#59.11, Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Historical Setting, 629 C.E. farm in the Vosges Mts.
 

         These things that Ana keeps on her shelf of precious things speak of our family at different ages. The value in them is in the ‘once was,’ and not the ‘someday, maybe’ of it. Simon’s ashroot harp that Brandell also learned his music with sits here just as Brandell left it when he traveled off to Constantinople. He left it behind because he intended to give up his music for the art, then when he arrived in that city, he found a builder of the kithara, used as a harp by the Greeks, so now his music flows new again. Isn’t that how it is with each of these old treasures?  They are the story of how we are new people always and again. Already the hands of the grandchildren no longer fit into the fingermarks of the child making the vase, and all of us speak with new words and phrases beyond the writing in the study pages we keep as books.

         Holding onto what was once can be seen either as a view of how far we have come or as grief for the once-it-was-better-than this. It all depends how we see from the place we are. And now, grief obsesses, though I still hear Ana’s breath in this silence. Grief hides in a place near love. Grief belongs to the universe, so we don’t own it, even though we may claim it. Love also belongs to the universe. Love is the universe. We live in love in the way a fish lives in the sea.

         Dear God, in all my prayers and psalm singing I always ask for you to stay close to me and to the ones I love, as though the distance was yours to cause. This distance is my own nature which fails to notice I am already swimming in holy love. Help me notice the beauty in this love even through this is a difficult time.  Amen.

         And now Ana is waking and all we can imagine is vulnerability and mortality that always was there, but never noticed.

         “How are you feeling, Ana? Can I get you anything? Are you warm enough? Do you want a sip of water, or some of this tea Hannah has made for you?”

         “It’s alright, Laz. I’m just glad you’re here.”

         I move the stool to the bedside, and brush her hair from her face, and take her hand.

         “You know, Laz….”

(Continues tomorrow)

#59.10, Thursday, August 22, 2024

Historical Setting, 629 C.E. farm in the Vosges Mts.

         While Ana sleeps, I keep watch and I am remembering the times of our lives looking at this shelf of precious things Ana keeps.  Now I see that Ana keeps a love letter I wrote to her while I was observing silence with the monks at Annegray before there was Luxeuil. I should read it over remembering how I expected our love should be kept secret from the monks, now maybe it should be secret from the grandchildren too.  I read it again for things I wouldn’t want read by others.

         No, it doesn’t have secrets from children, just from monks. I went to the monastery for Lenten prayers before we were blessed into marriage, but it was no use because my thoughts of Ana were leaping and dancing delighted, through any possible somber remembrances of Holy ritual before I could turn my prayers of gratitude over into the required seasonal sorrows of Lent. Just now, I could easily say those grieving Lenten prayers properly. But then, there I was, praying without ceasing with the monks, side-by-side with my deepest memories of Jesus, my friend. I know he would have appreciated my inattention to solemn prayers just for the sake of love. All of the many varieties of love were the theme of Jesus’s everything. He wouldn’t have required my sorrow at his death when I, myself, am the earthly sign that it isn’t a forever death. But the monks require the sorrow and the tears, and just now, I am really glad they do. My spirit aligns with the those who are grieving this day. When I wrote this letter my hopes were that Ana and I could live together forever. Now those same hopes are this sadness.

         Dear God, I should find gratitude for all these old hopes fulfilled, but right now that giddy gratitude seems as misplaced as the required sorrow was on the day I wrote this letter. I am grateful, but not joyful.

         And here is the ash-root harp Simon and I made for him that terrible summer. He wanted to fill the hole in the music that my absence had left at the church. Then it was his absence from us that left the deepest hole in our hearts. Simon’s book is here on the shelf as well.  It speaks in his voice of the child’s goodness. Ana and I still grieve for him.

         Then his harp kept newer songs because Brandell learned his own music on this harp.

(Continues Tuesday, August 27, 2024)

#59.9, Wednesday, August 21, 2024

Historical Setting, 629 C.E. farm in the Vosges Mts.

