This blog is a serial story in the genre of historical fiction. It posts on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays in installments of about 400 words.
Catching up on the continuing story line.
In May Lazarus delivered a message from Father Columbanus to a hostile bishop’s council meeting in Châlons to tell the bishops the Father would not be coming before them. The sole purpose to the meeting was to admonish the Irish abbot so his message drew such ire that the guards were ordered bury the messenger. Laz was driven through with a spear on a polearm witnessed by his sons. Then the twelve-year-old twins devised a plan to return the body of their papa to their mother, but of course, this story being what it is, it continues with the slow healing back to life of Lazarus into the summer months.
In the June Chapter Lazarus is still healing from the wound, while his sons are anxious to set out on new lives in search of a righteous response to the violence they witnessed. One plans to be a monk and the other a soldier. Ten-year-old Simon has taken on much responsibility for the work of farming while their father recovers.
Free Download “How Still Waters Run” a Novella by this author on the subject of grief. It is the same time frame and plot as the April through July chapters but told in the voice of Ana and Laz’s ten-year-old son, Simon.
Discovering Lazarus-Ink.blog beyond story…
THE HISTORY: The non-fictional historical setting of this saga is chosen to follow a single strand of first century teachings throughout the centuries to unravel and observe the shifts of Christian church history. Through heresies, judgments, wars and witches the question is always: “So then, whatever happened to the ancient universal love of God?”
THE FICTION: The What-If of this fiction is the character who is a literary device reincarnated from John Chapter 11, (That’s the story of the raising of Lazarus by his friend Jesus.) Lazarus is used in this blog as the fictional time traveler and the first person voice of the narrator. In this fiction Lazarus was bestowed by his friend Jesus, with the super-power of extravagant physical healing, so that at every death he endures he is eventually restored to life through slow and reliable healing, brought back as an ever-thirty-something man of ancient Israel whose memory of Jesus is never flawed.
THE BIBLE STORY? The Fourth Gospel (John) offers the amazing works of Jesus using “signs,” not “miracles” as we find in the other gospels. In John, the signs are physical metaphors for spiritual truths. As a sign, Lazarus is used in John’s Gospel as the physical example or metaphor for the spiritual truth of resurrection.
Bible scholars and close readers of the gospels will tell you that the fourth gospel differs from the synoptics (the other three), in that the story is told from the setting of Bethany just outside of Jerusalem, while the others are perceived to be grounded in Galilee of Nazareth with visits to the Temple and places nearby.
THEOLOGY: This Protestant seminary educated, unorthodox, mystic blogger believes that John was written from a point of view that reality is spiritual, and the whole of the physical creation is God’s creative work of art, offered to all the ever-living spirits of us to be as a sign, to speak of this reality of Spirit and allowing good mental health and healing into a nature of God’s universal love. Seeing the physical world from the spiritual reality is like seeing from Jerusalem when everyone else views the story as rooted in Galilee. It is the same basic story, but an alternative point of view.
Lazarus Ink 