Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne
I have to say, having seen the politics of the Frankish bishops manipulating the church, in my life and life again, this worm of greed has also been working to devour the religion from the inside.
Maybe Emil’s observation of Christianity is well founded. I’ve been away for a very long time.
Ships and men are gathering along this coast tucked into these fjords – which are tongues of sea pressing between the mountains. Snow and ice are falling away to reveal the new earth of springtime, a brief moment of solitude in all this beauty fills my longing for Creator.
Dear God, in this strange place where I am I still see your great works – the awesome altitudes of rock sides high and heaven soaring through the rising mist of morning – then the perfect image of what is earth and sky, is reflected in the stillness of the waters at our feet, as it is on earth as it is in heaven. Thank you for this immersion for basking in the beauty.
I also see around me the people of this time and place and they are longing to know you, yet they don’t have an imagination for anything more than themselves and maybe wooden dragon heads and sea monsters of their own design to frighten enemies. It is enemies here who seem invisible and imagined and are driving their lives in the same way some people are driven by your fulness of love. Give me a wiser understanding of people and love.
You have wiped clean these thin places so that finding you here, feeling your touch, and breathing in your breath of life is easy and peaceful. It seems no one else here notices. I guess you know this. With your help, I will do my best to keep my tenuous hold on the love thread I always try to follow.
And please stay close to the woman who calls herself Sjókona, whom I left alone in a ruin of a house with no door for closing. I couldn’t go back to her in my own grief, so I mentioned her loneliness to a sailor named Gunnar. May it be she has already been rescued.
Thank you for letting me live into this beauty of earth, and let me always bask in love. So be it.
Down from this place I found for my contemplation amid the rocks on the hillside, the rocky shore of the harbor is becoming an increasingly busy respite from the sea for Norsemen’s ships.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 