Gospel (34 page)

“Our Father, Who art in Heaven…”

Lucy, as always, prayed up a storm before flying. But here she was not alone: the Catholic contingent, St. Christopher medals by the score, was in evidence on this flight from Ireland to Italy.

“… And bless David McCall and his family and all who showed me such kindness and generosity in Northern Ireland, and bless Northern Ireland itself and help in all its troubles and move people to be better in the future, Catholic and Protestant…”

The plane started its acceleration.

“… and I ask the Holy Spirit to be with the captain and all the crew and passengers as we make this journey and keep us safe and free of harm.”

(You got it, Lucy.)

“But as in all things, Thy will be done. Amen.”

Takeoff. Those on the right side of the plane, now bathed in the intense afternoon light that made them squint, looked out over Ireland falling away beneath them.

Between the cumulus clouds and their fanciful shapes, under the blue sky and sea beyond, was the rain-lavished green of Ireland, performing now in the sunlight, verdant beneath the cloud shadows, emerald in the fields and smooth, gale-rounded hillocks of County Wicklow, a deep jade in the forests to the south, and different again like green glass held up to the sun along happier farms farther inland. And with tales of Patrick and Brigit, prophecies of Malachy and Columkille, the melange of hysterical Mariology and neurotic Blessed Wound tallies, and mostly, the blarney of O'Hanrahan in her head, she looked down to think: Yes, Eire, you are the perfect land for myth and legend, the right size for a fairy kingdom, and amid your bogs and loughs and glens, I can imagine the Celts and early Christians dancing amid the stone circles, telling lies by the fireside, and marveling at a magic not wholly of their own invention.

Turning from her window, she sensed something older and more decisive in herself, the sense of having learned a bit about what one is and what one need never be, where one comes from and where one hopes not to end up. She had bought an
Irish Times
to read on the flight and the bottom of the front page detailed a family of brothers in Derry. One had been killed, the other was in jail held by the British for some unspecified excuse, and the third brother had last night been knee-capped—held to the ground while someone drilled into his kneecaps with a power drill. The newest method, by IRA supporters who mistook him for an informer.

He was fourteen.

He was in the hospital and just wanted everyone to know that even though there'd been a mistake, he still was a friend of the IRA and there was Gerry Adams with various Sinn Fein party members and old despicable drunks in battle fatigues crowded ‘round his hospital bed putting a beret on his head while the boy held a flower arrangement in the Irish tricolor, smiling for the photo.

And Lucy thought with some sadness: poor Ireland, you fucked up your island. The only one you have. For a thousand years you evaded the Romans, routed the Saxons and the Danes, dislodged the Druids, chased the British out for the most part, only to end up killing yourselves, mowing each other down in the alleyways of Ulster with British automatics and Libyan explosives. In the name of that God, no less, Who so favored you with those good hearts and fine talents for lyric and song, Who allowed you magic and superstition after He commanded it pass from the rest of the Christian world. Tolerant and loving He was to His Hibernian children. And now you make scars on the Body of Christ that will not heal.

Lucy looked out the window to the luminous Western sky and was not the first immigrant's child to think: thank God, someone got on a boat and let me be born in America and not the streets of Belfast.

3

Well may I be forgiven, I am sure, a recitation of my own poetry when I describe the exhilaration of travel upon the road to what once was Jerusalem. Everything that befell the polis was deserved, but who among us does not remember its beauty and former glory? I am sure you are familiar with this much-praised passage in the
Hebraika:

O golden towers! O streets of beryl!

Whose stones would dance and sing with glee …
1

2.
Out of Negev, Xenon and I returned, past Bethzur, so that Xenon might give salutation to his parents and tell of his many adventures. Xenon's father, Jason, had decided the lad should begin a trade with his uncle in Ephesus rather than pursue mission work. It was determined that Xenon would accompany me that far.

