The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century Read Free

red-and-black plaid winter hunting coat and green army pants stuffed into tall black boots. The man stepped in front of him and abruptly established eye contact. Instinctively, Paul started to look away—eye contact in Manhattan can be dangerous, a lesson he’d learned well in his three years living there—but the man grabbed his right arm at the bicep and said in a loud voice, “Are you going to heaven, brother?”
    â€œWhat?” Paul said, compounding his eye-contact mistake by violating Manhattan’s unspoken, never-respond-to-them rule. He immediately realized his mistake and tried to pull his arm from the man’s grip.
    But the man held him tightly, the bond forged by Paul’s response, and said, “I mean are you saved?Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”
    Paul felt a return flush of the resentment and bellicosity he’d experienced just ten minutes earlier in Mack’s office. Who the hell did Mack think he was, telling Paul that a reporter shouldn’t report the news if it made a big company uncomfortable? And who the hell did this guy think he was asking if Paul was “saved”?
    â€œIs that what I have to do to get into heaven?” Paul said to the guy, his voice trembling with outrage, as if the man were a stand-in for the hypocritical Mack who’d just shattered his life.
    â€œAccept, believe, be forgiven, and repent!” the man proclaimed, raising the index finger of his free right hand in the air. “And you’ll spend eternity in heaven!”
    â€œLemme get this straight,” Paul said. “If I do these things, then I go to heaven when I die?”
    â€œRight! An eternal paradise!”
    â€œAnd you’re going to be there, too?”
    â€œOf course!” the man roared.
    Paul laughed, what he knew was a sarcastic and cutting laugh, and said: “If that’s where you’re going, then I think I’d rather be somewhere else.”
    He pulled away from the shocked man’s grip and continued his walk down Madison Avenue.
    â€œYou’ll bum in hell forever!” the man shouted at his back. “You’re running scared and you better be scared,because you’re gonna die in sin and burn in hell! The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will get you, because he’s wrathful and jealous! That’s right-run away. You can run, but you can’t hide!” The man’s voice, his rant, faded into the sounds of traffic as Paul kept walking briskly down Madison, along with the sea of other people all pretending to be totally oblivious to the man shouting threats behind them.
    But as he walked, Paul remembered his teenage years, the time he’d gone to Billy Graham’s sermon at Shea Stadium and walked down front for the altar call, and the church he briefly attended after that, where the pastor’s favorite theme was original sin and damnation. He eventually stopped attending the church, to a gnawing feeling of guilt.
    What does it all mean? he wondered as he walked. Was everybody born evil and hated by God because of a mistake some now-dead woman made thousands of years ago? Was it possible? Would any father, even a Heavenly Father, torture and murder his own son to save the people he created from his own wrath? Could it really be that this was the purpose of life, to escape the wrath of the one who created us? Or is there something deeper, something more comprehensible, something more compassionate, perhaps even right there in the Bible?
    â€œI’d give anything to know the answer to that one,’ Paul said from his heart, half aloud, a little corner of his mind also thinking that it would be a reporter’s ultimate story. He caught himself,wondering if any of the people around had heard him talking to himself. He looked around cautiously as he stopped with the flow of people for the red light at 41 St Street, but nobody seemed to have noticed his lapse.