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The Gospel for Extraterrestrials


Foreword. Dissemination Plans: Radio, Laser, Spacecraft.
Chapter 1. Salutation, Author’s Self-Introduction, Statement of Purpose: To Help Spread a New Kind of Love Throughout the Cosmos.
Chapter 2. On the Nature of This New Kind of Love.
Chapter 3. What has Helped Us Humans the Most to Have It: The Story of Jesus, Especially His Final Sufferings and Death.
Chapter 4. A Selection of Jesus’ Most Relevant Teachings.
Chapter 5. The Inability of Jesus’ Teachings Alone to Bring About the Transformation We Must Undergo to Have This Love and Know the Happiness It Can Bring.
Chapter 6. How the Part of Jesus’ Story Treating of His Final Sufferings and Death Can Produce This Transformation.
Chapter 7. The Author’s Readiness to Recount It to Extraterrestrials Despite All the Difficulties Involved.
Chapter 8. Two Preparatory Meditations.
Chapter 9. An Account (Especially Prepared for Extraterrestrials) of Jesus' Final Sufferings and Death, Part 1: From Jerusalem to Gethsemane.
Chapter 10. An Account (Especially Prepared for Extraterrestrials) of Jesus' Final Sufferings and Death, Part 2: The Agony in the Garden, Judas’ Betrayal.
Chapter 11, An Account (Especially Prepared for Extraterrestrials) of Jesus’ Final Sufferings and Death, Part 3: The Following Night; Pilate’s Order; the Flogging; the Way of the Cross to Golgotha.
Chapter 12, An Account (Especially Prepared for Extraterrestrials) of Jesus' Final Sufferings and Death, Part 4: Golgotha, the Crucifixion.
Afterword.
Some Possibly Helpful Books and Articles.





Foreword
     
      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 (120 KB) 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, Proxima 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 Shostak, 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 Proxima 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 spacetime, the Peaceful Kingdom foreseen by the ancient Hebrew prophets will emerge from the universal struggle for survival. (March 11, 2005.)
     
     1
     
      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 chimpan- 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.
     
     2
     
      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.
     
     3
     
      “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 Yeshua, 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.
     
     4
     
      “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 prehuman 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 thine 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 extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour.
     
      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 Sinope. 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 neighbour, and hate thine 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 maketh 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 labourers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with the labourers 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 saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith 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 saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, 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 thine 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 thine 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.

     
     5
     
      “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 Caiaphas’s slaves accompanying the posse of Roman soldiers performing the arrest, a man named Malchus, 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 Caiaphas 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 wast with Jesus of Galilee. But he denied before them all, saying, I know not what thou sayest. 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 betrayeth thee. Then began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man.

     
     6
     
      “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.
     
     7
     
      “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.
     
     8
     
      But, first, those of you who truly and seriously want to undergo this transforma- tion, 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...
     
     
     
      “And now that we have observed it for a few moments in the deepest silence, apart from all distractions, we have somehow found the courage to confront, as you propose, the woeful side of our condition. Each has a different tale to tell. Yet all of us non-humans, like you humans, participate in the same general condition, unlimited, alas, to any planet or moon.
      “Like you humans, we too are all born to die; we too have all suffered, though some more atrociously than others; we too have all, since our conceptions, been caught up in the universal struggle for survival.
      “The ferocious beasts from which we have emerged live on within us. Egoism, lust, anger, greed, and hatred have made victims of us all.
      “We shall always have with us, just as you humans do, the weak, lost, homeless, hungry, naked, lonely, foolish, halt, sick, wounded, and dying.
      “We shall never all be equals in talent, fame, or fortune. Even the best of us will always be less than what they could be, and the most ambitious of us, failures.
      “Nor shall we ever in our present states, until this new love’s kingdom comes at last, be free from wars or the specters of wars, conquests, and oppressions.
      “We shall always suffer, as we always have, from plagues, famines, tempests, floods, quakes, rains of fire, and every other sort of natural disaster.
      “Among us all, wherever we may be in space or time, justice unenlightened by compassion will never cease to travesty itself and blindly mock its victims’ true conditions.
      “Nor can there be in the whole cosmos any planet or moon inhabited by beings such as you or we, where the monsters born among us have not cast their dark and fiery shadows.
      “Nor shall we ever know for sure, any more than you do, where we come from, or why we must be born and suffer, or where we are going or what force, or principle, if any, informs us.
      “Nor have we ever pierced the Mystery of Love and Light, the Great Enigma.”
      “Yes! Despair! Despair! And if your eyes have tears to weep, weep! Groan if you can! And go through all those gestures that your species has evolved in order to express its most atrocious pains!
     
