Gospel (18 page)

“No, go ask Peter,” Thomas then said to me, “when next in Antioch and he will tell you why you were selected. Better for you, my friend, had you done as Jude has done, retired to his cloth shop in Beersheba.”

As for Jude, and even John, whose scholarship repelled Thomas and me alike, I asked Xenon to record their locations and I began planning to travel to see them. Xenon began to hiccup and I saw that he could barely hold the quill. (Indeed a sip from his cup confirmed to me that Thomas had supplied my scribe with wine undiluted.)

33.
Before I could protest, Thomas stood and got Xenon to his feet, preparing to take him for a walk. He boomed, “If it's gospels you want, why not peruse some of mine!”

I expressed amazement that he had recorded anything.

He said to me, “On the contrary. My wife Sepphora insisted upon it—she takes all my dictations!”

A woman! Xenon swayed unsteadily and so Thomas threw an arm around him and took him out for fresh air while I remained at the house and his wife, Sepphora, brought me some wretched Arab drink and a collection of scrolls for me to read.

I asked Sepphora, “Why did Thomas not educate one of his many sons to take his dictation?”

She said to me, “Why should he when we need our sons to work? Someone must work while he runs about preaching the Messiah has come, killed by the Romans.”

I understood by this denegration that she was not a Nazirene.

She said to me, “No, but then I never met the man, and what I saw of John the Baptist was fearsome.”

Yes, the Baptist was fearsome, but more on him momentarily [see 5:5–6]. Sepphora said to me further: “Why should my husband hire a scribe when I am so skilled in the Laws of Moses and the Prophets?”

34.
A woman speaking thusly to me! I becalmed myself by remembering that our abiding spirit of wisdom,
Sophia,
who pervades and penetrates all things by reason of her pureness,
28
is as female as the ground we walk upon. Scholarship is a task more fitted to a man, but a woman's learning surely does little harm, and does have the added effect of steeling young women against loss of virginity (without which any elevation of their wordly role is not possible).

I will quickly record that Thomas's ramblings were heterodox in the extreme. Not without a certain Aramaic flair, or without a certain honesty of spirit, but clearly too much from his travels has been stirred into the broth. I am the light that is darkness, the ice that is within fire, he that is first is last—this kind of Eastern tiresomeness.
29

35.
The next day after meeting a few of the paltry Nazirene congregation of ex-prostitutes and elderly, I was ready to pass out of that filthy town and on toward Beersheba to see Jude.

I asked of Thomas, “Is Jude involved in any ministry?”

“Not that I know,” he said to me, “and good thing too, bad a speaker as he is. His horrible stutter.”

But to do nothing!

“Perhaps it is his lot to do nothing,” said Thomas. “Well, my friend,” he then said, slapping my back as was his wont, “who knows if we shall see each other again? I am off to India, and at my age I can't see many more such voyages. I am off to finish what I started. Or rather, what He started.”

36.
Here I bethought it best to be honest and tell Thomas of my personal state. I envied him for the security of his faith, and I confessed I coveted it with an intensity that surely ranked as sinful. I would not have been surprised had he made sport of me, but he spoke warmly to me, which I took as a sign of his rustic good heart.

“I tell you what you do,” Thomas said to me. “You need to spend time with the elderly and perhaps the sick, as He instructed.”

My talents lie not there, I informed him.

“The prisoners then, when you get back to Jerusalem. We are to visit them, Our Master said. What you'd learn of the world when you see someone in the dregs of the Praetorian prison—those Roman swine!”

37.
I said to him, “I am not suited for that enterprise as well. When I speak to people beneath my class they tend to laugh at me and mock me.”

“And does not a prisoner need a laugh? Well, does he not? See the service that you might render, my companion?”

I record here that I was overcome with frustration when I said to Thomas: “You think me a total fool.”

Then Thomas embraced me and gave me the kiss of
agápe.
“But as my brother before the Teacher of Righteousness, I love you with all my heart,” he said to me. “I love you for the place you have in the scheme of things! I love you for the role that you were born to play!”

38.
But what role is that?

How many times, though, I turned to God in prayer to put my case before Him. My learning, my scholarship, my literary gift, my impeccable Greek, my background in the philosophers—how best could He bring it to use? And I have never felt my heart move to the sure answer.

And that was the last I saw of Thomas.

39.
Xenon and I began our journey to Beersheba and many of the women of the streets called to him familiarly and a horrible thought occurred that Thomas had taken him to one of these bowers of depravity! I charged Xenon to tell me the truth and he shyly insisted on his innocence, of which I was persuaded after many minutes of intense examination. A rascal, that Thomas. Licentious as Thomas could be, I know he would not have done that to young Xenon out of regard for me, being aware, surely, of my insistence on virgin chastity as the engine of refinement for the soul.

The details of our trip to Beersheba are unimportant as that is clearly the dullest, hottest journey one can make in this land.

40.
Jude
30
had a cloth shop where his wife commanded most of the business and commerce. “I have not a head for numbers,” he said to me, as if it were a point of pride his wife should manage the business. Jude looked as I recalled him. His hair had remained dark and his eyes were a gentle man's; he was as retreating as I remembered and he still spoke only under great duress and, for the first few minutes, with his stutter.

I asked him if there were a Nazirene synagogue in Beersheba.

