“He hath holpen his servant Israel—”
“Come on, Ma,” I cut off the last verse of the Magnificat, and grabbed her hand. “Run.”
When Ma and I caught up with everyone else, we found the apostle, true to his word, in the midst of giving instruction to the women inside the chieftain’s hut. A quick scan of the assembly told me some of the women were resistant, some cowed, some enthralled, some just plain confused. It was Sarah whose mood I could not fathom. She had taken her accustomed place at the apostle’s feet, and I could tell he was keenly aware of her, for every so often he’d look at her, and his face would soften. Once he bent and lightly touched her shoulder. But her expression never changed; the gold of her eyes made me think of mist, how blinding it can be when the sun begins to burn through it. Her face and body were motionless. I wondered where her thoughts had gone, and if she was all alone there.
Jesus, I prayed silently, Sarah. Help.
“Man is the image of God and reflects God’s glory; woman is reflection of man’s glory,” the apostle’s voice distracted me from my prayers. “For man did not come from woman; no, woman came from man.”
His congregation appeared baffled and there were some whispered exchanges; the Galatians did not know the story of Eve being fashioned from Adam’s rib. And hadn’t the apostle just said that in Christ Jesus there would be no male and female?
“Nor was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man, and this is why it is right for a woman to wear on her head a covering as a sign of the authority over her, because of the angels.”
“The angels,” interrupted Ma, who had apparently been following Paul’s Greek, and felt that he was poaching on her territory, “the angels do not care about head coverings. They don’t know about clothing; they never wear any themselves.”
“And the women,” Paul asserted loudly, “in the ecclesia shall keep silent, because it is not appropriate for them to speak, but they shall be subordinated, just as the Law says. And if they want to learn something, they will inquire of their own husbands at home, because it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the ecclesia.”
“Some of us don’t have husbands,” the irrepressible old woman spoke up. “Nor want any. What about us widows? And virgins, come to that?”
And Paul launched forth on the subject of marriage and virginity, though he didn’t exactly answer the woman’s question.
“To the unmarried and to the widowed, I say: it is good for them to stay as they are, like me. But if they cannot exercise self control—”
Self control, I thought, remembering the night he had called me to his bed. Was it self-control to refuse to enjoy it?
“—let them marry. To the married I give this ruling, and this is not mine but the Lord’s….”
I shut out his voice again as best I could. I did not want to hear him instructing the Galatian women in his narrow interpretation of his own Law. Again I thought of Mary B and wished she could be here to refute Paul point by point. Women not to speak in church? For Mary B the good news of Christ Jesus was just the opposite. Her friend Jesus had aided and abetted her ambition to study, going so far as to run away with her to the Essenes where he helped her pass as a man. Her friend Jesus staunchly overruled his followers’ objections and defended her right to be a disciple. I knew Mary B had wanted me to make a stand, to stand with her and all women, and I had failed her, as I was now failing my daughter. I looked at Sarah again and tried to imagine how she was hearing the apostle’s words—or if she was. But I couldn’t tell; she was closed to me. It was so painful to look at her; to feel so helpless to reach her. I closed my own eyes, but the darkness behind my lids opened my ears again.
“True, for me, everything is permissible, but I am determined not to be dominated by anything. Foods are for the stomach, and the stomach is for foods, and God will destroy them both. But the body is not for sexual immorality; it is for the Lord. Do you not realize that your bodies are members of Christ’s body; do you think one can take parts of Christ’s body and join them to a prostitute?”
Almost as if in a dream, slowly, swiftly, out of time, I rose to my feet, dry bones raised on the battlefield, cold inert clay warmed by divine breath.
“Out of the question!” Paul answered himself. “Or do you not realize that anyone who attaches himself to the body of a prostitute is one body with her, since the two, as it is said, become one flesh.”
“Do you say so, Paul of Tarsus?” I challenged him.
The apostle refused to acknowledge me, except by speaking more loudly.
“But any one who attaches himself to the Lord is one in spirit with him. Therefore keep away from sexual immorality. All other sins that people may commit are done outside of the body; but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body—”
“I tell you truly, tax collectors and prostitutes are making their way into the Kingdom before you.” My voice—or Jesus’s—cut through Paul’s ranting, and silenced him just long enough for me to jump in. “Do you know who said those words, Paul of Tarsus? Christ Jesus,’ I answered before he could. “Or Jesus, as I called him.”
An excited murmur ran through the crowd of women like a fresh breeze. I felt Paul’s eyes on me, but I looked only at Sarah, whose eyes stayed wide open, though tears began to well and fall. Sarah, I said silently, Sarah, I can’t be silent anymore. I can’t.
“You are claiming that you knew Christ Jesus?” The apostle’s voice was at once cold and tremulous.
“He was my husband.”
There was a moment’s silence as everyone took a breath and held it.
“I do not believe it,” Paul stated. “I know James, the Lord’s brother, and Peter the apostle. They have never spoken of a wife or—” He interrupted himself, and began to tremble as it dawned on him who Sarah might be, Sarah weeping now, soundlessly, her face still motionless.
