“Healer Woman,” he answered my look without looking at me. “By the grace of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, your daughter has been healed, and my memory restored. I am Paul, sometimes called Saul, late of Tarsus, now an apostle appointed not by human beings nor through any human being but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead, and I have come to bring salvation in Jesus’ name to you and your household and all who may be round about this place. If you will repent and believe, grace and peace be unto you from God the Father and Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins to liberate us from this present wicked world, in accordance with the will of our God and father to whom be glory forever and ever.”
For the second time in this story, I fainted dead away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
FATHER AND SON
DO YOU BELIEVE THAT MY BELOVED sent Paul of Tarsus to save Sarah’s life, not to mention her soul, to convert us, along with the Galatians, to Christianity? Well, that’s one interpretation. To me his arrival seemed more dreadful, even sinister. I had joined the ranks of all deluded parents who had believed they could outwit fate. Having fled with Sarah to dwell in remote mountains among an obscure, impoverished people in order to protect her from her father’s followers, I had now received the arch promulgator of the Faith into my hearth and home—and worse still, my body.
Yet I could not deny that he had called on Jesus to heal our daughter.
To sum it up, I was in a pickle.
When I recovered from my all too brief collapse—and please note, to my knowledge the apostle did not call on Jesus to heal me—I found that my guest was preparing to leave, putting on his cloak, which Ma had mended for him, picking up the walking stick Sarah had found for him.
“Where are you going?” I blurted out, feeling confused; everything had happened so quickly.
“Healer Woman,” he said, “by the grace of Christ Jesus, I am now clothed in my right mind and strong enough in body to make my way to the nearest village. There I will sojourn for a time with an upright man’s family, preaching the gospel of Christ and earning my bread by my trade (for those who do not work should not eat). I am sure you agree that it is no longer seemly for me to stay in the home of three unmarried women. Moreover, I must set an example for the brethren…”
The brethren? He spoke as if these wild mountain people were already part of the ecclesia. The Galatians had their own ways, tough and ancient. The apostle might find them a hard sell.
“…lest they misunderstand and be led to believe that I in any way condone lax morals or sexual misconduct. For I teach by example as well as word, and I must not be the cause of anyone falling into error.”
I eyed him dubiously and wondered if the return of his right mind had banished the memory of what he had done in what I supposed he might call his wrong mind.
“Point me to the path, Healer Woman.”
“It’s just at the edge of the glade, but part of it runs along the gorge and is quite steep. I will walk with you to make sure you don’t stumble.”
My erstwhile patient raised his eyebrows, perhaps alarmed by the prospect of being propped up by such a weak vessel as he no doubt considered me to be. Or maybe I am being uncharitable.
“Your place is with the child,” he said, more gently. “You will want to be here when she wakes.”
No argument from me on that point. Let him risk his neck then. I had done enough. All at once the strain of the last days and hours hit me hard. I wanted to curl up next to Sarah and sleep. Ma also appeared to be dozing, leaning against the wall beside Sarah’s pallet. We needed time to restore ourselves, to reclaim and rest in our timeless nature as The Three, separate and sufficient unto ourselves.
“Very well, then.” I stifled a yawn, and without thinking I added, “Isis go with you to guide your feet.”
The quality of his silence alarmed me; I looked up to see him looking at me intently.
“You are all gentiles here, then?” he asked. “No Jews?” he prompted when I didn’t answer.
I shook my head. These were treacherous waters. I didn’t so much as want to get one toe wet.
“And no one here has ever heard of Christ Jesus.”
When I knew him no one had called him by the title Christ, Greek for the anointed one. If this man, who boasted of being an apostle, could only know that he stood in the presence of the woman who had actually anointed Jesus. The memory of that night came back sharp as the scent of the spikenard I poured out on his head, rubbed into his tangled hair. But he would never know. I would never tell.
“He is my father.”
I whirled around to see Sarah still lying on her pallet but with her golden eyes wide open, eyes that seemed to fill the room with their light. The harsh, angular face of the apostle softened under her gaze.
“Child of the angels,” he said, and he went to kneel beside her. “Yes, it is even so that Christ Jesus is one with God the Father who raised him from the dead….”
So that was how his followers explained the Resurrection. How little they knew.
“….And at the right hand of the Father he lives and reigns until he comes again in glory. Poor fatherless child, through Christ your heavenly Father has reached out his saving hand to you. And in your innocence you know Christ as your savior, untaught as you are.”
Sarah said nothing more, but continued to regard the man gravely. I dreaded what she might say next, but I felt helpless to intervene.
“My son.” Ma opened one eye and fixed it on Paul of Tarsus.
“You do me kindness, mother, to call me so.”
“Not you,” Ma said rather rudely. “Him.”
“Wisdom speaks,” Paul marveled. “For Christ Jesus is the eternal Son. The progeny who was foretold by the prophets, the first born of all Creation—”
“I think you should go now,” I heard myself saying, and I noted with alarm a hysterical edge to my voice.