     Step 2: And now turn from these darkest of dark realities that plague us all to the brightest and most golden of all dreams. Imagine what your own world could be like if every being in it capable of having this unbounded love were actually to have it. “In my Father’s house are many rooms,” Jesus says. Try to picture what your own “room” would be like in the “house” of Jesus’ God, none other than the Lord of Love, this Living, All-Embracing Love.
      Now suppose that there is no world left in the whole cosmos that is not governed by this love, that all those that have failed to acquire it have, after progressing to a certain level of science and technology, destroyed themselves. Imagine what this love, when at last it reigns supreme, can do.
      Think of this love’s kingdom, embracing all remaining present and future galaxies, as the final, cosmic realization of Isaiah’s peaceful kingdom, where “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.” Think of it as one infinite family. Think of it as a universal kiss. Think of it, as many of our human artists have, as a boundless chorus, rings within rings, perpetually praising God, the Lord of Love, seated at the center and shining like unto our Sun.
      Think of it, as Jesus did, as the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of heaven.
      Imagine what the cosmos would be like if there were no more hunger, no more disease, no more loneliness, if none of us inhabitants of the cosmos were forced to go without shelter, if none of us were forced by the brutal necessity of nature to prey upon another, if every living being put first, before its own happiness, the happiness of every other--a cosmos where there were no more pride, lust, anger, greed, and hatred, where there were no more oppressed, no more oppressors, where there were games and sports instead of war, where this great, all-embracing love, with beauty, truth, and goodness forever at its side, ruled everywhere supreme.
      “We would each treat others, as we would want them to treat us. We would look first for our own imperfections before concerning ourselves with theirs. We would refrain wherever possible from moral judgments and be quick to forgive, so that our own transgressions could be forgiven.
      “We would all be able to become all the good things that we have it in us to become. Nature, lovingly cared for, would return our love with abundance. The whole cosmos would turn into one great garden, playing field, university, and place of worship. The sciences would reach new heights. The infirmities of old age would all be banished. Law courts and armies would fade away. Music, dancing, poetry, and all the other arts would flourish as they never had before.”
     
     9
     
     Imagine that, borne in a flash through space and time, you have joined Jesus on the night of his arrest. He and all twelve of his closest disciples, except Judas, tread slowly, silently, their heads bowed, up through a large olive grove.
     
      Jerusalem, their people’s ancient capital, where they have just had their last, farewell supper together, dominates the plateau behind them to the west, across the narrow Kidron valley. It is still winter. Several of the disciples are shivering slightly. You can glimpse portions of the starry sky, including your own sun or galaxy perhaps, above the silvery foliage.
      Jesus is the one leading them. In the semidarkness, his tunic glows as if faintly incandescent. Peter and the others follow right behind. It is as though they were all taking comfort in their closeness to each other.
      In order to observe the drama, now begun, of his final sufferings and death, you have made yourselves indistinguishable from the shadows. Unnoticed, you accompany the small company as it continues up the stony path.
      It would seem to them just yesterday that Jesus, humbly mounted on an ass’s colt, in conformance with an ancient Jewish prophecy—
     
     Fear not, daughter of Zion;
     behold thy king is coming,
     sitting on an ass’s colt.
     
     --had made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The hosannas, the shouts of the crowds proclaiming him the Messiah, the Anointed One, their long-predicted Savior and King, still ring in his and his disciples’ ears. They can still remember in sharp detail the shining eyes, the smiles, the waving palm branches, and the garments strewn in his way.
      He had carefully preplanned everything he could, beginning with the date and hour. As they were drawing near to the city, to Bethphage and Bethany, he had sent two of his disciples into the village opposite them to procure the colt. He had told them exactly where they would find it tied and what they would then have to do.
      He had been fully aware from the start that he was now putting his life in even graver danger than it had been already. It was the week before Passover, the great annual feast in which the Jews, forever chafing and rebelling under the Roman yoke, celebrated their liberation from Egypt, another, much earlier great imperial power. The city was swollen with pilgrims come to participate in the feast. Riots could have broken out at any time. For nearly seventy years, since the outset of the Roman occupation, all expressions of dissent had been ruthlessly put down. On one occasion, the Roman legate Varus had had some 2,000 rebels crucified. Over the years, many thousands more had suffered the same gruesome fate.
      This year, the authorities were particularly worried. A rumor had been circulating in the days before Jesus’ arrival that something truly momentous was about to happen. God was, at long last, going to intervene again in the unfolding history of His chosen people. The kingdom, that so many of their spiritual leaders, including Jesus, had for so long prophesied, was now really coming. The faces, shouts, and gestures of the men, women, and children hailing him, mounted king-like on his colt as though it were a noble steed, had reflected their hunger to believe this. As he had ridden towards and past them, there was not one who was not convinced, at least for that brief moment, that he was indeed the long foretold Messiah. There was not one who did not behold in him the glorious new King whom God had sent to deliver them from their imperial oppressors and rule in harmony and peace forever after the whole wide world.
      Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, paced back and forth. He had just now, for this new pre-festival season, put his troops on special alert. His spies were everywhere. The priestly aristocracy, always the main intermediary between the Roman occupation government and the populace, was also keeping track of everything that happened.
      They all regarded Jesus as another dangerous troublemaker. This was so even though he had taught that the kingdom would come to pass not by force of arms, but by an act of God.
      He could have dropped out of sight, disguised himself, slipped out of the city, and sought refuge in any of the surrounding towns and villages. But he was determined to go on with his ministry no matter what. He knew that he had not yet finished. If it was to succeed, he could never desert it.
     
