Note.  A good friend and fellow editorial consultant working at the Vatican Publishing House informed me earlier today that an e-mailed paper from Guyana has had the Holy See in uproar for the past week.  He said that he has never seen Vatican City in such turmoil since the passing of Pope John Paul.  He believes that the contents of the e-mail should be made known to the world and has enlisted my aid in doing so since I belong to the alleged country of origin of said e-mail.   I have been told by my friend that the Pope believes that it contains a message crucial to the events of Guyana at this time and that it should be decoded as quickly as possible.  Though I post it here, I cannot vouch for its authenticity. 

Ruel Albert Johnson

                                                                      *****

Three Versions of Jagdeo

By Bishop Juan Edghill

"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory...full of grace and truth."

John 1.14 

Justifiably, we can easily imagine him – were he conceived perhaps during the Crusades –marching triumphantly into Jerusalem, the bodies of the heathen followers of the rabid and morally corrupt murderer Muhammad piled high, their blasphemous infidel tongues silenced forever under the sweet retribution of his bloody and glistening blade of infinite justice – had that occurred, modern political science would no doubt have been spared the tropes of “Islamic Fundamentalism” and “Jihadist Terrorism”.

Ulysses – were the one whose name I proclaim been born in the time of the Ancient Greeks – would have had his legend eclipsed by a mightier one, an odyssey more epic, through a thousands Scyllas and Charybdises, the conquest of a thousand Cyclopes, even without the fixed star of a Penelope for comfort and guidance. 

Abelard – had the subject of my sermon entered this mortal coil in the latter part of the 11th century – would have abandoned his ill-fated pursuit of Héloïse and turned his devotion and affection towards the very personal and intimate love, discipleship and spiritual succour to which this humble author finds himself committed.

Nativity, however, is as precise a science as it is an area of theological enquiry. Comprehensible and accountable only unto themselves, History and Divinity reserved his temporal provenance for a small, rural village on the lush, green coast of a small South American nation, Guyana, some 48 years prior to the penning of this piece.  Future historians and theologians will no doubt record the precise date as the true genesis of the glorious age of the world to come.

Two Versions of Jagdeo

“[10] And there was much murmuring among the people concerning him: for some said, He is a good man: others said, Nay; but he deceiveth the people... [43] So there was a division among the people because of him.”

                                                                                          John 7 

Even at the time of the writing of this essay – nay, this epistle, this sermon, this testimony, this revelation – Bharat Jagdeo is preparing to leave office as President of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana.

Didorus Sycophus posits, as is repeated and expanded upon by Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli in Il Principe, that no great leader is without his critics and his detractors; and Swift observed that the surest sign of the appearance of a great genius is that “the dunces are all in confederacy against him”. 

Graciously, I shall not detail, only list, the calumnious arrows of dissent that have been volleyed against the burnished brass image of Bharat Jagdeo: the association with and employment of liars, drunks, turncoats, thieves, whores, whoremongers, rapists, homosexuals, murderers and pederasts; a propensity for misdirection and deceit; maltreatment of a ‘wife’ that he was not even legally married to; the coddling of murderous drug-dealers; nepotism and the selling off of state assets to friends; corruption; excessive pride and surrounding himself with sycophants; the practice of a policy of ideological racism; the suppression of free speech.

However, no matter the adversity faced by them, great men have always let their deeds rise above the false infamy thrown – like so much miasmic fecal matter – by their bitterest enemies. 

In objective worldly terms, his 12-year tenure in political office was both relatively and universally transformative.  While I would not prejudice the content of the seminal monograph I am currently writing as relates to the central thesis of this essay, I can comfortably relate just two of the lesser achievements of His Excellency that the objective reader may judge, ex pide Herculem, the greatness of his works, the inestimable bounty of his labour.

Let us consider his One Laptop Per Family Initiative.  In an age when access to technology is as crucial as access to grain or fish was back in the Biblical times, not only has the President, in essence, given the man the fish, he has taught him to fish as well.  Of course, much ado has been made about that it is a company of the Orient, Haier, which was awarded the contract to supply these laptops – these veritable loaves and fishes, this manna of modern life – to the multitude.  Yet it is but a sign of the President’s willingness to reach across borders, even to the heathen and godless Chinese so that they may see reconciliation and kindness in action.

