it. The man who came out told
me. I've also heard it in town. But in my heart, in my heart
of hearts, it's too much to accept. Although, on the way here,
I did sense something peculiar. In the whole city. The City of
Peace. Peace indeed! A city where they murder innocent people.
Not the mob, not some crooks in a dark alley, but the people
in power. The Romans. The illustrious noblemen.
This is a farce!
And the men inside the house
aren't much help either. Or weren't to him. At least I assume
there are men inside. I only met one of them. They told me, outside,
before I got here, in a whisper, that his disciples are hiding
here. Hiding from whom? And why? Maybe they know something I
don't? They certainly didn't know him as I do, even if
they had followed him during these last three years. Much good
it did them. Or him.
I feel a pang of anger.
So much had happened during
these last few years. I'd had my share of excitement, though
I didn't share my father's, nor Yeshûa's ambitions. Live
and let live was my motto. So far it served me well. Apparently
my friend hadn't fared so well. And then I'd heard, all the way
home, that he was a full-fledged teacher. A Master, they called
him. Like a Swami or Guru. God how time flies! I'd just returned
home from China. I had dropped everything and rode all the way.
I had to see him. To see if his dream had come true. He never
lost hope that it would. That he would fulfill his mission. It
had taken weeks to get here. It would have been many months,
had I traveled with a caravan. Had I had a premonition? Had he
called me to his side? Somehow?
I'd missed him by a day.
continue reading
in the book...
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." Chapter 2
The Desert
I
forget where or when
the following event took place, but it couldn't have been more
than a few weeks, months at most, after we first left Jerusalem.
We followed the main road to Shechem, then took the right fork,
bearing northeast towards Scythopolis, and finally crossed Jordan
just south of Lake Chinnereth to take the mountain road to Damascus.
It wasn't the best road, but my father deemed it the safest.
There were too many riffraff in the lower, richer grounds, where
bandits could hide in the thick bush that covered most of the
ground. The desert was safer. It was here, in the vast expanse
of rocks and sand that, for the first time, Yeshûa raised
a tiny edge of the veil that obfuscated from me, and I should
well imagine from the rest of the world, his most secret thoughts.
It was a moonless night, and
thus stars that salted the sky seemed to have multiplied a thousand-fold
from one horizon to the other. Against their background, the
River of Light, known to the Hebrews as N,har di Nur,
and to the Arabs as just Al Nahr, The River, was as vivid,
bright and sparkling and as clearly defined, as ever I'd seen
it on my travels. Back home, we knew it as the Bed of Ganges,
the most holy of rivers.
Until this night, Yeshûa
hadn't talked much. He preferred to listen. This was the beginning
of what became an almost nightly congress of thoughts that we,
two lads in their early teens, chose to share. To date, his interests
lay only in learning the intricacies of caravan life, of commerce
and other aspects that to a merchant were of great value. His
past was his own. His inner life remained safe behind those steely
irises of his, which absorbed with insatiable hunger, but, until
now, didn't give anything away.
Later, as the moon came out,
I found him standing alone on the top of a rock outcropping,
some two hundred steps from our camp, overlooking the arid ocean.
His head was held high, waving from one side to the other, as
though swayed by the non-existent wind. I recall, we had both
been entranced by the intensity of silence. If you've never spent
a night in the desert, don't pretend that you have. It wasn't
the real desert, forbidding in its vastness, which we would cross
on the way to Palmyra, but the essence was the same. A night
in the desert is unlike any other experience. You may be as tall
as an oak, as important as a minister in a Persian court or a
Roman tribune, yet out here, in the vastness of this endless
expanse of rocks and sand, amid the grotesque shadows cast by
moonlight you feel small. Tiny. Completely insignificant.
Even the mountains shrink under the grandeur spanning the horizons.
Yet, at the same time, you are not dwarfed by the exuberance
of the starry splendor. You are absorbed by it. It is as though
the sky inhaled you with every breath you took. You become part
of everything. Part of the Whole. Part of the sand and the rocks,
the hills and the air, the sky, the stars... You become a pebble
on the Bed of Ganges. You are like the breath that enters your
lungs and then floats out mingling with the invisible currents
in the vastness of space.
And every night was like that.
Night after night.
I wasn't aware of it then.
He taught me. Perhaps the first lesson he taught me was to appreciate
beauty. In all its forms. In all things. All places.
So many years ago, yet it
seem as though....
"What is your name for Yahweh?" he
asked me without turning his head. He must have sensed that I
followed him out of the tent we shared. I was surprised he used
the name Yahweh. The orthodox Jews were not allowed to use the
name of their god. I could have sworn Yeshûa had been raised
as an orthodox Jew. My father had said as much.
"Brahma," I replied.
"We have many gods in India. We have Brahma who created
the universe, Vishnu who sustains it, and Shiva is the Destroyer.
But they are all aspects of the same deity."
He didn't say anything. I
too, had been swept off my feet by the magic of the desert night.
I felt the need to share my wonder with him. "This is where
Brahma says to you I OWN YOU," I said quietly.
He remained silent. For a
time I thought he hadn't heard me. Then, as though emerging from
an ocean as deep as the desert was wide, he turned his eyes toward
me. They shone even as the stars above. "No," he said.
"This is where Brahma says YOU AND I ARE ONE."
the journey continues
in the book...
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