"I ran out into the street. I didn't mean to do it. I didn't know what I was doing. I cried out. I cried out that an angel had come to me, that an angel had appeared to me and spoken to me, that a child was coming."

She stopped.

"And that has earned me the everlasting ridicule of some in Nazareth, hasn't it?" she asked. "Though in time many forget."

I waited.

"The hardest part was to tell Joseph bar Jacob," she said. "But my parents, they waited. They believed me, yes, yet they waited. And when they saw that their virgin daughter had a child within her, when there was no denying it, then and only then did they talk to Joseph. And what they'd seen, others came to know as well.

"But an angel had come to Joseph in a dream. He didn't cry out in the streets about this as I had. And it wasn't the angel who came to me, who filled the room with light, no. But it was an angel and the angel had told him to take me as his wife. He didn't care that the whole village was talking. He had to go to Bethlehem for the census and he spoke to Cleopas and it was decided we would all travel together to Bethany, where Cleopas and I could lodge with Elizabeth and there Joseph and I would be married, and it would be over and done with, in that way. It was a winter journey and a hard journey, but we went together, all of us, and Joseph's brothers went with us, as you know now, and so did little James, our beloved James."

She went, speaking slowly.

She told me now the story that James had told - of the crowded stable and the shepherds coming, of their faces so full of happiness, and of the angels they'd seen. She told of the magi coming, and of their gifts.

I listened to her as if I hadn't heard these things.

"I knew we had to leave Bethlehem," she said. "There was too much talk there. The shepherds and then the magi. People came to the door night and day. Then Joseph awoke one morning and said we had to go right away. We packed up everything, and left within the hour. He wouldn't tell me why - only that an angel had come to him again in a dream. I didn't know we were going south to Egypt until it was evening, and we pushed on late into the night."

Her face became troubled. She looked away again.

"We wandered, all of us," she said. "We lived in many a small town in Egypt. The men took work when they could, and we did well. Carpenters can always work. People were kind. You were my delight. I didn't think of anything but you. You were the sweet child every woman wants. And all this while I didn't know why we were running. Then finally we went back north up to Alexandria and settled in the Street of the Carpenters. I loved it there. Salome and Esther loved it. So did Cleopas.

"Only after a while I heard stories, stories of what had happened in Bethlehem. Tales of a Messiah born there had caused a jealous rage to come from King Herod. He'd sent soldiers down from his fortress only a few miles away. They'd killed every little child in the village! Some two hundred children murdered in the darkness before dawn."

She watched me.

I struggled not to cry, not to fear, not to tremble - only to wait.

She bowed her head, and her face tightened.

When she looked up, her eyes were moist with tears.

"I said to Joseph, 'Did you know that was going to happen? Did the angel who came to you tell you?' He said, 'No, I knew nothing about it.' I said, 'How could the Lord let such a thing happen as the murder of those innocent children!' " She bit her lower lip. "I couldn't understand it. I felt, 'We have blood on our hands!' "

I thought for a moment I would give way to tears, but I used all my strength not to do it.

"Joseph said to me, 'No, the blood is not on our hands. Shepherds came to worship this child. Gentiles came to worship him. An evil King has sought to kill him because the darkness cannot abide the light, but the light can't be quenched by the darkness. The darkness always tries to swallow the light. But the light will shine. Don't you see? We must protect him and that we will do, and the Lord will show how.' "

Her eyes settled on mine.

She stared intently at me.

She reached out and took me by the shoulders.

"You weren't born of a man," she said.

I said nothing.

"You are the begotten of God!" she whispered. "Not the Son of God as Caesar calls himself the Son of God; not the Son of God as a good man calls himself the Son of God. Not the Son of God as an anointed King is called the Son of God! You are the begotten of God!"

She waited, staring at me, but she asked nothing of me. Her hands remained firm on my shoulders. Her eyes never changed.

When she spoke again, her voice was lower, softer.

"You are the son of the Lord God!" she said. "That's why you can kill and bring back to life, that's why you can heal a blind man as Joseph saw you do, that's why you can pray for snow and there will be snow, that's why you can dispute with your uncle Cleopas when he forgets you're a boy, that's why you make sparrows from clay and bring them to life. Keep your power inside you. Guard it until your Father in Heaven shows you the time to use it. If he's made you a child, then he's made you a child to grow in wisdom as well as in everything else."

Slowly I nodded.

"And now you come home with us to Nazareth. Not back to the Temple. Oh, I know how much you want to stay at the Temple. I know. But no. The Lord in Heaven did not send you to the house of a Teacher in the Temple or a priest in the Temple or a scribe or a rich Pharisee. He sent you to Joseph bar Jacob, the carpenter, and his betrothed, Mary of the Tribe of David in Nazareth. And you come home to Nazareth with us."

Chapter 26

From the mount of olives, we took the last look back on the city of Jerusalem.

Joseph told me what I knew, that three times a year we would come up to Jerusalem for the great Feasts, and that I would come to know the great city very well.

Our journey was a quick one back to Nazareth, as we didn't have the whole family with us, but we were never hurried, and we fell into easy conversation about the beauty of the land around us, and the little things of our daily lives.

When we finally came over the ridge, and the village was clearly in sight, I told both my parents that I would never do again what I had done - that is, leave them as I'd left them. I didn't try to explain what had happened. I simply told them that they need never worry that I would go off on my own away from the family again.

I could see that they were pleased but they didn't want to talk about what had happened. They had already let it slip deep and away from the current of everyday thoughts. At once my mother talked simple things to do with the household and Joseph was nodding to what she said.

A stillness came over me.

I walked with them, but I was alone.

I thought about what my mother had said - her quotation of Joseph, that the darkness tries to swallow the light and the darkness never succeeds in swallowing it. These were beautiful words, but they were words.

