"I know what you're thinking. You want a sign. What better sign could I give than to heal this little one? I could—but I will not. I am the Lord, not a magician. I have given this child a gift I have denied to all of you: eternal innocence. To you she appears broken. But to me she is flawless—like the bud that dies without opening, like the bird that falls from the nest and is devoured by ants. She will never offend me as you have done. She will never corrupt or destroy the work of my Father's hands. You need her. She will stir the goodness that keeps you human. Her infirmity will teach you gratitude for your own fortune. And there is more. Every day she will remind you who I am, that my ways are not your ways, that not the smallest speck of dust spinning in the darkest void falls from my hand. I chose you. You did not choose me. This child is the sign I give you. Keep her as a treasure."
This "little one" is mongoloid. The one speaking is Christ, returned to earth at the end of our century.
We are at the end of *God's Jesters*, and page by page we have drawn closer, breath held, to the end of humanity in a pyre of nuclear war.
The story begins with Pope Gregory XVII's renunciation of the papacy after receiving a revelation of the world's end. But neither the Church nor the world's governments can accept it. In the name of realism, they reject the truth—the first of many disturbing realities in this book, which I have read and reread with passion. Because beneath the narrative modes of action thriller, political fantasy, and religious speculation, it is deeply religious, yet never pedantic or preachy. It sheds light and provokes thought, even in a fictional narrative, on real themes of our lives: a Pope in his humanity, not the conventional image; a Church torn between world and revelation; a Christ who tends to bodies as much as spirits; an humanity headed toward the pyre, yet capable of rebuilding itself not on those who count most by our measures, but on the faithful, the innocent; the machinery of governments with their tendency, in moments of crisis, to begin eliminating the "useless."
It is a novel, yet it raises serious questions about the great themes of our lives: the irrational side of faith, marriage, the Church, the place of the handicapped, politics, and more.
West wrote of this book: "It says more than I myself meant to say." Reading it, we conclude that it makes us think far more than we expected when we first opened it.
M.B.
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