REVELATION-final1

DAY 31(Monday, 19 May 2014)MISSION POSSIBLEIt is DAY 31 of my hunger strike and I now weigh 76.5 Kg or 168 pounds and 10 ounces. Wehave secured funding for two more weeks of hunger strike and I have finished sending my letterto 218 cardinals after spending two days mining the internet for their emails.I continue to be in great shape but am of course somewhat physically weakened and as a resultfelt a little dizzy walking to St. Peter’s and back today, especially since I picked up the pace tokeep warm on this cloudy and somewhat cool afternoon.Yesterday, I described my first epiphany, which gave me the strength to endure the trials andtribulations of the past five years and the privations of this and previous hunger strikes. Today, Iwill recount my second epiphany, which happened in the south of Brazil at the stunninglybeautiful and gargantuan Iguaçu Falls a few months after the first, but during the same one-yearjourney around the world.I would have liked to let my diary describe it, as I lack the right words now, but all myproperty, including my intellectual property and the book I wrote at the end of my journeydescribing this event, has been confiscated by the Canadian authorities and never returned tome.While the first epiphany gave me the strength to endure the trials to come, the second gave mean inkling of what I was expected to do. It happened on a clear night as I walked along thegorge of the river mesmerized by the sublime spectacle of a dozen gigantic waterfalls. Themist rose into the night sky and formed a rainbow in the moonlight, a phenomenon I havenever seen before or since. In watching the churning river, deafened by the roar, I was struckby an insight that came to me with the same force and clarity as the tumble of the immensevolume of water before me: that I must “be the drop of water that changes the course ofthe river”. The message and the mission were unmistakeably clear and they came with asevere warning, namely that if I lack the courage to pursue it to the end I will be denied thejoy of being by the side of my two children. The mystery is that at that time my two boys,Ben and Oliver, had not been born and I was still single. I don’t know how to explain this andI have long given up trying, other then to resign myself to the time honoured adage that Godworks in mysterious ways. But despite the lack of logic, I took the warning to heart since Iwas allowed to feel, if only for an instant, the searing pain of the loss to come.I am not a religious man, but I cannot deny the spiritual nature of these two epiphanies, theonly such events I have ever experienced. They altered the core of my being and there is onlyone explanation. God spoke to me.131