Busiest airports

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - Flying through South America's busiest airports has become frightening and time-consuming for passengers and pilots alike as a surge in travelers overwhelms under funded air traffic control systems.
 

The Argentine capital's main airport radar hasn't worked properly since being struck by lightning in March, meaning jets must fly under manual control, causing delays and at least two near-collisions, according to air traffic controllers. A September crash that was Brazil's deadliest air disaster exposed other gaps, from inadequate equipment to poor training.

Angry stranded travelers have stormed airline check-in counters and runways and fistfights have broken out in waiting areas. Controllers — concerned about being made scapegoats — have engaged in strikes and work slowdowns to raise safety concerns.

The problems in Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo ripple through Latin America and beyond as travelers make connecting flights. On Friday, all flights from Sao Paulo to Europe and the United States were temporarily suspended due to equipment failure and another slowdown by controllers.

Brazil and Argentina acknowledge failing to make needed investments in radar for decades, even as South America's booming economies fueled growth in air travel. Foreign travelers to Buenos Aires' main international airport have more than doubled in five years to 2.1 million in 2006, while the number of domestic flights in Brazil has risen by 49 percent, the governments say.

The world's pilots have lobbied to solve the problems since a Boeing 737 wound up on a collision course with a small executive jet over the Amazon on Sept. 29, killing all 154 people on the passenger jet.

A Brazilian judge indicted four flight controllers and the smaller jet's two American pilots on the equivalent of manslaughter charges, but the defendants point to other problems, from holes in radar coverage to the inability of some Brazilian controllers to clearly speak English, the language of international aviation.

Passengers are getting jittery, too.

Meghan Bolden, a 26-year-old American studying in Buenos Aires, sweated through takeoff on her United Airlines flight home to Washington.

"The pilot, who was American, got on and said we were going to be taking off manually because there was no radar. But it was pitch black and we couldn't see anything on the tarmac," Bolden said. "It's like we were back in the Wright brothers era."

Manual takeoffs, spaced several minutes apart, are widely accepted under commercial aviation rules, and Argentine Defense Minister Hilda Garret has insisted her country's system is safe. "There is no such thing as air insecurity" in Argentina, she told an Argentine Senate committee on May 22.

She denied a claim by air controllers of at least two near-collisions due to faulty radar. According to transcripts, a U.S. business jet and an Aerosur flight came close enough for the Aerosur pilot to see the other captain's uniform. Another recording indicates that one jet circling over Buenos Aires crossed just 300 yards over another. But Garret acknowledged that the Argentine government has long deferred costly investments in new radars.

Bill Voss, president of the independent Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va., said Argentine authorities were not "exactly forthcoming" with the public about the lightning damage.

"Under any circumstances, having a radar down for three months indicates some significant problems in terms of funding and logistics," Voss said. "It should not be that hard to get radar service restored at a major airport."

The International Federation of Air Line Pilots' Associations, representing more than 100,000 pilots worldwide, issued a June 1 bulletin saying it was "surprised to learn that three months after it was damaged by a lightning strike, the radar station covering Buenos Aires still has not been repaired."

And Marc Baumgartner, president of International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers' Associations, wondered if Argentine controllers have enough training in manual controls.

"The problem is with air traffic controllers who are used to working with a radar environment, who are then asked to work in a blind air traffic control environment," Baumgartner said. "These controllers have to be more sufficiently trained."

Moscow next week introduces a city-wide label to identify GM-free foods, a move ecologists hail as ground-breaking but which foreign producers say is complex and costly.
 
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A handful of individual food producers around the world already use labels certifying their food is free of genetically modified elements -- but this is the first large-scale political effort to introduce such a system, Greenpeace says, expecting it to be watched by others as a test-case.

"These labels are important for consumers so they know which companies keep a tight control on ingredients in their products," Greenpeace's GM researcher in Russia, Natalie Olefirenko, said.

After an official -- voluntary -- inspection producers will have the right to carry Moscow's GM-free label for a year.

The European Union already insists products which contain more than 0.9 percent of GM-enhanced ingredients must say so on the packet, but environmentalists argue that does not go far enough.

"It's very important for the rest of the world to watch Moscow," Olefirenko said.

Greenpeace estimates around 80 percent of Russian produce contains no genetically enhanced ingredients, in line with other developing countries, against only about 20 percent in the EU and richer countries.

But Greenpeace said parts of the EU could follow Moscow's lead if it is a success, although the label should remain voluntary.

Foreign food producers say that is just one of the problems the label brings.

Supermarkets eager to curry favor with Moscow's government have hinted they will only stock products carrying the GM-free label -- and signals from the authorities suggest the label will effectively be obligatory, producer lobby groups say.

"And it's all extra costs," said Alexei Popovichev, head of Rusbrand which represents big Western producers such as Nestle and Kraft. "It involves special testing, special packaging and the costs will be passed on to the consumer."

Small domestic producers will probably feel the burden of the extra costs hardest as they will not be able to spread them through economies of scale, he said.

Western businesses also argue the GM-free label could mislead customers into buying poorer products because the assertion that foods contain no GM-ingredients could be misread as a signal that all the ingredients are of high-quality.

ARGENTINEAN APPLES

Greenpeace does warn there is a potential flaw in the Moscow GM label, saying the testing system chosen by Moscow is untried even though it says over $2 million has already been spent buying equipment for laboratories owned by a Moscow businessman.

The project, an initiative of Moscow's 70-year-old Mayor Yuri Lusaka, comes to a city where ecological concerns are not typically high: traffic chokes Moscow's roads, residents throw out rubbish with scant regard for recycling and the centrally controlled heating grinds out warmth during even the mildest winter.

Russia lags behind in the growing multi-million-dollar organic food industry -- Moscow has just one self-styled organic supermarket.

Called Grunwald, it is tucked away under an 18-storey concrete apartment block in a leafy, green suburb 30 minutes west by metro from the centre of Moscow.

Foreigners and wealthy Russians who live in nearby gated communities and dachas form the bulk of the customers, Marina Goldenberg, the supermarket's marketing manager, said.

All the products in the store -- and everything is foreign -- have been certified to be GM-free.

On a weekday mid-afternoon visit the handful of middle-aged women browsing the displays wore designer sunglasses on their heads and the latest fashion from London and Paris.

