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Rivkin, the Jewish historian, and by others who wrote directly about Jesus as a Jew in a Jewish world.

Essentially, my challenge became a conservative one: to render a convincing portrait of the Jesus of Scripture, the Jesus of tradition, the Jesus of personal devotion and belief.

Only the level of realism in the book was radical. That is, I took the technique of the realistic novel and used it as intimately as possible to present the living Boy Jesus of Scripture with His family, in Egypt, and in Nazareth after His return home. So complete was my commitment to the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation that no miracle reported in Scripture was left out by me, or skimmed over, or watered down for any contemporary prejudice on the part of "modern" believers who seek to "tame" the power of Scripture in the name of a variety of social concerns.

Jesus is God to me in these pages. Jesus is God to me in my belief. Jesus is God when I pray to Him, and when He answers me. No other "version" of the Man from Galilee has ever held my interest or evoked in me the slightest interest.

It wasn't until February 2007 that the second volume was completed: Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana - a story of Our Lord's last winter in Nazareth before His Baptism in the Jordan, His confrontation in the desert with Satan, and His return to Cana for the miracle of water turned into wine.

Once again the commitment to the orthodox dogma of the Incarnation is total. The writings of the great theologians Karl Rahner and Walter Kasper informed and nourished my belief, as did the work of numerous New Testament scholars who do not, in spite of their tremendous range and obvious sophistication, apologize for their own vibrant Christian faith. The numerous books by New Testament skeptics always manage to be helpful, simply because these people ask so many interesting questions. But my answers invariably come out on the side of orthodox faith.

I'm still with the Creed as I say it weekly at Mass; and the

"hero" of my new Christian novels is God and Man in the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, Jesus Christ.

How this has "happened" is not so easy to explain.

It isn't simply a matter of finding skeptical New Testament scholarship so poor, so shallow, so irresponsibly speculative, or so biased. That has indeed been the case. But something else, something infinitely more positive, has been at work in my spiritual journey since 2002 a deepening love of the Incarnation, a deepening meditation on what the whole thing seems to mean.

Now I don't for a moment pretend to be a theologian, and I cannot write with the concise poetic beauty of a Rahner or Kasper, or Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI. No matter how beautiful, theology always ultimately challenges me with its density of abstractions, and sometimes even with its abstract intent.

What I must do here is convey to the general reader - the member of the mainstream who is my brother or sister in the mainstream - how the Incarnation has become the central overwhelming and sustaining mystery of my life.

This morning I was in church talking to the Lord, and thinking about this.

I live in California now.

And I'm miles from the sumptuous and enormous churches of New Orleans that I've described. But the church I go to in California is also an exquisite and uplifting church.

One feature it has which is of great meaning to me is a shrine of the Virgin Mary, with a pure white marble statue of Our Lady holding her Infant Son. Nearby is a bank of real wax candles, burning in tiny blue glasses, and before the shrine is a prie-dieu, where one can comfortably kneel, resting one's elbows on the shelf of wood that is part of the kneeler, and pray.

I treasure the time before Mass during which I can come to this shrine and address my special petitions to the Virgin, which are always fervent and gentle and basically have to do with a plea for care. "Take care of me, Mother," is perhaps the most frequent refrain.

What overcame me this morning was a powerful sense of why the Child Jesus in Mary's arms meant so much to me why this particular figure of the Lord always touches my heart.

What played out for me was a sense of Our Lord's entire life on earth, and the definite choices He'd made as to His