"So do you think you can cure me, Dr. Castle?" Bartholomew asked.

"Do you want to be cured?" Castle asked.

"I'm not sure there's anything wrong with me."

"Look at you, Paul. Do you think there's anything about you that's normal?"

"Let me return the favor," Bartholomew said wryly. "So you don't think that your trimmed beard and nicely tailored clothes make you look like Sigmund Freud? All you need is the cigar."

"Touche," Castle laughed, appreciating the priest's intelligence and his wit. "So that's how you see it? Christ meets Sigmund Freud."

Bartholomew enjoyed the joke as well. "So, tell me, Dr. Freud, are you sure you don't want me to help cure you of this delusion? You must have heard by now that I have exceptional healing powers-maybe not as great as yours, but I'm told they're pretty considerable, just the same. If you let me take you into my own form of a.n.a.lysis, I am sure I could convince you not only that Sigmund Freud died a long time ago but also that there is a G.o.d who is very much alive."

Castle appreciated that Bartholomew was highly intelligent, smart enough to be a particle physicist invited to join the faculty of the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study in Princeton at a young age. Einstein had ended his career at the inst.i.tute and Bartholomew in his years as a physicist had aspired to solve the problems of a unified field theory that Einstein himself had failed to solve.

"But I've got to ask you a question," Castle said, wanting to get serious.

"I'm here to answer your questions," Bartholomew acknowledged. "Ask away."

"Why don't you cut your hair and trim the beard? Maybe if you looked a little less like Jesus Christ, you wouldn't be seeing a psychiatrist."

"That's possible," Bartholomew answered honestly, "but even if I could return to having short hair and being clean-shaven, I still have the stigmata."

"Are you telling me there is nothing you can do about your hair?"

"Every time I cut my hair and shave the beard, within a day or two the long hair and beard are back. I've tried cutting my hair and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g my beard three or four times a day, so they don't get a running start. But even that doesn't seem to work. If you want to prove it for yourself, we can head to the barber shop right now."

"That won't be necessary," Castle said, taking off his reading gla.s.ses so he could look Bartholomew directly in the eye. "I'm sure you know I'm an atheist."

"Yes, I do."

"I'm not even certain that Jesus Christ ever really existed. The events happened two thousand years ago. That's a long time ago. You're familiar with the Dead Sea scrolls, I a.s.sume."

"Of course."

"Then it's quite possible the whole story of Jesus Christ had been made up, out of a misunderstanding about the Essenes, the splinter religious sect that wrote the Dead Sea scrolls, or-who knows?-maybe by some other splinter Jewish religious sect wandering around in the desert of ancient Israel. Who knows if Christianity was invented simply to meet psychological needs these dissident religious groups faced in coping with their occupying captors from Imperial Rome. Besides, the Romans crucified countless thousands of people all over the ancient world. What was so significant about this one particular Jew? If there was a historical Christ and the ancient Romans did crucify him, I'm quite sure it was just another day's hard work for the centurions in Jerusalem unlucky enough not to be home in Rome. Instead they got the thankless job of nailing yet another unlucky Jew to boards and watching him die."

"There's one problem with your theory, Dr. Castle, as good and as interesting as I have to admit it is."

"What's that?"

"I died after that accident and I saw with my own eyes Jesus crucified. I stood there with my mother at Golgotha and I watched Jesus die."

"And I'm told you see Jesus in the confessional and that he tells you how to heal people. Is that correct, or did I get the wrong information."

"You have the right information," the priest said without showing emotion.

Then a thought occurred to Castle. "Do you see Jesus now?"

"Yes."

"Where is he, then?"

"He's with us right now, sitting right over there on your couch."

"I don't see him. How come you can see Jesus when I can't?"

"I can't answer that question," Bartholomew said. "But there's something I need to say to you."

Castle sat back in his chair. "What's that? Is it a message from Jesus?"

"I will let you decide that for yourself," Bartholomew said. "The only thing I want you to know is that you were not responsible for the death of your wife."

This took Castle by surprise. He rarely talked about his wife. He had loved Elizabeth since they were teenage sweethearts in high school. They married just as he entered medical school and she worked in an office as a legal secretary to support his medical education. He was in the operating room, in the middle of a very complicated heart surgery, when Elizabeth died. He learned after the operation that she had a brain aneurism that n.o.body realized she had.

Castle never forgave himself. If only he had listened when Elizabeth complained of headaches. He should have insisted Elizabeth get more thorough diagnostic checkups. If he had been more loving and attentive, the aneurism that killed his wife might have been discovered in time and her life could have been saved. He never would have gotten through medical school without her. Castle, for all his brilliance as a heart surgeon and psychiatrist, never got over the guilt that there was nothing he did to save his young wife's life.

Still, Castle was not impressed. "You're good, Paul. I will have to admit that. But it is no secret my wife died early in my career. You're an intelligent man and you could easily have surmised I felt guilty. It may surprise you but a lot of my patients are very intuitive. Sometimes I think the more psychologically disturbed my patients are, the more intuitive they become. You're not the first patient to try to intimidate me or throw me off the track by trying to turn the tables with imagined insights you think you have gleaned from my past."

