Leap of Faith

When I wake up to find myself in another century, on another continent, Ishmael is here with me. I am calm.

I have seen this place of the future before, many times in my haunting visions - I saw it when I was in the desert. Even my dress does not look much different. I seem to be wearing the same protective cloak, leaving only a screen for my eyes to see through.

I know I am safe because he is here. Ishmael is my sign of a sacred heart. For such is the heart of the Most Holy God, our Father. His heart is the heart of a father who has never turned away from his children.

When Ishmael asks for his father, I tell him of our Father in Heaven. I teach him to say that God is merciful, and to know that it is a sacred greeting to the source of life.

Without Ishmael, both I and my God would have no cause for existence. Without Ishmael there is no meaning to the universe: both the sun and the moon would be but the castaway marbles of the giants who inhabited the earth before the deluge.

The will of God it is, to sustain Ishmael, who with the free-spirited sincerity of child-like love runs towards his Father with open arms: to see that one rise again, to see him grow strong and independent, yet reaching gracefully towards the Divine even as a tree reaches towards the sun, loving its goodness and its warmth by nature, of its own accord. To see those arms reaching towards Him, that is what gives meaning to God’s own existence, to see the devotion of a son like Ishmael: that is why He took the trouble to create at all.

The Name of God we know just as well as it is known to the other family of Abraham. It is the Name meaning He Who Causes Becoming. That One is like a self-sustaining fire burning without wood and without fuel through all of the times and eternities. And the firstborn Son: he is the first spark that flew out of the fire, and the reason the fire sustains itself.

When the people of this century celebrate their Christmas, they celebrate in their infidel excess, without realizing it, the moment the spark flew out of the eternal God-fire.

What is the purpose of the God-fire? An artist can only paint so many stunning pictures upon the expanse, the abstract wilderness of colour of which the powerful eye in the sky has already sent back a million images to earth: how many such paintings can the divine eye make through its own projections into space, without getting terminally bored by its own perfection? An appreciative eye filled with the loving kindness of devotion, the eye of my Ishmael: that is what makes these things worthwhile to the Creator. He painted those pictures for his son to see in the fullness of recorded time, to see that his Heavenly Father was good.

He whose heart is composed of the purest God-fire, he who shall not bow to any demon or idol, nor shall he march to the dissonant tune of any stately human construct, but shall only recognize the One Who Causes Becoming as his ruler - he is who pleases the heart of our Father in Heaven. If He can find such a heart in humanity, He would know that it was all worthwhile: and sometimes in our human history even He thought that it could not be found, until the time of Ishmael, a son of a human woman born, but loyal and faithful just like the first spark of the divine.

“He will be a zebra of a man,” the angel said to me, back at the well when I dwelled among the ancients.

It is written in the Hebrew writings that the Lord our God would often consider saving his entire creation because of one righteous man. He is always searching for the true and unique: this one, my one and only, my Ishmael.

I am the appointed guardian of Ishmael. I am like a faithful dog who always sleeps with one eye open.

This is the work that I am doing here on this earth: therefore I am irreplaceable to God. There is no-one similar in womankind. I am immortal and indestructible because I belong to the Lord my God.

When Ishmael asks after his father, I tell him of his Father in Heaven. He Who Causes Becoming, the Self-Sustaining One.