THE CHRONICLES Book Eight – the man who sought to disprove God

‘The resurrection is his favorite target,” Resha said. “He says the accounts contradict, so it cannot be history. He says the earliest gospel ends with the women running away afraid and no risen Christ at all, and everything after was added by the church to sell the story. He says it in fifty-five seconds with a cut every three seconds and music underneath, and they believe himạỊạ
“He talks about church history too,” Rimmah said. “The crusades. The inquisitions. The witch trials. Every pastor who was ever caught with his hand in the offering plate or worse. He does a whole series called Receipts. He puts the date on the screen and the name of the scandal and says, This is your church. This is what your God’s people do.i
“Some of it is true,” the Devil said.
“Some of it is true,” Resha agreed. “That is the beauty of it. We do not have to invent much. They have given us plenty. We only have to make sure he presents it as though it were the whole story, and as though the Carpenter were the one holding the torch at every burning.”

THE CHRONICLES Book SIX The Meditation

A grown man three seats down had both hands on his own head and was shouting a name into the air with an intensity the chronicle has heard directed at almost nothing else in an ordinary week — not at a grave, not at a wedding, not in a hospital corridor at three in the morning. He had never once heard that man make that sound about anything that would matter to him in five years.

And a boy, catching a ball thrown from ninety feet, receiving all of it — nineteen thousand throats at once, arms up, a whole building come to its feet for a man who would not remember any of their faces by morning.

Not one word of it went upward.

“I didn’t have a second chance,” he said, to no one, in the noise, “and I have never once wasted a moment regretting that I don’t. There is nothing in me that grieves the shape of my own sentence. It is what it is and I settled the question of it before your sun was hung.

“But you have one. Every single one of you standing in this building has the one thing I will never again be offered, still open, still available at the hour I am watching you, and you are spending it on a man who cannot dribble a ball into eternity.”