Historical Setting: Monkwearmouth, 794 C.E.
What to do with this grieving mother is the issue. I could take her back to the nuns if they could listen without judging. Maybe they would receive her with pity, unless their own fear of a writhing demon overrules their holy compassion. Obligations to care for strangers are always weighed against the possibility of hidden demons. Maybe the nuns would understand her grief because they know the Matthew story of the slaughter of the innocents. Rachel could be their name for her. They know that Rachel weeps, and Mary ponders. They practice the mother’s grief each season with the Lenten sorrow standing with Mary at the cross. Maybe the nuns could understand.
But I know something of this grief also, because I have been the grieving parent, and even then, when it was my own child, I didn’t know the depths of Ana’s grief as the mother of our child. No one knows another’s grief, we only know our own and from our own grief, sympathy is born. We never have the same grief as another.
Dear God, you already know her, you love her, and I know you also love her child. You love the love bond of mother and child. You have given her voice to speak of it though the words she gave it were crude. Help me listen-in with what I have so carelessly named sympathy, that I may, in some little way, help carry the burden of her sorrow.
She’s shivering, even wrapped in my cloak. Her only garment is a simple dress– an undergarment the nuns gave her to hide her nakedness. I asked her if she has other things she can wear.
“Mister had fine clothes for his son’s mother, but he sent me off in my old beggar’s rags and what was left my old cloak, he used to wrap the dead baby in. The baby wore my rags into the sea. I meant to give that child more, but all he has in his death are my old rags!
“I wore fine clothes in Mister’s castle. And yet, he saved my rags because he knew from the first, he wouldn’t keep me. If he had only noticed me, I could have been a useful slave for him all the years of that baby’s life.
“I would be a good servant. I learned the fine words of the castle.”
“What do you mean?”
“I used to have wildwood words like “trashed” and “crud.” Now I have castle words: “dismissed” and “filth.”
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 