“Your belief is not necessary,” I informed him, “and there are reasons why Peter and James will not speak of me. Nevertheless, I was Jesus’s wife, and before that—” I paused and closed my eyes. You will know what to do, my beloved had said. “And before that, I was the prostitute who received him, broken and near death, and healed him. Just as I received you, Paul of Tarsus, in his name as one of the least of his brethren, just as I received you.”
At that the apostle fell down, his eyes rolling up, in his head, his mouth foaming.
“Healer Woman, quick,” shouted one of the Elders. “He’s having a fit. He’ll harm himself.”
I went to him and secured his tongue, so he wouldn’t bite it off and held him while the fire of the stars flowed through my hands into his small tough body. In the ensuing pandemonium, no one noticed Sarah slip out of the hut.
Not even me.
You have guessed, haven’t you? You don’t need to run mad that night, searching for her everywhere. You don’t need to scramble miles with me in the cold and the dark, hoping against hope that she’s just gone home to our hut to have a little time to herself. You are not surprised when I open the door and find the hearth cold, the only home she’s ever known empty of her. You know that when I look in the chest where she kept her few possessions—an eagle feather, a bear claw, a snake skin, a slingshot, a knife made of bone, a perfect polished river stone—they are gone. Gone, too, is the only thing that belonged to her father, the son of man who had no place to lay his head except my breast, who did not even carry a haversack. No, she did not take off with the Holy Grail—all the crockery at the last party was rented by Paulina, I am sorry to tell you—just the wineskin that he carried as he wandered wherever his feet told him to go. She had taken all her clothes and her bedroll. There was nothing left of her here, not one scrap of her to hold when I sank to my knees and wailed.
But you may be surprised to know that when I woke at dawn, aching and cold, still crumpled on the floor, the apostle was sitting next to me. I pulled myself up to a sitting position and looked at him. Do you think I should have railed at h
im, accused him of setting my daughter against me? Should I have torn his face with my nails? Are you imagining that he would counter by denouncing me for destroying my daughter with my pride, my folly, my foul whorish ways?
None of this happened. There was a terrible truth between us. We had fought over her; between us we had driven her away. We looked at each other and wept, rocking ourselves separately, neither of us able to offer the other any comfort, neither of us able to condemn the other without condemning ourselves.
“The search parties are looking for her in every possible direction,” Paul said at last. “They will find her.”
Not if she does not want to be found, I did not say. I only nodded hopelessly.
“We must think where she would go,” said the apostle.
“We know,” I said, suddenly realizing that I did know. “She is her father’s daughter. She’ll go looking for the truth.”
The apostle was silent for a time, staring down at the floor.
“So it really is true; she really is…his daughter.” He lifted his eyes to mine.
“James and Peter and the others, they wanted to take her from me,” I said; I had nothing left to lose. “Peter agreed to let me go on the condition that I disappear forever. We were hiding here; we were happy here.” And then you came, I did not say.
He nodded and fell silent again.
“I will not tell anyone,” he said at last. “I will not tell anyone who she is, I will not tell anyone that…that the Lord has a child.” He shuddered, and I knew the problem was not Sarah, but me, the unaccountable fact that Jesus could have loved me, touched me. “It would put her in danger.”
“She is in danger,” I said sharply. “She’s a child, a girl….”
As I had once been a girl on my own, raped, beaten, sold into slavery. Suddenly I wanted to scream, jump out of my skin. What was I doing here, talking to this crazy little man?
“I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go now.”
“Where? Where will you go?”
I just shook my head and began to gather my things.
“What about the old one?”
“His mother,” I said flatly.
“His mother,” he repeated, moaning. “His mother.”
I did not tell the apostle that Miriam had already said goodbye to me. I had not realized it myself till this moment, I had been so frantic. Now I remembered that just before I made my dash up the mountain, she had held me to her, and whispered, “Go now, Daughter of my Heart. I will send for you when it’s time.” She had known I was going before I did.
“The people here will care for her, and she must be here if…”
Sarah comes back. Sarah, come back, come back.
“I am leaving for Antioch as soon as I can make arrangements,” said the apostle. “I could give you the benefit of my protection, if you travel with me. We may be able to overtake her.”
If I could have smiled, I would have. This man, a head shorter than I, who still walked with a limp, offering to protect me, a strapping Celt, raised by warrior witches, to protect me, a mother animal separated from her young.
“Of course, it would not be seemly for me to travel alone with you,” he backpedaled. “But surely we can arrange an escort….”
“I am leaving now,” I told him.
“But that is folly.”
“I have no time to spare.” I got to my feet. “But you are right about Peter and the others. They must never know where she was or that she has gone. Never. Swear to me. Swear to me in the name of Christ Jesus that you will tell no one.”
He also was on his feet now and we stood facing each other.
“I already said that I wouldn’t.”
