Historical Setting: Jarrow, 794 C.E.
The Baker and I are waiting to meet with the abbot in the monk’s chapel of St. Paul. Here the window is leaded with pieces of colored glass. The places in this room where shadows would nestle are not shadows at all, but little patches of dancing light, though the room seems shaded in a solemnity and placid, like the cool depths of a summer forest.
Here the windows don’t reveal the awesome grandeur of vast panorama of Creation, rather the sun comes as a kind of inner light — a Spiritual presence. While I find it peaceful, the baker does not.
“He sees us, doesn’t he?” The baker says. “God is watching. He sees us when we’re sleeping, he knows when we’re awake, and he knows every sin! There is no hiding from God.”
I let the baker reminisce over Psalm 139 finding God everywhere, even in the depths of Scheol. While my own prayer of thanksgiving is silent.
Dear God, when I feel you near, I have a sense of peace. Thank you for your nearness in times of trouble, always present with comfort and assurance. But I am in here in your sacred presence with a man who has been harrowed with the rumors of Hell. I know that some people who represent you are known to find power in punitive abuse. So called, holy men threaten retribution for innumerable sins heaped onto a poor soul with mere human guesses threatening an afterlife filled with horrific punishments, though it has never actually been witnessed by any living person. He suffers an inescapable guilt gnawing at his conscience. Maybe he is only a victim of human power-plays and rumors. May your truth-filled judgment bring forgiveness and…
“What? Are you praying? Are you bringing the Holy wrath down on us?”
“Has ‘holy wrath’ come down, or is it mercy that surrounds us here?”
“Devils lurk.”
“God listens.”
“God knows we are all born in sin.”
“God set the land and the sea and the sky with life, and said ‘It is good.’ God didn’t create sin.”
“Then, by one man, Adam, sin came into the world.”
“Adam is only everyman. Original sin came into the world on the lips and the quills and inks of early church fathers — The once pagan Augustine remembered it and wrote it to be copied over and again.”
“The Church Fathers were Christian Saints.”
“They were also people — wise men, maybe, but people.”
The monk who showed us to this room comes to tell us the abbot will see us now.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 