      As the week before the feast progressed (and was it not on the day of Passover itself perhaps that the kingdom’s arrival would be complete?), it was as though he had calculated his every word and action to provoke the Romans and their priestly collaborators even further. He had even gone so far as to create a disturbance in the Temple courtyard, overturning, under the chief priests' noses, the moneychangers’ tables.
      “Why would he do that? Why that and not something else? Why distract us non-humans from the main lines of the story with such details, which have little meaning or importance for us? The ass’s colt? The palm fronds? Jesus, the Messiah? The high priests’ noses? The temple? The overturning of the moneychangers’ tables? Those things have nothing to do with us, our own experience, our own cultures, so far removed from your little planet in space and time.”
      That is true. You are right to object. The particular historical, cultural, and political framework in which these climactic events in Jesus’ life occur should not overly concern you. To explain, for example, the prophetic symbolism of his overturning the moneychangers’ tables, how it presages the imminent apocalyptic destruction of the Temple, would waste your time. It is too complicated. It would serve too little purpose.
      “What are the moneychangers doing in the Temple?”
      Money changing and the sale of sheep, pigeons, and other animals for sacrifice at the Temple’s altar were necessary for its normal functioning. The money changers, no doubt for a charge, converted the pilgrims’ various currency, often bearing Roman imperial images, into the Temple’s standard coinage, without any of these offensive images.
      But, as I was saying, in order to experience the transformative power of this climactic part of Jesus’ story, you do not need to know the precise theological, legalistic, and political reasons why Jesus’ enemies have him arrested and put to death. Nor do you have to be familiar with the apocalyptic vision of the end of history in which Jesus and his disciples are convinced that they are taking part.
      What really matters is that you never forget, as you follow this climactic part of the story, that Jesus is suffering and giving up his life for us. He is doing so because he loves us. He is confirming--in the only way that cannot fail to win many of us to him--the truth of his own teaching “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Everything he does in this part, as in all the earlier parts, is first and foremost motivated by his perfect, all-forgiving, all-embracing love for us.
      “We won’t forget. No, we won’t forget... But what do you mean by ‘us’?”
      A good question! As you already know, neither Jesus nor his contemporaries had any idea that beings like you might exist. The religion that has formed here, on our planet, around him and this love, which he so well embodies, has always been, up till now at least, very parochial.
      There is a delightful legend that, on the night that he was born, a host of angels appeared in the sky near his birthplace praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” The major creed of this religion outright declares that it was for us humans that he did all this:
     
     For us men and for our salvation, he came down from heaven,
     And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary,
     And was made man:
     And was crucified also for us . . .
     
     Nowhere in our Holy Scriptures and creeds is it written, however, that it was for us humans only... I myself--and I know that many other of my fellow humans would agree--that--
      “’. . . came down from heaven’? ‘Holy Ghost’? ‘Virgin Mary’? We are getting more and more confused. You can explain all that to us later, but, please, now just get on with the parts of the story that we can understand without too much trouble and which you believe it is important for us to be acquainted with.
      “Although we are not human, we cannot but assume--after all that you have told us--that if Jesus had known of our existence he would have loved us also with the same all-embracing love with which he loved you. Or, at least, we may be confident that it would be in accordance with the spirit of this love, which he embodied, for us all to be included in it.”
     
     
      Yes, of course! Of course! How could it be otherwise! His spirit!
      And now that the word “spirit” has turned up again, let me also say how glad I am it has! If the whole truth were told, Jesus’ spirit is the only thing about him that we can be absolutely certain existed and came into being in his time. It is what, more than any other part of him, goes on living and learning and expanding in us. For it is this spirit, which the story of his final sufferings and death makes fully manifest to us, that, more than anything else in the story, brings about in us the transformation we are concerned with here. I truly believe that. Otherwise, why would I be writing this to you? But now, I will indeed get on with the story.
     
