I couldn’t help raising an eyebrow. The Renaissance trappings, the King James language: it was all a bit much. Besides, what prayer could he possibly be referring to?

As if he were aware of my thoughts, he tilted his head and looked at me for a moment, quizzically, birdlike. I heard a long, musical “Oh” — not an external sound, but an “Oh” that resonated inside my mind like an arpeggio played on a harpsichord. Then he was gone, and in his place near the olive tree stood a seven-foot-tall ellipse of light.

“Does this suit you any better?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“In me,” said the light, “as the miracle of understanding is effortlessly achieved, each single truth that I discern shines in the radiance of all truths, like jewels in the crown of unitive knowledge. I am the intelligence that ceaselessly consumes every created thing, without being affected or changed by anything in return. Throughout the universe of my marvelously pure spiritual substance, all truths exist equally distant from one another and from myself, in such perfection of their harmony and correlations that even if I were to cease existing, the system of their simultaneous necessity, glittering like a diadem, would endure by itself, in all its sublime plenitude.”