Everyone has a special time of the year.
Mine has always been spring.
That first May, strangers came crowding through our door with gifts and stories. My mother said they told tales of great conjunctions, eclipses, and shooting stars. Ordinary people spoke of angels. My parents had dreams. They took me home ... and then to another country, well away from the King. People were dying.
My twelfth spring was the time we went to the city and no-one could find me. I was listening to the men who knew about God, and lost all track of time. Something within me was opening to Heaven and I needed to stay in that sacred space as long as I could, to understand who this boy was, who was me, yet bigger than me; to sense the answer to an urgent inner question. Then my parents appeared in the temple doorway, hours of panic giving way to relief, and we were back on the road.
Spring is a beautiful season in Galilee - the sculpted hills and rolling plains, so parched later in the year, erupt in a rich profusion of foliage and flowers; the warm air is full of sweet smells, all the lovelier after rain. It was like this in the April of my thirty-eighth year when my beloved mother and all my faithful friends followed me to an exposed hilltop to watch me die. I remember the smell of blood, the frightening gloom of the sunset lunar eclipse, the racking pain, and the despair that all I had taught and now had to leave behind might after all have been utterly in vain. There came asphyxia, and blood loss ... and the giddying trajectory of my freed spirit into the Light.
I was allowed to see my friends again; this was imperative. Once they realised that the body’s death was only the start of life, they were freed from the fear that might have silenced them. As it was, their joy was the seed of a great flowering of truth that spread throughout the world for two millennia, enduring despite the worst attacks of sceptics, lamentable distortion, bitter quarrels, cruelty, and interminable wars.
Then came another spring, another May, when I kept my promise to return. A new age of human evolution had been gaining momentum; into another small community in a drastically changed world I came again, under a holy sky. Now I was a little girl, growing up in a seaside town thousands of miles from my ancient home, and no different from any of the other children I played with on the salty shingle, among sand dunes, in the copses of maritime pine fringing coastal fields of wheat and barley. Nothing unusual graced my arrival; I was born quickly and easily to a mother who once again took a keen interest in everything and everyone under the sun and passed this on to me, and to another father whose practical skills overlaid an unostentatious spirituality. We didn’t go to church, but an eclectic muddle of books spread through the terraced house, amongst them seven volumes of Man, Myth and Magic, which kept me totally absorbed whenever I found time to curl up alone in a corner. At three I saw an angel.
Did I remember?
Christmas bothered me. It tugged at my heart, and yet it seemed all wrong. Part of me was alienated from the glitter and baubles and winter trees, while cribs and carols had me transfixed. Later would come Easter, amid all the promise of March or April, and I could be found hunched under my bedclothes, feeling sick and miserable without knowing why. “Too much chocolate, Frances!” my Dad would say ... and my mother would point silently at the untouched eggs on top of the wardrobe. In a day or two I would be normal again. Something remembered.
Three days before my twelfth birthday the Pope was shot.
“Serves him right for being a Catholic” said swanky Darren at break next day.
A surprising anger rose up inside me and I blocked his way back into school.
“Take that back!”
“Who says?” he sneered at me.
“Someone who knows better than you do !”
And in that moment I did know. So when he swung at me I just stood there and let his fist come. I felt the blood and I smelt it and a surge of agonising memory swept my body.
“Coward!” he shouted as the doors closed behind him. “I’ll get you!”
On the Saturday he was waiting for me when I came back with fresh cakes for my birthday tea. He had two friends with him. The cake box was knocked into the road as six fists and six boots tore into my clothes and my skin and I fell to the pavement in an anguish of bruises and blood.
“Pope-lover!” they jeered as they ran off laughing in that way that louts laugh when delighted with their vice and in fear of being caught. I managed to move my mouth - “You’re just ignorant! Violence only ends in violence! I pity you. You can’t kill the love that lives in me.”
It was all over the papers.
That was the beginning. I read and I read. Understood my history. Understood rebirth. Understood karma. Understood that every living soul is a tiny fragment of fathering, mothering God. Understood that love is deathless and darkness can never, ever overwhelm the Light. Understood that toiling humanity was still on its seemingly endless learning curve and few still realised who they truly were. That we come back and come back and come back until all the lessons are learned and all the debts paid to each other and God and the Mother Earth, and we are never given more than we can deal with. Understood that the Creation is an astonishing symphony and no life, not the tiniest thing, is ever separate from that music. That there were astrologers in the world as there were before, who could see, and who also understood ...
