chapter 13

After ten years in Rome, it was time for Jesus to be the messiah. Fau helped me with our children. Francis was almost ten and smart like his father. Jamie was seven and wild like his father. And Sarah was three. Fau had a little girl who turned six the day we boarded the ship for the place Jesus and I used to call home. Our children had never seen it.

Anne, Fau’s daughter, called Jesus her uncle. She was, however, his child.

On the long sea voyage, it was the children that kept our spirits from leaving us and jumping overboard to be with the fishes.

“Ignorance is brutal.”

Our first many days of living on the water were very wet. The sky was one big black cloud. Sometimes it looked like the rain would take a break but it didn’t. There were different kinds of rain.

The rain that seemed to float was our favorite rain. Little drops like bubbles that exploded into little points of wetness when they floated into our faces.

Our children had received more education than most of the ship crew. They simply had no opportunity to open their minds. Education was a scarce luxury. In many cases it was easier to communicate with the resident cats. Cats ignored the laws handed down by warlords. They ignored all the silly rituals. They seemed oblivious to fear and superstition. They did not care if a black man crossed their path. As long as he didn’t stop to kick them.

Obey or die. It was a horrible system. Everyone who woke up enough to see it knew it was killing us. I was happy for my children that they were not taught to hold to religion. I hoped that one day no child would have to go through the mind torture of religion. It was this hope that made me accept the dangerous theater that we had written and prepared. Borus reminded us many times not to ask for too much. It would take many years to unlock all the iron gates of violently propagated beliefs. Many generations.

Making free creatures of heaven into slaves of hell. It was impossible to ignore the problem and just take the children to the Toscana and raise goats and chickens. Jesus was made a legend by our ancestors. And he was to be made a religious icon by the Empire that ruled most of the western world. It was a chance he could not run from.

“Mommy, why are you crying.”

“I was thinking about your grandparents. They have been poisoned by the laws of Moses and I’m so afraid to see them.”

“They will still want to see their grandchildren.”

“Anyone who doesn’t want to see you Jamie, is a monster.”

“You’re mom and dad aren’t monsters.”

“No. Not anymore than you and me.”

Jamie made a scary face and I made one back at him and a little bit of sun broke through the clouds. And a bit of a smile returned to my face.

I put my arm around Jamie and tried to explain my parents’ religion to him. As simply as I could. He told me not to worry.

Every thing would be all right.


chapter 14

To say that Palestine was waiting for the return of Jesus would be an understatement.

Herod wasn’t happy but the women of his court were. Jesus was a hero for the women and children. Everyone except for those who would lose most by the freeing of the human mind, the warlords and their marketing monkeys, the priests and lawyers, were happy to see Jesus, his loving women, his loving children and his attentive crowds.

“Save us from the tyrants of Law and Chaos. Jesus.”

Jesus went down to the river to be baptized by John. The crowd loved it. John was washing them of their sins and preaching that Jesus would set them free.

“The evil pricks do not own your soul. And we will one day tear down their evil lie.”

The lawyers and priests were raging mad. And everything Jesus did made them more mad. Keeping the company of women and bastard children made them furious.

The more furious the fat assed lawyers and priest got, the more Jesus raged like an animal angel. The more he shone, the more hope he infected in the people.

When Herod’s sister Joanne left the palace with her maids and servants to lend their support to our Jesus theater, Herod, the inbred incestuous bastard, threw John into prison. We considered tying Jesus down to keep him from running amok.

When Herod had John’s head cut off because of his promise he made in his drunkenness to his niece/step-daughter, we had to take Jesus to Eritrea for a few moons.

We traveled down the Red Sea and hiked inland a few days and lived in a mountain village. And Jesus watched our children play with the local children and let his anger bleed out of him and remember that John would be back and that there was much Jesus had to do and he had no time to hate his half-brother Herod.

And when we left Eritrea, we knew that Jesus had infected them and that they had infected us. Our concept of life and time had been changed. Rome had been wiped out of our minds. We returned to Palestine, or as my family called it, Israel and Jesus taught and raved with even more fury.

When Jesus taught outside of the villages, great crowds would gather. And when they hungered, Herod’s soldiers brought us bread and fish.