Laudable as that initiative is, its splendour but pales to the luminescence of his Low Carbon Development Strategy.  In an age when the world is falling apart at the seams, when we are faced with the apocalyptic phenomenology of climate change, the President has sacrificed a great part of the patrimony of his state and estate – the blood of his rivers, the flesh of his land – so that the world should not perish but have everlasting life.  Yet we have still two versions of Jagdeo, apparently at variance with each other – the corrupt and the copacetic.

Dem hemlige Frälsaren 

Inherent within these two versions of Bharat Jagdeo we can find a transcendent third – out of thesis and antithesis is born synthesis, a unification greater than the sum of its ostentatiously disparate parts.  For those who speak of his open association with liars, drunks, thieves, turncoats, whores, whoremongers, rapists, homosexuals, murderers, pederasts, smugglers of exotic creatures [not unlike the dove-sellers in the temple], scribes, tax-collectors, and drug dealers, I can recount a man who sat near a temple and was brought a woman accused of adultery to be stoned – his response to those who brought her was simply, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”  I can recount that man also showing kindness to and breaking bread with those even of his disciples – his spiritual cabinet as it were – who would betray him, even on to the final meal before he was brutally murdered.  I can recount that same man sharing the fate of crucifixion with two robbers and condemning them not.  The Divine identity and purpose is clear, even if the earthly manifestations seem at first incidental – we live in age beset by apparently mindless calamity, wars and rumours of wars, famine, a time prophesied in the Bible as the end times, heralding a great Redeemer; now there emerges from an unlikely place a man who is named as Hero of the Environment, a Champion of the Earth.

Salvation cometh whence and where we least expect it: while it can be reasoned that, possessed of an omnipotence and omniscience inscrutable to human comprehension, the Great I Am could have chosen any more obvious figure in the history of our times to embody his Second Coming, the prophesied Comforter, the final advent of His Word made flesh – He could have chosen Barack Obama, for example; He could have chosen Bono – He, whose ways and motives remain eternally strange to men, has chosen Bharat Jadgdeo.  Dem hemlige Frälsaren – the Secret Saviour for this age – is thus hereby revealed to the world.

Already I can hear the Pharisaic clamours of “heretic” resounding around the hollow spaces the spiritually bereft churches of today – echoes of the murmurings that filled the temples of Jerusalem 2000 years ago.  I hereby assure those who murmur and those who are more inclined to the Truth, that that divination – as the one experienced by the prophet Isaiah – was preceded by revelation, and has been buttressed by subsequent proofs.  For who gives himself up to looking for proofs of something he does not believe in or the predication of which he does not care about?  A summary of the event of the divination and of some of the ecumenical evidences which support it, are as follows.

Summa Dialectica Divinus

 “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.  He came unto his own, and his own received him not.”

                                                                                                            John 1.10-11

Surely, it is said that “But of that day and that hour, no man knoweth, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son but the Father only.”  This has been taken by many eschatologists, scholars of the Parousia in particular, to mean that the knowledge of Christ’s return is unknowable and that his advent is instantaneous, citing select verses from Matthew 24, and 1 Thessalonians 4.  This literal interpretation of these verses is but poor hermeneutic analysis, and runs counter to the Messianic precedent of the organic development of the body of Christ as well as the propensity of God on High to conceal the Truth of his Word in the inadequate verbiage of gospel.  Even opponents of Christianity know enough of this phenomenon, the Divine eschewing of literalism, to imitate or deride it.  I can recall to the attention of the learned, the infamous Coda of the heresiarch, Satornibus Adamus, the central cosmology of which was based on the numerological and Symbolist significance of the number 42.  I can also draw attention to the more puerile example of the obscure French writer, R. Albert Jean-fils whose essay, La Trahison Des Clerics brutally skewered Cardinal Mazzarin – architect of the critical clerical endorsement for the reign of Louis XIV – not simply by a tongue-in-cheek satirical ‘addendum’ (purportedly written by Mazzarin himself) of the Cardinal’s theological masterpiece, Le Monarchie de Droit Divin, but also by weaving an accusatory expletive into the essay via an acrostic, coded simply by the italicization and bolding of the first letter in each substantive paragraph.  (R. Albert Jean-fils did not, as was just, long survive this blasphemy.)

