K 20: Apostasy [Final Entry]
"Apostasy shall be rejected by all faithful. Those who have known and accepted the true faith and then subsequently come to reject it as untrue shall face the greatest punishment."
I've read these words innumerable times. In my Creation Rite, how long ago? she asked me what I thought the worst sin was, and why. I skipped over Amaranth. I quoted the apostasy passage, and compared it to Amaranth. Strange answer but well supported, she said.
The worst sin.
Was the crone right? My subconscious dislike for Simeon chipping through? Azariah probably thinks I was testing him, throwing it out there to see if he'd bite. Breathe the word apostasy in reference to Simeon and see what happens.
Truth is
Truth is, it just came out. I didn't say it, it said itself.
It's what any devout Sanctified should think when they hear someone might be having second thoughts. Isn't it? Yes.
But it came out, with the wrong people listening and Azariah so fragile these nights, it came out, a thought become sound, a current become waves, become a real and solid thing, sprouting wings, gone halfway through the city by now, mutating as it hops from host to host, and I haven't even gotten home yet.
Why did I say that out loud?
Am I tired? Am I sick? Was someone boring at me with some discipline I can't even put a name to? Revelation?
Inevitably, he'll come after me.
He'll take it as a death threat and start to plot. But it's Azariah's disappointment that worries me. Death will come one night and I'll be sent to judgment, whether at some hunter's hand or Simeon's or Azariah's himself. But while I'm here, despair does not come from the threat of assassination, but from failing the church.
Failing the church is the only real death.
(Well. That and apostasy.)
So we do not despair. We do not fail. We do the appropriate penance of the appropriate severity, and we guard our thoughts and our tongue, and work our asses off as we always have, and soon this mistake, like all the others, passes into obscurity, remembered only by one or two who bring it up just to remind you that they remember.
[Diary ends here]
I've read these words innumerable times. In my Creation Rite, how long ago? she asked me what I thought the worst sin was, and why. I skipped over Amaranth. I quoted the apostasy passage, and compared it to Amaranth. Strange answer but well supported, she said.
The worst sin.
Was the crone right? My subconscious dislike for Simeon chipping through? Azariah probably thinks I was testing him, throwing it out there to see if he'd bite. Breathe the word apostasy in reference to Simeon and see what happens.
Truth is
Truth is, it just came out. I didn't say it, it said itself.
It's what any devout Sanctified should think when they hear someone might be having second thoughts. Isn't it? Yes.
But it came out, with the wrong people listening and Azariah so fragile these nights, it came out, a thought become sound, a current become waves, become a real and solid thing, sprouting wings, gone halfway through the city by now, mutating as it hops from host to host, and I haven't even gotten home yet.
Why did I say that out loud?
Am I tired? Am I sick? Was someone boring at me with some discipline I can't even put a name to? Revelation?
Inevitably, he'll come after me.
He'll take it as a death threat and start to plot. But it's Azariah's disappointment that worries me. Death will come one night and I'll be sent to judgment, whether at some hunter's hand or Simeon's or Azariah's himself. But while I'm here, despair does not come from the threat of assassination, but from failing the church.
Failing the church is the only real death.
(Well. That and apostasy.)
So we do not despair. We do not fail. We do the appropriate penance of the appropriate severity, and we guard our thoughts and our tongue, and work our asses off as we always have, and soon this mistake, like all the others, passes into obscurity, remembered only by one or two who bring it up just to remind you that they remember.
[Diary ends here]