They inspected GM-free apples from Argentina, which cost around $12.50 per kg, and wild salmon from Sweden at $80 per kg.

"When this new law comes in we will stock locally grown and produced food, prices will drop and more and more people will shop here," Goldenberg said.

And Dmitri Yawning, head of Russian consumer group KonFOP, said research appears to suggest GM-free produce is not a priority for most Russians.

He said research last year showed 60 percent of food buyers in Russia said price was the most important factor in choosing what to buy. Just over 5 percent picked ingredients.

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When Jose Luis Cabrera had coronary by-pass surgery after a heart attack five years ago, his wife had to bring food and clean sheets to him in the hospital. The operation itself didn't cost the Cuban couple a cent.
 

"I am so grateful. They saved his life," said his wife, Daisy Martinez, who works as a cleaner in an office. "It would have cost a fortune in the United States."

Hospitals in Cuba are often shabby and badly-lit, and lack equipment and medicines. But the health system built by President Fidel Castro's government has produced results on a par with rich nations using the resources of a developing country.

Experts say that is because Cuba focused on prevention and because its universal free health care allows Cubans to see a doctor quickly and treat illness before it needs costly procedures.

The Cuban system is extolled in filmmaker Michael Moore's new documentary "SiCKO," which argues that U.S. health care tends more to the profits of insurance and pharmaceutical companies than to public health.

To make his point, Moore goes to Communist Cuba with a group of Americans who suffer from health problems derived from working as volunteers in the ruins of New York's World Trade Center after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The film, which is due to open in U.S. theaters on June 29, makes the point that the treatment they lack in the United States is available for free in Cuba.

On key statistics measured by the World Health Organization, Cuba is in line with the United States.

The average life expectancy of a child born in Cuba is 77.2 years, compared with 77.9 years in the United States, according to the WHO.

The number of children dying before their fifth birthday is seven per 1,000 live births in Cuba and eight per 1,000 in the United States.

Yet the United States spends more than 26 times as much on health, $6,096 per person a year, compared with only $229 in Cuba, the WHO figures show.

DOCTORS FOR EXPORT

While Cuba has 73,000 doctors, twice as many doctors per capita as the United States, in recent years it has sent as many as 15,000 to work in the slums of Venezuela, its main political ally, in exchange for vital oil supplies.

The export of medical services has hurt Cuba's family doctor system and caused longer waits at health centers.

At the Havana clinic where Moore's American patients received free check-ups in March for respiratory problems and bone fractures suffered at Ground Zero, Yvonne Torres reads a Buddhist text as she waits for an appointment.

"The attention is pretty good, but it was a million times better six years ago, when we always saw the same doctor," said Torres, who suffers from tachycardia.

"The advantage is that it's free," Torres said. Medicine is often in short supply, even over-the-counter drugs, she said.

While Moore got free care in Cuba, most foreigners pay, in what some critics call a "two-tiered system" where elite hospitals are reserved for the Communist leadership and celebrities such as Argentine soccer idol Diego Mara Dona.

"In Cuba, the elite hospitals are as good as here, if not better," said Lionel Cordova, a Cuban doctor who works as a emergency room physician at Miami's Baptist Hospital.

"The hospitals dedicated to the health of regular citizens are a disaster," said Cordova, who was sent to work in Zimbabwe and defected in 2000. At these hospitals, Cubans bring personal items such as towels, bed sheets, soap and even food, he said.

And while Cuba holds up its health care system as one of the achievements of the revolution launched by Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1959, critics of the Cuban government say health care and other social benefits have come at a cost of political freedom in a one-party state.

Still, Cuba is a model for other developing countries that cannot afford costly medical treatment and where preventing illness makes good economic sense, said Gail Reed, producer of a recent documentary on Cuban health care called "Salud!"

Dr. David Hickey, a transplant surgeon at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, said Cuba is a world leader in primary health care based on preventive medicine.

"It's a very sobering experience for someone coming from the affluent West to see what they can achieve," he said.

Hickey, an honorary professor of surgery at Havana University, said he had nothing to teach Cuban doctors who do heart, kidney, pancreas and liver transplants.

A decades-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba forced it to develop its own molecular biology industry, which produces innovative drugs that prevent rejection in transplants.

Cuba has developed the world's first Meningitis B vaccine which is available in Third World countries but not in Europe or the United States due to U.S. sanctions.

Hickey said Cuba's health care budget was no larger that his hospital's.

"Cuba looks after 11 million with the same budget and produces better health care in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality and vaccination rates than we do," he said.

A two-year-old girl with an intelligence quotient of 152 has become the youngest current member of British Mensa, the international society for highly-intelligent people, it said Friday.
 

Georgia Brown, aged two years and 10 months, was welcomed into the exclusive club after an assessment by a child psychologist, who was said to be "elated" as the findings were what would be expected for a five or six-year-old.

But the little girl, from Aldershot, in southern England, is still not the youngest member ever to join British Mensa. She missed out by six days to Ben Woods, who joined in the 1990s.

The previous youngest current member was a three-year-old boy with an IQ of 137, who joined in 2005.

Mensa normally only tests people over the age of 10 and a half but accepts younger children who are found to be within the top two percent of the population.

The girl's mother, Lucy, was quoted by the BBC News website as saying that she called in the child psychologist to test her daughter's IQ after spotting that she was a quick developer.

"It's fantastic. We're so proud as a family," she said.

Mensa, which is Latin for table, seeks to identify and foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity, according to its website.

It also seeks to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members as well as to encourage research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence.

In the last decade, clerical abuse scandals involving Roman Catholic priests erupted in the United States and several European and Latin American countries.

Yet in Italy — a bastion of Catholicism — the issue never came to the surface and never made headlines.

Now, in the Vatican's backyard, the veil of secrecy is beginning to lift.

Friday, in St. Peter's Square, outside Pope Benedict XVI's apartments, about 30 people gathered to demand justice for victims of clerical sex abuse. Some held a banner proclaiming "Stop the Vatican Cover-Up."

This was the final event of a day-long symposium on clerical sex abuse organized by the Radical Party on the premises of the Italian parliament.

The day began with the screening of an American documentary, broadcast in January on PBS, by filmmaker Joe Cultrera about his brother Paul, a victim of clerical sex abuse.