     10
     
      Jesus and his disciples now stop at the same place in the olive grove where they have often come before, a place long been used for expressing oil from olives, called the Garden of Gethsemane. They do so even though they know that Judas expects them to come here. They also know that the authorities would consider it a perfect place to arrest Jesus away from the crowds that had so recently acclaimed him as their lord and king.
      You now hear him say to his disciples, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.”
      Taking with him Peter and two others, he goes over to a spot only a few steps farther on. Anyone familiar with our species would be struck by his paleness, his expression, and the way he walks. Although he is still a young man, he now suddenly seems old and infirm. He walks as though he might at any moment need support.
      “I am deeply grieved, even to death,” he says. “Remain here, and stay awake with me.”
      Going on a little farther, he throws himself on the ground and, after a few moments, you, who have now approached him more closely, can hear him pray, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.”
      The night grows darker. For a long, long time, he barely moves. Now and then, he inhales deeply and sighs. At other moments, he seems hardly to breathe at all.
      He stands up, returns to his disciples and finds them sleeping. He says to Peter, “So you could not stay awake with me one hour? Stay awake and pray that you too may not come into a time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
      Again he goes away, for the second time, and prays, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done.”
      Again he comes and finds them sleeping, for, as the old accounts put it, their
eyes are heavy. So leaving them again, he goes away and prays for the third time, saying the same words. Despite the cold, he is sweating heavily. The drops of sweat dripping from his face onto the ground are red, the color of our blood.
      Then he comes to the disciples and says to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.”
      While he is still speaking, Judas arrives. He is followed by a crowd, led by soldiers and bearing lamps and torches as well as swords and clubs. He comes up to Jesus and says, “Master!” He presses his lips against Jesus’ cheek.
      “This is the point in the story when Peter draws his sword and strikes off Malchus’ right ear. The other disciples vanish into the night. Jesus is bound and led away.”
      Yes.
     
     11
     
      Our sources differ, however, as to exactly what has just happened and what will happen during the following hours. In this part of the story, quite as much as ever, we are in a hotly contested no-man’s land between myth and history.
      “The account that you have already quoted about Peter’s denying that he knows Jesus sounds as though it could have really happened.”
      Yes, there must certainly be some solid truth behind it. There is no reason to doubt this. Despite some differences of detail, our principal sources all agree that it took place at the house of Caiaphas, the high priest. More than one even evoke a charcoal fire that the officers and slaves quite likely made in the courtyard and show us Peter among those warming themselves around it. You can perhaps imagine for yourselves it glowing, softly hissing and crackling, the slightly acrid, but not unpleasant burning charcoal smell. Some of the soldiers have perhaps taken their helmets off.
      You can also perhaps imagine yourselves present at the questioning of Jesus going on intermittently in rooms, big or small, crowded or almost empty, throughout this whole, long, dreadful night. The occasionally agitated shadows on the walls. Voices. Long silences. Shouts. Sighs. Yawns. Snores. Cocks crowing. The possibly, but not necessarily, reddish dawn.
      In front of you, unobserved as always, the scenes pass, jumbled all together, sharply perceived in dreamlike detail, then, like dreams, vanishing, hard to remember. You see Jews as well as Romans. You see people, mostly slaves and soldiers, mocking Jesus, spitting on Jesus, slapping Jesus, and punching Jesus. An old, white-bearded man, Annas, the high priest’s father-in-law, stares at him the way he had for many years at the lambs and other animals about to be sacrificed on the Temple’s altars. Jesus, standing, his hands bound, endures it all meekly, as though he were himself a sacrificial lamb. He does not try to break away. His ashen face betrays no anger, bitterness, or hatred. Sometimes he remains silent. Sometimes he answers.
      Occasionally one or two of the bright or dark figures standing or sitting close or at some distance from him in the lamp or torch or dawn light strain forward to hear what one or another of his questioners is saying, but his voice is always clearly audible except for when it is drowned out by other voices shouting.
      They interrogate him about his disciples and his teaching.
      “I have said nothing secretly. Why do you ask me? Ask those who have heard me, what I said to them; they know what I have said.”
      One of the officers standing by strikes him with his hand. “Is this how you answer the high priest?”
      “If I have spoken wrongly, bear witness to the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?”
      Caiaphas’s stare resembles his father-in-law’s. “I adjure you by the living God, tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God.”
      “You have said so.”
      The high priest stiffens. “You have always told the people that the kingdom of God is at hand. How do you propose that the kingdom of God will come about?”
