Читать книгу Spiritual American Trash - Greg Bottoms - Страница 14

Occasionally, after long hours of work, after a face full of government cleaning chemicals and toxic solvents, his brains felt like Jell-O bumping up against his skull, and bits of time disappeared like old pennies. But other days everything was sharp and sensible. On these days of clarity, James . . . Saint James turned into God’s lightning rod, a cipher for the Word.

He had grown up with the Bible. Bible was his first language. He could remember his father preaching in Elloree, sweat on his forehead like a field of blisters, people standing around in the backyard testifying. Praise God! He knew the power of God before he had any inkling of Self, knew later that there was no worthy Self without Him. But when he had these days of clarity, of vision, that’s when he knew the world was ignoring God and His commandments, knew the end-time was near. Six million Jews, God’s chosen people, exterminated. He could barely get his head around that one. And in his own neighborhood, a murder every day. Stealing. Lying. Coveting another man’s woman as if it were some kind of game. The list of human cruelties would take you a million lifetimes to recite.

So Saint James wrote ten new commandments for the world. But he wrote them in his own invented language, a series of loops and cursive-looking shapes that occasionally resembled letters. After his death, among stacks of paper, there were some legible notes found. Among them were these messages: “This is true that the great Moses the giver of the tenth commandment appeared in Washington, DC, April 11, 1931.” “This is true that on October 2, 1946, the great Virgin Mary and the Star of Bethlehem appeared over the nation’s capital.” “This is true that Adam the first man God created appeared in person on January 20, 1949. This was on the day of President Truman’s inauguration.” “This design [The Throne] is proof of the Virgin Mary descending [sic] into Heaven, November 2, 1950. It is also spoken of by Pope Pius XII.”

He also wrote a new book of Revelation. Like Saint John’s Revelation in the New Testament, recorded in a special language on the Isle of Patmos and scribbled onto parchment at the speed of a fever dream, Saint James’s Revelation was also a kind of stenography from God. On fire with the Spirit when he wrote, he recorded these messages in a spiral notebook. On the cover, in blue U.S. government ink, was written The Book of the 7 Dispensation by St. James. Scholars have deemed the book, like the commandments, illegible. The few English words that appear in it, such as “Revelation” and “Virgin Mary,” are most often in all caps and misspelled.