A Dark Sermon (Gambar 14)

Gambar was gone.

Everybody hoped that he would come back.

He would bring wisdom and love back with him.

He would come back even if he were dead.

Death couldn't stop Gambar.

That was already established.

Eleeza was gone as well but nobody noticed except her parents who didn't much care either way although therer were rumors

 In Eleeza's case, rumors were semi-spiritual.

When he/she returned everything would get much better on the Island. The Inlanders would stop fighting with the Islanders. The factions would unite in mystery and set aside recent history.

Dark knew that his power and the salvation of the Island rested in the pivotal event in his life, the moment on the skin boat when Gambar returned from the dead. This is what he preached.  

Without that pivot, he would have been merely traveling, with nothing to say to the splintering factions that gathered before him.

With the pivot, Dark had plenty to say:

"It is our revelaton that Gambar was raised from the dead. How can some of you say there is no resurrection from the dead. If there is no resurrection, how could Gambar have been raised? If Gambar was not raised from the dead our revealation is false and how can that revealation be false if we were on the boat with him when he was raised. If in fact, the dead are not raised and saved then Gambar was not raised, and your faith in Gambar is pointless and you are still as wicked and stupid as you were before Gambar came back from the dead. If we lose our belief that Gambar came back from the dead then we give up hope that we all have a life after death and therefore our only hope is for this present life and since our life here is pitiful, our only hope without belief in resurrection is equally pitiable.

Just as Gambar once rose from the dead to return to the boat, he will once again return to us"

etc. etc. etc.

This is how Dark turned experience into light, light into faith, faith into resurrection, resurrection into religion and religion into politics and politics into power.