Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne
How can I not speak up against such a terrible practice as setting girl infants out to die? And yet, anything I say to her, a victim, seems more like an accusation or a judgment against these people. The answer to my prayer asking for words comes only with judgment of my own judgmentalism. I understand I need to come to this with more empathy. But how can I be empathetic to something that just seems evil? It kills children, and leaves loving mothers grieving. I have empathy as an answer, but there is no one asking a question.
I say again, “I don’t even know your name.”
She argues, “You don’t know my name, and yet you know who I am.”
“’A seiðr,’ I was told.”
“So why would I need a name? I am known well enough by purpose.”
“A name is like a door that when set into a doorway gives power of entrance. Your name is how you are open to your friends and how you choose which strangers to welcome. To say you have no name is to bar everyone from knowing you. If you say you only have a purpose, though you are living and walking on earth, I’m asking, has this death of the infant happened to you even though your life was saved?”
“I have no death. Obviously, I am living. And I know things. I read the runestones, I know the heroes and the stories; I have answers that stand on their own without attribution: ‘it is the opinion of Steph,’ or ‘the word of Gull.’ What a seiðr says is said. A seiðr needs no name. If you came to me because I said my name Eve, woman of earth with no mother, we would have traveled all this way as a man and a woman, but not as a god guided by a seiðr.”
“You blamed me for being a ‘judgmental Christian,’ as though my sense of conscience is anathema here. So, I prayed for the right words to answer you because, surely, the love source, Creator of all life, would agree with my judgment and would give me the words I need to prove righteousness. But I wasn’t given any kind of offering of amazing words. Apparently, the god who is God agrees with you, I am just making a loud noise by judging without empathy. So, I was given a reminder to come to this with more human caring and less judgment. Now I feel such a need to know you by a name.”
(Continues Tuesday, March 25)
Lazarus Ink 