"He trusts in the Lord," they say, "let the Lord rescue him.

Let him deliver him, since he delights in him."

— David the King (attribution), Psalm 22:8 (before BC 587)

AD 2014, and the sixth year of the presidency of Barack Obama, St. Thomas Mount, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

"Jesus!"

I trip over a stone on the dirt path and fall on my knees and hands. Cardinal Daniel and my wife, Sharon, rush to help me up. Right knee skinned and bleeding below the hem of my shorts, my palms raw and dimpled from the pebbly ground, I struggle back onto my feet with the help of a third pair of hands.

"Thank you, sir," I hear Sharon say.

Brushing the dust off my shirt and shorts, I render an embarrassed smile as I turn to thank the helpful hands and then my jaw sags, opening my mouth like a hooked bass. I marvel at the startling appearance of the Archangel Micha'el. He's manifesting this time in the form of a young Scandinavian tourist, also in shorts, much more tailored and groomed than the homeless man he appeared to be eleven years ago — when all this began in the oak forest near my home in Monterey.

He stands here between Sharon and Daniel, neither of whom has a clue they are talking to an archangel. They cheerfully chat it up with him about their hometowns in California and France. The good cardinal would be prostrate in the dirt if he knew. I'll tell him later — if there is a later in store for me.

What's Micha'el here for? Wait, I'm not ready to know. At least, not yet.

My big toe got stubbed and is leaking a bit of blood. Blood. The visual of Yeshua whipped and crucified flashes in my mind.

It's been nine months since the elderly African-American minister, Grandma Fontaine, rode all the way from Mississippi on a bus so she could shove me into the last set of experiences. They ended with a much bloodier conclusion than I could ever have imagined.

Then they went even further, finishing with a scary descent into a cold, hopeless Hell itself.

So, I'm wary of the Archangel's presence. Is he a hallucination? No, they're conversing with him freely. He's real and the three of them are walking towards the little church at the summit of this hillock. Sharon glances back once, checking on me.

"C'mon, Jack!" Sharon says.

"You three go ahead, I'll be along in a minute," I say, feeling a need to be alone right now.

Micha'el has come to get me again. Sharon turns toward the church and they continue on. Jumping a bit, I discover I'm not alone at all. Right beside me pops up a short, very slender woman. She looks familiar but I can't place her and she's so young that I take her for a teenager at first; then I notice the depth and sparkle of her blue-sky eyes. She wears her dishwater blonde hair as closely cropped as a high school boy in 1960 — the year I was born. Punctuating her fine, angular features are two eyebrow piercings and a small golden bauble attached to the outside of her right nostril. I can't help but focus on the hardware. It looks painful. On the side of her neck, there's a tattooed figure mostly covered by the collar of her white blouse. I can't make it out.

"It's a lion," she replies to my thought, tugging on her silky collar so I can enjoy the image of a resting male lion.

"Where's the lamb?" I ask. "You know the lion laying down with the lamb?" My attempt at flippancy to mask my jitters completely bombs.

"You will see soon enough," she says strangely.

Who is she?

The woman tucks her hands into the pockets of her blue jeans, her sleeveless white top tight around her slender upper-body. She wears a gold pendant with small red letters, proclaiming, "Hail!" She walks energetically beside me and has an indescribable, almost cat-like, quality to the lightness of her steps as if she's half-floating.

"Ha!" She emits a slight giggle, beaming a brilliant white smile as if she finds me curiously funny. "I love cats," she says, with another giggle.

Reading my cat-thought about her unnerves me more and now I wish I had stayed with the party of three walking about twenty paces ahead of me.

Who is she?

"Hey, we'll get to that in a minute," she responds, again to my unspoken thought. "Settle down, now. Patience." Her smile disappears.

"You're rushing things again."

There's a rich quality, an unmistakable authority in her voice. Also, I sense again a subtle familiarity about her, like the vague almost déjà-vu feeling that I've met her before. A little disturbing because I know that until this moment, I've never laid eyes on her.

"What can I do for you?" I ask, quickening our pace as I watch the eyebrow piercings raise.

"It's been a while. Yeah, nine months — a human pregnancy. You've had some time to unpack what you saw. Right?"

"Unpack what?" I reply. "The gory death of Yeshua, my friend. My trip, or should I say, my entrapment in Hell? You people sent me to Hell!"

She laughs.

"It's not a joke," I say. "None of what I saw, none of what I've been through, is funny."

"Oh, come on, Traveler!" she says with way too much familiarity.

"Don't call me Traveler. I don't know you, Miss."

"Oh, but you do. Wait. Hmm ..." The bauble at the tail of her eyebrow shifts up slightly as she frowns in thought; lower lip juts out as if searching her memory banks. "Yeah. No. Come to think of it, we never did meet directly, but I was like with you a ton of times."

She sounds more and more as if she just walked out of her homeroom at Monterey High.

Okay. It's a hallucination. I'm going crazy. Again. Damn! When is this all going to stop? Am I going to live the rest of my days not knowing what's real and what circuits are crossed in this tortured brain?

