Chapter 1- A Bible
Code
Fourteen years ago I graduated from
Griffith University, Brisbane Australia.
I took a Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science, Modern Asian
Studies. The year was 1998 and after an
incredible length of time gaining my degree I was looking forward to doing
something with it. I didn’t really have
much of an idea exactly what I was going to do but I assumed that with my
degree, it was bound to be better than the part-time factory jobs I had been
keeping to get me through my studies.
Yet
one beautiful late year Sunday morning my life changed forever. I remember it clearly. I was getting ready to listen to FM 106.1
Sunday morning classical religious music show.
I hadn’t listened to the particular show for years on end, but had taken
to it for a few weeks leading up to that strange and awesome day. I had beaten the start of the show and was
looking forward to lie in bed and listen to the lovely sounds of the
music.
Suddenly
I was gripped by an overwhelming urge.
As soon as the announcer who may have been called Marion Arnold, or a
Marion/ Mary-Anne something at any rate, began to speak, my hand almost
involuntarily snatched my NIV Bible up from off a collection of religious books. The stack of reading included the Koran, the
Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom, various Japanese and Indian myths and legends, and
various photocopies from my degree reading.
I held my NIV bible from the floor as though my life depended on it and
a notion formed in my mind.
The
particular radio show I was listening to, traced a spiritual journey of musical
pieces from the old world to Australia and New Zealand. Something along the lines of musical piece
gets written in say 680 AD in England, gets performed first in New Zealand 1923
and so on. A surge of knowing exactly
what you are supposed to do barreled me over like a big dog, and like the bite
of a great big dog, it seared into my skull, my arm and my hand. The
numbers mentioned as years became, “ Page 680, chapter 19 verse 23!” So with my trusty NIV study bible I flicked
through to page such and such chapter and verse, and thus began the most
difficult and hellish time my soul may have ever experienced.
The
first sentence I read was prosaic. It
made sense as a first sentence. As is
not always the case in any book, the verse as a whole was easily a stand-alone
introduction that needed no foreword.
What I read could have been the start of any other book. I read it and in my mind I thought, “Okay well that worked”. I didn’t feel that I was hearing voices or
seeing strange hallucinations, it was somehow a perfectly normal setting, as
normal as hearing an old time radio show telling you how to bake a cake or
perform a magic trick. I thought,
“ Give it another shot, see what happens…”
It
was a sunny morning with enough cool wind to stop the Australian heat. I felt powerfully but somehow quietly
excited. When the first piece ended, I
waited to hear the announcer say the next year of composition and year of first
Australian or New Zealand performance.
It would have been something like composed in 723 AD first performed in
Wellington to such and such for the celebration of some occasion in the year
1916. I took my time to find the page,
chapter and verse, all of which were burning into my mind like some cool plume
of fire, and began to read. This time it
wasn’t the beginning of a stand-alone statement but rather a statement that
continued directly from where the first one had left off. Now I was hooked.
Could it be that I had stumbled upon
some living tissue of the bible code? A part of me like a little child was in a kind
of euphoria, believing that this code was certainly fit for me to believe it
was designed for me. After all what reason would I have had to
believe anyone was capable of trimming the translation of an American version
of the Bible? To coincide with ancient
British/Irish, perhaps others, years of composition matched to Australian and
New Zealand performances? All on the off
chance that some secret music society had solicited this Marion Arnold openly,
or with some mystical sorcery to list her music choices in this particular way! I mean it was possible I guess, the Chinese
had rice-grain calligraphy, but really, I was entering a state of incredible
euphoria instead.
Despite
all the personal feelings of not being the guy who has it easy, not being the
guy with the money or the girlfriends, nor even a good moral example for my
siblings. The whole nasty bag of tricks
being decidedly less than perfect or admirable can dish out to you as fate or
fateful choice… Something truly
incredible was happening to me. From
out of these seemingly random dates of composition and performance I was receiving
a divine revelation! My father was a
preacher and his father before him. How
pleased they were going to be to discover that I had seen fit to show up? My life had a religious significance!
It
was pretty awe-inspiring. I waited for
the third page number chapter and verse from the next piece. Neither believing nor consciously convinced,
but just sort of entering the kind of euphoria ‘Charlie’ must have felt in the ‘Willy
Wonka’ movies when he discovered he had a golden ticket. The pieces were in a
chronological order of composition and as a result I was flicking forward only
to new verses to read. The third
instruction behaved as the second continuing a developing narrative. The tale of or a statement to; a great priest
born to a great task for the fact of his indestructible nature, was forming in
the verses read one after another.