K’ung Fu-Tzu – that wise but pagan Oriental from the country of Haier – once stated that “If I hear the Way of Truth in the morning, I am content to die in the evening.’  I hereby present to you the Way and the Truth and the Life not simply as it was revealed to me, but also – in summary – those independent proofs of his existence which Jehovah has made manifest in the life of His Second Son, Bharat Jagdeo.  I will simply say that the first revelation came to me one afternoon as I was speaking with the President at State House – he was commending and rewarding me for my fairness and tolerance in the execution of my duties as Chairman of the Ethnic Relations Commission.  I had just secured His Excellency’s generous personal donation to my carrying out the Lord’s work, when a shaft of golden light descended from what I believed to be the window; when I got up to close the windows I saw that all were closed already and that the shaft of light emanated from what seemed to be the wall itself although there was no hole in it.  I looked back at His Excellency and he seemed all on fire and I heard a mighty voice from on high say, ‘Behold, Your Worship, my Spirit made Flesh and in Whom I am Well Pleased.  I charge you, Juan, to proclaim His glory in all the public spaces of the World, even unto Providence, for the Stadium there pleaseth me as a venue for His praises to be sung, even unto the multitude.’   I recall only picking up my briefcase containing the President’s monthly gift of charity, and leaving with a greater sense of Enlightenment than I’ve ever felt before.  The sage, George of Burgos writes of the mixed fortunes of those who have been privileged to witness directly the glory of God – “Saul who was blinded on the road to Damascus; the rabbi Simon ben Azai, who saw Paradise and died; the famous soothsayer John of Viterbo, who went mad when he was able to see the Trinity; the Midrashim, abominating the impious who pronounce the Shem Hamephorash, the secret name of God; Nils Runeberg who wandered through the streets of Malmö, praying and who died soon after of the rupture of an aneurysm”.  I escaped my revelation sighted, sane, and sound of body, and set myself the task of seeking the proofs of this euangelion, some of which I share now with you:

Unity is the name of the village in which Bharat Jagdeo was born.  This is not a simple fact, nor an accident of origin.  The thread of oneness is one that runs through the President’s life, including his current status as a single man – one unbroken by his supposed marriage to Varshnie Jagdeo since it was sanctioned neither by the Church nor by the Laws of Guyana – as well as the fact he as emerged as the greatest leader of a country whose motto is “One People, One Nation, One Destiny.”

Numerical symbolism is also crucial in supporting my divination of the Divine Nature of Bharat Jagdeo.  In no aspect of his worldly genesis is proof of Bharat Jagdeo’s divinity more apparent than in the date of his birth.  The symbolism of his being born on the 23 of the first month is rooted not only in the hierarchical numeracy associated with the Trinity (1-2-3), but also in the sequentialism of the New Genesis 1,2,3.  And numerologists and mystics throughout the ages have long written and observed the place of 23 in significant global events. (viii)

Temporal strife, and this is my final proof for now, is often the soil and loins from which divinity springs,humanitas the womb and loam of impeccabilitas.  That Bharat Jagdeo was born in 1964, the year that marked the beginning of the Satanic regime under which Guyana was held for 28 years (vix) is significant that his 28th year brought freedom to this land – his ascension then to the position of greatness from that point onwards was as if foretold in scripture.  And today, today, I – a simple man, a postman and priest – am charged with bringing you the news that while we may be losing a President, we are gaining a Redeemer, a Saviour… for he is Lord, he is Lord, he is Lord.

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.

Hosanna in excelsis.

Juan Edghill, Episcoparus*

Notes

* It should be stated that in light of the preceding epoch-defining Christological revelation, a special Vatican committee has been convened to initiate the mechanism necessary for the instant and precedent setting non-posthumous canonization of the author, as a first step towards his eventual automatic elevation to the Papacy, subsequent of course to the terrestrial departure of Pope Benedict the Sixteenth.   On his ascension, His Worship – the Bishop formerly known as Juan Edghill – shall thereafter be officially referred to as Pope Juan the Turd.  We strongly and enthusiastically believe that, judging from the Bishop's record of achievement, this is an honorific he richly deserves even now.