"You never remarried." Bartholomew persisted, ignoring what Castle had said. "Was that because you still feel guilty? Or, do you worry you would kill another woman by marrying her and neglecting her, too, just as you did with Elizabeth?"

"We're not here to psychoa.n.a.lyze me," Castle said firmly. "And I'm not impressed with your little guessing game, or with you calling me Dr. Freud. I don't believe for a minute that Jesus is here in this room with you, or that you have any secret friend who squirrels away insights to you about people's lives. A lot of people have imaginary friends as children. It's time, Paul, for you to grow up."

Bartholomew listened silently, not seeing any point in responding. He felt he had nothing to prove to Dr. Castle.

"So far all you are accomplishing is to confirm my suspicion you have a form of multiple personality disorder," Castle continued. "That Jesus you imagine you see sitting on my couches is nothing more than your manifestation of your subconscious."

"That's where there's a big difference between you and me, Dr. Castle."

"What's that?"

"Simple. Jesus showed me your soul and you obviously seem to hate G.o.d as much as you seem to hate religion."

"I don't hate anybody," Castle objected. "You're projecting onto me what you want to believe about me. That's all."

"No, it's not all," Bartholomew said very slowly and very seriously. "Believing in G.o.d is an experience, not a matter of logical proof. If the existence of G.o.d could have been proved by logic or by argumentation, the issue would have been settled by Aristotle or maybe St. Thomas Aquinas at the very latest."

"I concede the point," Castle argued. "But so what? That the existence of G.o.d cannot be deduced from logic is hardly a news flash."

"I understand," Bartholomew said, returning Dr. Castle's direct stare. "But if you'll permit me to predict something: before you are done with me, you will end up believing in G.o.d."

"I doubt it," Castle answered skeptically. "You are the one here with the Jesus haircut and the stigmata, not me. This is my office you are sitting in and we're on Fifth Avenue in the heart of New York City, not Jerusalem two thousand years ago at the time of Christ's crucifixion and death. I'm not looking for a religious conversion and we are simply getting off track here."

"There's one more thing Jesus wants you to know." Bartholomew pushed on, undeterred.

"What's that," Castle responded cautiously. "I can hardly wait to hear what secret Jesus has revealed about me now."

"Jesus understands that you blamed yourself when your wife died. He also understands that you changed careers because you felt you might have caught her illness if you had been more attentive to her needs, to her mental state."

"That's actually not why I decided to become a psychiatrist," Castle said firmly, rejecting Bartholomew's suggestion that he changed careers out of guilt. "And again, you're veering us off course."

"Maybe so, but you have to forgive yourself."

"What's your point?" Castle shot back.

"My point is that you will remain dead inside until you open your heart to G.o.d, and you won't find what you are looking for with your success as a psychiatrist or with the millions of dollars you have earned from medicine."

"Paul, I hope you won't take offense, but that's what other religious people have told me before. You may think your comments are filled with great insight, but frankly I find them soph.o.m.oric. A college student taking Psychology 101 would have to do better to get an A. Quite frankly, you don't know what you are talking about."

"Maybe not," Bartholomew said, "but I doubt if anyone has ever told you that you have to take the first step toward your own mental health by forgiving yourself for your wife's death. G.o.d decides when each of us lives and when each of us dies. You may think you are more brilliant than anybody else you have ever met, including me, Dr. Castle, but you are not G.o.d."

"That may be," Castle responded calmly. "But since I'm the doctor here and you are the patient, you're going to have to let me do the question asking; otherwise I won't be able to work with you as a patient. Right now you are merely wasting time."

"As smart as you are, Dr. Castle, you are not as clever as G.o.d," Bartholomew said, folding his hands in his lap and sitting securely back in his wheelchair. "That is all I had to say."

"Good, I'm glad we're finished with that," Castle said, determined to get back control of the interview. "Again, if we are going to make any progress here, you are going to have to let me do the question asking. I am the doctor here and you are the patient. Do you understand that?"

"Yes, I do," Bartholomew said without argument.

"Okay, then," Castle said, ready to start over again. "I'm going to accept for a minute that you died after your car accident, just exactly as you have said. Can you explain to me why exactly you returned back to life?"

"G.o.d asked me to return to life," Bartholomew explained. "I was with my mother in Heaven and G.o.d said he had a mission for me to accomplish."

"What was that mission?" Castle asked.

"First, let me ask you this." Bartholomew wanted to make sure he had the right information. "Father Morelli said he discussed with you the Shroud of Turin. Is that right?"

"Yes," Castle affirmed.

"All right, then," Bartholomew continued. "What I am going to tell you is the truth, whether you can accept it or not. G.o.d asked me to return to earth to interpret to the world the Shroud codex."

"But a codex is a book, an ancient ma.n.u.script," Castle objected. "An image of a crucified man on a burial cloth is not a book. When you say the Shroud is a codex, what do you mean?"

