If Paul represented the ecclesia (and who knew; he might be a renegade), the policy had certainly changed in the last thirteen years. According to this apostle, Jesus’s message was now for everyone. And hadn’t that been my own message (in so far as I had one)? What you might call the gospel of Temple Magdalen: everyone is welcome at the feast. Then why did I still feel so apprehensive?
“God appointed him as a sacrifice for reconciliation, through faith, by the shedding of his blood, and so showed his justness; first for the past when sins went unpunished, because he held his hand; and now in the present age, to show how he is just and justifies everyone in Jesus.”
The shedding of his blood, Paul made it sound so abstract, so bloodless, a neat theological solution to the problem of sin, which made no sense to me whatsoever. I had been there when the soldier thrust his spear into Jesus’s heart. I had heard his mother wail. Whether or not his death, so bravely met, had made him a god or a lost cause, I could not see what it had to do with reconciliation, justness.
“Do you think God is the God only of the Jews, and not of the gentiles, too?” Paul ranted on, and I forced myself to pay attention. “Most certainly of the gentiles, too, since there is only one God; he will justify the circumcised by their faith, and he will justify the uncircumcised through their faith—”
“Excuse me,” one of the men interrupted in halting Greek, the only language we all had in common. “I think I am not understanding rightly. Did you just say that the god of the Jews is the only god?”
I glanced around at the villagers, most of whom I knew; for at one time or another almost everyone had hiked to our hut, seeking the services of beings they considered Otherworldly at least, perhaps divine. Paul’s listeners seemed relieved that one of their own had spoken up, and murmured questions and comments spread through the crowd.
“I thought he said we’re all Jewish,” another sought to clarify.
“That can’t be right!”
“Preacher Man,” said an old woman, who would have been chewing tobacco if it had been grown in the Taurus Mountains. Instead she gummed hardened grain kernels, softening them enough so that she could digest them. “You haven’t been in these parts long, but around here we tend to worship whoever and whatever we damn well please.”
“False gods,” Paul jumped back in and took command again. “Since God who made the world and everything in it is himself Lord of heaven and earth, he does not make his home in shrines made by human hands…”
What? Not even in the empty innermost chamber of the Temple of Jerusalem?
“Nor is he in need of anything that he should be served by human hands; on the contrary, it is he who gives everything—including life and breath—to everyone. We are all his children. Since we are the children of God, we have no excuse thinking that the deity looks like anything in gold, silver, or stone that has been carved…”
“Begging your pardon,” the first man interrupted again. “Around here, we don’t go in for carving statues like the Greeks or the Romans. But we all know there be gods no human hands have made, in the trees, in the waters, in the rocks, in the winds—”
“Did I not just tell you!” Paul cut him off. “The Lord God made all that is in heaven and earth? All! The trees, the waters, the seas, the dry lands, and everything that swims, creeps, or flies. Do not mistake the clay for the potter, man. It is true that in the past you gentiles have been kept in darkness. But now, overlooking the time of ignorance, God is telling everyone everywhere that they must repent, because he has fixed when the whole world will be judged in uprightness by a man he has appointed. And God has publicly proved this by raising him from the dead.”
Your god was not there, I wanted to say, the terrible one was not there with me when I was sealed with my dead beloved in the tomb. Your god was not there when I unstopped the vial of whores’ tears, when I bathed him in my own tears.
“Who raised who from the dead?” I heard people asking each other.
“Christ Jesus!” shouted Paul. “God the Father raised his only begotten Son from the dead that all who believe in him might have everlasting life. It is proof of God’s own love for us that Christ died for us while we were still sinners. How much more can we be sure, therefore, that now that we have been justified by his death, we shall be saved through him from the retribution of God? ”
“Does any of this make any sense to you?” I whispered to Ma.
The Blessed Virgin Mary merely shrugged.
“Shush!” said Sarah.
Muttering, shrugging, and shushing: a pattern that would become all too familiar.
Paul’s sermon did not end there. In truth, it went on for days with a few, very few, breaks for eating, sleeping, and visiting the latrines. (By the way, from what I heard, no one ever saw Paul use the latrines at all; apparently he could not even piss if anyone was anywhere nearby.) I just wanted to give you a small sample of his style, a few of his themes. Those of you who have read the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s Epistles will know that I have repeated the man’s own words—which he, unlike my beloved, wrote down and, in effect, published. So let your quarrel be with him, if you have one. Or go read him for yourself.
Every day Sarah went down to the village as soon as she woke. She became the apostle’s personal attendant, fetching him water or food, sitting at his feet and listening. My daughter who used to run wild with the mountain goats, who could best any boy in a fight. What did she see in this aggressive little man? What did she want?
“Her father,” Ma answered my aggrieved silence one morning, as the two of us sat alone. “She wants to know about her father.”
“But you and I have already told her much more. The apostle never really says anything about him. Have you noticed that?”
“He says her father is God,” Ma retorted. “What else is there to say?”
“I believed my father was a god, too, much good it did me.”
“God,” Ma repeated, and in case I didn’t hear the capital G she said it again, “God.”
