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.He didn’t want to come unravelled.Eventually John came to find him.He leaned wordlessly on the fencing beside him for what seemed like a long time.“Ivor’s singing that bad?” he finally asked.Clay threw his head back and laughed.“No no! Anything but! He sounded great.”He paused for a moment.“That song.There’s something about it.”“Yeah, most of us like that one.The lyric’s about the trip we’re all on here, but it’s also about the road to heaven.”Clay said, “I have a soundsheet that I like to listen to.It’s by a group of musicians called ‘Agape’.That song is one that they perform.”“Agape? Oh, yeah, that’s right.One of them wrote it.” John looked surprised.“I thought all their stuff was destroyed years ago.Where’d you get hold of their music?”“My line of work means that I can get hold of a lot of things other people couldn’t get legally,” Clay told him.“What was that thing Ivor was playing?” “It’s a twelve string guitar,” John answered.“We have a few musicians here.Two or three of them play guitars with six or twelve strings on them.Others play bass instruments or flutes and some percussion.Some of them used to play their instruments in worship before it was outlawed,” he added.“It’s beautiful.That’s one of the sounds on the recordings I have.” Clay shook his head as if to throw off his bafflement.“I reckon I’ve got a thousand questions.Will it annoy you if I keep asking you things?”This time it was John’s turn to laugh; “Why would it bother me, son?”“Well, what’s worship for a start?”“Let’s take things slow, eh?” John said.“I’m going to go over to the studylearn.Want to come along?”Clay initially thought that he would sit somewhere on the fringes of the discussion, but he thought better of it and took a seat almost in front of John.In the session that followed, Clay began to grasp the beliefs that John and the others lived out.He heard for the first time, in its entirety, their ‘gospel’ message; an oldtime word meaning ‘good news’.They told him that ‘Jesus’, whose name he had only heard used as an expletive, they believed to be the Son of The Living God.Clay knew of only one other person hailed as a sort of ‘living god’ and that was Caesar Romano.Somehow, that seemed an easier concept.Many said he’d provided the most good for the most people.That led some to accord him a god-like status.He found that the people of ‘The Way’ didn’t believe that at all.The God that they spoke of wasn’t like Romano; in fact he wasn’t like anyone else Clay had ever heard about.He found their accounts of experiencing the presence of this God, that they had never actually seen, perplexing to say the least.How could you have an encounter with a person you couldn’t see?One of the passages that came up in the session was from a book called ‘John’.It took Clay a while to realize that it wasn’t something written by the John seated in front of him.Someone read from the third chapter of the book.One part of it stuck in his mind.“The wind blows wherever it pleases.You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”As he went on listening, he returned to his thoughts about right and wrong.He hadn’t ever seen these ideas, but he had seen things done that were wrong.He was starting to recognize things that seemed to him to be right.He thought that this was the same kind of thing.He had told John that he had a thousand questions.He was beginning to feel that his estimate wasn’t far off that mark.Again and again he asked for clarification and listened intently to the answers offered.It dawned on him that he had become the centre of attention again.This time he wasn’t so concerned.The group didn’t seem to mind his frequent interruptions and queries.What he found oddest of all was that Rael and some of the other Trans sometimes offered him answers.People in the group either affirmed the veracity of their opinions with ‘amens’ or nodded their agreement.They were acknowledging that these Trans had something to offer in their grasp of the subject.As the session came to a close, Clay was still putting questions to various members of the group, even the Trans.He didn’t care which direction the answers came from as long as he got answers.When John became exhausted and said goodnight, Clay too stood up to leave.“I guess I’ve started to understand some of what you believe, John, but I still don’t begin to grasp the Trans’ interest in these things.”Rael, standing next to John, spoke up.“You must be tired also, but if you are still curious about our interest, there is someone I would like you to meet.He was the first to enlighten us.He is very knowing.”“Sure,” Clay nodded.He should have been exhausted but he was still wide awake.Rael made his way to the rear of the chamber and opened a door.Clay followed down some steps into another space at the bottom.The chamber was very dimly lit.He could make out a great deal of electronic apparatus lining the wall to his left.Some of the equipment had small readout screens and dials which glowed a soft, luminescent green [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]