      “Love. By obeying the old commandment that we must love our neighbors as ourselves. This includes our enemies. We must love even the Romans. The kingdom will come not by force of arms, but by an act of God.”
      It is obvious to all the priests and other Temple officials present that this peasant spiritual leader, though versed in the sacred texts of their religion, is an impractical dreamer. Far worse, he is a radical one. He is creating disturbances, stirring up the people.
      Pilate has barely finished breakfast. His wife, curious, follows him into the judgment hall, and stands beside him.
      He does not care at all about the charge of blasphemy. The Jews’ religion does not much interest him. Since his recent assumption of the governorship--it seems just yesterday--he has shown nothing but contempt for their beliefs and practices. He has more than once already deliberately provoked their outrage. He has done so as a matter of policy, of course, but also for his and his fellow Romans’ personal amusement. Contrary to Roman practice, he is determined to bring imperial images into Jerusalem. He wants to appropriate Temple funds for a new aqueduct.
      He is impressed by Jesus’ quiet dignity. The man may not be handsome in any usual way, but he has a kind of beauty, you might almost say, a kind of royal bearing, recalling certain gladiators he had admired in this or that arena.
      For some time, he squints at Jesus like an old tailor trying to thread a needle.
      “Are you the king of the Jews?”
      “My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight.”
      “But are you a king?”
      “You have said so.”
      “What kind of king? What kind of kingdom?”
      “The lord of Love. The kingdom of God. the kingdom of Heaven. There is a place in it for you too.”
      “Yes, I know all about it.”
      His wife had told him.
      Pilate pauses, calculates. The doctrine of all-embracing, all-forgiving love that Jesus preaches strikes him too as unrealistic. The interpretation of traditional Jewish teachings on which it would seem to have been based must indeed, as the priests insist, be an extraordinarily radical one. Never in the real world could one love one’s enemies, turn the other cheek, return good for evil and survive.
      But, if only for a moment, Pilate is touched.
      Yet he agrees that telling crowds, especially in the days leading up to such an incendiary holiday, that their liberation is at hand, that the kingdom of God is approaching--no matter how nonmilitarily that kingdom is envisaged--could easily provoke another insurrection. It is always better to be feared than loved. If he is to preserve the peace, he has to make a preemptive blow, teach the populace another lesson, make an example out of this troublemaker. He has to silence all this talk about the coming kingdom. He has to show the Jews that they will never have any other lord than Caesar.
      Jesus steadily returns Pilate’s gaze. There is no fear or anger in Jesus’ eyes, only anguish, only tortured love. Pilate shrugs and turns away. The man is to be flogged, then crucified. Over his head, they are to put the charge, which is to read, however much the high priest might object, “THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS.”
      The flogging begins at once. The soldiers first strip Jesus naked. Then two of them, one tall, the other shorter, standing in front and in back of him, start whipping him over his whole body. You can see clearly the small metal dumbbell-shaped objects attached to the ends of the whips. One of these objects strikes him hard on his right cheek, causing a large swelling below the eye and a partial displacement of his nose. Blood streams down his face, down his whole head, back, arms, and chest—his whole body. It gathers in puddles on the pavement. Unable to control himself, he urinates and, for a brief second, defecates. A slave rushes forward to clean the tiles.
     Then the soldiers take him into Pilate’s headquarters. They gather the others in the court around him. They put a scarlet robe on him, and after twisting some thorns into a crown (our nearly universal human symbol of royalty), they put it on his head. They press it down. They spit on him. They put a reed (representing a scepter, our other major royal symbol) in his right hand. They kneel down before him (the way we traditionally have to show respect for a monarch). They mock him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!”
      After mocking him, they strip him of the robe and put his own clothes back on him.
      They bind him again and pull, kick, and push him, still wearing the crown of thorns, through narrow, crowded, crooked streets. Again and again, they press the crown down. A soldier just in front of him holds up the notice, containing his name and crime, to be attached to the cross above his head. Again and again, the soldier shouts, “Behold your king!”
      Two convicted thieves, who have also been condemned to be crucified, stumble forward side by side behind them.
      Each of the three condemned men drags on his back a heavy, splintery wooden plank about as long as an average human is tall. For a moment Jesus lurches forward as if he is about to be sick. A moment later, the vomit rushes forth. The soldiers keep pushing him on.
      A mass of other humans follows close upon Jesus, the two thieves, and the soldiers. It includes a company of women, bewailing and lamenting Jesus. One of them is his mother, Mary. See! She is the one who has just now raised both her hands and presses them, palms down, against her dark-ringed eyes.
     