For a short time I harbored a foolish hope that Paul would leave soon. Though he still limped a little, his restless vigor, which I had sensed even when he lay in a coma, had returned full force. Surely he would want to be on his way to some greener pastures than our remote stony mountains.
The first snowfall was barely more than a flurry, a few swirling flakes gone before they touched ground. Sarah came home from the village at noon that day, and I silently rejoiced as I served her some hot stew.
“So,” I said, doing my best to sound offhand, “I suppose the apostle will be heading down the mountain before winter really sets in.”
I referred to him as the apostle because Sarah frowned when I called him Paul, as if the use of his name was overly familiar.
“Why do you say so, Mother?”
“I can’t imagine he would want to endure the hardships of a winter here,” I reasoned.
Ma made a ruminative noise in her throat and sent me a look I couldn’t interpret.
“He is no stranger to hardship, Mother,” Sarah said. “He has endured all kinds of suffering in Christ’s name.”
“Christ?” I couldn’t help repeating.
She ignored me.
“He is going to spend the winter on the mountain, traveling from village to village, bringing the word of the Lord to the people. I am going to help him.”
“Help him?” I was becoming an echo, a redundancy.
“Guide him, carry his things, make sure he’s all right. I know the mountain, Mother, I know it better than anyone. You know that.”
Was she pleading with me, was there even a hint in her voice that I might have some authority and that she ought to ask my permission.
“Sarah,” I began. “Sarah, no. I can’t let you go alone with the apostle. It’s not—”
Had I been about to say: it’s not “seemly?” Jesus god, yes I had. Well, it wasn’t.
“Not what, mother?”
Sarah turned the
full force of her golden gaze on me, and I became lost in her eyes, so like her father’s in their intensity, like the Cailleach’s eyes in color, golden as the light in her valley on Tir na mBan where I had run away from my mothers for only a few hours when I was Sarah’s age. But not long after that my mothers had sent me away to druid school, where they could not protect me, where no one protected me from the terrible harm that came from another strange man.
“I am afraid, Sarah,” I tried in vain to keep my tone even. “Afraid he’ll hurt you. Afraid he’ll—”
Do to you what he did to me, take what you would give freely and force it. With me it didn’t matter, but with Sarah, Sarah….
To my dismay I began to weep. Sarah rose and came to put her arms around me for the first time since the day she recovered from her illness. She held me and rocked me as if I were the child and she the mother.
“The apostle won’t hurt me, Mother. He loves me. He calls me his daughter.”
Who better than I knew the way to a fatherless girl’s heart? I remembered what it had meant to me to have King Bran’s affection and protection. But I just could not connect the apostle with those benign qualities.
“Sarah, I will allow you to go,” I said, reminding us both who ought to be in charge, “only if I accompany you.”
She stiffened and pulled back from me.
“But he didn’t ask you to come with him. He asked me, only me.”
And just who the hell did he think he was, supposing he could waltz off with my daughter without so much as a by your leave. Never mind. I knew the answer. He was the apostle appointed not by man but by God himself.
“No mother, no deal,” I said. “It is not seemly.” There I said it. “He wouldn’t want to be the cause of moral stumbling among the brethren.”
Sarah looked at me, not as if I were speaking Greek (which she understood) but a language far more alien and incomprehensible. There were a lot of things I hadn’t explained to Sarah yet. My mothers had been more thorough with me what with their tales of Queen Maeve of Connacht’s generosity with the friendship of her upper thighs. But then there had been eight of them, and Tir na mBan had been a much simpler world.
“But what about Ma?” Sarah saw an out. “You can’t leave her alone.”
Ma, who had been humming and spinning, now spoke up or sang out.
The angels are round about me
and I shall not want.
My people revere me
and they shall bring me
oat cakes and honeycomb
cabbages and pigs’ knuckles.
“Pigs’ knuckles!” I laughed to ease the tension. “Ma, really! What would your son say? Nice Jewish widows don’t eat pigs’ knuckles.”
“I’m the next thing to a pagan goddess now,” she said unperturbed. “Or I will be soon. And whose fault is that?”
“Anyway, it’s true,” I said to Sarah. “We just have to let them know in the village, and Ma will have more than enough to eat.”
“Your mother,” Ma said to Sarah, “will never forgive herself if she doesn’t go. She may never forgive herself if she does. But never mind. There’s no help for it.”
Sarah was quiet for a moment, taking in her grandmother’s deciding vote. When you are part of The Three, two against one carries a lot of weight.
“Mother, if you go, you must promise me that you won’t talk. You won’t tell stories. Especially not about my father.”
I was cut to the quick; I kept quiet for a minute trying not to show it.
“Sarah,” I said at last. “I am going with you to make sure you’re safe, not to tell stories. I’ve told you before that I think it’s best if no one knows who we are.”
She regarded me gravely, almost sorrowfully, fully understanding that I had refused to promise.
“If you do tell about him, I will never forgive you.”
She might as well have said to me: I lay upon you, O Mother, a geis of danger and destruction if you open your mouth to tell a single story. And she probably would have, if she had remembered any of the Celtic tales I had told her when she was a little girl.
