Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland
I still have questions. Why are these people, already empowered by the magnificent nature of being human — already rich with power — setting their hearts on taking the riches of others? There must have been a disaster that skewed the human values. Love, in all its varieties seems taboo. Here is a world of men and where women are few. The few women who aren’t slaves are powerful oddities. Maybe this void of women is filled by capturing thrall. It seems a people always striving become lost from the simple peace of goodness.
I ask, “Why are women so few here and mostly they are women captured in raids?”
“If I attempt to answer you in your own language, I know what you will ask me next. And before I tell you about myself you have an obligation to explain who you are. How is it that you are a young man with an ancient memory?”
Over and over again, I’ve clearly failed to explain my oddity of life and life again to a pagan seer who really has no interest in a gospel story and surely not a Christian sermon on resurrection. So, what can I say?
“Once I was a Jewish kid living with my family near Jerusalem. I was best friends with an artisan, a builder, a smiðr. He was a teacher with a radically simple message about an intangible spiritual life — living in a world apparently made only of earthly works – tables, benches, walls, ships. So, in his teaching he used metaphors of tangible things to help people understand the invisible goodness. He built the fishing boats and set them on the seas to gather food for the hungry and bring comfort for the sorrowing – it was the opposite of Viking raids.
“He used things of earth as signs – using the visible to explain the invisible. He was looking for a physical sign to explain the notion that even death has no power to destroy this invisible nature of love. And it happened that he came back to my family when they were mourning my death. And then he called me back into life and I became a physical metaphor for a spiritual truth. I was bestowed with the same healing every living being has, but in the extreme – healing — even from death. So, here I am a forever sign of life.”
“So, you are telling me Jesus carved a rune and you are that rune?”
“Indeed. And now you will tell me who you are.”
(Continues Tuesday, March 4)
Lazarus Ink 