Free The Shroud Codex by Jerome R. Corsi Page B

about his wife. He had loved Elizabeth since they were teenage sweethearts in high school. They married just as he entered medical school and she worked in an office as a legal secretary to support his medical education. He was in the operating room, in the middle of a very complicated heart surgery, when Elizabeth died. He learned after the operation that she had a brain aneurism that nobody realized she had.
    Castle never forgave himself. If only he had listened when Elizabeth complained of headaches. He should have insisted Elizabeth get more thorough diagnostic checkups. If he had been more loving and attentive, the aneurism that killed his wife might have been discovered in time and her life could have been saved. He never would have gotten through medical school without her. Castle, for all his brilliance as a heart surgeon and psychiatrist, never got over the guilt that there was nothing he did to save his young wife’s life.
    Still, Castle was not impressed. “You’re good, Paul. I will have to admit that. But it is no secret my wife died early in my career. You’re an intelligent man and you could easily have surmised I felt guilty. It may surprise you but a lot of my patients are very intuitive. Sometimes I think the more psychologically disturbed my patients are, the more intuitive they become. You’re not the first patient to try to intimidate me or throw me off the track by trying to turn the tables with imagined insights you think you have gleaned from my past.”
    “You never remarried.” Bartholomew persisted, ignoring what Castle had said. “Was that because you still feel guilty? Or, do you worry you would kill another woman by marrying her and neglecting her, too, just as you did with Elizabeth?”
    “We’re not here to psychoanalyze me,” Castle said firmly. “And I’m not impressed with your little guessing game, or with you calling me Dr. Freud. I don’t believe for a minute that Jesus is here in this room with you, or that you have any secret friend who squirrels away insights to you about people’s lives. A lot of people have imaginary friends as children. It’s time, Paul, for you to grow up.”
    Bartholomew listened silently, not seeing any point in responding. He felt he had nothing to prove to Dr. Castle.
    “So far all you are accomplishing is to confirm my suspicion you have a form of multiple personality disorder,” Castle continued. “That Jesus you imagine you see sitting on my couches is nothing more than your manifestation of your subconscious.”
    “That’s where there’s a big difference between you and me, Dr. Castle.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Simple. Jesus showed me your soul and you obviously seem to hate God as much as you seem to hate religion.”
    “I don’t hate anybody,” Castle objected. “You’re projecting onto me what you want to believe about me. That’s all.”
    “No, it’s not all,” Bartholomew said very slowly and very seriously. “Believing in God is an experience, not a matter of logical proof. If the existence of God could have been proved by logic or by argumentation, the issue would have been settled by Aristotle or maybe St. Thomas Aquinas at the very latest.”
    “I concede the point,” Castle argued. “But so what? That the existence of God cannot be deduced from logic is hardly a news flash.”
    “I understand,” Bartholomew said, returning Dr. Castle’s direct stare. “But if you’ll permit me to predict something: before you are done with me, you will end up believing in God.”
    “I doubt it,” Castle answered skeptically. “You are the one here with the Jesus haircut and the stigmata, not me. This is my office you are sitting in and we’re on Fifth Avenue in the heart of New York City, not Jerusalem two thousand years ago at the time of Christ’s crucifixion and death. I’m not looking for a religious conversion and we are simply getting off track here.”
    “There’s one more thing Jesus wants you to know.”