I didn’t trust him. There was something about him that didn’t add up. Part of him was split off from the rest, and he didn’t let himself know it. Now when it was too late, I finally understood why I had been so uneasy about him, why I had wanted to protect Sarah from him. He was divided, tormented—like my father. He was also wily and dangerous. I had to bind him with an oath he wouldn’t dare break.
“Swear!” I advanced on him.
“All right!” He threw up his hands; he was clearly frightened of me. “In the name of Christ Jesus, I swear I will reveal nothing about…” here a sob rose, “about this innocent child. Furthermore, healer woman, I swear that I will look for her wherever I go, and I will never cease to pray for her to…her father.”
If I opened my mouth to speak, I would howl, so I merely nodded, grabbed my own bedroll and started down the mountain towards Jerusalem.
PART FOUR
PSALM
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
GUIDE MY FEET
Psalm
My goddess, my goddess, you have forsaken me
in my time of need and in my hour of desolation.
For I have failed utterly to protect my daughter,
to keep her safe from all danger and iniquity.
Once I carried her beneath my heart,
now my heart is broken within me.
For she has gone far from me;
from my countenance she has fled.
By night and by day, I will seek her,
and my lament shall not cease until I behold her again,
yea, until I see her beloved face.
Goddess, my goddess, with your loving protection
encompass her round, walk with her every step,
stay any hand that is raised against her.
Guide her feet into the way of peace, and grant me grace
that I may come once more into her presence
and hold her again in my heart’s embrace.
MAY BE YOU HAVE HAD A CHILD who ran away or disappeared in some other way—depression, anorexia, addiction, harmful love affairs, or even death. If you have suffered this loss, for what it is worth, I am with you; walking right beside you on that stony path. You may blame yourself, as I blamed myself. I don’t know that there is any help for that, though some will try to comfort you and reason with you. You are beyond reason. And self-blame may be the last shred of the illusion that we are in control. I held on to it as I journeyed east and then south, for if I had done something wrong, maybe, just maybe, when I found my daughter again I could make it right.
I am not going to detail all the stops I made or the people I met on this roughly four hundred mile journey, which took me forty days, at least, but I lost count. When you are searching for your child, you don’t care about the sights even if you see them; the hardships don’t matter much either. I had only one question, asked of everyone I met: Have you seen a girl, almost thirteen years old, with dark skin and hair and golden eyes. If you had once seen her eyes, you would never forget her. But no one ever answered yes.
If you are wondering if people preyed upon me or let me starve or tried to enslave me or lock me up, the answer is no. I had nothing of value for people to rob; I was no longer young, and my single-minded desperation may have made me seem mad to some, to others an object of pity. I had no pride anymore. So I kept walking, begging when I had to, offering the healing touch of my hands when I could. For the fire still flowed and had only ever failed me once when I needed it most. As many older women then and since have discovered, much of the time I was simply invisible, of no interest or consequence to anyone.
In late Spring I reached the port of Akko; from there I journeyed east again and picked up the Way of the Dove, heading straight for Galilee. For if Sarah was searching for the truth about her father, surely she would stop there where his ministry had begun, where he had called the first disciples to him, where he had healed people, raised a girl from the dead, cast out more demons than anyone could count. I was less sure that Sarah would want to visit my friends at Temple Magdalen. Surely it had been my revelation that I was a whore—and played the whore again with the apostle—that had driven her over the edge. Still I prayed she might feel compelled to see the place where she was born. In any event, I had to go there. I had to find out, and the c
loser I got, the more I longed for my old friends, for people who could know the worst about me, know that I had failed in everything, and yet would never judge me.
So one late night found me standing outside the gates of Temple Magdalen, a storm rising on the lake, the same as the night the Samaritan knocked on the door with my beloved slung over his donkey. The gate was barred for the night, just as it had been then, and as I knocked I started to shake with all the memories and with the fear that perhaps my friends had gone, and I would be a stranger where once I had welcomed the stranger.
“We’re closed for the night!” came a tired voice, so familiar though it was a bit creakier than I remembered. “Unless it’s an emergency and you have a sick man near death,” he sighed, “which I always have to ask in their freakin’ memories.” He was grumbling now, but I understood every word.
“Something like that,” I answered, hysterical laughter and tears overtaking me.
“What!?” he peered through the portal. “Who is that?”
“Reginus, open the gate, for Isis’s sake.”
In another moment we were sobbing in each other’s arms where we stayed for a long while till at last Reginus held me out to take a look at me.
“My goddess, what’s happened to you!” he said with forgivable tactlessness. “Girl, you’re a mess.”
I hadn’t thought about what I looked like in a long time, but now I realized my hair was more silver than red, not to mention long, wild and uncombed. My clothes were rags, and after weeks on the road, I was thinner than I had ever been in my life. I think it was my face that shocked him most, for it had been re-shaped by grief and anguish like a desert plain after a flash flood.
“Reginus?” Timothy called sleepily from their room by the gate. “Who’s there?”
Bright Dark Madonna Page 25