The story of Paul Cultrera, who kept silent for 30 years, resonated with the participants in the symposium.

Marco Marches, a 26-year-old from Agrigento in Sicily, says he was abused by a priest for four years, starting when he was 12.

He says the American story is "the story of all of us."

"At first we think we're the guilty ones," he says. "It takes years, and only if you're lucky enough to find someone who believes you, can you heal. I just wanted to stop this man from hurting others and hoped the church would embrace me, but that embrace never came."

In fact, the local bishop filed charges against Marches for slandering the church. Ultimately, Marches prevailed and his abuser was convicted. He now helps other victims, but says it's very difficult for them to come out into the open.

"Were not just in Italy, we're in the land of the Vatican," Marches says. "In small towns, it happens that when a priest is under investigation or in jail, people march through the streets with torches in his defense — not in defense of the victims."

Domenici Del Audio came to Friday's gathering from the southern region of Luciana. He said his 6-year-old daughter was sexually abused by a nun, but the tables have been turned against his family.

"We are told we're hysterical, we're crazy, we've been brainwashed," Del Audio says. "Our mayor says we have dishonored our town."

There are no statistics on the number of clerical sex abuse victims in Italy. Radical Party MP Maurizio Turbo, the symposium organizer, says Italian legislation is murky.

"We have a state-church treaty that guarantees areas of impunity to Vatican officials, including bishops and priests," Turbo says. "The average citizen who learns of a crime has to report it. Bishops and priests have a broader margin of movement."

One sign that clerical sex abuse is a taboo subject in Italy was last month's controversy over the broadcast of a BBC documentary on state-run TV. The broadcast was authorized only if it was followed by rebuttal from church officials.

Bishop Reno Fisichella, rector of Rome's pontifical Lateran University, rejected accusations that the Vatican protects pedophile priests at the expense of their victims.

"Children are well protected by the Catholic church and nobody has the right to give us lessons on this," the bishop said.

Little is known about Catholic church investigations and canonical trials. Until six years ago, cases were handled in their dioceses.

But in a 2001 letter to all bishops, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the current Pope Benedict XVI, ordered that all sex-abuse cases be transferred to the Vatican.

As theological watchdog, he also imposed total secrecy on the proceedings, with the threat of excommunication for any violations.

Daniel Shear, an American lawyer who has defended many sex-abuse victims in U.S. courts, accuses the Vatican — and the former Cardinal Ratzinger — of obstruction of justice.

"This gives them the opportunity to silence the victim, threaten the victim with hellfire for all eternity if they ever reveal what is going on in this transaction," Shear says.

One Italian magazine says 1,000 sex-abuse cases have been reported to the Vatican, but only 10 have been investigated.

But Paul Cultrera says silence kills.

"I stayed silent for 30 years because they did such a good job at convincing me that it was all my fault, and this could not be something a holy man had done to me," he says.

June 25, 2007 · Farmers are taking the idea of a local food co-op beyond fruits and vegetables, signing up customers for regular deliveries of local, naturally raised meat.

If you're interested in getting your child or teen to keep reading during a hot, long, lazy vacation, offer them these cool summer books. Librarian Nancy Pearl's picks all have great first lines, three-dimensional characters and strong finishes.

Psalm 16:11 - Sermon in a Sentence: Hold to the conviction that experiencing the King’s presence makes for a better world.

Is God Real?
Here is some proof that there just might be someone watching over us.

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The following message is addressed to whatever extraterrestrials may encounter it. If all goes as currently imagined, an Arizona foundation endowed by a progressive Christian Seattle billionaire who prefers to remain anonymous will finance and direct its communication. This will involve three different media, or modes: radio waves, laser pulses, and numerous—possibly as many as 7,000—inscribed six-ounce synthetic diamonds.
In contrast to the twelve-inch gold plated copper phonograph records in the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977, now still progressing through the outer reaches of the solar system towards interstellar space, these diamonds, thanks to our advancing nanotechnology, will have an almost unlimited capacity for digitally expressed information. They will thus be able to include together with the following short text a large variety of supporting material—decoding facilitators, dictionaries, linguistic manuals, encyclopedias, Biblical books, theological works, illustrations, hymnals, musical recordings, etc.
It is estimated that the broadcasting operations, based in Arizona, could be initiated as early as 2007. The launching of the diamonds, from a pad on the same high desert site, will follow no later, it is hoped, than the end of 2010.
The current plan is to transport the entire stock by rocket to a point halfway between Earth and the nearest star, Proximal Centauri. The rocket will then release its cargo. A device around which the diamonds have been clustered will explode. The diamonds, propelled by the explosion, will travel off in different directions. If and when they approach other stars in our galaxy or beyond, their brilliance should make them visible to alien telescopes or spacecraft even before they enter the atmosphere of any planets, moons, or other possibly inhabited celestial bodies.
There is, as we know, a growing belief among astronomers and astrophysicists that extraterrestrial life is not preposterous, not possible, but probable. Frank Drake, one of the leading pioneers of the contemporary search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI, has, as we also know, calculated that somewhere between a thousand and a hundred million radio-emitting civilizations may exist in our galaxy alone. Seth Shasta, another senior SETI Institute scientist, recently said that he thinks that it is likely that “we’re going to hear from extraterrestrials by the year 2020 or 2025.”
The fact that, since 1995, a new breed of scientists—planet hunters—have already discovered more than 130 planets outside our solar system bolsters these theoretical calculations.
Whether our attempt to spread among other worlds what, as progressive Christians, we believe to be the most precious heritage of our religion--disengaged from the all too parochial man- and Earth-centered theologies and mythologies in which it has traditionally been set--will succeed we shall probably never know. At, let us say, 37,000 miles per hour, the approximate current speed of Voyager 1, it could take one of the diamonds 80,000 years to reach even Proximal Centauri. It could take millions or even billions of years to reach a civilization capable of accessing the inscribed information. Long, long before that, our own civilization may have destroyed itself. Some of the diamonds may still be flying through space even after our planet no longer exists and the sun itself has become a red dwarf.
The mere chance, however, that the message conveyed by the following text may help not only to improve the lives of some of our individual fellow beings elsewhere in the cosmos, but also actually to transform the cosmos itself into the ideal place of our dreams, makes this whole venture worthwhile. The fact that our own human world has failed to heed this message and thus, as its power to destroy itself grows, make its eventual annihilation more or less certain does not mean that other worlds have to do so too. The spirit Jesus embodied is surely not just for Earth alone. The laws of evolution, which apply to whole civilizations and worlds as well as genes, gene pools, and the beings they compose, assure that sooner or later somewhere in space-time, the Peaceful Kingdom foreseen by the ancient Hebrew prophets will emerge from the universal struggle for survival.



