Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 46

Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 46 - The Wide Path

This is Episode 46 of the serialized version of the novel, Virtual Eternity: An Epic 90s Retro Florida Techo-Pro-Life Love Story and Conversion Journey. These 52 episodes are presented here free for you every Friday. You can buy the paperback version [] from Mike Church’s Crusade Channel Store or at Amazon.

Or you can start reading at the Table of Contents: here

Chapter 7: Power over God

The Wide Path

In which Jonathan’s new convictions about TRUTH are challenged by the modern temptation to wield power over our eternal fate, which allows us to deceive ourselves on the extent of our own sovereignty

Images and smells narcotized everything. First, sleep, it seemed, captured my body and arrested how it worked. The visions enticed me. The shapes were strange and familiar. The colors were common and part of another spectrum. My eyes fixated. My retinas burned with the activity of energy pulses. My eyes would close as their retinas fatigued. Then they opened to curious colors and shapes, all the colors imaginable, all the shapes that were mathematically possible. I drifted between sleep and awareness of the images for minutes, then hours.

In one moment of a now, pain pulsed my head. My consciousness perceived it in the next now. By then, comfort replaced the pain. I knew the rest of my body thrashed in agony, but I had only calm. My weighty cocoon pushed me away and peeled off me. I burst upward with a shout. Stunning freedom ruled me. My body twitched as I watched through the concrete and glass of the building. I was rising away from it.

The loss of my body both freed and saddened me. I had known such joy, suffering, and learning in that shell. I was grateful for it. I saw the melting wastelands below and grieved.

Geese flew below me. I dove down into their “V.” I sped northward on the back of the goose at the apex. This was an earthly joy. My lost body had enjoyed them along with my soul. But now, my soul delighted in them more than ever.

I saw houses and farms and cities below, in crisp detail. A few children fished in snow-banked creeks. From a thousand feet high, I heard their laughter and smelled their father’s fire. Wolves romped in forests. From within clouds, I heard their barking and saw their coats’ shine. Meadowlarks perched on the plains. From the back of a goose in flight, I heard their whistle and saw their yellow chests’ ruffle.

A light shone on my right as I sped with the geese northward. It floated with me for many miles. I learned I could turn to it.

“Hello, Jonathan,” the light said, although it did not speak as a human speaks. It had no air or skin to vibrate, but it communicated. I enjoyed the floating speck. I whirred away from the fowls with sadness. They had perceived me and liked me. I turned to the dot of light.

“Hello. Who are you?”

“I am Dante. I am to deliver you to your eternity. We must hurry. A being who seeks you for his eternity is afoot. He thinks you have been abandoned. We must make haste to that holiest of places.”

“I have been judged?”

“One of his slaves has taken your earthly life, so we have been permitted to help this time.”

“I am grateful, generous ghost. But I’m a bit sad to be removed from the beautiful earth. May I view it once more before we ascend?”

“We must make haste. That fiery light searches for you. Let us go far from here. He will be near soon.”

“To the south, then, to Florida where it now blooms with spring while the rest of the continent either swelters, melts, or freezes.”

“True, my friend,” Dante said. “We have no more superb place in the Western world for a month. You will guide me to that earthly beauty, that approximation of what I hope to guide you to: Beauty that souls alone see.”

We whisked over the lands in seconds yet beyond time. We soared over the plains, from white to brown to green, over the same roads I drove ten months ago. We flew downward now over sprouting oak trees, over fields with flowering athletes. These men exchanged baseballs through the air. I attempted to capture the earth in words, but I failed. The fields were greener than I had ever remembered seeing with bodily eyes. The palms fluttered their fronds. The warm wind passed through my glowing body. I heard the soothing sounds: the whistles of the players, the clap of the balls into wood and leather, the counsel of fathers to sons. I could not describe how my soul’s senses enhanced. I turned and smiled at Dante, the poet, who could.

We floated onward through forests on the backs of alligators and ibises. We circled woodpeckers and palms.

“I must visit my wife, and see her with my newly found senses.”