“He is also called the stumbling block.” Paul rose and fixed a stern glance on me.
“Thank you for all you have done for my daughter,” I managed to say. “We are grateful, but we must rest.”
“It was not I but Christ in me who healed your daughter. Come to the village tomorrow,” he said to all of us. “Come and hear the word of the Lord.”
He touched Sarah’s head in a blessing gesture and bowed his head to Ma. With a curt nod to me and no thanks for my care of him, he turned and left the hut.
“Watch your step,” I muttered, but he did not appear to hear me.
My longing for self-contained respite with Ma and Sarah was in vain; our trinity—and our unity—thoroughly ruptured by this other, this fourth, this alien force. I spent the afternoon cleaning and airing the hut, keeping a close eye on Sarah, who stayed in the yard with Ma. They were both quiet, too quiet, their silence charged with things not said. The evening meal found us still under some kind of spell, as if a geis against speech had been laid upon us. I decided to break it.
“We have to talk.”
Are there any other words with the power to set up such instant resistance? Ma immediately began to hum, and Sarah gazed down into her bowl of stew. All at once I felt angry. Dangerously, recklessly angry. I had nearly lost my daughter, and I was furious with myself, with Ma, and with Sarah.
“What is wrong with you both? What is wrong with us all!” I demanded. “Sarah, what were you thinking when you cut yourself like that, and then hid your wounds? Ma, how could we both be so blind not to see that she was sick? Where the hell were the angels? What good are they? She nearly died. Sarah, you nearly died. Do you hear me?”
No one answered. I buried my face in my hands and wished I could weep. It would be something, some response—at least from myself.
“I nearly died,” Sarah spoke at last. “But I didn’t die. My father saved me.”
And I heard in her voice that note of exultant defiance as when she had sat in the tree, as I now knew cutting her own flesh. My stomach clenched, but
at least she had spoken. I lifted my face from my hands and looked at her, and she surprised me by looking directly back, her golden eyes now fierce.
“Why didn’t you tell him, Mother?”
Mother. I reacted to that word, the harsh formality of its sound, without even comprehending the question. When had I stopped being Mama? Someone soft and comfortable, comforting. Someone loving and loved.
“Did you hear me, Mother? Why didn’t you tell the man that you knew my father?”
“Sarah, first of all, you may not know this, but Jesus is a common name. We don’t know if the Jesus the man prayed to was the same Jesus as—”
“Maeve of Magdala.” Ma came abruptly back from wherever her mind had been wandering, a disconcerting habit of hers. “I have known you—and loved you—as a whore, an adulteress, an impulsive fool, but I have never known you as an outright liar. I don’t want to begin now. That man, whoever he is (the angels know) healed in my son’s name. And you know it.”
Thanks a lot, Miriam of Nazareth, for shaming me in front of my daughter. But of course, she was right. It was time for me to come clean. I hadn’t lied to Sarah before, but I had left out important parts of the story, crucial parts.
“Forgive me,” I said. “Sarah, I owe you the truth.” I had her full attention now. “I didn’t want Paul, who calls himself an apostle of your father, to know who I am. I didn’t want him to know who you are. Ma, Sarah, when you tried to tell him, he didn’t understand what you were saying. Leave it that way. Don’t tell him anything more.”
“Why?” came Sarah’s inevitable response.
“Just don’t. Please don’t.”
I knew the futility of that injunction as soon as I pronounced it. It never works. Don’t eat that fruit. Don’t go to the hidden valley, a prohibition from my mothers that I had defied, as Jesus had defied his parents and run away to the Temple to debate. I had no business keeping her from her father’s business, so to speak. I was about to say so, to begin again when Sarah seized her moment.
“You can’t stop me.”
She looked at me with something almost like hatred. If my heart had not already been thoroughly broken, it would have shattered.
“Your mother is only trying to protect you, Sarah,” Ma said with maddening mildness. “But she should know by now, she should have learned from me, she can’t, she can’t, she can’t. God wins in the end, the terrible one always wins.”
I just barely managed to keep myself from shouting: shut up!
“Sarah!” I didn’t even know what I wanted to say; I just desperately wanted to grasp control that was already lost. “Sarah, listen to me. Remember I told you we came to these mountains to be safe?”
She eyed me warily.
“Safe from the men who killed my father,” she repeated my half-truth.
“Yes,” I took a deep breath. “And I also wanted to keep you safe from…from his followers, his apostles.”
Her expression shifted, but I could not name what I saw in her face. Pain? Confusion? Disbelief?
“But if they loved him,” she said slowly, “why would they want to hurt me?”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. My beloved had said: I came into this world to bear witness to the truth. Well, his truth had killed him. Would mine kill me? I opened my eyes and sought hers again.
“They wanted to take you away from me.”
She stared at me for a moment.
“Why?”
Before I could launch into an explanation, my mother-in-law sang, yes sang.
She was a whore, a gentile whore
and she wouldn’t worship the terrible one
the terrible one, no, she wouldn’t
worship the terrible one, the terrible one
no never, never at all.”