         I find myself pacing, worrying, contemplating emptiness while Ana sleeps here.

         Here in our house by the hearth is Ana’s shelf of precious things. It is where she keeps the icon Greg brought as a gift – the treasure that sent Brandell off to find the master of this craft and learn about the pigments. He came home with the art-master’s daughter for his bride, so this object has taken him more places than anyone would suppose.

         Some things here are shaped into gifts by the hands of our grandchildren.  These beeswax candles Ana uses to read by after dark, shaped into columns around wicks by tiny fingers. And here a raw clay vase and a little bowl are pressed from creek clay, still poked like a pattern with little fingerprints. They hold precious remnants of seasons past: dried flowers and lavender stalks in the vase, and a small collection of bird feathers and dragon fly wings to give bones to dreams of soaring.

         Something resembling a bookshelf has all of our collections of parchments bound in bows of wool that are known to this family as books. Some are tied up pages of our own thoughts and writings.

      And here among these “books” are pages remembered of Ana’s teacher, Eve’s, medical book. This book was the healing lessons for generations from Eve’s own teacher who took her in as a young child after the first round of a plague, unknown in that time, left Eve and her brother orphans. In Eve’s generation she took in Ana — little Anatase – who had been given over to a Pagan tribe by Christians, because she seemed possessed with a demon observed by illiterate people when a girl child seems to be learning to read.  She was named for a useless blue stone mined in these mountains. She learned the warmth of family with Eve and when I found that child again, she was nearly a woman, in the care of the monks of Annegray known then by the name of Ana. [Footnote]

         Ana’s own little clay flutes are here. The one with the five holes is the one she plays now, sometimes she plays with our harps and the singing at the church. And she still has this little flute she learned to play as a child’s toy. It was hearing that music, the few practice notes on that flute, which was my first awareness of the child Anatase — inquisitive and wise for a small child.

[Footnote]Dear readers, to follow this story is not necessary to go back, but Ana’s life story is told in blogs #19 (April 2021) and on. and stories of Eve begin in blogs #2 (November 2019)

(Continues tomorrow)

#59.8, Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Historical Setting, 629 C.E. farm in the Vosges Mts.

         “She’s sleeping.  We talked. I know. I don’t understand it, but I know what you know.”

         “I’m sorry Papa. I’ve seen this before. Momma knows this thing also. Vizsla and I didn’t agree. But Momma told us what to do.”

         Vizsla speaks, also in a whisper, “As a surgeon, trained for battle wounds I would want to take my blade and sever every evil root, seen or hidden, known or imagined until there was no more of the possibility of that root spreading, likely taking the whole life of her. And then I could say we had done all we could…”

         Hannah told me of Ana’s own answer to Vizsla’s plan, “Momma knows this longing for the power to rescue despite the life of the patient. She told us before we even cut her breast how she wanted this decision to be made.

         “the nuns already did all they could, and they did nothing at all with the blade.” She said at first, she blamed them, even though she also knew they knew there was nothing they could do. “Instead, their prayers gave me back this time with all of you. It is a vacant wish that this could be fixed with the blade. It is a prayer answered with love, that we can belong to one another for a day more or forever.”

         “And then” Hannah explains, “we proceeded to cut a pebble from that same breast that nurtured me and my brothers and sister, but it wasn’t a simple thing we just could fix. Vizsla did the stitching back. I couldn’t see to do that through my own tears.”

         So, we will cherish this precious time of belonging for however many days or months there are.

         Isn’t it one day more or forever that gives each of us our own mortality? Each day is precious and cherished, which is a perception of knowing our earthly finitude.  Some of us live long and lonely grasping for the thread of love left in our longings. We wish away earthly endings, and yet, we always must find them.

         Hannah and Vizsla go now, to spend their night together as the young lovers as Ana as I were once.

         In summer’s dusk I sit by the cold and darkened hearthstone listening to her sleeping breath. My prayer is always gratitude for her breath even in this anxious grasp to hold onto this most tangible moment.

