Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Visiting Tours
This journey, visiting the bones of my loved ones along my way, is really about finding the spiritual life and life again of those I once shared bread with. It is the joyful side of life — the weedy overgrown vines of remembrance.
Dear God, thank you for this happenstance to take the message I am assigned to carry on to Marmoutier. Thank you for these generations of shared times with loved ones and my gift for remembering these things. Though, I have to say, remembering often feels more like grief, revisited. Amen.
I choose my route to follow the Loire to Tours, passed the fields I once planted, and the houses with roofs where I laid the thatch. In those times we first learned of plague in the worst way. So many died. And the Roman rule of the ancient times was waning. Then it was the Christian Church, not the kings as much, who were stretching to fill the earthly power vacuum. Maybe that didn’t change, as we simply became accustomed to some rulers claiming castles on earth and others, in miter hats, claiming heaven. Yet the tender prayers of children soar to heaven naming gratitude for mothers and fathers and loved ones though rarely for kings or bishops.
I slow this horse’s fast trot, and dismount. I walk along with the horse, beside this river I remember.
Here, where houses once stood are paths that in another time marked the journeys of friends and family coming to our door. Then these stones were stacked to enclose the gardens we kept. Here, these wild tangles of vines that make havoc with the landscape on the untamed edge of the road, speak remembrances of the vineyards filling the wine cups of the generations who once lived here. The river still runs its path, and the Church, the basilica at Tours built into the city wall, still stands as it was rebuilt after a fire. Keeping things the same is always a matter of rebuilding. What once seemed new is always another time’s relic.
Tonight, I stay in an inn by the river. Maybe this innkeeper is someone’s great-grandson I might have once known. Even if this inn is made of fresh cut wood, nothing is really new.
Tomorrow I will deliver the letter to Alcuin.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 