The Story of Paul Tarsus

     This story is true.  It is a story that I have debated telling for many years and I am not fully convinced that the time is right.  But as my life nears its autumnal years, I have no choice but to put these words on paper.  With all of the modern skepticism, new age beliefs, and false prophets, will the world ever be susceptive to the understanding of a modern miracle from God?  I pray that my words will do justice to the importance of this event and that the message reaches enough receptive ears that it will be preserved for future generations.

      With this daunting task at hand and with years of deliberate, contemplative preparation I will hereby attempt to present this implausible chronology; a factual account of the most remarkable person in our modern history.  This is a story about a child who lived but a scant eleven years; a child whose extraordinary talents and insights gave those of us fortunate enough to have known him, a clearer understanding of the purpose of our lives; a child who both embodied and transcended the heaven and hell of human existence. 

     This is the story of Paul Tarsus as I remember it.  I will endeavor to avoid taking license to embellish his tale with unnecessary implications and assumptions.  There were of course, many people with whom Paul interacted outside of my presence and except where I was reliably informed about those acts, I cannot recount those incidents with integrity and must leave my readers wanting for the truths beyond my memory and experience. 

      In the interest of the unavoidable honesty that is innate in the understanding of Paul and his teachings, I have changed nothing within this report other than the names of those who wished to practice their lives with privacy.  Every included person in this text has been personally contacted for the purpose of both gaining their permission and to forewarn them of this publication.  There are those ancillary characters of whom I have little or no knowledge, that by their own familiarity with Paul and his life, will be able to identify the aliases that I have herein crafted.  To those people I can only ask their kind favor in protecting my friends from untoward incursions into their sequestration. 

     There is one detail that has been omitted from this proclamation.  I have promised Paul's parents to keep secret the burial place of the child.  In addition to the distracted and ignorant souvenir hunters wishing to fill their reliquaries, I know that there are avid and earnest academicians who would relish the revelation of Paul's sepulcher for the sacred purpose of studying the genome that produced this tragic prophet.  I will state this: Paul is interred in a place of his own choosing.  He lies in a simple grave marked only with his Christian name and the dates of his birth and death.  His earthly remains are adorned with a ambrosial garden of azaleas, roses, gardenias and camellias, his spirit, as it did in life, exists in a realm beyond our understanding.  I visit him often, at his grave and in my prayers.

     When I met Paul, I was only 23 and he was a child of four.  He came into my life by the fortunate happenstance of being born to an ex-girlfriend of my older brother.  Sheila Swartz-Tarsus had remained friendly with my family but in my rebellious early adulthood, my familial contact was sporadic at best.  I would occasionally see Sheila and her husband, Gus, around town; I knew they had a son, but my relationship to her family, and likewise with my own, was kept distant to avoid the uncomfortable task of justifying or apologizing for my lifestyle and chosen avocations. It was during a prolonged intoxicated binge that I had the occasion to debate the sectarian and cultural perversion of religious truths with a professor from my seminary days.  He was an Orthodox priest and it was at his insistence that I attended what he referred to as an unvitiated mass at his church.  It was there, in a stupor of religious ambiguity and alcohol withdraw, I reaffirmed my friendship with Sheila and Gus Tarsus, and met their remarkable child, Paul.

     I was ignorant of many things in those youthful days of debauchery.  I blamed my faltering Faith on my studies of the history of sin inspired misinterpretations, inconsistent translations and self-indulgent amalgamations by so-called Christian leaders.  Science and Creationism had each spawned such strong arguments on the fallibility of other, that coexistence seemed possible only after haughty compromise and ideological transmogrification.  From Biblical timelines to Paleolithic fossils, from Heaven and Hell to the expanding universe and theoretical God-particles, from deific miracles to quantum physics, I, like so many theologians and scholars, was in search of a divining or defining truth.  So it happened, without any stability of belief and with no basis of knowledge of empaths, dimensional thoughts, the Universal Mind, or disincarnate intellects, I met Paul; a child with the answers, with teachings, with abilities that defy the current precepts of medical science.  This child, reared simultaneously in the Orthodox and Judaic Faiths, fluent in English, Hebrew and Greek, would fortify my understanding of Faith, science and the undefinable.  Paul Tarsus would change me in ways that I still cannot explain, except to say, he gave me purpose.