(Continues tomorrow)

#59.7, Thursday, August 15, 2024

Historical Setting, 629 C.E. farm in the Vosges Mts.

         Ana asked me to hold her hand.

         “Laz, I know you are worried and hurting and I only thought if you were asked to pray for someone else who was in grief, you would just get beyond yourself. I didn’t know he was just going to walk in and you would have to deal with him so directly.”

         “I know this frustration. It is a prayer thing.  And it is exactly the prayer thing that weighs most heavily on me just now.”

         “A prayer thing?” she asks.

         “It’s not anything keeping me from prayer, or allowing me to pretend I am praying when I am not.  It is that thing that is the most disconcerting about prayer, that God answers in God’s way, and it isn’t always an answer I’m willing to accept. It is just that sometimes the answer comes in asking me to do an uncomfortable thing.”

         Ana is confused, “So you don’t really want God to be with Vizsla in his grief?”

         “I didn’t want Vizsla’s grief to be my responsibility. I wanted to cast it off onto God. But more than that, the matter here is that God knows, whether or not I speak it aloud. Even if I ponder it wordless in the depths of my love, you know, and I know it is my prayer over and over again that you won’t have to go through a terrible thing here with this pebble in your breast.  I know what everyone isn’t saying, and I know what I don’t want said. And even God isn’t answering that prayer according to my wishes.”

         Ana answers as a matter of fact, “We know now it isn’t a pebble or a pea, Laz. It is a whole root of something terrible. We have to acknowledge that reality, to say it to one another, to do with it whatever is asked of us.”

         I don’t want to hear Ana’s voice tell me this.  I want to be the one who knows just what to do and fixes this thing. We say nothing more.

         Now Ana is sleeping. This deep and peaceful quietude, dark and terrible, but also, she is promising a gift of time we have for sharing more in life. I spread her beautiful flow of pure white hair onto the pillow and spread the blanket to keep the night draft from her shoulders.

         Hannah and Vizsla come in quietly, together, holding hands, hollowed and drained by their own work here and their own tears.

(Continues Tuesday, August 20, 2024)


#59.6, Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Historical Setting, 629 C.E. farm in the Vosges Mts.

         Vizsla came into our house in the middle of my prayer just in time to hear my spoken prayer asking God to be with Vizsla in his time of grief in the passing of his mother. So, he holds onto me now, as his brother in grief.  Maybe I am that, but only by holy happenstance; I didn’t choose it. And especially, I don’t want it. There is nothing about Vizsla that makes me want to be a brother in anything with him, particularly in grief.

         Now, through all this loud wailing and tears a theological question rises up about the nature of God. Is my God different than his God? I don’t really have God, God has me. Does Vizsla even notice God? I know nothing of these Avars at all, except they fight Christians in East and they wander the Persian desserts then leave their families to starve in the lands by the Danube!

         I know God is God. I don’t pray aimlessly into a void. I recognize Earth and all Creation as the great metaphor, the wondrous poetry, the art of the first and always Creator, the Spirit of all that is.  God is love, and love is the …  

         But I would rather argue theology with Vizsla than share with him in grief.

         I argue, “It isn’t my God or your God, it is just God. It doesn’t matter if you are Greek or Roman, Jewish, Ishmaelite, or Zoroastrian, God is God. If God is God religion doesn’t forge new gods. We just come around to finding that same God each in our own way. The one religion blames another for its different ways.”

         Vizsla observes, “Pagans call other tribes Pagan. Christians sever their own Jewish root. In the name of God’s love religion slaughters religion.  And you wonder why I don’t own your God?”

         “Vizsla, it is God, not me, who answered your need for compassion no matter what oddities of coincidence made you think my prayer was for you.  Just, leave me out of it.”

         Simply and truthfully, without frills, I actually do know that Love is demanding me to share this odd man’s tears of grief just now. He seems to think that my duty-prayer brought God in affirming to him that he is beloved despite the hole in his spirit called grief.

         We clearly don’t share all these human contingencies to God called religion, but maybe we do share in grief and in need.