41.
“There is none,” he said with difficulty. “Though my wife will bring people over to pray. And there are pilgrims.”

I inquired as to the object of pilgrimage.

“You, too, must know of pilgrims,” he said to me. “They come because I knew The Teacher of Righteousness and was one of the Twelve. Once a week or more someone passes through this town to touch my hand or to have me pray with them.”

I asked how he honored such requests.

He said to me, “Alas, I do not think the Lord has allowed me to be part of a healing, though once or twice I am sure I did some good. They ask about Him and I, in my way, stammer out what I remember, though my memory has blurred through the years. Do you not find it so?”

Yes, very much! It is the very reason, I told him, that I had embarked upon these travels! To recover the truth of those few precious years when He was among us.

“You always had too much money,” Jude said to me, I believe in jest.

42.
Tell me, I asked of Jude, why haven't you gone with the evangel through the land?

He laughed. “The way I speak? Sometimes I am so unable to deliver my voice that I merely nod yes and no to pilgrims' questions. I wonder that I have given out incorrect information because some of the old and infirm have heard fantasies, have heard fictions. Two days ago a woman with an issue of blood, clothed in stained bandages, her face pale as new cotton, came to this house. She had heard that Our Master said that any who have such an infirmity are sure to reach Heaven for they are already washed in blood. You see how she was confused.”

And you corrected this crone?

“No, I did not,” Jude said to me, reclaiming his stammer.

From what I made out, Jude confirmed her mistaken notion of Our Master's teachings. Indeed, he was sure Our Lord would have told the woman the same thing or perhaps have healed her, although it was mysterious why some He healed and some He walked by. I recall Thomas asking Our Lord that if God were a God of love, why did Our Lord not visit the leper colony outside of the city and heal every sufferer? Our Lord made no answer. Mysteries too profound to consider!

43.
Repeatedly Jude said to me: “Don't you see, my friend, it was enough that she had faith to come? It is such faith that God will reward. No, I could not help her, even after she walked from her village across the sands to my door. In the next world, though, she will walk into the Kingdom.”

I confess here to a certain desperation with this laxity concerning Our Master's teachings. I do not feel good about it now, but I am afraid I was rather unpleasant to Jude and I asked if with his whimsical innovations of Our Master's philosophy, he had brought as much as a single soul into the Kingdom-to-come. What of Moses and his stutter—he delivered a people!
31
Why was Jude at all chosen by Our Lord?

Jude gave me the brotherly kiss of peace. He then said, “Is it not possible that the soul Our Lord intended to save was mine?”

44.
I explained to Jude that it seemed unlikely with only Twelve Disciples to choose amid all the world, to commence all the chores assigned us before the coming End Times, that Our Teacher should be so inefficient but to gain only one small soul for the New Kingdom by Jude's selection.

“You think it a waste,” Jude replied to me, “that only myself was gathered to Our Lord's flock by my selection. But I tell you, I believe that to be sufficient. Could it have been that Our Master looked out upon the world and saw me lost and brought me to Him the only way He knew how?”

But how impractical!

Jude laughed and said: “But that is precisely the sort of thing He was always doing.” Jude then put a hand upon me and with his other hand touched his heart. “For all your learning, my brother, I believe it is I who knew Him better.”

45.
And as I left Beersheba that evening, I looked over at Xenon asleep on his mule plodding by my side, and I looked out upon the vast wastes of the Negev and wondered that God should send His True Prophet to personally redeem the likes of Jude and, if so, that the Most High Father must love His children very much indeed. But then to what purpose was I brought near Our Master as a Disciple? What did He gain through such a wretch as me?

IRELAND

 

There was a beggar boy used to be in Burren that was very simple like and had no health, and if he would walk as much as a few perches it is likely he would fall on the road. And he dreamed twice that he went to St. Brigit's blessed well upon the cliffs and that he found his health there. So he set out to go to the well, and when he came to it he fell in and he was drowned.… It is likely it is in heaven he is at this time.

—An ancient Irish holy legend, collected by L
ADY
G
REGORY
(1906)

No single story would they find

Of an unbroken happy mind,

A finish worthy of the start.

Young men know nothing of this sort.

Observant old men know it well;

And when they know what old books tell,

And that no better can be had,

Know why an old man should be mad.

—from “Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?”
Last Poems
(1939)
W. B. Y
EATS

This morning from a dewy motorway

I saw the new camp for the internees:

A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay

In the roadside, and over in the trees

Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.

There was that white mist you get on a low ground

And it was deja-vu, some film made

Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound.

Is there a life before death? That's chalked up

In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,

Coherent miseries, a bite and sup,

We hug our little destiny again.

—from “Whatever You Say Say Nothing,”
North
(1975)
S
EAMUS
H
EANEY

In name of the Former, and of the Latter

And of their Holocaust. Allmen.

—
Finnegans Wake
(1939)
J
AMES
J
OYCE

 

 

J
UNE
26
TH
, 1990

Lucy found Dublin more modern-looking than she imagined, but still more of a large town than a city, which despite its recent thousandth birthday was not full of the ancient winding alleyways or cobblestones of quainter European capitals. It was staid and Georgian where it was grand and monumental, and shabby where it was not grand. Standing at the River Liffey and O'Connell Street she fought off disappointment that the legendary, much-invoked Dublin was not somehow more, well, Parisian or at least visually equal to Oxford, endearingly ancient.