Rome had given us full protection. Herod had been visited by Lords more powerful than him and told to not interfere with the campaign for the New Church of Rome. Herod was not happy to have Jesus running freely throughout his land but he consented to his Lords rather than lose his head.

It was a brutal travesty to lose John. On the other hand, it put a new element of seriousness into the theater. It made Jesus into an angry god that would not be silenced by the priests and lawyers.

Both of our families were not at all happy with our obvious move toward the occupying Empire. They would not be any happier to know that behind the campaign was a plan to bring and end to religion.


chapter 15

It was very soon impossible to distinguish our theater from real magic. The people lived in such poverty of body and soul that there was no way to go but up.

There was so much sudden caring and love parading through Palestine that it was pointless after a few weeks to stage healing. Many were healed with a smile and a touch. Not everyone could be healed. Jesus was not the hand of God. He was a Heritic. Just another angel. He was nothing more than a clever animal with many friends who knew things that most didn’t. And most people who needed healing were not physically ill. Most were simply frightened. Many could be healed with a little olive oil or herbal medicine. It wasn’t breaking any rules of reality. It was simply working with it. Jesus was very real. Just a bastard willing to look for a bit of truth in a world of big fat lies and wealthy lying pricks.

“Hello. We are both here. And so is the sky. The heavens. We have entered the kingdom of the gods. We are the angels of life.”

They had been so beaten by warlords and their laws of servitude that they had fallen into darkness. Ignorance.

Jesus spent most of his time trying to get people to think. To use their heads for basic logic. Most people didn’t take time to entertain ideas. The notion hadn’t occurred to them.

“There are no sins, people. You are not born with sin. The priests and lawyers are telling you brutal evil lies. They have made you believe you must die to go to heaven. They have sold you this lie to make you obedient slaves.

“Heaven is here and now. Live and be in heaven. A prostitute, a tax collector, a sheep herder. It does not matter. We all live here now. We can all sit down and watch the moon rise over the hills and know that it is real. That we are under the moon and under the stars. Under the sun and we are born and we die and we are born and we die and we grow and if we take the power back from the warlords who stole heaven. We will know that we are the angels becoming the gods. We are the gods. Life is our holy mother.”

“Jesus, there is someone coming through the roof.”

Jesus looked at me and I shrugged. We had that one already. A second one hadn’t been planned. But it was pretty obvious that the man had been drinking and that his friends were enjoying themselves. Looking to be part of the Jesus show.

So Jesus said the same thing he did at staged events.

“Your sins aren’t real. You are a free man.”

It was Goddard with a beard.

“Pick up your bed and walk.”

He stood up slowly and smiled.

“I can walk.”

Of course he could walk. He had been walking his whole life. The priest knew it. Most everyone else knew it. It was just a game. Mocking the Holy Scriptures and the perpetrators of the horror story.

So we all walked to the synagogue to annoy the priests. It was time to send them into a rage. To mock their holy rit. People touched Jesus as he walked by making a show of being healed. Dancing and singing, mocking the priests and lawyers. 2,000 years of the laws of Moses.

The animals suddenly coming to their senses.

One could imagine the world waking up.

But Borus warned us against underestimating the power of fear. The world still couldn’t read. We should have fun but also patience. The road not yet traveled was a long one. Tyrants had ruled with their system of fear and ignorance since before written history. It was the right war to fight but it was a long hard one.

So the theater continued and Jesus and his team and his disciples taught the people and inspired them to believe in themselves and to understand that those that called themselves holy were the opposite of holy. It was the grand leaders that were using the masses to fight their war games, to collect mineral resources from concurred lands. It was the poor man that worked in the mines to make the ruling class rich. It was the priests that lived in palaces and robbed from the poor widows to enjoy their obscene luxury. It was the Lords that enslaved the masses and kept them frightened with military rule. The system was a vile travesty and no one who demanded honour deserved it. It was a horror story propagated by evil tyrants and it was costing the world its wealth and its life.

To obey and serve the ruling class was a crime against life. Stand up and demand that the peeks be leveled off. Demand an end to slavery. Demand an end to war and plunder. Demand an end to the lies that they have sold us as truth. Demand and end to religion.

Jesus was stirring up a lot of trouble.

The lawyers and priest were not happy.


mary helene chapters 16 - 18