#57.2, Wednesday, June 5, 2024

Historical Setting, 629 C.E. On the way to the Secular Church

         We are putting the wedding together today for Brandell and Gaia. Gaia, a blind woman with amazing vision, has only been in this strange land a short time and already the people she has invited number, maybe a hundred and more, if counting so high were even fathomable.

         And we’ve cleared a space behind the little heap of stones that is the church in the woods to make a wide place for the feasting and the dance. And of course, there is that surprise Brandell has for Gaia up there.

         Everyone is buzzing around her, adding flowers for her hair, and chains of daisies around her neck; she is surely the queen bee of the garden and yet she is busy with considerations sending Hannah off with the donkey cart to the castle serf fields for Will and Layla and the baby. And now the cart is coming back up the creek path, followed by a line of peasants who just want to dance again to Brandell’s songs.

         And two miles away in the other direction, Haberd and the mule wagon, as instructed by Gaia, are traveling with the elders of the Jewish refugees and it is likely their whole families are following after the wagon up there.

         Mater Doe is probably standing out there now in the clearing, watching anxiously to see if the old vintners of Burgundy are following after the Jewish families on the same road that once brought the men to her door inquiring for an excuse for a war. She will choose her words of ritual carefully to speak the blessings in the name of the one God who is the love we all share when we notice we are all sharing love. There will not be three gods, or a hundred gods, or one god who chooses only a few, but the God that is God. That is the one God for us all who only yesterday blessed this same ritual of the ants that were gathering between the stones at the farmhouse doorway.

         Brandell has been up here at the “secular” church extending the long table we prepared for the feast.  We made a table long enough for our two butchered lambs and all the trims.  I fear a longer table may look sparse even with the abundance of food we will share today.

(Continues tomorrow)