"He trusts in the Lord," they say, "let the Lord rescue him.

Let him deliver him, since he delights in him."

— David the King (attribution), Psalm 22:8 (before BC 587)

AD 2014, and the sixth year of the presidency of Barack Obama, St. Thomas Mount, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

"Jesus!"

I trip over a stone on the dirt path and fall on my knees and hands. Cardinal Daniel and my wife, Sharon, rush to help me up. Right knee skinned and bleeding below the hem of my shorts, my palms raw and dimpled from the pebbly ground, I struggle back onto my feet with the help of a third pair of hands.

"Thank you, sir," I hear Sharon say.

Brushing the dust off my shirt and shorts, I render an embarrassed smile as I turn to thank the helpful hands and then my jaw sags, opening my mouth like a hooked bass. I marvel at the startling appearance of the Archangel Micha'el. He's manifesting this time in the form of a young Scandinavian tourist, also in shorts, much more tailored and groomed than the homeless man he appeared to be eleven years ago — when all this began in the oak forest near my home in Monterey.

He stands here between Sharon and Daniel, neither of whom has a clue they are talking to an archangel. They cheerfully chat it up with him about their hometowns in California and France. The good cardinal would be prostrate in the dirt if he knew. I'll tell him later — if there is a later in store for me.

What's Micha'el here for? Wait, I'm not ready to know. At least, not yet.

My big toe got stubbed and is leaking a bit of blood. Blood. The visual of Yeshua whipped and crucified flashes in my mind.

It's been nine months since the elderly African-American minister, Grandma Fontaine, rode all the way from Mississippi on a bus so she could shove me into the last set of experiences. They ended with a much bloodier conclusion than I could ever have imagined.

Then they went even further, finishing with a scary descent into a cold, hopeless Hell itself.

So, I'm wary of the Archangel's presence. Is he a hallucination? No, they're conversing with him freely. He's real and the three of them are walking towards the little church at the summit of this hillock. Sharon glances back once, checking on me.

"C'mon, Jack!" Sharon says.

"You three go ahead, I'll be along in a minute," I say, feeling a need to be alone right now.

Micha'el has come to get me again. Sharon turns toward the church and they continue on. Jumping a bit, I discover I'm not alone at all. Right beside me pops up a short, very slender woman. She looks familiar but I can't place her and she's so young that I take her for a teenager at first; then I notice the depth and sparkle of her blue-sky eyes. She wears her dishwater blonde hair as closely cropped as a high school boy in 1960 — the year I was born. Punctuating her fine, angular features are two eyebrow piercings and a small golden bauble attached to the outside of her right nostril. I can't help but focus on the hardware. It looks painful. On the side of her neck, there's a tattooed figure mostly covered by the collar of her white blouse. I can't make it out.

"It's a lion," she replies to my thought, tugging on her silky collar so I can enjoy the image of a resting male lion.

"Where's the lamb?" I ask. "You know the lion laying down with the lamb?" My attempt at flippancy to mask my jitters completely bombs.

"You will see soon enough," she says strangely.

Who is she?

The woman tucks her hands into the pockets of her blue jeans, her sleeveless white top tight around her slender upper-body. She wears a gold pendant with small red letters, proclaiming, "Hail!" She walks energetically beside me and has an indescribable, almost cat-like, quality to the lightness of her steps as if she's half-floating.

"Ha!" She emits a slight giggle, beaming a brilliant white smile as if she finds me curiously funny. "I love cats," she says, with another giggle.

Reading my cat-thought about her unnerves me more and now I wish I had stayed with the party of three walking about twenty paces ahead of me.

Who is she?

"Hey, we'll get to that in a minute," she responds, again to my unspoken thought. "Settle down, now. Patience." Her smile disappears.

"You're rushing things again."

There's a rich quality, an unmistakable authority in her voice. Also, I sense again a subtle familiarity about her, like the vague almost déjà-vu feeling that I've met her before. A little disturbing because I know that until this moment, I've never laid eyes on her.

"What can I do for you?" I ask, quickening our pace as I watch the eyebrow piercings raise.

"It's been a while. Yeah, nine months — a human pregnancy. You've had some time to unpack what you saw. Right?"

"Unpack what?" I reply. "The gory death of Yeshua, my friend. My trip, or should I say, my entrapment in Hell? You people sent me to Hell!"

She laughs.

"It's not a joke," I say. "None of what I saw, none of what I've been through, is funny."

"Oh, come on, Traveler!" she says with way too much familiarity.

"Don't call me Traveler. I don't know you, Miss."

"Oh, but you do. Wait. Hmm ..." The bauble at the tail of her eyebrow shifts up slightly as she frowns in thought; lower lip juts out as if searching her memory banks. "Yeah. No. Come to think of it, we never did meet directly, but I was like with you a ton of times."

She sounds more and more as if she just walked out of her homeroom at Monterey High.

Okay. It's a hallucination. I'm going crazy. Again. Damn! When is this all going to stop? Am I going to live the rest of my days not knowing what's real and what circuits are crossed in this tortured brain?

"Christ," I say dejectedly.

"Amen," she says, becoming more solemn. "I am called Gavri'el."

"Uh, what?" I blink at her.

"You named your daughter for me," she says to my vacant stare.

"Gabriella?" I ask. "She's named after her godmother, my aunt."

"Well, it's my name, too. Your aunt was named for me."

Tia Gabriella has been dead for fifteen years and this girl looks all of twenty. I shake my head to loosen up my grey matter a little. It makes me think of Eema, the name for Mom in Aramaic, Mother Mary's chosen nickname replacing the more common Miryam. During the Annunciation, Eema consented in the name of humankind to give birth to Yeshua and thus facilitating God's saving entry into history.

Is this slight, punctured female the Great Angel Gabriel?

I see the tattoo of a lion again. The lion. Some intel comes into my brain from a source I can't discern; I call this a download. Was she with me on that first day, when the mountain lion lunged at a fleeing rabbit across the road? I remember swerving my big Benz to avoid them, almost having a dance with one of...