“Yes, you must. But we must also hasten our tour,” Dante said. “I fear he will seek you there.”

We glided to Maureen’s lines of blossoming trees. From our height, we saw the ocean. We dipped down to the tiny house and hovered. We looked down through wood planks into her porch. The midday sun illuminated her on her sofa.

“She naps now,” I said as I dove closer. “How peaceful she seems. But she’s distraught. I promised her I’d return. But maybe all is not lost. I feel hope for rejoining my body.”

“We shall see,” Dante said. “But we must hurry. Look quickly at the woman with whom you are united on earth. Look quickly, or it may be the last pleasantry you ever know. Oh! I see his light in the distance.”

I pushed my glance down to Maureen. She glowed in the sun, an enhanced sunlight. I could see through her skin, for inside her, around her middle, two dots of light clung. They stood out from the rest of her insides. They glowed as Dante glowed. They glowed as the children at the baseball fields and at the fishing stream glowed. They lived. Two children were within her. The babies turned their heads to me. One held up its hand.

“Hello, little ones.” “Hello,” one infant said, but it did not speak. Its cells were incapable.

“You are our father, I know. Thank you for giving us life on earth.”

“You will enjoy that life. It’s rich with love, achievement, beauty, and companionship.”

“And it leads back to that Lady of Heaven, who awaits to take us to the glorious light of the Holy Trinity. With that knowledge, I should think life on earth is wonderful.”

“I don’t fully know what life is like with that knowledge. I had forgotten. Very few remember, little one.”

Sadness leaped into its eyes. “Oh! Will I forget too? Can I go back to Him now? I still can!”

“No, little one! I’ll help you. I’ll guide you, whether or not I live.”

“Life on earth is long and difficult, but how much more so without knowing God.”

“No! No!”

The tiny being dislodged from Maureen. It dimmed. Life began to flow from it. I swooped downward, passing into Maureen. I felt her jump upward. I reattached the child and massaged the link to Maureen. The baby’s glow reappeared, but it faded, then brightened, then faded, in, out, in. Did the other disconnect too?

“We must go, Jonathan,” Dante said. “He is here!”

“I cannot leave these children. But I will.”

“Hello, Jonathan.” The voice was deep and soft.

“Yes? Who are you?” I spun upward to face the warm light.

“I have no name. It is time to go, with me. You must. This spirit has stolen you. We will supply you with the impressions of earth once again.”

“Yes, but the child--”

“The fetuses are no longer your concern,” the being said. “We will examine your life. Would you not like that? You experienced many exciting things. We will remember each moment. Let us go.”

I left Maureen and glided behind the being of light.

“Come,” the light-being said. “You will not be punished for what you have done. All is permitted. Let us review the great things you have accomplished.”

Something resisted my move onward and pulled at my back. I heard Dante whisper something about, or to, someone named Michael.

But I followed the light-being downward into a tunnel of stars. This being required no atonement. He overlooked all my transgressions, for they were merely shortcomings of my nature. He even seemed to consider my evil as good. I did not need to subjugate myself to any God or man. Existence was all that I required. I required no striving for the True and Authentic, Good and Beautiful.

“You can choose to come with me.”

“No, light-being. I cannot choose now. I chose before this. I seek the Holy Trinity, and should be cleansed for my sins, for my continuing attachments to the earth, which still reign in me despite what I know to be true, despite my realizing that my soul, that part of me that chooses how and why to know God, would still sin against God because of my humanity. I already chose the Almighty, the Holy Trinity, but surrender my will to the divine will, which by the suffering, torture, and blood shed for me by Jesus, saves me.”

With this light-being, I would never discover the essence of the Good, the Holy Trinity. When I had remembered the Trinity in the truck, it was summoned from my childhood, or before. The infants also knew the Trinity. But the light-being near me lacked it. He lacked love for the Good, that is, for God. He was the devil.

“No,” I said.

I was stopped.

“You are saved,” someone said from behind me.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall possess the land.

Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from evil

Next week: Episode 47 - The Elysian Fields Part One: Olson

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