O fellow creatures, wherever you may be, in whatever corner of the cosmos, greetings!
My name is Philip. I am addressing you from a small planet that those of us who speak English, its current major language, call Earth. It orbits a medium-sized star that we call the Sun, in an outer region of an ordinary spiral galaxy that we call the Milky Way.
Our species is a sort of upright vertebrate that our naturalists have labeled, justly or not, “Homo sapiens” (“Man the wise”). Except in scientific discourse, we still prefer, however, to use our more traditional names. In English, we most often call ourselves, “humanity,” “human beings,” “the human race,” “humans,” “humankind,” “mankind,” or simply “man.” Endowed with the ability to make tools and with brains twice as large as those of any other species on our planet, including the chimp an- zees, our nearest living cousins, we have now reigned over it for more than 30,000 of its years.
I am writing you on the merest chance that you exist or will exist by the time this message reaches you, and will receive, decipher, and seriously study it. For my subject is nothing less than a unique kind of love, beautiful and joyful beyond all measure. It demands, by its very nature, that those who have it do their best without delay to help others to have it too. Now that we humans have gained the capacity to spread word of it beyond the confines of our sun’s system, we must, therefore, make haste to do so--though we risk thereby addressing empty phantoms. For if, in fact, you do exist, your future happiness as well as ours, and indeed that of the whole cosmos, may well hang on our success.
This love, so relatively new to us, so beautiful, so precious, has brought to those of us who have it greater happiness than we have ever had before. Nothing else, dear friends, can so well minister to so many of our deepest needs. It has the power to make the worlds we live in far, far better than they could ever be without it. It has infixed in many of those who have it not just the hope, but also the assurance, that, through its power, the time will come--though none of us may live to see it--when it alone shall reign over all that is or ever shall be.
The brutal struggle for survival out of which all of us creatures in the cosmos have evolved will then at last give way to harmonious cooperation. The dream of universal peace, going back, for all that we can tell, to the earliest of worlds, will finally come true.
Unlike carnal love, friendship, and all those other kinds of love that we humans and many of our fellow species here on Earth have always had--and some or all of which you, no doubt, have always had as well--this love has not been with us long. It has been here only a few thousand of the 3.5 billion years or so (according to our way of reckoning time) that life has been evolving on our planet. Yet, in that tiny fraction of our often violent and tragic history, it has already accomplished many wondrous things. Ever since its first known appearances, largely veiled in myth and legend, it has kept on spreading among us. Untold millions of us have come to have it and gladly labor to hasten the advent of its reign. Nor is there one of us who, having come to have it, would not rather die than be deprived of it.
Some of you, dear fellow beings, may already, when you read this, know this love too. There may be many planets--and moons--where it has bloomed besides our own, and some where it has taken even deeper root. But if you have not known it yet, I can tell you how you also may do so, and when you have, you will treasure it, I promise you, quite as much as we do.



But if you were to ask, “What is this love, that you should treasure it so highly?” I would be hard put to tell you plainly. The happiness it brings to those of us who have it is overwhelming. It surpasses any other kind of love that we have ever had. The ecstasy of erotic love cannot compare to it, nor even the ecstasy of music.
It is not limited, like erotic love or the old, ordinary kinds of friendship, to those objects whose qualities attract us. It makes us love all our neighbors as we do ourselves. It even makes us love those whom we might otherwise have hated. Indeed, it is never more itself, or more joyous, or more full of promise for our common good, than when it envelops all that lives, or ever has, or ever will, in its embrace.
Even where it possesses traits in common with those kinds of love our species and no doubt yours as well have always known, it differs from them in that it gives of itself impartially like the sun that shines or the rain that falls on all alike. It is compassionate. It is long-suffering. It is kind. It is not vain or self-centered. It is generous. It suffers and is quick to forgive. It takes more delight in others’ well being than it does in its own and is never happier than when it is bringing its happiness to them. It would rather console than be consoled, understand than be understood, give than receive, love than be loved.
It is infinitely curious. It delights in the knowledge of its object, much as a bridegroom delights in the knowledge of his bride.
It takes pleasure in our natural differences as well as similarities. It is courageous. It is both gentle when need be and violent when need be. Some have compared it to a cleansing flame. It prizes figurative truth as much as literal truth. It delights in dancing, music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture. It aspires to build whole shining cities, nations, and worlds in its own image.
It incessantly creates. It desires multiplicity as well as unity, and it dreams of the greatest possible unity in the greatest possible multiplicity. Music, poems, paintings, buildings, and other works of literature and art are never more beautiful than when it manifests itself through them.
It inspires, supports, and reinforces everything that is best and most desirable in our relationships with one another. It abhors war and loves peace. It renders democracy, monarchy, and all other forms of government equally beneficent. It has no favorite political economic system, capitalist, socialist, communist, or any other, provided it is fully present in each one.

We can never have enough of it. Its embrace can never be too close.
For those of us cosmic creatures whose science and technology have enabled us to destroy our respective worlds, it may be all that can save us.
It has something infinitely playful and childlike about it.
Of the countless joys it brings, none surpasses that which comes from its assurance that through us it is laying the foundation of its kingdom.
There is nothing more worth living for--or, if need be, dying for.
Yet it neither excludes nor replaces most of those kinds of love that we, like the chimpanzees, whales, and many of our other fellow species here on Earth, have always known. If we have it, we love our family and friends as dearly as we did before, but we love them and all our other fellow living beings in this mysterious and wonderful new way also, whoever and wherever they may be.