(Continues tomorrow)

#59.5, Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Historical Setting, 629 C.E. farm in the Vosges Mts.

         Regardless of the humanly derived and practiced separations of religions, in the universal nature of God’s love, we both share in grief and we are both a part of the same love of God.

         Really, I would much rather argue theology, or bible, or even how a musical tune should be sung. I would much rather take a stand on any issue. But he sees me as a partner in our own terror of emptiness just now. He claims me with his hug for brotherhood and his tears are for our common lot. I really don’t want him to grieve a woman’s death just now because I don’t want to imagine myself in grief also.  I just want someone to fix Ana.

         I know I don’t get to choose my grief but I push him away from me.

         He apologizes, “Sorry, Papa Lazarus, you just seem so much like Brandell, who knows me so well, I guess I just assumed you would understand too.”

         “Of course, I understand grief. I guess I was just thinking only of my own sorrow just now and not feeling very welcoming.”

         And he argues, “Of course, but my grief is more profound than yours since my mother is actually dead and your wife is yet alive. And besides, Brandell lets me cry with him.  And furthermore, your God answered your prayer to bring me comfort immediately by sending you. I know, I know.” he says, holding his hands up as a shield between us. “I will be careful not to overstep my welcome with you.”

         Arguing with Vizsla would be so much more gratifying right now than is sharing empathy with his grief. On one hand he is brilliant and clear thinking, but on the other hand he is an emotional rag basket.

          “You want to be rid of me too, don’t you Papa Lazarus.” And he leaves.       

         And now Hannah comes in. “Papa, what did you say to Vizsla?”

         I would have added my defense here, except Ana calls Hannah to her bedside, and whispers something to her. Now Hannah leaves with the same huffy attitude as Vizsla.

         Ana calls me to her bedside. I could only apologize for becoming so visibly annoyed with Vizsla right in front of her and all that over a prayer? I know there was no excuse for showing off my worst nature to this near stranger.

          I can only apologize to Ana now. I wish I was the loving person others expect me to be.

(Continues tomorrow)

#59.4, Thursday, August 8, 2024

Historical Setting, 629 C.E. farm in the Vosges Mts.

         Ana asked for a prayer aloud for this stranger, Vizsla, who is grieving his mother’s passing even though my mind and my heart are all only on Ana at this time. She wants me to speak the prayer words aloud, so together she and I can pray this. I take her hand, we close our eyes and…

         I whisper to God, “Dear God, sometimes the prayers in our hearts are our deepest worries — what we care for most. I know you hear what is in our hearts. But if you were distant and different from us then we could just pray with words that sound right but don’t really touch deeply, so please dear God, listen also to my unspoken prayers when I speak words aloud.” (There is a sound at the door, and yet I continue to speak the prayer.  Now it is silent at the door, probably the intruder realized it was not something to interrupt. So, I continue the prayer aloud.) “And together, Ana and I ask for you to be with Hannah’s Vizsla, as he has to face this time of deepest grief. And help me to nurture the empathy for him that I know is felt by those who love him. Amen.”

         And here he is this awkward fellow Vizsla who just burst into the door while we were in prayer.  He was listening at the ending of the prayer, and now he thinks … whatever he thinks … he missed the part where I said it was Ana who told me to say it, so I was only speaking the part of the prayer about this strange misfit fellow in order to please Ana. And now he has thrown his arms around me, and is sobbing on my shoulder. Of course, I know God loves him and Hannah loves him. 

         Now, he says he was so moved that I took my empathetic plea to “my God.” And he is thanking me for caring. 

         What does he even mean, “my God?” Are these Avars not Christian? Even Arians who don’t follow the Creed, worship the one God of Abraham and Jesus.

         “Is your God different than my God?” I ask him.

         “If it is the religion that makes the God, then all our fighting against the Christians surely would require all of us who are Persians to have a different God,” Through his blubbering he adds, “But…”

(Continues Tuesday, August 13, 2024)

#59.3, Wednesday, August 7, 2024

Historical Setting, 629 C.E. farm in the Vosges Mts.