     12
     
      Now imagine a grove of huge wooden poles set up in a rocky, desolate, and barren place called Golgotha (which means Place of the Skull) not far outside Jerusalem, on the northwest side. Next to it are many tombs carved in rock. It is a place that passers-by on their way to or from the Damascus gate can see quite clearly. Several poles have humans pinned to them, their arms outstretched, hanging from rough, heavy wooden planks attached at right angles to the poles—the same sort of planks as the ones Jesus and the thieves are carrying. All these victims are naked. Large iron nails have been driven through their wrists and feet, their joints pierced and ripped open. Blood has been draining everywhere. One still gasps for breath.
      Every day, new ones arrive. Most are carted away after they die. Others are left to rot where they hang. Dogs sometimes urinate upon some of the poles. Occasionally, a raven--one of those big, black birds you can see now watching in the distance--will come and peck out a dead man’s eyes.
      Today, as always, several bystanders hold their noses. The smell of rotting flesh floats faintly here and there.
      “What time of day is it? Where is your sun?”
      No one can say. Imagine it still rising but somewhat closer to the zenith than earlier. I would say almost noon. The shadows, from which you are still indistinguishable, are getting shorter.
      “It would be appropriate if it were a dismal, gray day or clouds were passing overhead, obscuring the sun. Perhaps a storm brewing.”
      Yes, I suppose that anything like that is possible. But no one can tell for sure what the weather was really like. Sometimes I prefer to imagine that the sky is blue, almost spring-like, at least for now.
      In any case, the moment has come for these new victims to be crucified in their turn. The soldiers, each versed in his peculiar task, break up into three small groups, each assigned to one of the three new victims.
      The captain decides that the two thieves will be crucified one on Jesus’ right side, the other on his left.
      While two soldiers stand in front of Jesus and hold him tight, another takes the wooden plank and drops it on the ground between him and the pole that they have selected for him. For the third time today, he is stripped naked, left wearing nothing once again but the crown of thorns.
      Some of the old accounts say that it is here that they offer him wine mixed with bile, and that he refuses.
      Then four of the soldiers assigned to him roughly force him to lie down on his back with his arms outstretched over the plank, the palms of his hands facing up. The soldiers hold him down. He is trembling and gasping with fear and pain. Two other soldiers position two nails over his wrists. Other soldiers are doing the same with the two thieves.
      While the captain looks on, another soldier picks up a heavy iron hammer. He kneels behind Jesus’ left wrist, raises high the hammer, and brings it down with all his might over the nail. Jesus’ scream is followed by the loud flapping sound of the ravens taking flight. Dogs somewhere are barking. The two thieves are screaming too. Some of the women scream.
      Then there is silence.
      As the soldier with the hammer drives in the other nail, over Jesus’ right wrist, Jesus screams again. The two thieves are screaming again. The dogs are barking again, joined, this time, by others, somewhere farther away. The women scream again and sob violently.
      Meanwhile, other soldiers have placed three long ladders up against the pole they have chosen for him. Two of them climb the ladders on the right and left sides. Others lift Jesus and hold him while the two who have just climbed up the ladders reach down and seize him. They place against the pole the crossbeam with him hanging from it. It is about twelve feet above the ground, that is to say, more or less twice the height of an average human. Using a rope, the soldiers then make the crossbeam fast to the pole.
      “Do you really suppose this is the way it was?”
      None of the things I am asking you to imagine here may have happened exactly the way I am saying they did. That was, I thought, understood from the start. Some things may not really have happened at all, like--need I say?--the flapping ravens’ wings, the barking dogs. I am doing the best I can. I am relying mostly on the best information that I have, but also somewhat on my own imagination. I want to bring this part of the story alive for you, to make it concrete, to invest it with all the dramatic force it can have for you.
      But what I am asking you to imagine is just as believable, I dare say, as any other account of these same events. Perhaps, indeed, it is more believable than some. These would include even those that millions of my fellow humans have over the centuries taken to be literally true in every detail.
      A mere dry summary will not do in any case. It is not enough just to say, for example, in the words of one of our most oft-repeated creeds: “For our sakes and for our salvation, Jesus was crucified, he suffered death, and was buried.” Whether we are humans or non-humans, we each must build on this assertion, which is almost certainly true, but all too short and abstract, our own concrete, sensuous, verisimilar dramas. Ask any painter or sculptor. That is the only way we have of getting closer to what really happened. That is the only way we have of “being there” or as near as it is possible to be. That is the only way we have to experience the full power that this part of Jesus’ story has to transform us and make us share with him the new kind of love that he brought us.
      “Now that the crossbeam--the plank you mentioned--has been put in place, the soldiers fasten his feet to the pole with another nail?”
      Yes, that is the way we usually imagine it: a nail, not a rope, although we are told that the Romans sometimes used a rope.
      “He is screaming again, and the two thieves, one on either side of him, are screaming again, and the women are screaming again, and the ravens’ wings are flapping, and the dogs in the distance are still barking.”
      Finally, two soldiers nail the notice stating his name and crime to the post a short distance above Jesus’ head:
     
     THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS.
     