Many of those fellow humans among whom this new love first appeared, bright as the dawning sun, between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, equated it with their one and only god, whose name they deemed too sacred for utterance, the Almighty Father, the Creator of Heaven and Earth. Indeed, I must confess that the better I know this love, the more, despite the scientific skepticism that marks my age, I also am moved to apprehend in it the presence of a living spirit, holy and worthy of all worship.
Yet to have this love and know the joy it brings, dear friends, we do not need to be of any philosophy or religion, human or non-human--not even Christianity, perhaps the richest (though still, alas, all-too-human, all-too-Earthbound) religion that has taken shape around it here on Earth. For Christianity, without this love blazing at its center, would lose most of its extraordinary luster, but this love itself would still blaze on as brightly as ever even if all its religious settings were to vanish.
For this love is not itself the artifact of any religion or philosophy--any more than a flower or a star. It requires no leap of faith or feat of logic for us to acknowledge its existence. Whether it is in fact a living spirit may be questioned. Whether it is in fact, as the founders of this new religion thought, the one true God, may be questioned. But its existence may not be questioned; for even those of us humans who do not yet share it have witnessed its presence in the words and actions of those who do.
Nor does it take a philosopher or theologian to convince us, once we have beheld this new love and the vision of a better world it fosters, that nothing is more beautiful or worthy of devotion.
It must be said, moreover, that, over the centuries, many of this new religion's followers' perception of this love has gradually broadened, straining the limits of its creeds and dogmas. The first Christians believed that humans are the issue of a separate divine act of creation. They held that Man is distinct from, and superior to, Earth’s other animals. They had no idea that Earth is a planet. They did not know that it orbits round the Sun. They did not know that there have been or are or will be untold trillions of other planets orbiting round untold trillions of other stars. They had never heard of galaxies. They did not dream that beings like you might exist. They imagined that God, the Lord of Love, had created Man--and Man only--in His image. They pictured God seated like an Earthly king upon a throne, surrounded by angels and resurrected Christians in a realm called Heaven, high above their little province and its sky. Rejoicing in the thought that they loved all their neighbors, they loved, in fact, only the other members of our own species.
It did not occur to them that humans could have non-human neighbors. But as time went by, this love impelled some of us Christians to join those followers of other faiths who love not only all our fellow humans, but all our fellow creatures here on Earth as well--especially those who are or might, for all we can tell, know pleasure and pain, hope and fear, joy and sorrow. We love not only our own pet cats and dogs, but also all other cats and dogs. We love all cows, horses, sheep, and pigs. We love all birds, not only those with the fairest songs or feathers. We love our closest cousins, the chimpanzees, and all our other fellow apes. We love the dolphins and the whales, which also love and play and sing like us.
Eight centuries ago, as we reckon them, one of those fellow humans whose memory I most cherish, a saintly monk called Francis of Assisi, preached this love’s gospel to the birds, much as I am now, following his example, preaching it to you, who may, for all that I can tell, resemble birds.
He also loved all that he believed that God, the highest and the greatest object of his love, the Lord of Love, had made. He loved the Sun, the Moon, the stars. He loved water, wind, and fire. In celebration of this all-embracing love, he addressed to the Lord of Love this canticle, which many of us still sing most worshipfully today:

O most High, most powerful, good Lord,
To you belong the praise, the glory, the honor and all blessing.
To you alone, most High, do they belong,
And no man may fitly speak your name.

With all your creatures, Lord, be praised,
Not least for our Brother Sun, who daily brings us light.
Beautiful and radiant in his great splendor,
How well he tells of you, most High.

Be praised, my Lord, for Sister Moon and for the Stars,
Carved by you, clear and rich and fair.


Be praised, my Lord, for Brother Wind . . .

Be praised, my Lord, for Sister Water . . .

Be praised, my Lord, for Brother Fire . . .

Be praised, my Lord, for our Sister, Mother Earth . . .

And now, dear friends, that our advancing scientific knowledge of the cosmos has made us more confident than ever that you do, indeed, exist, I want you to know that I love you also. If only my arms were long enough, I would enfold the whole cosmos in them. I love you with all my being--or as we humans say, borrowing from an old, prescientific psychology, for lack of better terms--”with all my mind, with all my heart, and with all my soul.” I love you wherever and whenever you may be. I love you as dearly as I love my fellow humans, here, on Earth. I want you to share this love with us, to join with us in one vast, ever more comprehensive intergalactic communion. I want you to experience along with us the incomparable happiness that this love brings. I want you to work along with us to help it to extend the foundations of its kingdom throughout space and time.



“We don’t know about you humans,” I can almost hear you say. “But however eagerly any of us may want to have this new, unconditional, all-forgiving, all-embracing love you talk about, none of us can have it just because we want to. We are not built that way.”
That is quite true, I would answer. And we are no different from you in that respect. It is too contrary to the natures that we are born with, no matter what part of space and time we may inhabit. It is too novel, too strange, and too foreign to all the other kinds of love that our different species, wherever they have evolved in space and time, have ever known. To those of us who do not have it, it may rightly seem absurd. It confounds the worldly wise. It terrifies the rich and powerful. It appears too much at odds with the law of self-preservation. It is too threatening to the original order of things. It requires more courage than most of us can summon--and more purity of character and singleness of purpose than most of us possess.
If, therefore, we truly want to have this new kind of love, come to know the incomparable happiness it brings, and take part in the creation of its kingdom, we must each undergo a fundamental inner transformation, tantamount, as some of us humans have put it, to being “born again.” But since it is impossible for any of us, human or non-human, to change our natures so radically just by our own volition, somebody or something else must help us.
Who or what, dear friends, can do this best for you non-humans, I cannot say for sure; but if you were to ask me what I suspect has done this best for most of us humans, I should tell you that it is the life and teachings of Jesus. And, in particular, it is the accounts that have come down to us of Jesus’ final sufferings and death.
“Jesus? Who was Jesus?” you are undoubtedly wondering. “What could Jesus have done or said that has so much helped you humans to undergo so radical an inner transformation that you compare it to being born again? And why do you say that it is particularly the accounts that have come down to you of Jesus’ final sufferings and death?”
Here, on Earth there is hardly anyone, I would reply, who does not know of Jesus or has not heard one version or another of his story. He is the central figure of Christianity. No human, I suspect, has embodied this new kind of love as fully and dramatically as he.
He was not the first human to imagine it or want to have it. Nor was he the first one whom we know of to dream of the better world that it will bring about. For example, several centuries before Jesus is believed to have been born, another Jew, Isaiah, one of our greatest poets, had evoked “a peaceable kingdom” where