“I couldn’t let them take you from me. I wouldn’t. Your father,” I pulled out my strongest card, “your father showed me this mountain in a vision. And we’ve been happy here. Haven’t we?” I almost pleaded. “We’ve been safe.”
She regarded me for a long, excruciating moment.
“You had no right to steal me and hide me away from my father’s apostles.”
I was stunned. No right? I had every right, the only right. I had mother-right, rights revered by every druid in the Holy Isles. All the blood of my foremothers rose in me. I wanted to get up and slap my daughter across the face, shake her till her bones clattered. Maybe it would have been better if I had, if she had fought back at me, if we had torn at each other’s hearts, literally.
But I wasn’t quick enough. She rose and ran out of the room into the night.
“Sarah!” I shouted.
I got up to run after her, but Ma’s hand closed on my arm with startling force, and I could not shake her off without hurting her.
“Not this time, little dove. Not this time.”
The rare endearment undid me, and I began to sob.
“She will come back. This time. She will come back. Let her be.”
Ma was right. Sarah did come back a couple of hours later. I know, because I was lying awake on my pallet, unable even to close my eyes. I had tried to talk to Jesus; call it praying if you will. Anger can be a prayer, too, and I was angry with him. So angry with him for dying, for being a heavenly father, as Paul had referred to him, instead of an earthly one, right here beside me where I needed him, sharing my worries or soothing them, talking to our daughter when I couldn’t. And what was he thinking? Healing her through this strange man? Why hadn’t he healed her directly? Why hadn’t the fire of the stars flowing through my hands been enough? If Jesus answered me, I could not hear him, I could not sense his presence; my own turmoil was too loud.
When Sarah slipped into the hut, she went immediately to her own pallet and curled up in a tight ball. I could not stop myself from going to her, caressing the back she turned to me. At least I did not try to speak. Give me credit for that much wisdom.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
PREACHER MAN
THE NEXT DAY I announced that I would go to hear Paul of Tarsus preach in the village. Sarah glared at me; I think she had wanted to go alone, and no doubt suspected that I wasn’t going simply to hear Paul hold forth. She was right about that. I may have trained as a bard, spent most of my adult life as a whore and a healer, been married briefly to the prince of peace (if you want to call him that, and I don’t at the moment) but I had been raised by warrior witches. Though the man had saved my daughter’s life and appeared to have a tender regard for her, my gut said: this man is your enemy. As for loving my enemy, I figured I had loved him enough by healing him, tending him, inviting him to enjoy my body—a gift he had not known how to receive. Now I intended to study him, to know his next move before he did.
“I will go, too,” said Ma surprising us both. Since we had arrived at our isolated hut, she had never gone further than the yard, preferring to let the world, so to speak, come to her. “I want to hear what he says about my son.”
“You’re not going to refer to him as your son in front of the apostle, are you?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“I can predict many things, Maeve of Magdala, but not what will come out of my mouth.”
“Well, I’m not going to tell him,” Sarah spoke up.
I turned to her with a smile of relief, but the smile froze.
“I’ve decided I don’t want him to know. Who you are, Mother.”
Before I could ask her just what the hell she meant by that remark, she headed for the door.
“Wait!” I snapped at her. “We are going together to hear the preaching, and you will help your grandmother down the path.”
Paul of Tarsus was already famous or infamous for his eloquence. Some Greeks from Iconium once decided he must be the incarnation of Hermes, the god of speech, and the local priests would have offered a sacrifice to him, if he hadn’t carried on and torn his clothes, insisting (in a moment of rare modesty) that he was mortal. Later in Troas he gave a sermon that went
on all day and into the middle of the night. A young man sitting on the window-sill grew so drowsy that he fell out the window to his death. Paul took a short break to resurrect his victim, then went back upstairs and continued to preach.
When we came upon him in the middle of our mountain village, he was only just warming up. Fortunately there were no third story windows, nor any buildings of any size. He was preaching outside, and everyone was still quite alert on this crisp autumn morning. We joined his audience, standing at the edge of the crowd, and his message must have been compelling, for no one paid much attention to this unprecedented visit from the reclusive Three.
“We had to proclaim the word of God to the Jews first,” Paul was saying, “but since the Jews rejected it, since the Jews do not think themselves worthy of eternal life, here and now we turn to the gentiles, for this is what the Lord commanded us to do when he said:
‘I have made you a light to the nations,
so that my salvation may reach
the remotest part of the earth.’”
“What can he mean?” I muttered to Ma. “He’s Jewish. Peter is Jewish. James is Jewish. For Isis’s sake Jesus was Jewish. Last I knew, you had to be—”
“Mother, shush!” whispered Sarah. “I want to hear him!”
“God’s saving justice was witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, but now it has been revealed altogether apart from the law. God’s saving justice given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. No distinction is made: all have sinned and lack God’s glory, and all are justified by the free gift of his grace through being set free in Christ Jesus.”
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