I needed to travel - which meant I had to work, as we had little money. For twelve years it meant spending all my extra-curricular time waiting tables, serving at bars and counters, and selling my paintings. One good run of wealthy customers got me to the Middle East and the poignant air of my old home, another funded a grim journey to South America where the depredation of the rain-forest came as a terrible shock. I joined movements. I marched. I stood on town hall steps and political hustings, talking and talking and talking to anyone who would pause to listen. I was one small, scarred, embattled woman with a loyal group of sympathetic friends raising my profile as high as the current state of the media allowed, in a relentless effort to turn the increasingly dangerous tide of human selfishness and thoughtless destruction. I met an astrologer who knew me - who had found the very moment of my first incarnation; she too encouraged me onward in the new crusade.
The decadence, the complacency, the widespread greed and depravity of this ever more materialistic, clever and crowded world was breaking my heart. Like stars in the night, there were shiny people everywhere, young and old, trying to mend what mankind had broken, but it now seemed hopeless. Could nothing rescue the Earth from ruin? The forests - the lungs of the planet - were wrecked and dying. Whole species of precious creatures, crucial to a once beautifully-balanced ecosystem, were going to the grave. The earth was poisoned, the seas polluted, the air thick with suffocating fumes from traffic, planes, industry, warfare and blazing oil. People, who could have been angels, were turning into demons.
By 1993 I had my Doctorate in Ecology and Climate Science. This commanded a sufficient degree of respect, and I worked my way into broadcast journalism. By day I endured the tedium of repeat takes under tiring lights in stifling studios; by night I opened my heart and soul to the Divine Source, entreating all Heaven for redemptive guidance.
“Doctor Spring ...”
“Please call me Frances.”
“Frances, you have taken a lot of stick - sometimes literally - over the past few years for your forthright opinions on climate change and human behaviour. Have you revised your position at all, in view of on-going controversy?”
I had not.
Somehow I had to warn a civilisation in denial that God himself was about to take charge of the weather. Folly could no longer be tolerated. The jet-stream would sweep south under His finger and years of ferocious storms and punishing droughts would bring nations to their knees.
I had to inform the cynical media that I would die by violence in public three years from now, and would reappear two decades later to a frightened world as witness to the truth of everything Heaven had taught through me, both now and two thousand years ago.
This I have now said.
Soon it begins again.
...........................................................................................................................................................................
Mine has always been spring.
That first May, strangers came crowding through our door with gifts and stories. My mother said they told tales of great conjunctions, eclipses, and shooting stars. Ordinary people spoke of angels. My parents had dreams. They took me home ... and then to another country, well away from the King. People were dying.
My twelfth spring was the time we went to the city and no-one could find me. I was listening to the men who knew about God, and lost all track of time. Something within me was opening to Heaven and I needed to stay in that sacred space as long as I could, to understand who this boy was, who was me, yet bigger than me; to sense the answer to an urgent inner question. Then my parents appeared in the temple doorway, hours of panic giving way to relief, and we were back on the road.
Spring is a beautiful season in Galilee - the sculpted hills and rolling plains, so parched later in the year, erupt in a rich profusion of foliage and flowers; the warm air is full of sweet smells, all the lovelier after rain. It was like this in the April of my thirty-eighth year when my beloved mother and all my faithful friends followed me to an exposed hilltop to watch me die. I remember the smell of blood, the frightening gloom of the sunset lunar eclipse, the racking pain, and the despair that all I had taught and now had to leave behind might after all have been utterly in vain. There came asphyxia, and blood loss ... and the giddying trajectory of my freed spirit into the Light.
I was allowed to see my friends again; this was imperative. Once they realised that the body’s death was only the start of life, they were freed from the fear that might have silenced them. As it was, their joy was the seed of a great flowering of truth that spread throughout the world for two millennia, enduring despite the worst attacks of sceptics, lamentable distortion, bitter quarrels, cruelty, and interminable wars.
Then came another spring, another May, when I kept my promise to return. A new age of human evolution had been gaining momentum; into another small community in a drastically changed world I came again, under a holy sky. Now I was a little girl, growing up in a seaside town thousands of miles from my ancient home, and no different from any of the other children I played with on the salty shingle, among sand dunes, in the copses of maritime pine fringing coastal fields of wheat and barley. Nothing unusual graced my arrival; I was born quickly and easily to a mother who once again took a keen interest in everything and everyone under the sun and passed this on to me, and to another father whose practical skills overlaid an unostentatious spirituality. We didn’t go to church, but an eclectic muddle of books spread through the terraced house, amongst them seven volumes of Man, Myth and Magic, which kept me totally absorbed whenever I found time to curl up alone in a corner. At three I saw an angel.
