He laughed, then looked at me warmly.
“Are you studying the Manuscript here at the mission?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “We teach others how to pursue the kind of experience you had on the ridge. You wouldn’t mind getting some of that feeling back, would you?”
A voice from the courtyard interrupted: a priest calling for Sanchez. The older man excused himself and walked down to the courtyard and talked with the priest who had summoned him. I sat back and looked at the plants and rocks nearby, taking my eyes slightly out of focus. Around the bush closest to me I could barely make out an area of light but when I tried it on the rocks, I could see nothing.
Then I noticed Sanchez walking back.
“I must leave for a while,” he said as he reached me. “I’ll be going into town for a meeting so perhaps I can acquire some information concerning your friends, or at least how safe it is for you to travel.”
“Good,” I said. “Will you be back today?”
“I don’t think so,” he replied. “More like tomorrow morning.”
I must have looked insecure because he walked closer and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. You are safe here. Please make yourself at home. Look around. It is fine to talk with any of the priests, but understand that some of them will be more receptive than others depending on their development.”
I nodded.
He smiled and walked behind the church and entered an old truck I had not noticed. After several attempts it started and he drove around the back side of the church and onto the road leading back up the ridge.
For several hours I remained in the sitting area, content to gather my thoughts, wondering if Marjorie was all right and if Wil had escaped. Several times the image of Jensen’s man being killed flashed across my mind, but I fought off the memory and tried to stay calm.
About noon, I noticed several priests were preparing a long table in the center of the courtyard with dishes of food. When they finished, a dozen or more other priests joined them and began serving their own plates and eating on the benches casually. Most of them smiled pleasantly at each other, but I could hear little talking. One of them looked up at me and pointed to the food.
I nodded and walked down to the courtyard and prepared a plate of corn and beans. Each of the priests seemed very conscious of my presence but no one spoke to me. I made several comments about the food, but my words were met only with smiles and polite gestures. If I attempted direct eye contact, they would lower their eyes.
I sat down on one of the benches alone and ate. The vegetables and beans were unsalted but spiced with herbs. When lunch was over and the priests were stacking their plates on the table, another priest walked out of the church and hastily prepared a plate. When he finished, he looked around for a place to sit and our eyes met. He smiled and I recognized him as the priest who had looked at me from the sitting area earlier. I returned his smile and he walked over and spoke to me in broken English.
“May I sit on bench with you?” he asked.
“Yes, please,” I replied.
He sat down and began to eat very slowly, overchewing his food and smiling up at me occasionally. He was short and small with a wiry build and coal black hair. His eyes were a lighter brown.
“You like the food?” he asked.
I was holding my plate in my lap. Several bites of corn remained.
“Oh, yes,” I said, and took a bite. I noticed again how slowly and deliberately he chewed and tried to do the same, and then it struck me that all of the priests had been eating that way.
“Are the vegetables grown here at the mission?” I asked. He hesitated before answering, swallowing slowly.
“Yes, food is very important.”
“Do you meditate with the plants?” I asked.
He looked at me with obvious surprise. “You have read Manuscript?” he asked.
“Yes, the first four insights.”
“Have you grown food?” he asked.
“Oh no. I’m just learning about all this.”
“Do you see energy fields?”
“Yes, sometimes.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes while he carefully ate several more bites.
“Food is the first way of gaining energy,” he said.
I nodded.
“But in order to totally absorb energy in food, the food must be appreciated, eh…”
He seemed to be struggling for the right English word. “Savored,” he finally said. “Taste is the doorway. You must appreciate taste. This is the reason for prayer before eating. It is not just about being thankful, it is to make eating a holy experience, so the energy from the food can enter your body.”
He looked closely at me, as though to see whether I understood.
I nodded without comment. He looked thoughtful.
What he was telling me, I reasoned, was that this kind of deliberate appreciation of food was the real purpose behind the normal religious custom of being thankful, with the result being a higher energy absorption of the food.
“But taking in food is only first step,” he said. “After personal energy is increased in this way, you become more sensitive to energy in all things…and then you learn to take this energy into yourself without eating.”
I nodded affirmatively.
“Everything around us,” he continued, “has energy. But each has its own special kind. That is why some places increase energy more than others. It depends on how your shape fits with the energy there.”
“Is that what you were doing up there earlier?” I asked. “Increasing your energy?”
He looked pleased. “Yes.”
“How do you do that?” I asked.
“You have to be open, to connect, to use your sense of appreciation, as in seeing fields. But you take this one step further so that you get the sensation of being filled up.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
He frowned at my denseness. “Would you like to walk back to the sitting place? I can show you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Why not?”
I followed as he led the way across the courtyard and back to the sitting area. As we arrived, he stopped and looked around, as if surveying the area for something.
“Over there,” he said, pointing to a spot that bordered the dense forest.
We followed the path as it wound through the trees and bushes. He picked a spot in front of a large tree that grew out of a mound of boulders so that its huge trunk seemed to be perched on the rocks. Its roots wrapped around and through the boulders before finally reaching the soil. Flowering shrubs of some type grew in semicircles in front of the tree and I could detect a strange sweet fragrance from the shrub’s yellow blossoms. The dense forest provided a solid sheet of green in the background.
The priest directed me to sit down in a clear spot amid the bushes, facing the gnarled tree. He sat beside me.
“Do you think the tree is beautiful?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then, uh…feel it…uh…”
He seemed to be struggling again to find the word. He thought for a moment and then asked, “Father Sanchez told me that you had an experience on the ridge; can you remember how you felt?”
“I felt light and secure and connected.”
“How connected?”
“That’s hard to describe,” I said. “Like the whole landscape was part of me.”
“But what was the feeling?”
I thought for a minute. What was the feeling? Then it came to me.
