The Book of Love (40 page)

The screen of Maureen’s laptop blurred as the tears began to stream down her face. This girl’s story touched her deeply. There was something terribly wrong here, an injustice that screamed to be examined. Lucia Santos had witnessed one of history’s most famous and accepted
miracles, was by many accounts an exceptional mystic and visionary—perhaps the greatest of her time. And yet she had been imprisoned for seventy-eight years under an imposition of silence and often in terrible conditions by the very institution that claimed to revere her. As an elderly woman plagued by illness, she was not even allowed the comfort of a warm and dry place to sleep.

Maureen burned with Boudicca’s battle cry of the Truth Against the World. There could only be one reason to keep such a woman from talking, one reason to deny her the comfort of friends, family, and even her personal confessor at the end of her life: someone was afraid of what she was going to say. That someone was the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. What was the Church so afraid of with regard to Lucia that her jailer was none other than the pope and his right-hand man, the right-hand man who succeeded Pope John Paul II to become Pope Benedict XVI? Would her truth contradict the carefully crafted history of the Fátima visions? Or was there something greater, something truly shocking and dangerous to the Church that had been revealed to this very special little girl?

And was it true that Lucia never stopped having visions?

The world would never know. Lucia Santos had been successfully silenced, and all that remained of her story was the sanitized official version, the version created by those who imprisoned her. The Church completely controlled the documented events to ensure that their agenda was served. Truth would not be allowed to get in the way of politics, power, and economics. Historically, it never had. Perhaps it never would, Maureen mused.

As Maureen prepared to close out her research, one final detail leaped from the page, something about Lucia’s life that she had not noticed before. She caught her breath as she saw this one shocking fact in the girl’s biography.

It was now obvious to her why the blessed Lucia Santos had been treated like a danger to the Church.

According to Portuguese documents, the recorded date of Lucia Santos’s birth was March 22, 1907.

Lucia Santos was an Expected One.

Confraternity of the Holy Apparition
Vatican City
present day

“I
NEED TO KNOW
about Lucia Santos. Please.”

Father Girolamo had been pleasantly surprised when he received the phone call first thing this morning advising him that Maureen Paschal was anxious to see him immediately. Peter made the arrangements.

“Ah. I see our presentation on Knock has inspired interest in the apparitions of Our Lady. But why do you come to ask about Lucia specifically?”

Maureen met his gaze squarely across the desk. “You tell me.”

He smiled at her. “You have done a good deal of homework in a short period of time, my dear. I see that there will be no need for pretense, so let us agree to be completely honest with each other. I knew Lucia Santos.”

Maureen was startled by this. While she knew that Father Girolamo was considered the expert on apparitions, she hadn’t expected him to have had personal experience with the famous witness of Fátima.

“Do you remember when we discussed your dream? I was aware, before you told me, that the book that Our Lord appeared to be writing radiated with blue light, and you asked me how I knew this?”

Maureen nodded but said nothing, intent to see where he was taking this.

“I knew because Lucia had the same dreams.”

Maureen gasped before catching herself. “So we are…connected. Beyond the birth date.”

“Yes, you are. Lucia Santos was one of the most remarkable visionaries of all time. You should feel it an honor to be in her company.”

Maureen felt the tears brimming, hot behind her eyes, as she nodded in acknowledgment of the honor.

“Then why?” she asked when she found her voice. “If you believe that she was so great a visionary…then why was she silenced for so long? And treated so poorly?”

“It was not as harsh as you believe it to be. Lucia was not like you, aside from the visions. You are, in fact, a rare case. Do you know that? Most women who had these experiences were not able to function in everyday life as you do. They entered convents voluntarily and for their own protection. Many of them became completely unable to lead lives outside their visionary experiences and had to be cared for. Lucia was one of these. She did not live in our world much of the time, and she needed solitude. She requested it. I assure you, she was very well provided for by all around her.”

Maureen had a million questions, but knew she had to consider the next one carefully. “The secrets. Were any of them about the Book of Love?”

The old priest’s reply was firm but not harsh. “You venture into territory that you must know I am not allowed to discuss with anyone. For now, I think it is enough that you know that Lucia had the same dream of our Lord as you have had. Perhaps you should pray about this. You have much in common with Lucia Santos, and she was a great help to the Church. She inspired many faithful then as she still does to this day. Perhaps you should change your focus. Turn your attention to all the good that has come from her legacy, and stop trying to find the ill. That is what Lucia would want from you, if she were here today. Of that I am certain.”

As Peter walked with Maureen back to her hotel, they discussed Father Girolamo’s revelation. They were to meet Bérenger in his suite and finish reading through the final pages of Matilda’s autobiography.

Maureen needed to duck back into her room to grab her laptop and her notebook for their meeting. She opened the small closet to retrieve the leather carry-on bag where she stored her writing materials.

The bag was gone, and so were her laptop and her notebook.

It was the last straw for Maureen’s nerves, strung as taut as they were in the aftermath of the last weeks.

“What next?” She looked at Peter as she sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m not sure how much more I can take.”

Peter put his hand on her shoulder. “Breathe, Maureen. Just breathe. It’s terrible, but it isn’t the worst thing that has happened. And you got through all that.”

Maureen nodded. “I’m trying, Pete. But it’s getting harder. What happened in Orval was really scary. And now this. I’m starting to feel very exposed. And I’m really struggling with the fact that I feel like I have no control over my own life.”

“But you do. You have free will.”

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

“Of course it is. Right now you’re here in Rome, chasing the clues and trying to find the truth about the Book of Love, which I believe is exactly what God wants you to do. But that’s your choice. Your free will. You can tell God right now to get another storyteller and grab your passport and get on the next flight back to L.A. You can walk away from this entire process at any moment that you want, simply by choosing to do so. That’s what free will means.”