My young charge and I ventured next to the environs of Jerusalem and to—what was then—my family estate, still a Nazirene commune. Things there were troubled, and I will admit that in the weeks I had traveled much petty bickering had broken out. A pair of Nazirene brothers had stolen monies accrued by the selling of our olives and so had to be expelled. (As you know, we live communally as Our Master would have us do, sharing everything, burden and bounty, and thereby avoiding the horrors of moneylending and rank commercialism Our Master so inveighed against.)

3.
With the foolish, doomed Revolt surging and subsiding around us, Xenon chose to remain on my Nazirene commune through the spring and summer [of 67
C.E.
]. There the enterprising young man learned our rules, befriending everyone with his simple ways, especially the womenfolk for whom he spared no effort to help with chores. O, to think of my noble band of Nazirenes now, weathering the storms and evils of the highway! Such is what you commanded with a wave of your hand when you usurped the property and evicted these living saints among us!

But let us not dwell on this time and time again.

4.
No person, I determined, could better explain the mysteries of the time after Our Lord's execution than Joseph [of Arimathea] himself, who offered up his own tomb for the Teacher.

O exquisite oblation!

Joseph had died in the time of the monster Cuspius Fadus [Procurator, 44–46
C.E.
], but I thought a trip to Arimathea would not be amiss to learn some record of the man. Again, I made a short journey to find Duldul ibn-Waswasah, who extorted from me many coins before revealing the whereabouts of Joseph's reclusive country estate. Joseph's own mansion had been turned into a meeting place for Nazirenes: a commune, much on the model of my own, thriving and splendid. Xenon and I joined a group of tradesmen and their soldiers, to avoid the bandits who were omnipresent in that era, and we found ourselves after two-and-a-half days walking into much-trampled Arimathea. Joseph's commune had become a rabbinical school for—steel yourself, my brother—Nazirene women!

5.
The women resembled nothing more than Bedouins, with only their hands and face revealed. I imagined it would be a dowdy lot, filled with unmarriable daughters and penniless widows, but I was quite wrong. Some women could have entered marriage without dowries they were of such beauty, and I at once saw the necessity of the impenetrable defenses, given what marauding Romans might do to this panoply of Helens. I was reminded of my own lines from my epic
The Hebraika
in which the hero, King David, at first spies the Daughters of Jerusalem:

O cluster of henna blossoms, thy satchel of myrrh!

How from afar I drink in your odors and inhale thy nard!
2

Such were the beauties of this compound! How wise and appropriate that they did not sully their worth by entering into the marketplace of matchmaking and courtship, which turns all women into little better than tavern harlots. How much more beautiful the stainless path of chastity, the only wedding aisle a woman ever need traverse, her immaculate groom the True and all-fulfilling Church!

6.
Sadly, I did not favor the leader of the convent, Maryam, the sister of Lazarus, the man Our Lord famously cured from a hopeless terminal bleeding.
3
Lazarus seemed a quiet and woman-dominated soul, an odd choice I thought for such strong attachment and friendship granted by Our Master. More intolerable was his sister Martha, a shrew and slave driver in the peculiar mix our race seems to propagate. Martha and I had battled a few times at various gatherings of the Teacher, in which she supervised all domestic matters—food, laundry, sewing, and the like—and, looking back, it was well the women took these matters in hand, as Our Master might well have walked through sandals and been naked for all the attention that he gave to such. From the time I was sixteen I never recovered Martha's good opinion after a harmless, precocious remark I made about some emetic broth she had stewed, one might have thought, from carrion and hay, such was its aroma.

7.
Maryam, however, was the more decorous sister, but pitifully burdened with scholastic pretensions. She was, as I remembered her, handsome but serious-faced, a woman of the kind that is never at her chores or upon the tasks she is assigned, dreamy and indifferent to the household cares that God has made woman's lot. She announced, for example, “Some of your contendings are quite false, I assure you.” (This she said in a made woman's lot. She announced, for example, “Some of your contendings are quite false, I assure you.” (This she said in a tone as haughty as any woman had ever used with me.) “You contend, for example, that meditation upon the Most High in young women will lead, if their hearts are true, to a cessation of the menstrual flow.”