“Love,” I said. “I guess I felt a love for everything.”
“Yes,” he said. “That is it. Feel that for the tree.”
“But wait a minute,” I protested. “Love is something that just happens. I can’t make myself love anything.”
“You do not make yourself love,” he said. “You allow love to enter you. But to do this you must position your mind by remembering what it felt like and try to feel it again.”
I looked at the tree and tried to remember the emotion on the ridge. Gradually, I began to admire its shape and presence. My appreciation grew until I actually felt an emotion of love. The feeling was exactly the one I remember as a child for my mother and as a youth for the special little girl that was the object of my “puppy love.” Yet even though I had been looking at the tree, this particular love existed as a general background feeling. I was in love with everything.
The priest slid away several feet and looked back at me intensely. “Good,” he said. “You are accepting the energy.”
I noticed his eyes were slightly out of focus.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because I can see your energy field getting larger.”
I closed my eyes and tried to reach the intense feelings I had acquired on the ridge top but I couldn’t duplicate the experience. What I was feeling was on the same continuum but to a lesser degree than before. The failure made me frustrated.
“What happened?” he asked. “Your energy fell.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just couldn’t do it as strongly as before.”
He just looked at me, amused at first, then with impatience.
“What you experienced on the ridge was a gift, a breakthrough, a look at a new way. Now you must learn to get that experience by yourself, a little at a time.”
He slid back a foot farther and looked at me again. “Now try more.”
I closed my eyes and tried to feel deeply. Eventually the emotion swept over me again. I stayed with it, attempting to increase the feeling by small increments. I focused my regard on the tree.
“That is very good,” he suddenly said. “You are receiving energy and giving it to the tree.”
I looked at him squarely. “I’m giving it back to the tree?”
“When you appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of things,” he explained, “you receive energy. When you get to a level where you feel love, then you can send the energy back just by willing it so.” For a long time I sat there with the tree. The more I focused attention on the tree and admired its shape and color, the more love I seemed to acquire generally, an unusual experience. I imagined my energy flowing over and filling up the tree, but I couldn’t see it. Without changing my focus, I noticed the priest get up and begin to walk away.
“What does it look like when I’m giving energy to the tree?” I asked.
He described the perception in detail and I recognized it as the same phenomenon I had witnessed when Sarah projected energy onto the philodendron at Viciente. Though Sarah was successful, she apparently wasn’t aware that a state of love was necessary for the projection to take place. She must have been acquiring a love state naturally, without realizing it.
The priest walked down toward the courtyard and out of my range of vision. I remained in the sitting area until dusk.
The two priests nodded politely as I entered the house. A roaring fire fended off the evening chill and several oil lamps illuminated the front room. The air was filled with the smell of vegetable, or perhaps potato, soup. On the table was a ceramic bowl, several spoons, and a plate holding four slices of bread.
One of the priests turned and left without looking at me and the other kept his eyes lowered and nodded at a large cast iron pot sitting on the hearth by the fire. A handle protruded from under its lid. As soon as I saw the pot, the second priest asked, “Is there anything else you need?”
“I think not,” I said. “Thank you.”
He nodded and left the house as well, leaving me alone. I lifted the lid from the pot—potato soup. It smelled rich and delicious. I poured several ladles full into a bowl and sat down at the table, then pulled the part of the Manuscript Sanchez had given me from my pocket and placed it beside my plate, intending to read. But the soup tasted so good that I focused entirely on eating. After I finished, I placed the dishes in a large pan and stared at the fire, hypnotized, until the flames burned low. Then I turned down the lamps and went to bed.
The next morning, I awakened at dawn feeling totally refreshed. Outside a morning mist rolled through the courtyard. I stoked up the fire and put several pieces of kindling on the coals and fanned it until it caught up. I was about to look through the kitchen for food when I heard Sanchez’s truck approaching.
I walked outside as he emerged from behind the church, a backpack in one arm and several packages in the other.
“I have some news,” he said, motioning me to follow him back inside the house.
Several other priests appeared with hot corn cakes and grits and more dried fruit. Sanchez greeted the men, then sat with me at the table as the priests scurried away.
“I attended a meeting of some of the priests of the Southern Council,” he said. “We were there to talk about the Manuscript. At issue was the government’s aggressive actions. This was the first time any group of priests has met publicly in support of this document, and we were just beginning our discussion when a government representative knocked on the door and asked to be admitted.”
He paused as he served his plate and took several bites, chewing them thoroughly. “The representative,” he continued, “assured us that the government’s sole purpose was to protect the Manuscript from outside exploitation. He informed us that all copies being held by Peruvian citizens must be licensed. He said he understood our concern but asked us to comply with this law and turn in our copies. He promised that government duplicates would be issued back to us at once.”
“Did you turn them in?” I asked.
“Of course not.”
We both ate for a few minutes. I tried to overchew, to appreciate the taste.
“We asked about the violence in Cula,” he went on, “and he told us that this was a necessary reaction against a man called Jensen, that several of his men were armed agents from another country. He said they planned to find and steal the undiscovered part of the Manuscript and remove it from Peru, so the government had no choice but to arrest them. There was no mention of you or your friends.”
“Did you believe the government man?”
“No, we didn’t. After he left we continued the meeting. We agreed that our policy would be one of quiet resistance. We will continue to make copies and distribute them carefully.”
“Will your church leaders allow you to do that?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” Sanchez said. “The church elders have disapproved of the Manuscript but so far have not seriously investigated who is involved with it. Our main concern is a Cardinal who resides farther north, Cardinal Sebastian. He is the most vocal in opposition to the Manuscript and is very influential. If he convinces the leadership to issue strong proclamations, then we will have a very interesting decision to make.”