         Here at Ana’s bedside, I just want to know she will be strong and well soon.  I want to hear Hannah say her mother is fine and the surgery was minor revealing nothing more than a miss-placed pebble. But that isn’t what they’re saying.  All I can think of is this shadow of dread and all we are talking about is this socially awkward intruder, Vizsla.

         “Laz, he was an Avar soldier, and left his mother with their tribe to travel with the other soldiers to fight with the Persians against the emperor. But when he saw the horrors of battle, he chose to learn healing. So, of course, he was perceived as awkward and misfit among the soldiers. And maybe he lives up to that perception. But then, Hannah has some rough edges herself.

         “He studied medicine and went back to the wars as a pacifist. Now, ten years later he traveled with the Avars and the Jews, on that same journey with Brandell and Gaia. The caravan passed through his own land where he found that all of his family had died in the plague that swept their homeland while the Avar soldiers were away. He is grieving, Laz. Surely you can understand.

         “He is a brilliant and fine physician. It is a blessing from God that he and Hannah have found one another.”

         “I will try to be grateful, Ana. It’s hard to think of anything now but how you are doing.  Do you need anything?  What can I do for you?”

         “You know the unspoken as well as I do, Laz. There is nothing I would rather do than wake up from this fearsome thing strong and well again. But maybe it is just something we have to work through.”

         “Ana, in this most sensitive time, I’m so sorry you have to deal with that stranger who is following Hannah.”

         “Maybe it is a woman thing, Laz. Multi-tasking – sharing thoughts for another to lighten my own worries.  So, I wish to listen to you say a prayer aloud before I doze off just now. I want to hear your beautiful, gentle voice of man who will speak gratitude for Vizsla. And I want to hear your voice ask for God to be with him too in his own grief. I mean, God already knows your plea to stay close by us in this troubling time. I want to overhear your prayers spoken deep and wide for this man.”

(Continues tomorrow)

#59.2, Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Historical Setting, 629 C.E. farm in the Vosges Mts.
 

         Vizsla? He came along when Hannah was called to her mother’s bedside.  He was at the wedding wearing the colors of a ruthless, militaristic wandering tribe though he brought no weapon to the wedding. He came alone on horseback down from Trier and stayed to himself all through the feasting and the dancing. Why would I trust him now?  He just starred at Hannah, all through the evening then he took her away with him after the morning clean-up and we had to send Hannah’s brother on horseback yesterday to bring her back again. And here Vizsla came along, too.

         Hannah is in with her mother and I am waiting out here for Ana to call me. Vizsla is out here with me. He really isn’t very personable. He seems to have nothing to say to me.

         “I’m going in to check on my wife.”

         “No. You have to stay out here! Hannah said so.”

         Now Vizsla is standing between me and the door.

         “I’m Hannah’s father. She can’t tell me to stay out.”

         “Obviously she can and she did.”

         “Ana is my wife. I have to see her now.”

         “Wouldn’t it be lovely if pain and sorrow would yield to all of our wishes just because we are strong men. Strength doesn’t always get its way.”

         What a ridiculous thing to say. I just nudge him out of my way, and here I am in my own cottage with my wife and my daughter where I need to be.

         Thank you, God.

         Ana is awake and smiling and talking softly with Hannah. There is none of the terror just now that I feared they were hiding from me.

         “Papa, where is Vizsla? I sent him out to be with you.”

         “And I needed to come and see my wife.”

         Hannah abruptly leaves. But now I can be here with Ana. And she tells me, not about her own pain and fears, but about Hannah and Vizsla.

         “He’s like a stray puppy, following after Hannah. She is in love with him, Laz. And that is a beautiful blessing for both of them.”

         “He seems awkward in inappropriate to me. Maybe for him he is a good match for Hannah, but she should have so much more. She is a fine physician, brilliant and beautiful.”

         “You should get to know Vizsla. She really wants to keep this stray puppy.”

(Continues tomorrow)