Pure White Lily Plaza, late November dusk.
Snow had begun to sift through the high cedars that guard the City of God Sovereignty, each flake catching the last amber light before vanishing against the white stone underfoot. A hush lay over the amphitheater like held breath; only the low wind in the douglas-firs and the distant thunder of the hidden falls spoke aloud.
At the center, upon a dais of unhewn basalt veined with quartz, stood I, Michael of Nebadon, clothed as a man among men—dark wool coat falling to the knee, white linen at the throat, boots still flecked with the mud of worlds I had lately walked. My hair was bound simply at the nape; no crown, no blazing or otherwise, announced me. Those who know me need no announcement.
Around the plaza the new arrivals gathered, drawn by roads none but spirit could chart.
A lama from the high plateaus of Tibet, saffron robes dusted with travel, eyes still wide with the altitude of revelation.
A barefoot aborigine woman from the red heart of Australia, ochre markings glowing against her dark skin, carrying a coolamon filled not with water but with songlines.
A young physicist from CERN, coat unbuttoned despite the cold, clutching a notebook whose equations had lately begun to sing.
A former child soldier from South Sudan, now tall and quiet, the scars on his arms catching the torchlight like pale lightning.
A poet from Reykjavík whose verses had outgrown every language she owned.
They and a hundred more—some in silk, some in rags, some in the plain dress of Midwestern farms—stood shoulder to shoulder under the same falling snow, waiting.
I lifted one hand, palm open, and the snow itself seemed to pause.
“Children of time,” I began, voice low yet carrying to the farthest cedar, “you have crossed oceans of water and oceans of doubt to stand here in this high valley where the earth still remembers Eden. You feel the thinness of the air, the nearness of the stars, the hush that is not silence but listening. Good. Feel it. This is the threshold.
“You have read—some of you—that the finite creature cannot approach the Infinite Father directly, that the gulf is too vast, the glory too blinding. You have read it and despaired, thinking the road too long, the requirement too high, the self too small. Tonight I tell you otherwise.
“The Father is not hiding.
“He has never hidden.
“It is not His aloofness that keeps you from Paradise; it is the gravity of the creaturehood itself—beautiful, necessary, temporary gravity. Were I to translate the least of you this instant to the blazing Isle of Paradise, you would stand in the midst of the Father’s presence and not know Him, even as mortals on Urantia walk daily in My presence and call Me brother, friend, stranger, and pass by.
“Yet listen—” I stepped down from the dais until I stood among them, close enough that the physicist could see the snow melting on my coat, close enough that the child soldier could see the scar that runs beneath my left eye from a nail driven long ago on a minor planet.
“The Father has solved this seeming impossibility with a gesture of unspeakable tenderness. He has placed within each of you—not the worthy, not the educated, not the pious, but each of you—a fragment of His own absolute self. A Thought Adjuster. A Mystery Monitor. A pure droplet of the final reality dwelling in jars of clay, tents of skin, waiting.
“That gift is uniform. The lama has no more of it than the child who once carried a rifle. The physicist’s equations do not purchase a superior model. The poet’s metaphors do not enchant a prettier spark. The same unutterable Pre-Father fragment indwells the billionaire and the beggar alike. That, beloved, is the democracy of eternity.
“And when a soul—any soul—turns wholly, without reservation, toward the Father’s will, crying in the depths, ‘Not my will but Thine,’ something irreversible occurs. The fragment awakens fully. The fusion flame ignites. And from that moment, no power in the universe—not depravity, not pain, not the accumulated gravity of ten thousand wrong choices—can prevent that soul’s steady translation, sphere by sphere, inward and upward, until it stands at last in the actual presence of the Source and Center and knows as it is known.
“Time? Yes, vast time is required. You will circle the seven superuniverses more times than your present mind can hold. But every circle spirals inward. Every translation is a homecoming postponed only long enough for love to perfect itself.
“Look around you tonight.” I swept my hand across the gathering. Snow had begun to crown every head like absolution. “These beside you are your future fusion companions, your mansion-world classmates, your finaliter comrades. The one whose language you do not speak will one day teach you songs that only perfected beings can sing. The one whose skin is not your color will stand beside you when you both behold the Father face to face.
“So do not fear the road. Do not resent the years. The Father desires your company more than you desire His—and that is a wonder that still astonishes even a Creator Son.
“Settle this in your philosophy now and forever:
To each of you, and to all of us,
God is approachable,
the Father is attainable,
the way is open.
“The snow falls gently because it has eternity to reach the ground.
Walk as gently.
Love as fiercely.
Choose, every morning, the will of the One who chose you before you were.
“And I, Michael of this local universe of Nebadon, your elder brother who once walked your Urantia dust in sandals now long decayed—I promise you: you will see Him. You will embrace Him. You will become, particle by particle, the unique and eternal version of Himself He has always dreamed you could be.
“Until that day, the pure white lilies of this plaza will keep blooming through every winter, and the light at the heart of this City will never dim.
“Welcome home, little ones.
The adventure has only just begun.”
I stepped back. The snow resumed its falling. Somewhere a single cedar bough released its burden in a soft crash of white. And in the hush that followed, a hundred new disciples—some weeping, some laughing, some simply breathing as though for the first time—knelt, not to me, but to the unspeakable Presence that had always been waiting inside them.
And the City of God Sovereignty, hidden high in the Cascades, glowed a little brighter against the dark.
Michael Of Nebadon