(As is common knowledge.)

“It is God's design,” Maryam said to me, “that we should be as we are; it pleases Him that we are so. In my own discussions with the Teacher, He made it abundantly clear that the Law, so relentlessly obsessed with our uncleanliness, was not of God but wholly of Man.”

(But this is the sort of rhetoric one hears from women everywhere these days.)

8.
Maryam continued “Our earthly fathers would have us be unclean more than we are clean. To touch a corpse is to be unclean
4
—but one never sees the men attend the dying family member or anoint the body of the deceased. Rule upon rule confirms we are tainted and unholy, but I found none of this in He Who Gave Himself.”

You anticipate perhaps, my brother, that I should oppose this female community, raised up like the chastened schools of Yavneh,
5
but I shall not disparage these women who were in earnest. (Indeed I have changed somewhat regarding women and Our Church, but more on that when I tell of Mary of Migdal on my journey to Egypt [see 6:21–36].) No, the community shall receive muted praise from me because of their vow of virgin chastity (which I have always felt to be the engine of refinement for the soul). Furthermore, Maryam seemed intimately acquainted with my
All Heresies Refuted,
certainly no small mitigation.

9.
Maryam guided me through her convent but felt it prudent that Xenon be taken to the most distant kitchens and away from the main life of the all-female community, and quite properly too! Two sisters led him away to see to his appetite while Maryam accompanied me to her chamber, lined with scrolls and copies of Holy Scripture, the
Ecclesiasticus,
a hastily copied
Wisdom of Solomon, Esther
(this heretical text one could expect in such an unorthodox enterprise), and many more minor works I noted. She asked if I would care to see Saul's latest missive. My defiant words convinced her I most certainly did not! That accursed Saul of Tarsus, the Great Heretic, held sway even here!
6

Maryam declaimed, “Paul accepts women as deaconnesses and as elders. The saintly man has built a Church of women all throughout the Great Sea. And it is upon womankind that the Church will grow and thrive.”
7

10.
Jerusalem, I reminded her, still considered Peter chief among the disciples.

“What should anyone care about Jerusalem?” she replied to me in indifference. “The Church is wherever human hearts accept His Teachings, and the leader is whoever takes the beggar's hand and leads him to a warm meal. What? You would have that old fool Peter, thick and as unthinking as the rock he's named for, sit above us like an overstuffed Pharisee? I hear from my correspondent, a Nazirene sister of Rome, that when in the Romans' capital our Peter attends the pharisaic synagogue in the Jewish quarter, half-Nazirene, half-Pharisee, when it suits him. It is Paul alone among the men who grasps the breadth of Our Master's teachings.”

11.
Saul who had never met Our Master! As I made quite clear in
All Heresies Refuted,
I myself saw Saul lead the Temple rabble to execute five of our Gentile converts outside the city gate. I have heard him speak on Nazirene iniquities before the Sanhedrin, I have heard Saul plead with the Pharisees for our extermination, and what is more, I have former classmates from my own academy-days who studied with the great Gamaliel, as did Saul, and report him to be without a shred of human warmth—and to think he is now raised up before us, this Cilician, to do battle like Typhon!
8

“If you would but read his circulated letters,” Maryam said predictably, “you would see a changed man.”

12.
But my argument, made many times before and since, was this: to credit this Saul of Tarsus with Divine inspiration and guidance was to make a mockery of Our Master's time on earth. It is as if to say that the life and mission of Our Savior were insufficient to form His Church, that the Most High miscalculated and had to resort to employing an extra person.

“And that is precisely what the Most High has done,” Maryam said placidly. “Come now, do you believe that you Twelve have done the job well enough? James, before they killed him, was indistinguishable from a Pharisee; Jude, Philip, and Nathanael have not to my knowing advanced His Church past a handful of new converts, and the converts James bar-Alphaeus, John, and Thomas garner only render us ridiculous. And what of you, Matthias? What shall be written of you?”