“I came as you did in search of answers and in search of one.”
“In search of one what?”
“In search of one who.”
“Then who?”
It was only after a long pause that the answer came.
“The Oracle.”
Chapter 2
THE VISION
I DON’T KNOW how I can convey it, how unlikely it was . . . how unlikely that it happened to me, of all people. I doubted everything except what I could see with my own eyes. And so that’s where it began, with my own eyes.”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw a vision.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how,” he replied. “I never saw one before. I had no idea what to expect or what was happening.”
“How did it happen?”
“I was in my apartment. It was night. I was sitting on the couch, watching television, when the sound of the television began to fade into silence, and then my apartment . . . faded away . . . into the vision.”
“So what did you see?”
“I’ll tell you,” he replied, “but not just yet. At this point the main thing is that it made no sense to me. I couldn’t explain it.”
“You couldn’t explain what you saw or the fact that you saw it?”
“Both. There was nothing in it I could relate to or make sense of, and I couldn’t explain why I was seeing it in the first place. At first I thought I was going crazy. So I kept it to myself. I went to work, I came home, and I sat in my apartment and hoped it would never happen again. But that wasn’t to be. A week later, again at night, again while I was sitting on my couch, it happened . . . the same exact vision with every detail playing out as if I was watching a recording of the first vision.”
“So what did you think?”
“I thought I was crazy but that my insanity was remarkably consistent.”
“So what happened?”
“Another week went by, and it happened yet a third time, every detail unfolding exactly as it did before. It was then that I came to the conclusion that it couldn’t be me. No matter how crazy I was, there was no way I could have come up with something so detailed, so real, so consistent, and so totally foreign to anything I had ever seen or imagined before.”
“So if you weren’t going crazy, then what?”
“I didn’t know what. But if it didn’t come from me, then it had to be coming from somewhere else. And if it was coming from somewhere else, then there had to be a reason it was happening. I had to find out why.”
“How would you do that?”
“In the vision a name was given, a person called the Oracle. Along with that name, or title, was a directive. I was to find him. If I could find the Oracle, I would find the answer.”
“How could you possibly find him . . . if he even existed to begin with?”
“I didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t even know if he was real. But I decided the best way was to go to my computer and search the internet.”
“And what did you find?”
“A lot of companies and products and services and projects are called Oracle. That didn’t help. So I decided to search the meaning of the word. An oracle was one who spoke, and more specifically, one who spoke divine revelation or counsel or prophecy, an authority you went to for revelation and truth. An oracle could also refer to the revelation itself, the truth, the word, the counsel, the prophecy, the message given.
“The ancient world was filled with oracles. As long as people seek revelation and as long as they believe that there are those who can reveal such things, there will always be oracles of one kind or another. The most famous of these was the oracle at Delphi. The seekers would journey to the Temple of Apollo to receive the oracle’s revelations. But the oracles were all over . . . in China, India, Europe, South America, Africa, all over the world, each claiming the powers of revelation and prophecy, each claiming to speak from God or the gods.”
“So oracles were a part of pagan religion.”
“Pagan oracles were part of pagan religion,” he replied. “The Bible speaks of the pagan soothsayers and warns against their practices, the channeling of spirits, the practicing of divination, and the worship of pagan gods. But the Bible is also filled with those called and appointed