"Christ," I say dejectedly.

"Amen," she says, becoming more solemn. "I am called Gavri'el."

"Uh, what?" I blink at her.

"You named your daughter for me," she says to my vacant stare.

"Gabriella?" I ask. "She's named after her godmother, my aunt."

"Well, it's my name, too. Your aunt was named for me."

Tia Gabriella has been dead for fifteen years and this girl looks all of twenty. I shake my head to loosen up my grey matter a little. It makes me think of Eema, the name for Mom in Aramaic, Mother Mary's chosen nickname replacing the more common Miryam. During the Annunciation, Eema consented in the name of humankind to give birth to Yeshua and thus facilitating God's saving entry into history.

Is this slight, punctured female the Great Angel Gabriel?

I see the tattoo of a lion again. The lion. Some intel comes into my brain from a source I can't discern; I call this a download. Was she with me on that first day, when the mountain lion lunged at a fleeing rabbit across the road? I remember swerving my big Benz to avoid them, almost having a dance with one of the thick trees in our community oak grove. It shook me so deeply that I found myself in a wilderness park to get rid of the jitters before going to a conference where I was scheduled to speak.

When walking into the forest, I met the homeless man who stands so close now, the Archangel Micha'el, but I didn't know that then. Maybe, she was the lion just as Micha'el was the homeless man — both there at the beginning, both there to send me off on this crazy adventure called the rest of my life.

The angel protects, as Eema says.

Guess there were always angels around me. I let the wonder of that realization wrap me like a warm blanket.

"You are ready to continue," she says with no question mark in her voice.

"I am ready to continue on my tour of Saint Thomas Mount," I say handing her the brochure. "See?"

"That's not what I'm talking about," she says.

"Understood, but I'm not going back today. Sorry. Tau'ma is trying to show me something coming to this place and I have to be here to see it." (Tau'ma is the Aramaic name for the apostle Thomas, meaning Twin.) "Besides," I continue, "my wife and the cardinal are here as well."

"Oh, they'll be fine. We'll take care of them!" she says.

"You're pressuring me, Gavri'el!"

"Traveler! Nothing will be forced upon you — you know that. It is you who called us here because you're ready, not the other way around."

My brows arch up, eyes widening in astonishment.

"This is for you," she says softly.

"You've made a mistake. I never called you here."

"It is not in your thoughts as we can see, but your Wisdom-Heart has been calling out to us for some time."

I squint my doubt. Wisdom-Heart? What does she mean?

"It is that part of you," Gavri'el answers, "which lives in the Kingdom, like a river meeting another river, which is the part of you living in this body." She pulls at my dusty shirt. "At the confluence of these two rivers, there is a creation of a new and brilliant sea. It is God-in-Us and it is called the Wisdom-Heart, its waters moving in love alone. You sensed it with your brain. It gathered in your thoughts in Calcutta, in Kolkata, but your Wisdom-Heart resides in the Kingdom and communicates endlessly, eternally, with us all."

Oh, my head hurts with that one! I don't know what she's talking about exactly — although, maybe I do — for I have loved my wife and daughters. In some moments, great moments of intimacy, there are brief, deep connections I could call heavenly. I suppose that is when my Wisdom-Heart brings my awareness to the Light, to the Love-Field, and the Kingdom, even if only for a moment or two.

"You are ready now to lay him down," says Micha'el, who is standing next to me, "and be a witness to the returnings and the beginning."

I check out the threesome walking ahead and the Archangel Micha'el is still with them. Bi-location. Nothing surprises me anymore, not for long.

As we form a little triangle of discussion, Micha'el enters the conversation in low tones like a cello playing a somber air, in counterpoint to Gavri'el's squeakier clarinet.

"Hey, I'm grateful you came here, of course. I am. But really, I can't go back now. I've got much to do here with Sharon — and in Kolkata, as well. I felt something there."

As I register the unwanted whine in my voice, I realize that not a second of my 21st century life is ever lost during these experiences — except, of course, if this body dies back there. Then, all is lost. It is both a real possibility and the greatest risk of these experiences.

"Don't you trust in God that He will deliver you?" Gavri'el asks.

That's a piece from Handel's Messiah, the classical oratorio that I play whenever I do my journaling. It sounds like she's quoting from a chorus the composer took from Psalm Twenty-Two. It resonated so deeply within me that I memorized it while in the hospital.

He trusted in God that he would deliver him if he delight in him.

I remember now the mocked Yeshua on the way to Gol-Goatha. I see him carrying the plank made from his friend, the tree, suffering the scornful abuse of those watching. My blood boils.

Do I trust in God as Yeshua trusted the One he called Abba? The next stanza of the beautiful song of King David floats up into my thoughts: "Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother's breast.

From birth, I was cast upon you. From my mother's womb, you have been my God."

The blood of birth and the emergence into light. Blood and Light like in a recurring dream I recall so vividly. There are so many rebirths in a single lifetime. There are also many small deaths. And most of them are pretty damn painful! I'm pissed off and full of wonder at the same time. I'm a living paradox in witness of the Great Paradox, the tension and relationship of polarized forces that seem to collide yet somehow reconcile in Him, converge into that divine pool. In me, too. The Wisdom-Heart Sea.