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down
with the kid,
and the calf and the lion and the
fatling together,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

But Jesus, who began, as the story goes, as a carpenter, the son of Joseph and Mary, in his family’s carpentry shop in the small Palestinian town of Nazareth, was, if he really existed, the first fellow human we know of who not only actually had this all-embracing love and shared this dream, but also willingly laid down his life to further its realization, even though this meant suffering the most painful of all deaths.
While he was still a young man, he left his trade in order to consecrate himself completely to helping us to have this love also and proclaiming that its kingdom was at hand. Wandering from town to town with his disciples, he preached his message to all who would listen. In return, we crucified him. But even as he hung in agony upon a cross--the cruelest form of execution our species has as yet invented--he did not stop loving us. It is said he prayed his god, the Lord of Love, “Father, forgive them. They do not know what they are doing.”
“Is all that really true?” you ask. “Or is it just a story like those associated with so many other religions?”
There is, indeed, in the oldest versions that have come down to us--the best and almost only sources that we have--much that many of us modern humans find hard to believe. Angels. Devils. A star that guides three foreign kings, alerted by prophecies, to the house where Jesus has just been born, then comes to rest above it. Numerous other marvels. These oldest versions even have Jesus turning water into wine, walking on water, raising the dead, passing through walls. They maintain that the god whom he called “Father” (and whom we now most often refer to in English simply as “God”) really was his actual, biological father. They also maintain that Jesus was the long expected “Messiah,” or “Anointed One,” destined to save his people, the Jews, and to be their king. As I have said, the first appearances of this new kind of love here, on Earth, are largely veiled in myth and legend. It is hard to tell where history stops and myth and legend begin. Our whole way of envisioning reality has radically changed since these earliest extant versions of Jesus' story were written.
Yet many scholars who have studied them in light of our growing knowledge of the real society and age in which they are set, are convinced that it truly does have some historical basis. They insist that Jesus, or Yeshiva, as he was called in his own language, really lived and uttered many of the words and did many of the things the authors ascribe to him.
I should add that we also sense behind their different portraits of him always the same immensely lovable and admirable fellow human. This is so even though different authors put them down, for all that we can tell, at different times in different places between, some say, thirty and a hundred years after they all tell us he died. Many of the words and phrases they put into his mouth are more or less the same. So are most of the traits they give him: not only the never-failing kindness, gentleness, warmth, humility, courage, patience, and the other traits that we associate with this love, which he so perfectly embodied, but also the astonishing intelligence and wisdom, authoritative knowledge of his people’s sacred literature, uncanny ability to see into our hearts and minds, warm, gentle humor, healing touch, eloquence, gift for inventing and telling stories.
Many of us modern humans feel that, despite all that separates us from him, we know him better than we do our closest relatives and friends--better even than we do ourselves. We love him, in fact, as much as it is possible for us humans to love any one, and there is never a moment when we do not feel his undeniably real spirit living on within us and among us.
Moreover, for those of us who still, though locked in constant combat with what I sometimes like to think of as the Angel of Doubt, have managed to retain so far our inherited trust in the same God, what I have just called Jesus’ undeniably real spirit and God’s spirit are one and the same thing.


“What were some of Jesus’ teachings--the ones that might help non-humans like us to grasp more fully the nature of this new kind of love and gain a clearer picture of the better world it bears within it?”
I suspect that these teachings would include, to begin with, those having to do with our loving all our neighbors, even our enemies, as ourselves. They are certainly among those teachings of his that have been most helpful to us.
Throughout the entire history of life on Earth, since our remotest presuming ancestors first emerged from the primeval slime, the vast majority of us have thought it only right to hate their enemies. Thus David, one of the Jews’ greatest poets as well as former kings, cries out in one of his hymns:

Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody
men.
For they speak against thee wickedly, and thane enemies take thy name in vain.
Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? And am not I grieved with those that
rise up against thee?
I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.

In another hymn, David prays God to punish not only an evil doer but also his wife and children:

Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also
out of their desolate places.
Let the extortion catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labor.

Beginning only about 3,000 years ago, however, here and there on our planet, certain seers began exhorting their followers on the contrary to love their enemies. In the history of my own civilization, one may think of, for instance, the Greek Cynic Diogenes of Syncope. Jesus, too, was among them. Sitting on a mountainside, he tells the multitude gathered there to hear him:



Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thane enemy. But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? For sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them who do good to you, what thank have ye? For sinners also do even the same. And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? For sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind to the unthankful and to the evil. He market his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. Be ye therefore merciful, even as your Father also is merciful.



It might also help you to read Jesus’ best known parables. As I have said, he was a master inventor and teller of stories. He knew as well as any of us the power that good stories well told have always had to change hearts and minds, and he often used this power to help us better understand this new kind of love and to make us want to have it. I especially like the following, about the owner of a vineyard. In it, Jesus distinguishes between what has traditionally passed for justice among us (and probably you too) and this new love:



For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire laborers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with the laborers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and said unto them; Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their way. Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did likewise. And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and smith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He smith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall yet receive. So when even was come, the lord the vineyard smith unto his steward, Call the laborers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first. And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny. But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny. And when they had received it, they murmured against the Goodman of the house, saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day. But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thane is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thane eye evil, because I am good? So the last shall be first, and the first last.



The group of Jesus’ purported sayings known by us as “the beatitudes” might also interest you. He believed, as I have said, that the better world this new kind of love brings with it--what he often called the “kingdom of heaven,” or the “kingdom of God”--was about to come on Earth, that, indeed, it was already arriving. In these sayings, he comforts the poor, the hungry, and the sorrowful, assuring them that this new world will be theirs, and that when it comes, they will all be satisfied and laugh with joy.
Not only do these sayings help us to form a better idea of this new, happier world as he conceived of it; they also help us to grasp more clearly the nature of the love he preaches. For in every one of these sentences it is this love that speaks and that reveals itself to us through him.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be
filled.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven.