      A ledge inserted about halfway up the pole gives some support for his body--but not as much as he needs. He keeps slipping off and trying to get back on. When he does, it is easier to breathe, but even then, he has to struggle to get more air into his lungs.
      His mouth is wide open, a dark, gaping hole, and his tongue darts back and forth between the corners of his lips. His eyes roll, staring wildly into the distance, as if searching for something that is not there. Then suddenly, his eyes are squeezed shut, and he cries out, loudly, so that everyone can hear, “Father, forgive them! They do not know what they are doing!”
      There is a long silence, broken only by the distant barking of the dogs. All eyes are once again turned toward him. The soldiers, the women, and all the others looking on seem frozen, as if time had stopped. I would like to think that the words we have just heard him utter would be forever flying throughout the cosmos, echoing in the grottos of the heavens, resounding back and forth between the galaxies. “Father, forgive them, forgive them, forgive them...” In all the history of unfolding time, this human that I am, now evoking for you this drama, can conceive of no greater line or no greater character to utter it.
      The day wears on. Jesus and the two thieves are writhing and grimacing most horribly.
      Some of those present in the crowd of other humans watching cry out to him, “If you are the king, why don’t you command to be taken down.”
      “Is this the kingdom that you promised us? If you are the king, come down from your cross now, and we will believe in you.”
      Some pick up bits of rock and try to hit various parts of his body. The soldiers, we are told, divide his clothes among themselves by casting lots.
      The thieves crucified with him taunt him too.
      At one point, he is said to have seen his mother, Mary, and his dearest disciple, a younger man named John. He asks John to take care of her just as if she were his own mother. John promises that he will. Great tears continually flow from Mary’s black-rimmed eyes. She is stretching out her arms upwards toward Jesus. The black veil covering her whole body from the head on down flutters in a sudden wind. At least, that is how I have sometimes imagined it.
      “This is where the storm could break.”
      Yes, whatever you like. One of the old, best-loved accounts tells us that, from noon on, darkness comes over the whole land until three in the afternoon.
      It is not long after that, we can imagine, that, again with a loud voice, Jesus cries out, according to the same account, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani!” That is, in his native language, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
      Then he cries out still again with a loud voice and breathes his last.
      “And then?”
      As I have said, the different versions differ. The account that I was just quoting tells us that at this moment the curtain of the Temple is torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shakes and the rocks are split. The tombs are also opened, and many bodies of saintly people who had fallen asleep are raised. One of the other best-loved accounts tells us that it is now, at about the sixth hour, that there is darkness over all the earth.
      “And now the thunder and lightning?”
      Perhaps, if you insist. I am not so sure. It does not really matter. The truth lies elsewhere.
      “Is there more to the story?”
      Oh, yes! The old accounts go on. They tell, each according to its own tradition, what happens afterwards.
      “What is that?”
      Here again, it is impossible to know for sure. As I have said, the accounts differ. The veil of myth and legend gets even thicker. It is a matter of faith, of hope. Many of us believe that, three days after Jesus dies and is buried, he rises again and ascends into heaven and that he will come again, in great glory, and that his kingdom will have no end. But this is a quite different subject. I am not sure that I would know quite how to present it to you. I am old, very old as we humans go and full of questions. Someone else might do a better job.
      “Is there anything more that we should know in order to imagine better the part of the story you have just presented, anything that would enhance its power to transform us, to make us love the way Jesus loves?”
      Most probably there is. But I have done the best I can. And for now at least, what I have told you should be enough. If not, do not despair. Just remember. The time may come. You have to be ready. Meanwhile, the story will take root, I hope, and grow in you. It has a hardy inner strength of its own. It can adapt to almost any soil. Once planted, it has a way of reforming and perfecting all by itself its telling.
      Now I must say goodby. You may not receive this until many millions of our years have passed. We humans may have long since disappeared. Our planet may no longer exist. Our sun itself may have vanished. But if only the part of Jesus’ story that I have just tried to pass on to you survives, we humans shall not have come and gone in vain.
      As I say, just remember. He died for us all, for you as well as us. Follow him. We all have nothing more precious than this love.
     
     
     




