Chapter 1: Miri Meets Eyes

“You did not see me nor recognize me. I served you as a garment and you did not know me.” - Gospel of Mary

^{Reader note: If you read this before July 9, the woman you knew as Sera is now Miri. Nothing in her story has changed. I'd simply been calling her by the wrong name, and why it was wrong won't be apparent until Book 2. Hold onto "Sera," though. It isn't gone. It was just early.}

It felt like a hand inside the base of my skull and it pulled me out effortlessly and abruptly.

It seized hold of the bottom of my mind and yanked, and I was back on the cushion, back in the hotel room, gasping like I’d been holding my breath.

My eyes shot open. The candle was still burning. The icon still inviting. The prayer beads still in my fingers. The TV still blaring through the wall next door.

My hands were shaking. A deep, skeletal shake, like the bones themselves were rattling. I moved the beads through my fingers to feel the stones. I shifted my weight and found the ground beneath me supportive and firm. My spine was concave. My shoulders hunched. My head lolled back and forth, drooping from my neck like a pendulum. Side to side. Tick. Tock.

The clock!

I checked the clock. The world was exactly as I’d left it six — no, forty! — minutes ago. Where had I been? Where was I now?

I looked around haltingly from beneath my brow bone, like a captive willing herself to behold her tormentor. Where was my tormentor? I saw the dark grey furniture. The spare decoration. The deadbolt on the door. The artificial art. Real. Solid. Ordinary.

And nothing with eyes.

What was that?

I said it out loud to no one. Then, making the sign of the Cross:

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

The prayer of the Desert Fathers. The incantation of incarnation. A centering prayer — and a shield. It drew a moat of light around me that nothing but Christ could cross.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

My heartbeat slowed. The shaking eased. The breath caught up to itself. One vertebra at a time, my spine remembered it was supposed to hold me upright.

But my mind — my mind would not remember it was supposed to keep me steady.

I had been deep. Deeper than usual, which was saying something, because my usual was already deeper than most people ever go. My hunger for spiritual understanding was, according to Father Thomas, too willful for my own good. It had been dragging me into territories I feared and yearned to know fully since I was nineteen years old and a well-meaning yoga teacher said you have a gift and I took that for an invitation to open every door in the universe.

I opened a lot of doors. Chakras. Astral projection. Kundalini. Plant medicine — the real kind, in the jungle, with a shaman who smelled like tobacco and seekers who smelled like trauma. I was always reaching. That was the thing about me: I reached and I strived and it never stopped.

Until Him.

He showed up on the first night of an ayahuasca ceremony in the Peruvian Amazon. I was beset by demons of my own making and had screamed out — or maybe I thought it:

Jesus. Fucking. Help. Me.

Instantly, I felt a hand touch my neck and the walls of the well I had been drowning in dissolved around me. I was back on my mat. Back in the hut in the Peruvian jungle. Watching the shaman tend to a man weeping to my right. The dream was gone. The hallucination a flicker in my memory. I purged.

He returned on the second night, and on the third, until I could not feel the medicine at all — I was simply lucid in His all-encompassing presence. And He was always there, waiting, consoling, until there was nothing left in me to fear, no demons to battle, no frameworks to wade through. Just…calm surrender.

But, evidently, He had left something unfinished for me. Something left for me to know, that only returned once I got home from Peru when I realized I could no longer fully access the completion that I had felt with Him.

There was more work for me to do. Somewhere yet to arrive.

I had found my next station on the path from new age to Gnosticism. I had been working my way through the powers described in the Gospel of Mary: Passing through Darkness. Then Desire. Past Ignorance.

And they no longer recognized me because I had transcended those blockages and was no longer shaped like them. They did not see me as I moved with the ease of long practice to the threshold I always reached and struggled against: the Fourth Power and its seven forms — the point where Mary’s soul says what binds me has been slain and ascends free. But mine refused to.

I never ascended free. I remained bound here. This was the place where my striving always faltered and never resolved. Existential angst that tantalized me into distraction. Categories that clouded my attention. Knowledge that teased my faith. Edges that toyed with my faculties without granting satisfaction. The Power I was unable to transcend, that still recognized me. No matter the technique, I could not get back to the peace of completeness I felt only once, inside and beside Christ in the jungle, and never again since.