Why, Sarah? I wanted to ask, why are you so against me? What has changed between us? Something held me back. Maybe I didn’t want to know the answer. Maybe I was afraid if I pushed too hard, I’d lose even more of her. Maybe I just didn’t want to give up the last tattered thread of illusion that I was in control.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
RELUCTANT CAMP FOLLOWER
AND SO IT CAME to pass that I spent the winter trudging after Paul and Sarah from village to village. The season actually worked in Paul’s favor. It is a Celtic tradition to welcome wandering bards in the winter months, to house and feed them in exchange for entertainment. People had more time on their hands in the winter and were more confined and tended to pick fights and start feuds as the season wore on, so Paul was a welcome diversion to the Galatians. Though he was not a storyteller, he could talk all night, and he spoke with passion and sometimes great poetic flair. I had to give him that. People responded to his fervor and intensity as much as to theological contortions and exhortations. And the one story he did tell—about his conversion on the road to Damascus—was quite dramatic and in frequent demand.
“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Paul (as Jesus) would cry out with just the right mix of reproach and sorrow.
“Good question,” I would find myself muttering. “So what’s changed?”
Paul also liked to detail his sufferings, the number of times he had been beaten, stoned, imprisoned. He boasted that he shared the wounds of Christ, and he did have scars on his hands and feet, but I personally never saw them bleed, and the scars on his stomach most certainly came from the last time he was tossed over a cliff.
Even though he didn’t make much effort to hide his impatience with what he considered the Galatians’ backward ways (you stupid Galatians, he was later to rail at them in an epistle) the mountain people were impressed with this scrappy little man, his heroic exploits and boasts, and he was daily winning converts to the religion of this new god, who was, after all, not so different from Tarku and Attis and other regional dying-rising gods. But Paul’s Christ Jesus promised more: he was not just a local, seasonal god but the god who would judge the whole world when it ended (any minute now). The Galatians had had a hard time; they’d been conquered more than once, stripped of wealth and power. The end of the world with its dramatic restoration of justice was a cataclysm to welcome. If they repented and believed, Christ Jesus would open the way to the Summerland, to Tir nan Og, the land of youth, where time turns back on itself like a Celtic knot.
At least that’s how I explained his appeal to myself; for I confess it disturbed me to see my neighbors converting in droves to a Jesus I barely recognized, Jesus as played by Paul of Tarsus.
“God,” the apostle assured his listeners frequently, “set me apart from when I was in my in mother’s womb, and called me through his grace and chose to reveal his Son in me.”
It was even more troubling to watch Sarah sitting and listening with rapt attention. What had happened to my wild child, who roamed the mountain, who had known her father in the form of a deer, an owl, a snake? How could she trade these live encounters for Paul’s abstract pronouncements? But I had to admit that she seemed peaceful, purposeful. She anticipated all the apostle’s needs, fetching him food and water (he took no wine) his cloak or staff. He treated her with tenderness, and the mountain people regarded her with respect—and a touch of reverent awe. The youngest of the Three, whom they had watched grow from a baby, was coming into her own, as what? No one had a name for it yet, but somehow the apostle had sanctified a singularity in Sarah that only weeks ago the village people had regarded as a problem.
If Sarah had found her place, I felt I had lost mine. The mountain people had accepted me as Healer Woman, someone who kept to herself, to her own back yard, except to gather wild herbs and roots in places even more remote. They did not know wha
t to make of me as the reluctant camp follower of a traveling preacher, and one they were obliged to receive in their homes and give a place at their hearth. Up till now, The Three had been a natural (or maybe supernatural) fixture that people had come to rely upon. You wouldn’t want a boundary oak that had stood for centuries deciding to go for a walk. Of course natural features did change, springs dried up, streams shifted course, sometimes a boulder perched for eons would suddenly shift and roll down hill. But these were not necessarily events to be welcomed; in fact, they could be regarded as evil omens.
Even though I was disturbingly out of place, at first people still turned to me when they or their children were sick. Away from home and the herbal and dietary remedies I might have used (and taught others to use) I relied more and more on the fire of the stars that flowed once again through my hands clear and sure, as if it had not failed me when I needed it most. One day I held a child who had the whooping cough, one hand in front of the boy’s chest, one on the back. I closed my eyes and saw the fire, cool as water now, flow into all the tiny branching passageways, calming, soothing, clearing a way for the air. When the child breathed and slept peacefully, I became aware of another burning sensation, not within me, but from outside; it prickled and singed. I opened my eyes, and found the apostle watching me intently, with a look that wavered between curiosity and censure.
“By what authority do you heal, woman?” he asked.
I must tell you, we were not alone; indoors in the winter, no one ever was. I had been sitting as far from the preaching as I could get in the wattle and daub hut of the village chieftain, letting the drone of the apostle’s voice be just that. Now he had halted his sermon and turned his attention and everyone else’s on me. I was most aware of Sarah, who had averted her eyes from me, perhaps afraid of what I might say.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I answered truthfully. Then I remembered my beloved insisting that he had not healed anyone, his god had or rather their faith in his god. To me it had all seemed an unnecessary complicating of something elemental, rain soaking into earth, sunlight splitting the husk of a seed.
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