Part Two   "He said, 'A person is like a wise fisher who cast a net into the sea, and drew it up from the sea full of little fish. Among them the wise fisher discovered a fine big fish. So the fisher threw all the little fish back into the sea, and with no hesitation kept the big fish. Whoever has ears to hear ought to listen.' " The Gospel of Thomas 8 (Trans. by Marvin W. Myer)
The Story Continues....

• Later that same evening, while struggling to concentrate on my own manuscripts -- editing them for about the hundredth time, with still no end in sight -- I finally succumbed to the temptation to look Reverend Bail's sermons over one last time, with a view towards getting them out of my mind once and for all.

 
• Since I was in the editing mode, and since they were to become food for the worms soon anyway, I started right in editing them as ruthlessly as if they were my own. And the strangest thing began to happen. I actually began to enjoy myself....

 
• I found that by tweaking them up a little here, and mashing them down a little there, I was able to create whole new "realities" from them. Just as plausible and provable from the Bible as anything Reverend Bail had managed to come up with. But a hell of a lot more interesting, it seemed to me.

 
• I said to myself, Could this be what Jesus meant when he said to love your enemies? To do good to those who persecute you? After all, he was merely repeating an ancient proverb, which goes on to say that by so doing you will "heap live coals on his head"! This prospect excited me so much, I went to the bathroom for the first time in weeks.

 
• Afterwards I got drunk, and ran outside through the forest to the graveyard, where I stumbled among the tombstones laughing and crying, my heart bursting with the most unbearable, yet irrepressible joy! I was like the man who stumbled into an abandoned field, and found a great treasure buried there. All I had to do now was go back and sell everything I owned, in effect, and give up on my own manuscripts in order to buy that field.