So that night, with the Nag Hammadi texts spread across my hotel room floor like a map to somewhere, I hovered again at the threshold. Luminous and bound. Striving and waiting. The same place where I always begged for release.

That’s when something touched me.

Not on my neck but from across. From a lateral direction I didn’t know existed in that space, in a chasm opening between thoughts that I’d never noticed before.

The other Powers had discernible qualities I recognized: fog, anxiety, certainty. This Power, the one that always refused me passage, simply felt like inscrutable blankness. No qualities at all for me to work with.

But today, instead, what it had was eyes.

Something was looking at me. Something was looking at me the way it looks at a doe when it’s been stalking through winter for a lifetime.

The eyes told me three things.

The first: this presence carried a longing I knew well. The same reaching. The same aching at the threshold. The same standing at the edge of a bottomless want that kept slipping through my fingers. Whatever this was, it was stuck too. Stuck in a way that matched mine so precisely it was like looking at myself. Am I the Fourth Power?

The second: it needed to consume me. I could feel its hunger, ancient and deep, like a rumble in my own voracious consciousness. But unlike mine, this being’s hunger was born of heedless, domineering command, the way an obsessed historian devours a long-lost lectionary, or how a starving man regards bread.

Or how a predator looks at a doe in winter. Did he — it — want to need me? Does a predator want the doe, or does he merely need it to survive? The blankness around me darkened.

The third — and this was the thing that should have frightened me more than the hunger and didn’t: the third thing was butterflies.

My stomach. A low flutter in my belly that I have only ever associated with a lover I pined after but wasn’t mine to keep. A travel romance pleading to make its home in my heart but resigning itself to the tyranny of geography. A longing. A thrill. A promise I had been praying for. Union. Asking God to show me. Asking God to send me whoever it was I was supposed to love with everything I had become, with all the love that lived inside me now — all this gratuitous love that had absolutely nowhere to go.

And here, in the deep place, in the territory between soul and spirit that I could not yet transcend, something touched my mind, and my body responded.

This was insane. I knew it was insane. But the body doesn’t lie the way the mind does, and my body was saying finally to something I couldn’t see clearly and shouldn’t even want — and that now threatened to consume me.

Then the eyes asked me: What are you?

Wondering. The captivated captor. The hesitant hangman. The executioner who stays his hand long enough to draw out my last sigh.

And then, trailing the question so quietly I almost missed it because my mind was already flipping through frameworks — demon, angel, psychotic break, what is this? —

You are the first thing I’ve wanted in eight hundred years. At first, I needed you. But now I want, and I will not feed my need.

SHIT — Jesus! Help! I thought with my whole mind.

That’s when the hand yanked my doe brain out of that winter.

And then I was here. On the floor. Trembling.

I sat with it for a long time.

Something in the spiritual realm had seen me. Something sentient. Something ancient. Something that looked at me with hunger and wonder and a sincerity that had no business existing alongside that much…power. And my stomach had done the thing. The finally thing.

And the part that frightened me — stupid, stupid girl — was not the eyes, but how much I wanted to go back.

But God is love, and there is no fear in it. I cannot and will not fear this thing. I am protected.

Whatever had found me in the dark, whatever had asked what are you? with the voice of genuine awe, had touched my mind.

And my mind was already leaning toward this mystery like a plant toward light.

My soul belonged to God, I knew, but my body was now leaning too. My chest. My belly. The places where I feel God, where I feel love, where I feel the things that are too private for Sunday mornings.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

I had been seen. Hadn’t I always wanted to be seen? And something in me — something deeper than choice, deeper than the years of spiritual practice that should have made me more cautious than this — something in me wanted this Power with eyes to possess me.

My body and my mind found each other again: I would have this dance. I would know its roads, no matter where they lead. And then I would transcend them. Because I knew the territory. Because I had Christ — and there is no fear in Him.

I blew out the candle and sat in the dark for a long time. The TV had gone quiet. The neighbors in the next room were finally asleep. The only sounds were the clockwork of my heartbeat and the question rising between my breaths:

What, in fact, am I? Am I child of God, or a doe in winter?

I didn’t have the answer yet.

But I would find it, wherever it lay.