What can I say? I believed it.
I wanted to believe it.
I was the stuff of myth and legends. My Father was greatly pleased with me. I was
such a great priest that ten percent of the Armies of God responded to my
disciplined counsel. I was going to
achieve what I had set out to, for the fact that all had been prepared and
forethought of. No matter what depths I
fell to socially, those experiences would be the rod of my own science. I would be a priest of the blood sacrifice
forever. I would have enough to get by
while achieving this great task, and I would deliver new opinions where old
opinions seemed quite old indeed.
There were more than six or seven musical
pieces in all. Each verse, I remember
as though it was my own Father or Mothers blessing. Hands on my head and their solemn instruction…
as though some super Ninja in a movie was addressed by super beings of
war. On the other hand I was getting the
strange feeling that I was in fact an author of this strangely formed message. Had I designed to deliver this message to
myself?
While I read the message I was awash
with a sense of all that had happened to the dominion of man and woman during
the period covered by the musical pieces.
As though millions of souls felt a deep sense of sorrow for all that had
happened to humans, animals, plants and minerals beneath the forces of history. It was the revelation of a material reality. Our
own souls were all these creatures and beings.
How could we not even realize the evolutionary location of our own
souls? How slain was our memory not to
even remember our own lives? It would
become clear to me that forces of pure evil were behind the phenomena, and it
was a horror shared by every single soul of my own precious dominion of life.
Yet
the text left me completely in the dark about how I would achieve the vast
doing of good the message insisted I would be a part of. Would I take over the United Nations? Run the world into some grand truth that
would last forever? Should I start my
own church? I had no idea at all. For all the how and wherefore I had been
given by this message, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable of me to wonder if
the Pope wasn’t going to pick me up in his Pope-mobile and fly me off to Rome. Nor if the President of the USA or Prime
Ministers of Britain, Australia or New Zealand would install me as their
supreme military adviser. There were no
details at all, just the simple assurance, that having been sent forth I would
win out and never be abandoned no matter what befell me. The experience had left me in a state of
totally confused euphoria. I was
overwhelmingly relieved that my life would mean something. Excited that I was a
warrior priest in the fight against evil.
Perplexed by the warnings that it would be hard. That it could throw me to the bottom of the
moral sweepstakes just as it lifted me to the top. That evildoers would
continue to be evil throughout, and a myriad other concerns, revelations and
feelings of awe.
It
also gave me a feeling of my own decency, that I was a respectable man with a
great and heroic destiny. How should I
explain it? I felt like putting on my
best clothes and telling my parents wonderfully intelligent things. At the same time I was in a kind of shock,
an elative shock, the shock of being so emphatically
gladdened. If I had some kind of
Royal Court or acutely aware loyal supporters I felt like I could take over the
world, the only problem was what exactly could I do with it? I don’t know why I felt it to be true, but it
felt so good and so wonderful, it just had to be true.
The
show ended and I felt that my life would be changed forever. I had no idea what the armies of God actually
did, neither an exact idea of what the armies of Satan were up to. I had no idea what I would do to the armies
of Satan, or the world or for the armies of God. I only had a sense that I had had a true
religious experience and it promised terrible times ahead for me. Times that I would somehow endure and win
over in the end. I felt that it was
destiny, everyone has a sense of their own value, and the verses I had read in
such a strange circumstance filled that sense of mine like first love or some
other thing I had yet to experience, perhaps the birth of your own child.
Incredibly
I never recorded the passage of those verses. The memory of them has stuck in
my mind as surely as a tattoo is stuck into the skin. All one should have to do to rediscover
those verses would be to find the musical program of that morning and using a
particular edition of the NIV study bible, repeat the process. Yet for what I know now of the multiverse,
it wouldn’t surprise me if there was never any Mary-Anne Arnold, nor if the
pieces had never been played in the order I heard them. Only later did I remember that Marion Arnold
was the name of the actress who played Marion Cunningham in the old hit show
‘Happy Days’. There was even a name in
the text of the message I could never find afterwards in the bible text, ‘
Stephen Goodly ‘. Go figure! Yet to this day it seems to me that the music
was inspired. When it came time for
those pieces to be first performed, and what affected the layout of the NIV
study bible of the particular edition my father owned, something of a divine
unity joined all those inspirations of the divine in a grand concert that
settled on me that morning and inspired me to open my bible, in exactly the way
I did. I had no idea what to do as a result, as I
thought about the fact of my ignorance, I knew my not knowing would come back
to haunt me.
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