Maureen snapped at him as her exhaustion got the better of her. “But what about
the time returns
? If this is my mission—to do this work—then I can’t walk away from it, no matter how much I may want to.”

Now it was Peter’s turn to raise his voice. He could feel his own anger and frustration building within him. Those emotions had been churning for the better part of two years, and now they were finding expression.

“Why do you think there is even a need to say
the time returns
? It’s because humans can’t get it right. If we accomplished what we were put here to do in the first place, the
time
wouldn’t have to
return
. But we can’t do that. We can’t be obedient and follow God’s plan, as simple as it is, because all our human rubbish gets in the way when the going gets tough—our ego, our anger, our envy, our greed. That’s what Jesus was trying to tell us. That was his real message: that this is all so simple. It’s about love and faith and community. And that’s
it
. Do you know what I consider the most important thing I have learned in all my years as a priest? The only piece of spiritual wisdom that really matters? It’s this: you can throw away the entire Bible if you just keep what Jesus
tells us in Matthew twenty-two, verses thirty-seven through forty.
‘Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law of the prophets.’
Done. Finito. That’s all you need to know. And they’d throw me out of the Vatican for saying this, but we can make Bible study courses three minutes long, because that’s the entire teaching right there. Everything else just gets in the way and obscures the message.”

He took a breath, but he was far from finished. “This is easy stuff, right? It should be—it was meant to be. But the human race has made a mess of it for two thousand years and wreaked the worst havoc and wrought the most horrific destruction, in our Lord’s name, because we can’t live by those two most basic commandments. So God has to keep sending souls to earth who he thinks might be right for the task of reminding us how to live in that simple love. But the free will factor does us in every time.
Every time.
And we can’t create heaven on earth with just a few people having that intention. We need to get the whole world on board with these simple understandings. It’s a ridiculous, daunting, insane task, but one that God clearly thinks can be done, which is why we have to keep trying. It’s why we have to keep searching and why you have to keep writing, no matter what. It’s your job and your mission—and, yes, it was apparently your promise. But it’s still your free will to do it or not.”

She was listening to him, as she always did, and he was making a lot of sense. But she was overtired and overwrought. What she really needed right now was someone like Tammy, a girlfriend who would let her cry and tell her that it wasn’t her job to save the world. Because she just wasn’t up to it. Not tonight.

“Sometimes, I just feel so…used.”

“Really? How tragic for you. God has chosen you for a task so special that his own son speaks to you in dreams, and you feel used. Miracles happen all around you, things literally fall out of the sky to provide you with what you need, and you feel used. Your work changes lives, maybe even saves lives, and you can’t be bothered to think that’s a good thing because you’re too busy being immersed in your own personal
pity party. Knock it off, Maureen. I’m sorry this is upsetting for you, but you need to snap out of it. We have work to do.”

Peter waited in the silence that followed. The last speech was a calculated risk. Sometimes that approach with her worked and she did, indeed, snap out of it. Sometimes, she just cried harder. At other times, she threw things at his head and didn’t speak to him for weeks at a time.

He held his breath, but he didn’t need to duck.

“Okay.” Maureen sat up straighter and ran her hands through her hair, trying to pull herself together and focus on the work facing them. “So let’s say that the time is returning and a group of us are here to fulfill a promise. So…what does that look like? When, exactly, did we make this promise? Easa mentioned the promise in my dream. He said:
‘Follow the path that has been laid out for you, and you will find what you seek. Once you have found it, you must share it with the world and fulfill the promise that you made.’
Is this promise something we made in heaven? Is it a promise to God? A promise to each other? To ourselves? Do we all sit together in some great conference room in the sky and plan this out and say, ‘Right, I’ll see you down there, don’t be late?’ I just don’t understand.”

“I can’t answer that, Maureen. This is a matter of faith at the moment, believing in something we can’t see and don’t understand. And maybe we need to find the Book of Love in order to fully grasp whatever
it
is.”

He looked at her closely for a minute, beginning to feel guilty about berating her. There were dark circles under her eyes and she looked very fragile. This was quite a burden to carry for anyone, and most people would have snapped under this pressure a long time ago. Maybe he had gone too far. “How long has it been since you’ve had any sleep?”

Maureen stopped to think and shrugged. “Define sleep.”

“Well, I know you better than to say an entire night, but how about at least a few hours at a time?”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember. Not recently.”

“Your brain needs to rest and to process all the information that
you put into it, and it never gets a chance to do that. You need to get some sleep.”

Maureen nodded. “I hate taking sleeping pills. They make me groggy and useless. They numb my brain, and I can’t afford to do that.”

“Have you tried praying?”

She smiled weakly at him. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Given that you have a pretty direct line to those with ears to hear, I think you should really try it. Ask and you shall receive. In the meantime, I’m going home. And I am not coming back tomorrow unless you tell me in the morning that you at least tried to get some sleep and got yourself straight with the Lord your God. How’s that for motivation?”

“It’s not motivation, it’s blackmail. But I’m too tired to argue with you. So, yeah, I promise.”

True to her word, Maureen got on her knees at the side of the bed, just as she had done as a child. She asked Easa to help her, to give her some rest and some comfort in all of this. She knew she was acting in a manner that was ungrateful for all of the grace he had bestowed upon her, and she was most heartily sorry. But sometimes, this was hard. The responsibility was too great. She just needed to sleep a little better and to feel more protected in this process.

Then, she did something she hadn’t done in years. She recited the Lord’s Prayer, and tried to remember exactly how it fit within a six-petaled rose.

“Thy will be done,” she whispered. “Really. I mean it. And I’m sorry.”