"Learning to read the Shroud is like learning to read an ancient ma.n.u.script written in a language you can no longer decipher." Bartholomew tried to explain as clearly as he could. "You may think I have stopped being a physicist. But that isn't the case. I've never stopped being a physicist. Deciphering the meaning of the Shroud is like solving the most challenging equation physics has yet to solve. I will decipher the Shroud codex for the world, and when I understand the message of the Shroud and when I communicate that message to the world, the world will understand. When I had the experience of dying, after the car accident, G.o.d a.s.sured me that I would be able to communicate the message Jesus embedded in the Shroud. When I finally break through, you will be there to experience it firsthand. I'm confident you are the psychiatrist G.o.d meant me to see. Otherwise we would not be here together this day."

Castle's first reaction was that everything Bartholomew had just explained was delusional. "Is this why you are manifesting Jesus, with the long hair and the beard, and now with the stigmata?"

"Yes," Bartholomew answered. "I am manifesting Jesus. It started with my physical appearance and now I am beginning to manifest the wounds Jesus experienced in his pa.s.sion and death."

Castle decided to get to his core question right away. "Are you Jesus Christ? Is that what you want me to believe?"

"No," Bartholomew said emphatically. "I am not Jesus Christ. I am manifesting Jesus Christ."

"Are you manifesting Jesus Christ, or your idea of Jesus Christ?" Castle asked sharply. "This is an important distinction. How do you know what Jesus Christ looked like? He's been dead two thousand years and there's no photographs."

Bartholomew sat back in his chair and took a deep breath. He began slowly. "I know you don't believe me, but when I was dead I traveled to Golgotha and I saw Jesus on the cross dying. I was there with my mother. I know I look like Jesus because I saw Jesus with my own eyes. Whether you believe it or not, the Shroud of Turin is the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ. G.o.d told me that was true and I saw with my own eyes that the physical Jesus who lived and died two thousand years ago is the crucified man you see today in the Shroud of Turin."

Hearing this, Castle no longer had any doubt that Bartholomew believed his delusion was reality. Still, he knew Bartholomew was highly intelligent and he wondered how the priest would react to Castle's hypothesis that his subconscious was manifesting the physical characteristics of the man in the Shroud because Bartholomew wanted to believe that man was Jesus. "When was the first time you saw the Shroud of Turin?" he asked.

"I was in high school. We had a weekend retreat and one of the priests showed us photographs of the Shroud of Turin as one of our meditations."

"What impact did the Shroud of Turin make on you?"

"Profound. I had never heard about the Shroud before and I was overwhelmed to learn how precisely the image of the man in the Shroud matched the pa.s.sion and death of Jesus."

"Did you study the Shroud after that?"

"Yes, I have never stopped studying the Shroud."

That confirmed for Castle that Bartholomew had internalized the image of the man on the Shroud, such that his subconscious was capable of projecting that image back in the manifestations Castle was currently seeing. "Maybe studying the Shroud has made such an impact on you that your imagination has taken over. Surely you must realize that all of us project onto reality what we want to believe is true."

Bartholomew thought for a minute, formulating his answer. "I know you think I am mentally ill," Bartholomew said. "But you have to accept that I really did experience dying. I'm not trying to make myself look like Jesus. All this is just happening, exactly like G.o.d told me it would."

Castle made some additional notes in Bartholomew's file.

"Are your wrist wounds painful?" he asked.

"Not all the time."

"How about now?"

"No, they are not painful now."

"Are they bleeding now?"

"Not that I know."

"You went unconscious at the altar when the wounds on your wrists appeared. Tell me what happened."

"Again, you won't believe me if I tell you."

"Tell me anyway."

"When the stigmata hit me, while I was saying Ma.s.s, it felt like I had traveled back in time again. I was right back at Golgotha on the day of Christ's crucifixion, just like I experienced when I died and went to Heaven. Only this time, I was the person being nailed to the cross. Somehow I had taken the place of Christ and I was feeling his pain. The nails were being driven through my wrists. The pain was excruciating. I blacked out because I couldn't bear the pain. When I woke up, I was in the hospital. I have no idea how I got to Golgotha and I have no idea how I got back here."

"You were a successful physicist," Castle said. "Don't you consider time travel far-fetched?"

"No, I don't," Bartholomew said, responding firmly. "You may not know much about modern physics, but I was a particle physicist. I was looking for what Einstein called the unified field theory. Multiple dimensions and time travel were part of what I studied."

"Do you think time travel is possible?" Castle asked skeptically.

"It's a lot more than what Jules Verne imagined," Bartholomew answered. "I doubt if you want me to give you a graduate course in particle physics, but a lot of physicists, including me, think there are multiple dimensions, maybe as many as ten dimensions, that define our universe, not just length, height, width, and time."

"What made you change careers and decide to become a priest?" Castle asked.

"It was my mother's death. My mother raised me and I was devoted to her. She is maybe the only person in my life that I truly loved. After her death, I felt I needed to get closer to G.o.d. Suddenly, physics seemed to me to be going nowhere. Searching for a unified field theory only took me away from my mother while she was alive and the knowledge I gained there was no help to me whatsoever in healing her illness. She slipped away from me before I was ready to let her go."

"How did your mother die?"