But he warns the rich:

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

“Certainly these last sayings and the others you have quoted for us non-humans are as illuminating as they are moving. They deserve to ring throughout the whole cosmos. But none of them is enough to overcome the innate reluctance that we also have to love our enemies. None has the power to bring about in us the fundamental inner transformation that you treat of. Has any of them really been able to do this for any of you humans?”
To be honest with you, I do not think so. None of Jesus’ words or deeds up to his arrest and subsequent sufferings and death, have ever, insofar as I know, done this for any of us humans either: even his multiple acts of kindness and compassion, his willingness to talk with whores, adulteresses, and tax collectors, his healing the blind and lepers, his raising of the dead, his insistence on ceremoniously washing his disciples’ feet at their last meal together before his arrest--all those things that he did or, at least, is said to have done.
They help, but they are not enough. At the most, they can induce in those of us who are ready only a beginning of the inner transformation that we must undergo if we are truly to have this love. They shed, to be sure, more light on it than any other human ever has before or since. They bring out more clearly its matchless beauty. They help us desire it more nearly. But in themselves they cannot overcome our fear of it. They cannot make us actually love like him all our neighbors as ourselves, even our worst enemies. They cannot bring us to that state where we can sincerely forgive our enemies, unhesitatingly turn the other cheek, gladly return good for evil.
The story of Jesus itself bears this out. Nothing Jesus says or does before his final sufferings and death prevents Judas Iscariot, one of his original twelve disciples, from--or so the story goes--betraying him for thirty pieces of silver. Nor does anything prevent Simon Peter, the disciple on whom he has counted the most to carry on his ministry, from--or so the story also goes--giving in to anger and returning evil for evil the night his enemies arrest him.
I am thinking of the version of this incident according to which Peter draws his sword and strikes one of the high priest Anaphase's slaves accompanying the posse of Roman soldiers performing the arrest, a man named Machos, and cuts off his right ear.
As they bind Jesus and lead him away, the other disciples who, along with Peter, had been with him in the garden where the arrest takes place melt into the night, deserting him in his hour of greatest need; and it is not long before Peter, who has declared he would always follow him and, if necessary, lay down his life for him, will deny not only once, but thrice, that he has ever known him.

And they that had laid hold on Jesus led him away to Chiapas the high priest, where the scribes and the elders were assembled. But Peter followed him afar off unto the high priest’s palace, and went in, and sat with the servants to see the end. . . . And a damsel came unto him, saying, Thou also west with Jesus of Galilee. But he denied before them all, saying, I know not what thou safest. And when he was gone out into the porch, another maid saw him, and said unto them that were there, This fellow was also with Jesus of Nazareth. And again he denied with an oath, I do not know the man. And after a while came unto him they that stood by, and said to Peter, Surely thou also art one of them: for thy speech betrayed thee. Then began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man.

“If nothing that Jesus does or says before he is arrested can in itself bring about the transformation that we must undergo to have this love, how then can the part of the story about his final sufferings and death? It must have something to do with this part’s extraordinarily dramatic character, the thoughts that it provokes and the emotions that it arouses in us.”
Yes, of course!
Just as a good wrestler exploits his opponent’s own strengths to win a match, Jesus does likewise in his struggle to overwhelm the old natural creature in us. He enlists in this new love’s service the transforming power inherent in feelings and emotions that our species and yours too, no doubt, have always known.
This is why, if Jesus is to fulfill his mission, he must make this part of his story as dramatic, if not more so, than any other story we can imagine. It must appear that he has failed at just that point where we have been led to think he is about to triumph. He has to be exalted, transfigured, hailed as king, only, the next moment, to be cast down. Having raised our hopes only to dash them, he has to go on surprising and dismaying us. Things have to go from bad to worse. He has to be betrayed, bound, tried, mocked, scourged, and crucified. He has to shake us to the very depths of our being. He has to fill us with the greatest possible pity and terror. He has to astonish, disgust, and infuriate us. He has to make us utterly despair. He has to make us hate his enemies with all our might and, at the same time, hate ourselves for hating them. He has to shame us with the realization that we are born of the same flesh as they, that the same dark primeval forces shape us all. But he has also to make us proud by showing that our species, though capable of producing such monsters, can also produce at least one being as selfless and compassionate as he--or even conceive of such a being. He has to make us, even as we pity him, envy him. He has to astonish us with his heroism. He has to call forth in us an infinite gratitude for the magnitude of his love for us. He has to make us admire him more intensely than we have ever admired any of our friends before. He has to make us fall madly in love with him on the highest spiritual plane. He has to make us yearn to identify ourselves with him more than we ever have or could with any other hero--yearn not just to be like him, not just to follow him, but to become him, leaving our old selves behind.
He has to make fully manifest to us at last the beauty of his love for us and draw us with it ever closer to him even as the spectacle of his bruised, scourged, pierced, bleeding, and befouled body distresses and repels us. He has to bring into sharp contrast with his matchless moral beauty everything most ugly in our old, innate natures and our condition. He has to make his backdrop everything darkest and most dreadful in the all too real worlds in which we have up to now had to live. He has to demonstrate the power of his boundless love by pitting it against the whole Evil Empire, visible and invisible, which has enslaved us all. He has to show us just how much pain and anguish we can all, like him, with this love’s grace, endure. He has to suffer the cruelest form of execution, as I have said, that we humans have invented. He has to let us nail him, naked, to a cross, spikes hammered through his wrists and feet, a crown of thorns pressed down upon his head, and leave him to hang there limp or writhing, suffocated by his own weight, struggling for breath, tearful, mocked, spat upon, smeared with his own blood, vomit, excrement. He has to wonder whether God, his Heavenly Father Himself, whom he had dared equate with this new love, has not abandoned him--the cruelest torture of them all. Up to the very end, he has to prove to us that he still loves us no matter what, that nothing we can ever do can make him cease to love us, that he forgives us, that he is still determined to return good for evil, that he regrets nothing he has ever said or done for us, that, even as he dies, he is still doing all he can to free us from the ancient evils that beset us, that he still dreams of the approaching triumph of love’s kingdom.

