This is my favorite passage from The Last Temptation of Christ. I'm not super-Christian, it's just GOREGOUS:

They talked and sighed. Jesus, meanwhile, was sitting up, thought still in a deep sleep. He felt he was not asleep at all, but rather standing body and soul in the Jordan, refreshed. The desert sand was being removed from his body and the virtues and vices on mankind from his soul-- leaving it again virgin. Suddenly, it seemed to him in his sleep that he had cmoe out of the Jordan, taken a green untrodden path and entered a dense orchard full of blossoms and fruit. And it seemed he was no longer himself, Jesus the son of Mary of Nazareth, but rather Adam, the first man to be created. He had issued from God's hands at precisely that moment-- his flesh was still fresh clay-- and had laid down on the flowering grass to dry off in the sun so that his bones might congeal, colour come to his face and the seventy-two joints of his body tighten and enable him to stand up and walk. While he lay and ripened under the sun birds fluttered over his head, flew from tree to tree, promenaded on the springtime grass. They conversed among themselves, twittered, looked at this new creature who lay on the grass, examined him with curiosity. Each had his say and then continued on; and he, versed in their language, rejoiced to hear them.

The peacock, proudly fanning out its feathers, strolled up and down, threw oblique, seductive glances at this Adam stretch on the ground, and explained to him: "I used to be a hen, but I loved an angel and became a peacock. Is there any bird more beautiful than I am? None!" The turtle-dove flew from tree to tree, lifted its throat to heaven and cried: "Love! Love! Love!" And the thruh: "Among the birds, only I sing and keep warm in the thickest of frosts." The swallow: "If not for me, the trees would never blossom." The cock: "If not for me, morning would never come." The lark: "At dawn when I fly up into the sky to sing, I say good-bye to my children because I never know if I shall return from my song still alive." The nightengale: "Don't look at me as I am now, in my poor clothes. I too had large gleaming wings, but I turned them into song." And a long-nosed blakcbird came and clung to the shoulder of the first-created man, bent over to his ear and spoke to him softly, as though entrusting a great secret to him:

"The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent, and identical: both green, both beautiful. Take care, Adam! Take care! Take care!"

Exactly then, at dawn, with the blackbird's song in his mind-- Jesus awoke.