Historical Setting: Monkwearmouth, 794 C.E.
The grieving girl tells her story.
“The Christmas bells rang just then, same as when he was born that night when them nuns called me “Mary.” That baby were then, warm and wide-eyed, wiggling and wriggling alive; such a sweet babe he were. But then, the bells ring and Mister handed him back dead. I held him close ’til the bells stopped. I rocked him dead, and I sang to him dead.”
She starred off and sang and rocked herself.
“Coo baby in the willow tops, tumbles down, tumbles down”
“Used to, he’d smile back when I sing, but dead don’t smile. I poured my milk on him, but dead he didn’t put his mouth to me and pat me with that tiny little baby hand.”
Her tears flood every word now.
She says, “I promised that baby I’d never leave him alone even dead, so I took him down to the sea where I could go too, to them pits of sheol. But I was dragged back to the rocky sand and now he goes on and on all alone, without a mother, all alone and so cold…”
Her sobs are all consuming. She’s telling me, a stranger, all of this, because God already knows and yet she still needs to say it. It is the season when the nuns don’t chant a lullaby. It is a dirge.
“Herod the King in his raging …lullay, lullay”
It is the story that Matthew told all the way through.
It is the season now after the names remembered fled to Egypt, and now the song is for the weeping “Rachel.”
And here is this young woman who was snatched from the sea by men who would play the heroes. Her life was saved but she is inconsolable — consumed by a raging demon, or is it grief? I know its name is grief. The grieving mother is the story that also finds Mary grieving at the cross.
What can I say to her?
I offer only silence and thoughts. The allegory of God’s love for all people is the bond of the mother and child. That love bond is every mother and child.
“Yet, Rachel still weeps.”
“Who is Rachel?” She asks me.
“It is an allegory in the gospel. Maybe Rachel is any woman who weeps for her lost child.”
“So, Rachel knows me?” She asks.
(Continues Tuesday, January 13, 2026)
Lazarus Ink 