In my mind, without feeling, without crying, without shivering, I saw the dead man in the Temple, I saw the Passover lamb bleeding into the basin, I saw the children I'd never seen killed in Bethlehem. I saw the fire in the night leaping up to the sky from Jericho. My mind went over and over these things.

When we entered the house, I sat down and rested.

Little Salome came up and stood before me. I didn't say anything, because I thought she would set down a bowl or a cup and then go away as she always did, the busy little woman that she was.

But she didn't do this. She stood there.

Finally I looked up.

"What?" I asked.

She knelt down and she put her hand on the side of my face. I looked at her and it was as if she'd never left me to be busy with the women. She looked into my eyes.

"What is it, Yeshua?" she asked.

I swallowed. I felt my voice would be too big for me if I tried to say it, yet say it I did.

"Only what everyone has to learn," I said. "I don't know why I didn't see it before." The man on the stones. The lamb. The children. I looked her.

"Tell me," she said.

"Yes!" I whispered. "Why didn't I see it?"

"Tell me," she said.

"It's so simple. It won't mean anything to you until it comes to you, no matter who you are."

"I want to know," she said.

"It's this. That whatever is born into this world, no matter how, and for whatever reason, is born to die."

She didn't answer.

I stood up. I went outside. It was getting dark. I walked through the street and out to the hillside and up to where the grass was soft and undisturbed. This was my favorite place, just short of the grove of trees near which I loved so to rest.

I looked up at the first few stars coming through the twilight.

Born to die, I thought. Yes, born to die. Why else would I be born of a woman? Why else would I be flesh and blood if it wasn't to die? The pain was so terrible I didn't think I could bear it. I would go home crying if I didn't stop thinking of it. But no, that must not happen. No, never again.

And when will the angels come to me with such bright light that I am not afraid of it? When will the angels fill up the sky with singing so that I can see them? When will angels come to me in my dreams?

A quiet fell over me, just when I thought my heart would burst.

The answer came as if from the earth itself, as if from the stars, and the soft grass, and the nearby trees, and the purring of the evening.

I wasn't sent here to find angels! I wasn't sent here to dream of them. I wasn't sent here to hear them sing! I was sent here to be alive. To breathe and sweat and thirst and sometimes cry.

And everything that happened to me, everything both great and small, was something I had to learn! There was room for it in the infinite mind of the Lord and I had to seek the lesson in it, no matter how hard it was to find.

I almost laughed.

It was so simple, so beautiful. If only I could keep it in my mind, this understanding, this moment - never forget it as one day followed another, never forget it no matter what happened, never forget it no matter what came to pass.

Oh, yes, I would grow up, and there would come a time when I would leave Nazareth, surely. I would go out into the world and do what it was I was meant to do. Yes. But for now? All was clear. My fear was gone.

It seemed the whole world was holding me. Why had I ever thought I was alone? I was in the embrace of the earth, of those who loved me no matter what they thought or understood, of the very stars.

"Father," I said. "I am your child."

Authors Note

Every novel I've ever written since 1974 involved historical research. It's been my delight that no matter how many supernatural elements were involved in the story, and no matter how imaginative the plot and characters, the background would be thoroughly historically accurate. And over the years, I've become known for that accuracy. If one of my novels is set in Venice in the eighteenth century, one can be certain that the details as to the opera, the dress, the milieu, the values of the people - all of this is correct.

Without ever planning it, I've moved slowly backwards in history, from the nineteenth century, where I felt at home in my first two novels, to the first century, where I sought the answers to enormous questions that became an obsession with me that simply couldn't be ignored.

Ultimately, the figure of Jesus Christ was at the heart of this obsession. More generally, it was the birth of Christianity and the fall of the ancient world. I wanted to know desperately what happened in the first century, and why people in general never talked about it.

Understand, I had experienced an old-fashioned, strict Roman Catholic childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, in an Irish American parish that would now be called a Catholic ghetto, where we attended daily Mass and Communion in an enormous and magnificently decorated church, which had been built by our forefathers, some with their own hands. Classes were segregated, boys from girls. We learned Catechism and Bible history, and the lives of the saints. Stained-glass windows, the Latin Mass, the detailed answers to complex questions on good and evil - these things were imprinted on my soul forever, along with a great deal of church history that existed as a great chain of events triumphing over schism and reformation to culminate in the papacy of Pius XII.

I left this church at age eighteen, because I stopped believing it was "the one true church established by Christ to give grace." No personal event precipitated this loss of faith. It happened on a secular college campus; there was intense sexual pressure; but more than that there was the world itself, without Catholicism, filled with good people and people who read books that were strictly speaking forbidden to me. I wanted to read Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus. I wanted to know why so many seemingly good people didn't believe in any organized religion yet cared passionately about their behavior and the value of their lives. As the rigid Catholic I was, I had no options for exploration. I broke with the Church. And I broke with my belief in God.

When I married two years later, it was to a passionate atheist, Stan Rice, who not only didn't believe in God, he felt he had had something akin to a vision which had given him a certainty that God didn't exist. He was one of the most honorable and conscience-driven people I ever knew. For him and for me, our writing was our lives.

In 1974, I became a published writer. The novel reflected my guilt and my misery in being cut off from God and from salvation; my being lost in a world without light. It was set in the nineteenth century, a context I'd researched heavily in trying to answer questions about New Orleans, where I was born and no longer lived.

After that, I wrote many novels without my being aware that they reflected my quest for meaning in a world without God. As I said before, I was working my way backwards in history, answering questions for myself about whole historical developments - why certain revolutions happened, why Queen Elizabeth I was the way she was, who really wrote Shakespeare's plays (this I never used in a novel), what the Italian Renaissance really was, and what had the Black Death been like before it. And how had feudalism come about.