‘Saint Odile? Oh, my! Claudia Procula becomes Saint Odile! There is something in that!’ I thought on it, ‘She was born blind because she remembered the healing of the blind man, is that what you are saying?’
‘The healing she had seen lived so deeply in the soul of Claudia, pairé, that it became a part of her body in the next life.’
I took a moment to ponder it. ‘We are not meant to escape the endless wheel of incarnations, are we Lea? We are meant to return, again and again as Buddha told Jesus. Perhaps we have been like the Essenes in our faith!’ I fell into despondency to think this. ‘We have kept ourselves pure by closing ourselves off from the world. Perhaps we too have become prideful? Have we not forsaken the earth as a place of the devil, and do we not see the incarnation of the soul again and again as a punishment? We even take the consolamentum so that we may never return!’
‘But the Catholics too, have erred, pairé, since they do not see past one life and have bound themselves to dogmas and laws like the rabbis. Your faith has grown too light, and the Catholic faith has grown too heavy. One sees only purgatory while the other sees only heaven…the ideal lives between them, in the middle,’ she said.
52
SEVEN
In those days I wondered: Why must morning always come with such regularity? Why can I not remain a vassal of the everlasting dominion of the night? Only fools love the day more, for the night is like death to them!
It was not so to me. I lived for the night.
One such night, waiting for Lea to come, I had a moment to look out onto the world outside the fortress. A heavy rain was falling to entice the buds on the trees and to attract the wild flowers from their beds. It reminded me of standing at the gates of the fortress a year ago, when I had the sense that I would not live to see a new spring. It had been a true sense, to my reckoning, for despite my newborn love of life and youthfulness, despite my open eyes and light-filled heart, I knew the end was near and the sadness I felt was not for death itself, but for a wasted life.
I heard a humming in my ear then, a bee, crawling on the windowsill. Strange it was to see a bee out at night, with her little wings drenched from the rain. Guilhabert’s words returned to me. He had told me that I must seek the rose like a bee and my thoughts turned now to those songs sung by troubadours, songs of a love so chaste that it recalled the love of a bee for a flower.
If I were a bee, then surely Lea was the rose!
I did not tell her my musings when she came, finally. I was ashamed and confused, elated and forlorn as I listened to her voice tell about the Mother of God and her concerns for Jesus, who had just returned from his travels to Bethany.
‡
Jesus seemed weary and old, and his face, which had once shone so brightly with the majesty of youth now waned, pale and dry, as if the fire in his soul had all but consumed the wood of his body.
These long months she had gradually come to know in her heart the measure of her son’s destiny, of the pain and suffering he would have to undergo, and it caused her a deep sorrow. Perhaps her son sensed her sadness, for he began to spend long moments with her. They walked in silence together or sat in each other’s presence in prayerful meditation, each feeling the wave-like proportions of the future hurrying towards them. Sometimes he touched her arm as she walked past, and she was full of comfort. At other times it was a look or a word that filled her soul with warmth and strength.
In one sense, the pain of these dragging days made her almost unable to breathe, and in another, her heart wished to hold back the time forever, for she wondered how she would endure it when it came? How long would last her strength? How long could she bear to witness the violence and hatred and death that were to be visited upon him?
Recently, Lazarus, the young man who had provided so well for all of them these many months, had become unwell. His sickness had grown worse and he had lain consumed with fever in the cool of the booth for most of the feast. He did not rise even when Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea came to warn of the desire of the Pharisees to seize her son.
Soldiers had been dispatched to look for him in every place and they must be careful. To add to this, the disciples began to return again, two by two, from their apostleship in the villages and towns of Judea and Galilee. They brought more followers in their train and now the household was consumed with activity and the forward march of things - the feeding and housing of so many men and women. And yet in the quiet of the afternoons, beneath the date palm in the walled garden, she found time to sit among the other women to listen to his teachings
These past months the women had marched in her son’s train with their skirts tied around their ankles and their sandaled feet bound in cloths. They did not sway like the women from the cities when they walked, for they had learnt that to travel long distances one had to conserve one’s strength. Now he was speaking to them without the men, of things only appropriate for the ears of women.