Historical setting: 588 C.E. Forest Primeval
We’ve found the druid and a band of the pagan tribe; maybe we found them by coincidence or perhaps by the synchronicity of the holy. The druid asked Daniel if we have come to join in the festival of Samhain.
Daniel answers, “We’ve come to pay homage to the dead, rightly enough. As if you didn’t know my aunt was brutally slain, and it is our mission to avenge her death.”
“Your aunt, you say? She is the practitioner of the healing arts to whom we loaned the child?”
“Indeed.”
“That’s very tragic. So what’s become of the child?”
Count Bertigan flourishes his sword. “You tell us.”
“I have to admit” answers the druid, “I have no idea, but we have in our band a soothsayer able to listen to the voices clamoring from the depths of the world of dead this very night.”
The pagan priest calls forward a very old woman from this line of unarmed and mostly elderly pagan woman.
The druid offers, “As we were preparing to make our own fire your smoking embers called us here for the festival then we heard the piercing wail of the banshee, keening through the woods.”
The Count, whose scream of terror they surely heard asks what?
“The bean-síghe,” the druid answers, “it is the fairy banshee who weeps through the night for the dead. Surely the spirit of your woman of medicine is wandering and lost between the worlds on this night. But we have a soothsayer among us who can bring peace between the living and the dead.” [Footnote]
The elder woman who is known to listen through the thin places, steps toward the smoky fire at the center of our gathering. She invites all who are standing just to crouch down and to listen in quiet. There is a silence of near prayer. For me, it is a familiar atmosphere where I am often for my prayers to the one un-namable God of my childhood. It’s not my need in this moment to demand some kind of uniformity of spirit among others at worship here because I know of God so vast to include us all in the creative love. Somewhere in the nature of God’s holy love we are one. So maybe some here are listening to the spirit they name as gods of earth rising into the thin place of this night, or maybe it is the spirits of the dead, or maybe it is the Christian’s bidding for angels from above and a holy triptych Godhead.
[Footnote] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banshee, retrieved 8-10-2021
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 