Bud Sparhawk - Resurrection

Had I prevented the emissaries from sharing Ttchiok and carrying his soul back with them? That possibility worried me more than I cared to think about.

But then I recalled his words upon awakening from his rebirth. “I am reborn,” he had said. A modicum of the faith had remained in him and I knew that he would carry it forward. Even if he fell prey to something larger and more ferocious perhaps some part of that faith would be passed along.

And so it would go until the faith was shared throughout this world, shared in the vast communion of predation and love.

I too, must be reborn, I thought in an amazing epiphany. I now realized that so long as a few of the faithful professed the Word and carried the ideas forward into the future, there would be no loss of God’s faith in the world. Like the flesh of Ttch*lok we few faithful must surrender our own lives to serving humanity until the day we die and pass a part of that faith on to others.

It is our own way of communion.

In the morning I wearily started my journey back to the dome, wondering what my punishment would be now that I had destroyed our link to the emissaries. I am sure that some of my associates would want to extract a horrid penalty for what I had done, forcing me to pay penance for transgressions real and imagined. I doubted that any would understand why I had to act as I did.

God works wonders in strange ways and to me he had administered a hard lesson; but in that lesson he had taught me a new humility about my role in this life.

And renewed hope for my role in the next.