In the Wake of Ahmadinejad's Visit, Author Calls for Interfaith Cooperation

Author Riva Sepia's novel, The Secret of Jesus, Peter, and Jacob, fights the growing tide of religious strife around the world. In this simple story, two boys from different religious backgrounds are implicated when a statue of Jesus disappears. The resulting tension ends when the innocent wisdom of children teaches adults about true spirituality.

New York, NY November, 2007 - During his September visit to Columbia University, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended the right to cast doubt on the Holocaust. His words fuel the rising tide of religious-based strife that author Riva Sepia says must end.
   
"For thousands of years believers of many different faiths have been at each other's throats," Sepia says, "when instead we should be friends."
   
Her book, The Secret of Jesus, Peter, and Jacob, takes up this cause with a simple and positive tale. The story is told through the eyes of Jacob, a young Jewish boy who lives in the small town of Shelton. His best friend, Peter, claims the statue of Jesus in the Catholic church has spoken to him. When Peter insists that Jacob go into the church to hear it himself, Jesus asks the boys to stop his suffering by taking him off the cross.
   
Moved by Jesus' obvious suffering, the boys oblige. The priest, Father Francis, is at a loss to explain what has happened. The statue of Jesus weighs several hundred pounds and would have taken many men to move. The boys know better, though. When they pulled the nails from the cross, the statue grew warm and supple. The living Jesus climbed down the ladder and into the world.
   
But everyone wants to put him back on the cross. The congregants find the empty crucifix too hollow a symbol to focus their prayers. When Rabbi Levy of the local synagogue confronts Jacob about having visited the church, Jacob's father can't help but laugh. "For two thousand years we've suffered as Jews for putting Jesus on the cross," he says. "Now they're accusing my boy of taking Jesus off the cross! We can't win either way!"

Among moments of humor and heartwarming innocence, The Secret touches on issues that are tearing the world apart today. The millennia-old accusations that Jewish people are guilty of deicide have appeared in everything from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ to the Vatican's inclusion of a prayer for the conversion of Jews in a recent papal order about the Latin Mass.

That's how a statue should look

"How do children learn these things?" Sepia asks. "Through the parents. We adults are teaching the next generation to continue these old hatreds. But we are in the Twenty-first Century. The Jesus in my story is a Twenty-first Century Jesus. It's time we started living like that, too, in the modern world!"

The author's words have particular meaning when considering the continued violence by Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel. Our world, Sepia says, is torn apart by religious strife on many fronts, including America. The story in The Secret reflects those conflicts in the microcosm of small-town life.

The boys wonder that the Catholics can't be satisfied by the simple cross used in the Protestant church. The Catholics demand the return of their image so fervently that the priest arranges to have another made. Court officers treat the entire thing like a theft and try to eliminate any spiritual context from their investigation. Jacob's father celebrates that Jewish people are finally as free from their pain and suffering as the liberated Jesus.

The boys, meanwhile, have sworn that they won't tell anyone Jesus is again walking the earth. They are afraid he will be pinned back onto the cross in the church. "The poor thing," Sepia says of Jesus. "He's suffered enough. Take him down already!"
   
In the end, Father Francis finds an acceptable solution. St. Mary's will have its statue...one with no ears, eyes or mouth. "That's how a statue should look," the Father claims, because statues don't hear, see or speak. "Jesus," he says, "definitely is not a statue." The people of Shelton will have to be satisfied with Jesus' spirit. They will put aside their idols just as Abraham did in the Biblical stories.
   
And Jesus? Well, he's walking back to his home in Israel. God wants him to reason with Ishmael and Isaac, the sons of Abraham, so they will make peace. Before leaving, he says that if Jacob visits him during Hanukkah, the boy can light the first candle. He assures Peter that he will always be allowed to light the second candle.
   
"Perhaps with the holidays coming up," Sepia says, "people will have pity on poor Jesus and end his suffering forever."
   
And in doing so, they will take one giant step toward ending the suffering caused by religious strife in our world.

The Secret of Jesus, Peter, and Jacob is available from Barnes & Noble or through Amazon.com. Riva Sepia's other books include Speak to Me About Love, a young woman's quest to capture the opportunities presented by the cultural revolution of 1970s America while captivating a special man.

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