The Clowns of God Read Free Page A

placid, very relaxed. I began to read the fourteenth chapter of Saint John’s Gospel, which the Abbot had proposed for that day’s meditation. You remember how it begins, with the discourse of Christ at his Last Supper: “Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me.” The text itself, full of comfort and reassurance, matched my mood. When I reached the verse, “And he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father’, I closed the book and looked up.
    Everything about me had changed. There was no monastery, no garden, no labouring monk. I was alone, on a high, barren peak. All about me were jagged mountains, black against a lurid sky. The place was still and silent as the grave. I felt no fear, only a terrible, bleak emptiness, as if the kernel of me had been scooped out and only the husk remained. I knew what I was seeing, the aftermath of man’s ultimate folly a dead planet. For what happened next I can find no adequate words. It was as if I were suddenly filled with flame, caught up in a fiery whirlwind, hurtled out of every human dimension into the centre of a vast unendurable light. The light was a voice and the voice was a light, and it was as if I were being impregnated with its message. I was at the end of all, the beginning of all; the omega point of time, the alpha point of eternity. There were no symbols any more, only the single simple Reality.
    Prophecy was fulfilled. Order was completed out of chaos, ultimate truth made manifest. In a moment of exquisite agony I understood that I must announce this event, prepare the world for it. I was called to proclaim that the Last Days were very near and that mankind should prepare for the Parousia: the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus.
    Just when it seemed the agony would explode me into extinction it was over. I was back again in the cloister garden. The monk was hoeing his roses. The New Testament was on my lap, open now at the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew: For as the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth even into the west. So shall the coming of the Son of Man be.” Accident or omen? It did not seem to matter any more.
    And there you have it, Carl, as close as I can come to it in words, with the closest friend of my heart. When I tried to explain it to my colleagues back in Rome, I could see the shock in their faces: a Pope with a private revelation, a precursor of the Second Coming? Madness! The final explosive unreason! I was a walking time-bomb that must be defused as quickly as possible. And yet I could no more conceal what had happened to me than I could change the colour of my eyes. It was imprinted on every fibre of my being, like the genetic patterns of my parents. I was compelled to talk about it, doomed to announce it to a world rushing, heedless, towards extinction.
    I began work on an encyclical, a letter to the Universal Church. It opened with the words: “In his ultimis annis fatalihus … In these last fateful years of the millennium .” My secretary found the draft on my desk, photographed it in secret and distributed copies to the Curia.
    They were horrified. Separately and in concert, they urged me to suppress the document. When I refused, they put my apartments under virtual siege, and blocked all my communications with the outside world. Then they summoned an emergency meeting of the Sacred College, brought in a team of physicians and psychiatrists to report on my mental state, and thus set in train the events which led to my abdication.
    Now, in my extremity, I turn to you, not only because you are my friend, but because you too have been under inquisition and you understand how reason rocks under the relentless pressure of questioning. If you judge that I am insane, then I absolve you in advance from any blame and thank you for the friendship we have been privileged to share.
    If you can go halfway to believing that I have told you a simple, terrible truth, then study the two documents appended to this