Jodi Picoult - Change of heart

She rolled her eyes. "Did you even hear my piece at air?"

Fletcher paused. "You know I love you, right?" The girl nodded.

"Well, let's just say if God was hanging around here today, that last bit probably sent Her running for the hills."

Tryouts for band are tomorrow," she said. "What am I going to do!"

"Switch to the flute?" Fletcher suggested, but he put his arm around the girl and hugged her as he spoke. As he turned, he noticed me. "Ah.

You must be Michael Wright." He shook my hand and introduced the girl. "This is my daughter. Faith."

Faith shook my hand, too. "Did you hear me play? Am I as bad as he says I am?"

I hesitated, and Fletcher came to my rescue. "Honey, don't put the priest in a position where he's going to have to lie-he'll waste his whole afternoon at confession." He grinned at Faith. "I think it's your turn to watch the demon twins from hell."

"No, I remember very clearly that it's your turn. I was doing it all morning while Mom worked."

"Ten bucks," Ian said.

"Twenty," Faith countered.

"Done." She put her violin back in its case. "Nice to meet you," she said to me, and she slipped out of the barn, heading toward the house.

"You have a beautiful family," I said to Fletcher.

He laughed. "Appearances can be deceiving. Spending an afternoon with Cain and Abel is a whole new form of birth control."

"Their names are-"

"Not really," Fletcher said, smiling. "But that's what I call them when Mariah's not listening. Come on back to my office."

He walked me past a generator and a snowblower, two abandoned horse stalls, and through a pine door. Inside, to my surprise, was a finished room with paneled walls and two stories of bookshelves. "I have to admit," Fletcher said, "I don't get very many calls from the Catholic clergy. They aren't quite the prevalent audience for my book."

I sat down on a leather wing chair. "I can imagine."

"So what's a nice priest like you doing in the office of a rabblerouser like me? Can I expect a blistering commentary in the Catholic

Advocate with your byline on it?"

"No... this is more of a fact-finding mission." I thought about how much I should admit to Ian Fletcher. The confidentiality relationship between a parishioner and a priest was as inviolable as the one between a patient and his doctor, but was telling Fletcher what Shay had said breaking a trust if the same words were already in a gospel that had been written two thousand years ago? "You used to be an atheist," I said, changing the subject.

"Yeah." Fletcher smiled. "I was pretty gifted at it, too, if I do say so myself."

"What happened?"

"I met someone who made me question everything I was so sure I knew about God."

"That," I said, "is why I'm in the office of a rabble-rouser like you."

"And what better place to learn more about the Gnostic gospels,"

Fletcher said.

"Exactly."

"Well, then, the first thing is that you shouldn't call them that. It would be like calling someone a spic or a Hebe-the label Gnostic was made up by the same people who rejected them. In my circles, we call them noncanonical gospels. Gnostic literally means one who knows- but the people who coined the term considered its followers know-it-alls."

"That's what we pretty much learn in seminary."

Fletcher looked at me. "Let me ask you a question. Father-in your opinion, what's the purpose of religion?"

I laughed. "Wow, thank goodness you picked an easy one."

I'm serious..."

I considered this. "I think religion brings people together over a common set of beliefs... and makes them understand why they matter."

Fletcher nodded, as if this was the answer he'd been expecting. "I think it's there to answer the really hard questions that arise when the world doesn't work the way it's supposed to-like when your child dies of leukemia, or you're fired after twenty years of hard work. When bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people.

The really interesting thing, to me, is that somehow religion stopped being about trying to find honest solutions... and started being about ritual. Instead of everyone searching for understanding on their own, orthodox religion came along and said, 'Do x, y, and z-and the world will be a better place.'"

"Well, Catholicism's been around for thousands of years," I replied,

"so it must be doing something right."

"You have to admit, it's done a lot wrong, too," Fletcher said.

Anyone who'd had limited religious instruction or a thorough college education knew about the Catholic Church and its role in politics and history-not to mention the heresies that had been squelched over the centuries. Even sixth graders studied the Inquisition. "It's a corporation,"

I said. "And sure, there have been times when it's been staffed badly, with people who think ambition trumps faith. But that doesn't mean you throw the baby out with the bathwater. No matter how screwed up God's servants are in the Church, His message has managed to get through."

Fletcher tilted his head. "What do you know about the birth of

Christianity?"

"Did you want me to start with the Holy Ghost visiting Mary, or skip ahead to the star in the East..."

"That's the birth of Jesus," Fletcher said. "Two very different things.

Historically, after Jesus's death, his followers weren't exactly welcomed with open arms. By the second century A.D., they were literally dying for their beliefs. But even though they belonged to groups that called themselves Christians, the groups weren't unified, because they were an very different from one another. One of these groups was the socalled

Gnostics. To them, being Christian was a good first step, but to truly reach enlightenment, you had to receive secret knowledge, or gnosis. You started with faith, but you developed insight-and for these people. Gnostics offered a second baptism. Ptolemy called it apolutrosis- the same word used when slaves were legally freed."

"So how did people get this secret knowledge?"

"There's the rub," Fletcher said. "Unlike the church, you couldn't be taught it. It had nothing to do with being told what to believe, and everything to do with figuring it out on your own. You had to reach inside yourself, understand human nature and its destiny, and at that moment you'd know the secret-that there's divinity in you, if you're willing to look for it. And the path would be different for everyone."

"That sounds more Buddhist than Christian."

"They called themselves Christians," Fletcher corrected. "But Irenaeus, who was the bishop of Lyons at the time, disagreed. He saw three huge differences between Orthodox Christianity and Gnosticism.

In Gnostic texts, the focus wasn't on sin and repentance, but instead on illusion and enlightenment. Unlike in the Orthodox Church, you couldn't be a member simply by joining-you had to show evidence of spiritual maturity to be accepted. And-this was probably the biggest stumbling block for the bishop-Gnostics didn't think Jesus's resurrection was literal.

To them, Jesus was never really human-he just appeared in human form. But that was just a technicality to the Gnostics, because unlike Orthodox Christians, they didn't see a gap between the human and the divine. To them, Jesus wasn't a one-of-a-kind savior-he was a guide, helping you find your individual spiritual potential. And when you reached it, you weren't redeemed by Christ-you became a Christ.

Or in other words: you were equal to Jesus. Equal to God."

It was easy to see why, in seminary, this had been taught as heresy: the basis of Christianity was that there was only one God, and

He was so different from man that the only way to reach Him was through Jesus. "The biggest heresies are the ones that scare the Church to death."