The archangels are here for me because I called them here. Clearly not with the upper three inches of my body, but certainly with this heart Gavri'el was describing. There's always the reluctance of the immediate; the not-now-maybe-later-yes-tomorrow. Tomorrow I can make myself ready. Yet, there's no tomorrow is there? Just now. It is the only place and time, God can call me into wonder again. Love cannot connect in the concept of tomorrow; love doesn't connect in concepts period. It exists only in this moment.

But, I left Yeshua in the cool precincts of Hell. Is that the scene into which I, consensually, will insert my body once more? Do I want to yank open my heart with the crowbar of grief or test my mind with that experiential overload? Looking up at Gavri'el and Micha'el who await my response with the patience of the ages, I still hold all the doubt again — in fact, more than ever.

Questioning why me?

How is one man — one insurance guy — so darn important that he merits the attention of such great beings taking such great trouble to convince him to return to such a great God? I should be further along the path than I am; I must be the slowest case they've ever had.

Shoulds and Musts — the mortar by which Satan cements the stone walls of Hell.

Yet, I resist, heels dug in. Doubts running rampant in my brain without mercy. Yet, my yearning keeps bringing them to me, inviting me to take that bungee jump into the unknown called God.

The yearning is winning. I don't trust fully yet, but I am willing to jump nonetheless. I remember the line from a movie, the title of which is long forgotten; a posse of men were about to ride into a gunfight and one of them quips fatalistically, "Well, you're gonna die from somethin'!" Then into the fray, they charge.

"Let me tell my wife and Cardinal Daniel," I say.

"A moment of your life will not be lost," he says, "You will return to this place and in this minute."

"If I do not die there," I whisper.

"We protect ..." Gavri'el adds, "And we possess the Father's power in this."

Well, if Abba, or Av'va, the Source, is choosing this for me, who am I to refuse?

I look up as Sharon, Daniel, and the tourist-Micha'el enter the small white-plaster church dedicated to the martyred Tau'ma. She glances at me and waves me over, obviously unable to see the two others with me.

"Look, there is a stand of trees beside the church," Gavri'el says.

We three walk over to the shady bench under the branches. The leaves flutter in the thick, sultry breeze, and I sense the Father's presence here with us. Yeshua calls it the Kingdom. I can only describe it as an all pervasive magnetic field, the Love-Field, magnetic in that its pull can be felt and witnessed as it brings you into full participation, tuning you into itself. It's as real and as "common" as a mother playing with her baby, an old man feeding the ducks at the park, a gardener lovingly planting next year's tulip bulbs, or even a pair of lovebirds sitting side-by-side on a birdcage branch. Not complicated, but to access the Love-Field, it requires the release of your story's busy-ness for a moment or two. Reason and the mind's chaotic thought-stream don't take you there. Cannot.

"Yeshua the Christ awaits you," Micha'el says and I feel moving into my heart, the peace of the Rabbuni; Rabbuni being the Aramaic name for Master or, Spiritual Teacher. It is the name that his followers called Yeshua.

I take a breath and look at the Nordic tourist and the slim American teenager, the two great archangels, and say,

"Okay, let's do this."

In those words of surrender, I feel my heels relax and the pace of my heart accelerate as Eema's sentence of acceptance to Gavri'el comes into my remembrance.

"Behold! I am here, the Servant of God! Let it be done unto me according to your word!"

I sink once more into the familiar darkness. My heart beats irregularly for a moment and then returns to an excited rum-pa-pum-pum. Like in the Little Drummer Boy, the Christmas song. Like the boy at the Nativity of the Lord, I resolve to "play my best for Him ..."

Yeshua says: "When you see your own likeness projected into time, it makes you happy. But when the time comes that you are able to look upon the icon of your own being, which came into existence at the beginning, and neither dies nor has been fully revealed, will you be able to stand it?" — Logion 84, Gospel of Thomas (ca. AD50-AD125)

AD 72, and the fourth year of the reign of the emperor Vespasian, A hill near Chennai, India

The right knee is still bloody. I can see that first.

Before my eyes opened, there were only the colors of red and orange, yielding into a bright, breakfast-shake green. I'm wearing a short, chiton-like garment made of what feels like soft linen and it's the color of pomegranates. On my feet are sandals that lace up the calves like Johanan's Grecian pair that I wore in Ephesus, but these seem to fit better. I haven't dared to look up from my legs yet.

Reluctant.

I'm not quite ready to engage with what surrounds me. I wait for a download. It's not coming yet ...

Taking in four deep breaths, I find the air is still familiarly warm and humid, but fresh, smoky-fresh. In this era, there is none of the vehicle pollution that spreads like a brown blanket of pestilence in India's cities of the 21st century. A mangy, grey dog, skeletal, regards me hungrily. He then licks the blood off my wound and I let him. I've heard — but have no idea whether it's true or not — that a dog cleaning a wound could aid the healing.