The Waystation

My name is Peter; my last name doesn’t matter.  By the time you read this I may have been dead for hundred of years so you would never have heard of me - well, dead at least by previously conventional standards. I was named after the “rock-church” guy; my parents were devout Catholics.  Anyway, I’m just your average Peter, one of millions of Peters who have passed through here over the centuries.  I am writing this journal for you, the next Grey Messenger, but I know that while personally therapeutic, in the end my chronicle will have no purpose.  To be honest, I must delude myself and assume that He will let someone else read it so that I can keep my sanity but even more so, so that I don’t slip and make a critical mistake, something that is almost impossible to do here.  I know that much of what I say may be unfamiliar to you if it’s centuries before you are assigned.    I’m having such a very difficult time holding it all together, dealing with the sorrow, the anger, the pain, the sin.  But if I fail, the consequences will be so very severe, and I will be damned and I know what that means and eventually so will you if you don't already.  I’ve been in this place for nearly fifty years I would guess, which is a very short time by standards here.  It seems like an eternity, and yet I’m just getting started. 

I’m sure He considers it a kindness and I know that it truly is, to allow me to write the journal.  He is quite aware of the weight He has placed on my shoulders.  That was His point after all and while the circumstances as to how we came to be here may differ, all Grey Messengers are treated exactly the same.  Since no one ever sleeps here, it’s obvious that He knows I need some kind of relief from time to time, some sort of respite if I’m ever to acquire that which He so desperately wants to give me. But this ain’t a socialist Utopia.  “We are all in this together” may be a romantic concept or a great sound bite in a political campaign in the last world, but it doesn’t work here.  In here, I’m responsible; in here, it’s every man for himself. You can’t shift the blame; you can’t redistribute your transgressions against Him.  There are no second chances. There is no greater good.

I know that He will see to it that files and a cabinet are in my office and after recording my thoughts I will place my journal into a file and the file into the cabinet.  It will always be there when I need it but I know it’s all an illusion for my benefit.  The file doesn’t really exist, nor does the pen I feel I am holding in my hand as I write or the paper in the journal or the cabinet in which the journal is placed.  Even if the journal did exist, would He let someone read it?  I would like to think that He would but it is much to ask, I think.  Still in His wisdom He knows that for me to execute my responsibilities I need a connection to the life that I left until I can accept my new reality.  Geo told me that it takes centuries to understand and accept this place but I don’t believe I ever will.

It’s so very, very strange here – I’m still not used to it or even sure what is real or what is not. I have no body, no physical presence but that doesn’t matter.  I retain all the senses, the feelings, the sensations, even the free will that I had in my corporal life.  I know that I lived; I know that I died and I know that I am a soul.  But what is a soul?  I have learned that a soul is a complete mental and spiritual chronicle of everything, and let me emphasize that I mean everything, that you ever did in your former life. Yet it isn’t simply that.  Attached to that chronicle is an overwhelming feeling of unadmitted responsibility, of self deception, of perpetual selfishness, of unaccepted guilt, of one’s sins.  But you can’t shun it, you can’t ignore it, and you absolutely cannot walk away from it.  There are no convenient memories here, no equivocations, no self justifications, no “yeah, but’s”.  You can’t justify deception by arguing about what the definition of “is” is.  You know what you did and so do they and you can’t walk away from it - not here, never here.  Everyone in the valley knows what everyone else did in their lives.  There are absolutely no secrets in this place.