Historical setting: 584 C.E. Eve’s Garden
We’re walking in Eve’s garden and I am asking Eve about the sorrows of my missing years with this family. Eve tells me she knew of her blindness for many years, even while she had her sight. As a healer she knows it follows the small pox and she bears the scars of the pox. I argued with her in the times past, blaming her for not maintaining her reading skills as an adult.
“I’m so sorry Eve, that I didn’t understand your worry then. But you gave me such a lame excuse; you said you needed to fit in with the ways of the times when women don’t read. I thought that was a strange argument from you. You always seem so unbent by popular opinion and as wise as the ancient women, some who were scholars in their own times.”
“I forgive you Papa. I don’t need to forgive God for my blindness though. We’ve come to terms with this. The hurt was in the fear of not seeing. And with the helper that I have now my dependence on a child has also brought me into a circle of love I never expected to know; the blindness itself opened me to many new paths of learning that the likes of you, who see with your bright eyes will never know. There is one hurt but many days with the blessings of healing.”
Perspective becomes excuse.
We have come the full circle on this path. I’ve found my daughter Eve is older and silvered and clinging to a tattered bit of wisdom now. Thank you God for this beautiful child with all of her gifts to help and heal. Stay close in our needs.
Anatase has returned from her errand and is already waiting on the garden bench with the pages and she is reading ahead; maybe she is even reading the sad pages I meant to save her from seeing.
“Anatase, I would like to skip around through the pages because I may need to hear some particular things from Old Nic. I’m hoping someone will be taking a cart down to Poitiers so that I might ride along to go and see where Nic is buried. Today I want you to read to me about the monastery called Ligugé. Did he write any pages about Brother August and Brother Joel?”
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 