Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Francia
This horse and I are strangers to one another yet, so my traveling chatter is set loose on Creation itself.
Dear God, thank you for the eternal flow of goodness – the river running down, always – the winds coming new across the grain fields – the stars and the skies, — the patterns of caring for one another, always growing richer in love and beauty, despite grief. Thank you.
When last I was crossing through this land it was peopled with common farms, cottages, forests, simple paths laid among old Roman ruins. But now, the patterns are of changing ways of farming. The start of the change I’d seen at the Waldelenus castle fields with rich land-owners dividing the lands to be worked by the poorer classes.
Now everywhere are castles surrounded by smaller and smaller parcels of agricultural land farmed by those without the power of choice called serfs. As happens in patterns of power, the arrangement isn’t as we’d thought it would be when it began. The expectation was for the plenty to be shared. The ones who turn the soil would share with the Lords of the Manor who provided the land and the safety. What seemed like a good plan, sours when lived to become simply servitude and more poverty for those who till the soil. It is just more wealth and power for the already powerful. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Now castles are being stacked in stone everywhere.
It is a very old story, older than all my lifetimes. I first saw it as Roman. But it comes around again and again. Wealth seeds greed. Then when greed is perceived as normal, even the poor believe the flawed notion that wealth is an earned accomplishment. But wealth is a striving not an end. Because there is no definitive amount it is always simply, more. Like a mirage, wealth is always beyond and never attainable. The aspiration is a famished dead end.
Jesus wasn’t being absurd but truthful saying it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven where love and joy are the measure of success.[Mark 10:25] That is not a curse on the rich, it’s a simple fact.
Passing through this land now, I wonder if these serfs ever gaze into the heavens or see beyond the mountains and bask in the beauty of this earth. Do they see this most beautiful day?
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 