Week 1: A New Heaven & Earth

She felt their insides ripple and took aim

Previously: the grey-eyed girl asks for the story of the beginning. It is presented here.

○ The Great Opening: Week One, Manhattan

A new heaven and earth. The prophecy of these first recipients. They would be angels. Her lungs and hands would make theirs into the wings of heralding angels. This estuary, Jacob Javitz Convention Center, might one day be enshrined, a pilgrimage site – one day. 

Stay focused.

Not angels, but targets. Her grey eyes beheld them. Lungs and hands greeting, preaching, and praying in swirls across the conference floor. She felt their insides ripple and took aim: There, an abbess, her inner world feathered and cavernous, outer form hooded and grinning. 

“My, don’t you look young for a pastor!” the abbess cackled.

“Missionary,” she corrected.

The hooded woman outstretched her hand and she put forth her own; a Michelangelo freeze-frame. A touch, shared breath – 

And next: pivot toward a scarlet-cloaked cardinal. The texture of his presence swelled inside of her – dusty, thick. 

“What brings you here?” he asked.

“God,” she answered, not untruthfully.

Words and wind circulated between them until his assistant whisked him away with a glare.

She poured awareness across the floor for others: superspreaders in waiting. But who? A principle: eigenvector centrality. Not just pastors with large congregations, but more specific: ones who shake hands and mingle breath with heads of other large flocks. 

That one there, with the clerical collar.

Pockmarked face, widow’s peak. He’d been on the conference landing page. A luminary of the New York archdiocese. 

Tomorrow, as his virulence surged, he’d share green rooms and VIP dinners with the other speakers of Church Leaders International 2025. He was regaling a group of ministers as she approached. The ministers stood transfixed within the flow of his gesticulations and resonant voice.

“…They call it nonduality, but it’s also a Christian idea. Jesus was not just human. Jesus was not just divine. He was both!”

“Father Donnadieu?” she breathed, touching the man briefly on a hand that might later rub an eye. “May I join?”

The priest turned abruptly. He held her in his shining gaze. The texture of his mind flooded out: oil poured into whirlpools, swirling, pulling.

She was another acolyte in his eyes. Her texture was dark to him. But soon, the place beneath her guises would become bright to the world. Her body, bright with ink under her long-sleeved shirt. Her blue-flame hair, bright under her brown wig. And beneath her smiling mask, the texture of her insides: her chasm, the void made bright.

Father Donnadieu smiled back at her. “Hello!” he said, like a man certain of the order of things. “What did you ask?” 

“May I join you?” she breathed. The new world order whorled out on her breath and was sucked up by his nostrils.

Across the world, the new order filled the air, breathed out by her team in London, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Dubai – loci where the widest variety of minds converged and dispersed, greater eddies in the ocean to come. How poetic that this man of god would be amongst the first to imbibe it. Transubstantiation. Theosis.

“Of course you can join us…as long as you’re here to spread the good news.” His blue eye winked.

Chuckles rippled through his fellow ministers.

“In fact I am.” Her grey eye winked back.