Did I remember?
Christmas bothered me. It tugged at my heart, and yet it seemed all wrong. Part of me was alienated from the glitter and baubles and winter trees, while cribs and carols had me transfixed. Later would come Easter, amid all the promise of March or April, and I could be found hunched under my bedclothes, feeling sick and miserable without knowing why. “Too much chocolate, Frances!” my Dad would say ... and my mother would point silently at the untouched eggs on top of the wardrobe. In a day or two I would be normal again. Something remembered.
Three days before my twelfth birthday the Pope was shot.
“Serves him right for being a Catholic” said swanky Darren at break next day.
A surprising anger rose up inside me and I blocked his way back into school.
“Take that back!”
“Who says?” he sneered at me.
“Someone who knows better than you do !”
And in that moment I did know. So when he swung at me I just stood there and let his fist come. I felt the blood and I smelt it and a surge of agonising memory swept my body.
“Coward!” he shouted as the doors closed behind him. “I’ll get you!”
On the Saturday he was waiting for me when I came back with fresh cakes for my birthday tea. He had two friends with him. The cake box was knocked into the road as six fists and six boots tore into my clothes and my skin and I fell to the pavement in an anguish of bruises and blood.
“Pope-lover!” they jeered as they ran off laughing in that way that louts laugh when delighted with their vice and in fear of being caught. I managed to move my mouth - “You’re just ignorant! Violence only ends in violence! I pity you. You can’t kill the love that lives in me.”
It was all over the papers.
That was the beginning. I read and I read. Understood my history. Understood rebirth. Understood karma. Understood that every living soul is a tiny fragment of fathering, mothering God. Understood that love is deathless and darkness can never, ever overwhelm the Light. Understood that toiling humanity was still on its seemingly endless learning curve and few still realised who they truly were. That we come back and come back and come back until all the lessons are learned and all the debts paid to each other and God and the Mother Earth, and we are never given more than we can deal with. Understood that the Creation is an astonishing symphony and no life, not the tiniest thing, is ever separate from that music. That there were astrologers in the world as there were before, who could see, and who also understood ...
I needed to travel - which meant I had to work, as we had little money. For twelve years it meant spending all my extra-curricular time waiting tables, serving at bars and counters, and selling my paintings. One good run of wealthy customers got me to the Middle East and the poignant air of my old home, another funded a grim journey to South America where the depredation of the rain-forest came as a terrible shock. I joined movements. I marched. I stood on town hall steps and political hustings, talking and talking and talking to anyone who would pause to listen. I was one small, scarred, embattled woman with a loyal group of sympathetic friends raising my profile as high as the current state of the media allowed, in a relentless effort to turn the increasingly dangerous tide of human selfishness and thoughtless destruction. I met an astrologer who knew me - who had found the very moment of my first incarnation; she too encouraged me onward in the new crusade.
The decadence, the complacency, the widespread greed and depravity of this ever more materialistic, clever and crowded world was breaking my heart. Like stars in the night, there were shiny people everywhere, young and old, trying to mend what mankind had broken, but it now seemed hopeless. Could nothing rescue the Earth from ruin? The forests - the lungs of the planet - were wrecked and dying. Whole species of precious creatures, crucial to a once beautifully-balanced ecosystem, were going to the grave. The earth was poisoned, the seas polluted, the air thick with suffocating fumes from traffic, planes, industry, warfare and blazing oil. People, who could have been angels, were turning into demons.
By 1993 I had my Doctorate in Ecology and Climate Science. This commanded a sufficient degree of respect, and I worked my way into broadcast journalism. By day I endured the tedium of repeat takes under tiring lights in stifling studios; by night I opened my heart and soul to the Divine Source, entreating all Heaven for redemptive guidance.
“Doctor Spring ...”
“Please call me Frances.”
“Frances, you have taken a lot of stick - sometimes literally - over the past few years for your forthright opinions on climate change and human behaviour. Have you revised your position at all, in view of on-going controversy?”
I had not.
Somehow I had to warn a civilisation in denial that God himself was about to take charge of the weather. Folly could no longer be tolerated. The jet-stream would sweep south under His finger and years of ferocious storms and punishing droughts would bring nations to their knees.
I had to inform the cynical media that I would die by violence in public three years from now, and would reappear two decades later to a frightened world as witness to the truth of everything Heaven had taught through me, both now and two thousand years ago.
This I have now said.
Soon it begins again.
...........................................................................................................................................................................