 

“Could you tell us this part of the story in somewhat more detail, the part that has to do with his final sufferings and death?
I can and will most gladly, though I hardly know how best to go about it, given the considerable differences that must surely exist between you and us humans. The notes and the accompanying illustrations should help. So too should the copies, included in an appendix, of the four most widely known and venerated early accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings--those we commonly refer to as The Four Gospels. Also, you may wish to listen to the attached digital recordings of Saint Mark’s and Saint John’s Passions by Johann Sebastian Bach, whom many of us regard as our greatest composer. It may be that for some of you, as well as for some of us, this part of Jesus’ story may best be told through music.
I am by no means certain, however, how much any of these materials will help you. It may well be that the human and other forms depicted in the illustrations--the city, the ass and colt, the shouting crowds, the palm branches, the costumes, the Jews and Romans, the priests, slaves, and soldiers, the swords and helmets, the skies, city, roads, houses, temple, garden, rocks--may confuse you more than not. It may be easier for you to identify yourselves with Jesus and the story’s other human characters--and with all us humans, for that matter--if you do not have to contemplate our outer, visible forms and settings. Though you and we are all the same, or so I would believe, in those respects that matter most, is it not likely that the shapes and arrangement of our eyes, mouths, and noses, for example, or our lack of wings, fins, or antennas may distract, alienate, or perhaps even repel you? As I have said, you may resemble birds. You may be closer to whales or octopi or even vegetables or flowers. You may inhabit fiery shores with purple trees and orange mountains under green skies--or like some of our most fantastic shrimps--dull-red volcanoes in the blackest depths of briny seas. Your cities may not resemble ours so much as beehives, coral reefs, or spider webs. And, as for music, ours may be too different from yours in its timbers, lengths, and tempi. A piece that lasts for us one or two of our hours could take, for you, only a few seconds, like the high-speed copies that we can now make with tape recorders or computers.
“At least you could try! You could tell us everything you think would interest us in the story as you yourself suppose it actually took place. Or if that is impossible, given the inability of your historians to determine in any great detail what really happened, you could recount--or summarize--for us the version that seems to you nearest to what could have happened. You could choose to relate only those parts of the story that could have been historically true, whether you know they are or not. You could peer through the myth and legend, like someone peering through a fog, at what might seem to be robed and sandaled figures moving in it or beyond it and tell us what, if anything, you seem to see them doing.”
Even when it comes to events that could have happened, the different versions do not agree with each other in several important respects. When all is said and done, we can only surmise, we can only reconstruct. No one knows today what the historical Jesus actually looked like. Our historians and anthropologists have scientifically established what must have been the general features of the Jewish peasants among whom he was born and raised. There is an old tradition that he was bearded and had long hair, that he wore a seamless tunic, that he was not particularly good-looking. There is also, piously conserved in the Cathedral of Turin, a 2,000 year-old linen shroud, which bears, like a photographic negative, the reverse image of a crucified man. Some believe it may actually be the shroud in which one of Jesus’ rich disciples, Joseph of Arimathea, had his master’s body wrapped after it had been taken down from the cross. But no one really knows. Over the centuries, artists have portrayed Jesus with their own distinctive racial or sub-racial features. They have given him blond hair and blue eyes, for example, instead of black hair and brown eyes. Some of the earliest artists even imparted to him the traditional features and poses of their older gods, an Apollo, a Dionysus... Many artists have placed a halo around his head. Likewise, many have set the events they depict from his story in the sort of regional settings with which they were familiar--very different from those in which they might actually have taken place, in the Palestine of Jesus’ day; and they have clothed him and the story’s other characters in the costumes of their own times and places--very different from tunics, sandals, and other articles of clothing that he and his contemporaries would actually have worn.
“None of that should trouble us very much. Like you, no doubt, we have many stories with characters drawn from other races and cultures than our own, even other species, and we are still capable of identifying with them and sharing their feelings and emotions and being moved by them and their stories, just as much as we would be if they were biologically closer. So do begin!”
All right, I will. I do now think I can. What you have just said greatly reassures me. Note that I will not, however, include everything that many of us believe really happened in this part of Jesus’ story--or that at least must or could have happened. Some things are more relevant to what I am doing than others. I only want to evoke, as vividly as I can under these circumstances, those things having to do most directly with Jesus’ final suffering and death and with how he showed his boundless love for us up to the very end--only with those things which must be left in if it is to have the powerful transformative impact on you that it has had on so many of us. Nor will I include all the little descriptive details that the original authors, master storytellers all, put in to make their narratives more vivid and concrete, or, when need be, verisimilar and historically credible for us humans, but which might only puzzle and distract you. I will provide, in short, not too much more than a roughly sketched-in series of scenes. Except for the few specific, concrete details that I shall furnish, you can flesh their outlines in for yourselves as much as you would like, drawing on your own imaginations. Or, if you wish to compare my account with the more detailed traditional ones, on which we all must draw, you can always read the final chapters of the Four Gospels, in the Appendix.

 

But, first, those of you who truly and seriously want to undergo this transform- ton, share this love with us, know the joy it brings, and participate in the advent of its kingdom must take a little while to prepare yourselves for it. You must be quiet. You must be still. You must make sure that there is nothing in your surroundings that might distract you. You must be in the right mood, the right frame of mind.
“How would you suggest we do this?”
There are many ways you could try. I am not sure that any of them will work--at least as soon as you would like. Something none of us expect just might happen. This love is like the wind, which blows where it wills, and we hear the sound of it, but we do not know where it comes from or where it goes; and so it is with every one who undergoes this transformation.
However, following the two steps I am suggesting here should, if nothing more, help you be ready for it whenever, at its own bidding, it comes to you.
Step 1: First, after several moments’ silence, make room within your conscious- ness for a review of life’s sorrows. I say this, because the least likely of us to be ready for this transformation are those who are happy and contented with their present lots, those who close their eyes to the dark side of life or have never had to face it. It is significant that Jesus does not say, “Come to me, all who are at ease, all who enjoy your lives as they are, all who feel you have nothing to worry about,” but, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”
Indeed, it is just when it may seem to us that things are darkest, when we cannot bear the burden of living any longer, when the pain and apparent absurdity of life crush and overwhelm us, when we are tormented most of all perhaps by the prospect of our own imperfections, our own failings, our own wretchedness, that we are most ready.
Take your time. Do not fear to contemplate, for once, all that torments you the most, all that has been most sharp, bitter, nauseous, and absurd in your own personal experience of reality. Then pass in review the history of your world, which, I suspect, has been no less dark and tragic than that of ours.

“Yes... Yes... More than one of us are following your advice...

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