Afterword to My Fellow-Human Readers

      You yourselves must each decide whether or not the preceding text should be taken seriously and, if so, to what degree. I am, as I say toward the end, an old man—probably even older than the author of the Gospel of John is supposed to have been when he wrote it. I may well have already progressed farther than I realize down the path to senility. One would have to be at least a little crazy to spend even a moment on converting extraterrestrials.
      Yet before coming to any conclusions, consider, pray, that sometimes doing crazy things can be a form of play and, as Huizinga makes clear in Homo Ludens, one of my favorite books, we humans are sometimes never more serious—or more truly ourselves and in our right minds--than when we are playing.
      I should also confess that I share the Russian reverence for the holy fool. The song of the holy fool in Boris Gudunov is one of the most beautiful and haunting I have ever heard. It would make a fitting musical backdrop for much of the above text. To be taken for a holy fool myself would not overly displease me.
      This is true, even though an even fitter backdrop would be Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. (Indeed, if it were permitted to give extraterrestrials only one work of literature or art to inform them as to the nature of Christianity, this work should be not any written work or painting, but this great musical masterpiece.)
      I should perhaps also say that it does not really matter to me too much whether or not this “gospel,” as I have called it, attracts many human readers. This is so even though I would be delighted to learn that some may have found it not without worth. I should be the first, moreover, to be amazed if any real extraterrestrials were ever to receive and decipher it. To be sure, given the fantastic century in which we humans live today, anything might happen. The universe is stranger than any of us can imagine. But I have already reaped my main reward.
      What started out as a playful exercise I thought would take only an afternoon to complete has taken more than a year. My objective was to write something that would not only inform extraterrestrials (assuming they exist or will exist, can receive messages from us, etc.) about the nature of Christian love, but also make them actually share it. I thought this would be easy. It was not. I had hardly begun before I found myself wrestling with a thousand questions.
      How do we who have known this love best convey the idea of it to other intelligent beings in the cosmos who may never have known it? Can we not say of it what Saint Augustine said of time ("What then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who does ask me, I do not know.")? Is this love only an emotion or state of mind and heart? Only a cultural artifact, like romantic love? Or, as some would say, is it a living spirit to be welcomed into our hearts (whatever "hearts" are) and loved and worshiped?
      When and where did it first actually appear on Earth? May it really be equated, as some have maintained, with the Buddhist metta, for example, or the four Buddhist Brahma Viharas? Or is it not largely unique, comprising not only the limitless loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity designated by these Buddhist terms, but also other, peculiarly Christian (or Judeo-Christian) qualities--most notably those suggested by the Christian equation of God with Love and, therefore, love with God?
      How fully is it anticipated or prefigured in the book of Isaiah and elsewhere in the Old Testament?
      To what extent can we see it already dawning before the New Testament was written in the language, thought, and experience of ancient Hellenism--for example, the sacrifice offered by the demi-god Prometheus on behalf of man, or the teachings of the followers of Diogenes of Sinope?
      How could we make these alien beings actually come to possess it themselves? How did Jesus himself transform his first followers, empowering them to love others as he had loved them? How can he still do it for us?
      And who—or what—precisely was Jesus? And what exactly is his story? How true is it--or fictional? Does it really matter whether or not there was an historical Jesus?
      What can we reasonably assume about the nature of the extraterrestrials who would be most likely to receive our messages? Must we regard them as our "neighbors" in the Christian sense? What would Christianity look like through their eyes? Could other worlds already be familiar with the love that Jesus embodied?
      To what extent may Christianity itself be exportable—including the major creeds and, above all, the eucharistic rites through which we endlessly repeat the drama of the Crucifixion and thus continually revive in us its transformative, salvific power?
      If Christianity were to become a cosmic religion what form would it take? How much would it differ from the forms in which most of its adherents still know it today?
      What would become of its anthropocentric, geocentric elements? Would not the discovery that there are other civilizations out there in the universe have at least as revolutionary an impact on Christianity as the Copernican theory?
      Is it possible that, although the first Christians believed that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, it may not actually arrive until long after our planet has disappeared?
      May not what we call Christian love be an evolutionary survival device, a means, if nothing else, of preventing advanced technological civilizations from destroying themselves? May only one or two of the millions of civilizations among whom this love, however it is introduced, is known survive—and not necessarily ours?
      I have answered none of these questions to my complete satisfaction. Yet I have a clearer idea now of what I value most of all in this present life, here on Earth, than I had before. I have not solved any of the Great Mysteries, but I have gained, through this long effort, a better, saner focus. I have a clearer, sharper idea of where my nearly lifelong struggle with doubt has led me--my need for faith and my need to question, my need to know and my need to dream, my love for my old faith and my longing for a new faith more in accord with our best contemporary philosophical and scientific conceptions of reality.




Some Possibly Helpful Books and Articles for this Gospel's Human Readers


Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation: the Beginning of our Religious Traditions. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Borg, Marcus J. The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith. HarperSanFrancisco, 2003.

Burklo, Jim. Open Christianity: Home by Another Road. Rising Star Press, 2000.

Cahill, Thomas. The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. Anchor Books (Doubleday), 1999.

Cahill, Thomas. Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus. Doubleday, 1999.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Laelius, on Friendship (Laelius de Amicitia); edited with an introduction, translation & commentary by J. G. F. Powell. Arris & Phillips, c1990.

Coffin, William Sloane. The Courage to Love. HarperCollins Publishers, 1982.

Coffin, William Sloane. Letters To A Young Doubter. Westminster John Knox Press, 2005.

Cupitt, Don. Reforming Christianity. Polebridge Press, 2001.

Cupitt, Don. The Way to Happiness. Polebridge Press, 2005.

Doherty, Earl. The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Canadian Humanist Publications, 1999.

Frankfurt, Harry G. The Reasons of Love. Princeton University Press, 2004.

Fredriksen, Paula. From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus. Second edition. Yale University Press, 2000.

Geering, Lloyd. The World to Come: From Christian Past to Global Future. Polebridge Press, 1999.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. 1938. Eng. tr., Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Harper & Row, 1970.

Jones, Robert. God, Galileo and Geering: A Faith for the Twenty-First Century. Polebridge Press, 2005.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Works of Love. Tr. from the Danish by David F. Wenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson. Princeton University Press, 1946.

Laughlin, Paul Alan. Getting Oriented: What Every Christian Should Know about Eastern Religions, but Probably Doesn’t. Polebridge Press, 2005.

Laughlin, Paul Alan. "The Once and Future Christ of Faith: Promising Options Beyond the History-Faith Dichotomy," The Fourth R: An Advocate for Religious Literacy, Vol. 18, no. 2 (March-April 2005), pp. 2-7, 18.

Laughlin, Paul Alan. Remedial Christianity: What Every Believer Should Know about the Faith, But Probably Doesn't. Polebridge Press, 2000.

Miles, Jack. God: A Biography. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. Random House, 1979.

Rougemont, Denis de. Love in the Western World (L'Amour et l'Occident); tr. by Montgomery Belgion. Princeton University Press, 1983, c1956.

Spong, John Shelby. Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile. HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.

Spong, John Shelby. The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love. HarperSanFrancisco (Random House), 2004.

Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology. Vol. I. The University of Chicago Press, 1951.
















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