Langdon strained to hide his emotion, and yet he could not believe what he was hearing. Sophie Neveu had unwittingly witnessed a two-thousand-year-old sacred ceremony. [From The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.]

The best thing about The Da Vinci Code is that it’s getting a lot of people interested in Christian history. You can get a conversation about the Gnostics started in the dentist’s office; you can talk with a stranger about Mary Magdalene while you’re waiting on the safety island for the streetcar. These things didn’t happen before Dan Brown.

People are genuinely interested in genuinely interesting things. Some people have swallowed some wrong ideas, but the fascination with history is entirely good. Many of the book’s readers are truly curious, and they’re asking the right questions.

What did Jesus really teach? Did orthodox Christianity pervert Jesus’ original message? How do we know the Gnostics didn’t have it right?

These are exactly the right questions to be asking. But how will we get the right answers out there?

That brings us to that little snippet from Dan Brown’s famous novel. Ancient secrets have a powerful attraction for us.  A two-thousand-year-old sacred ceremony - imagine that! Imagine the excitement of seeing for yourself a ritual that has been handed down, essentially unaltered, for twenty centuries! It would be the experience of a lifetime!

Or at least it should be. But how many of the same readers who tingled with excitement when they came to that line have stumbled blindly by and missed exactly that experience in real life?

In any Catholic church, or any Orthodox church, or any Lutheran or Anglican church - wherever the Christian liturgy is celebrated, you can witness a two-thousand-year-old sacred ceremony. More than that, you can participate in it.

This is the message we we’re trying to get out with The Grail Code: that the experience of a lifetime is waiting for you just around the corner. The current obsession with historical mysteries is a wonderful thing, because we have the most profound mystery of all to share with the world. We’ve kept it miraculously intact for two thousand years.

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