Post #27.2 Thurs. December 2, 2021

Historical setting: 588 C.E. Forest Primeval

         Here is the place where once we kindled a fire. It’s a cold little mound of ash without a whisper of smoke. We eat leftovers from the great feast of victory this noon day. It is still and very cold.  The sun only pretends to prod its tenticals between the naked limbs of forest. The village of the tribe we met here can’t be very far. I wonder if they are already watching us.

         No sooner do we start on the trek deeper into the wood when the little druid appears in front of us, not welcoming, but holding a large staff like a barrier to block our way.

         “Don’t take another step! Go back and die on your own lands.”

         “What are you talking about?”  I ask.

         “But Sir, Druid…” starts Thole.

         “It is Largin, I have a name.”

         Thole continues, “Very well, Druid Largin, I’m called Thole, but you may wish to call me Troll if it is more suitable to your faith. And this man is Laz… Ezra; he is called Ezra. But if you don’t like Holy Bible names he can be whatever you wish.”

         “Of course he can. And I wish you both away!  Go far away and take your Christian plague with you to the farthest shore!”

         “Plague?” I think his sudden fear has a reason.

         “As though you didn’t know. The woman who knelt by your fellow with fever to give him tea is now raging with fever herself, soon to die of plague. For fear of plague I can’t even allow her own sisters to bring her any comfort. She will die very soon, and it’s all because of the Christian plague.”

         Thole argues, having once lived in the home of a healer known to be pagan, “Plague isn’t Christian. It can spread to anyone.”

         I add, “I don’t think our fellow even had the plague. The tea made him well. I’ve seen plague and I know how it kills. I’m sure the Count didn’t have plague.”        

         “First you people break the promise to return the child. So we have no able practitioner when we need her most, then you come to us at the sacred night of Samhain and bring a plague down on us.”

         “Please, Druid Largin, take me to see this woman and I will give her a healing brew myself.”

         Thole takes my arm, “No Ezra, what if…”

 (Continues Tuesday, December 7, 2021)


Post #27.1, Weds., December 1, 2021

Historical setting: 588 C.E. Jesse’s Farm

         It’s an early rising for chores long before the night is broken. Thole and I milk the goats and fill the oats in the horse’s trough as silently as we can not to waken Jesse and whomever else he has in his bed after yesterday’s feasting.  We draw buckets from the well to fill the hollows in the watering stones. Now that Jesse has chickens two hen’s eggs are found in the straw so we put them on the board next to the bowl of fresh goat’s milk and they will know the chores are done. Thole chooses to leave without speaking his hurt to his father.

         Just before the gates of Tours is the ferry landing and Thole reminds the ferrymen that three days ago he was crossing with a horse and the ferry tipped, so he didn’t get the boat ride already paid, and now we should cross the river without paying. Oddly it is agreed.

         It’s late in the morning by the time we’re on the north side of the river. Three day old tracks left by eight horses are easy to follow along the riverbank and into the woods.  I can guess where we are going but why we are going is a mystery to me.

         “Thole, do you have a reason or a plan?”

         “I just want to be near the spirit of Auntie Eve. I’m looking for the druid to ask if we can join up. I should think they need more strong young men, don’t you suppose?”

         “Yes, I would suppose so, since their tribe is older people and most are women. But why would you want this?”

         “Okay, Ezra, you don’t have to come! You can just go back to the greed and garish selfishness! I can do this by myself.”

         “I’m not arguing. I’m just wondering.”

         “I want to belong where the people still know the spirit of Auntie Eve. They haven’t forgotten her. I thought you would want to be close to her too.”

         Dear God, when you are counting every hair of every head of Creation – caring for humankinds and all of the beasts too — surely the lines people draw separating our varieties of worship might not be important to you. Let me not keep these walls in my own heart, separating tribe from church. Give me eyes to see wider. Amen.  

         (Continues tomorrow)

Post #26.13, Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2021

Historical setting: 588 C.E. Forest Primeval

         Thole is defiant. Grieving for Eve who raised him through his childhood, then he left her in her blindness to go back to his father to take the responsibilities of a farmer. Maybe he feels the same guilt as I, who also abandoned Eve in her silent, uncomplaining need because she seemed so resilient and able.

         Through his howls and tears he keeps reminding me I don’t understand, and yet my own sorrow tells me I do – or maybe not.

         My prayer begs God’s presence in my own grief, but it yields the empathy for me to see beyond our shared loss of Eve. And it is true that Thole claims his own grief, because his deep sorrow is his father’s betrayal of some kind of unsaid vow to Eve. Or maybe it is that Thole feels he is betrayed by his father’s stranger — a widow, immune to suffering grief – already a mother and ready to bring with her a family of her own sons and daughters. With all these people as a family for his father, what use might Jesse have for Thole? It is need and usefulness that binds a family until love wears a silent pathway.

         The black water of night flows in thick braids shaped into river by the obstinance of these two opposing banks. We sit here with the murmur of the river under the winter’s dark.

         A sudden jolt of inspiration sets Thole on his feet. “My father named me “Troll.” Let him feel his own loss of Thole now. I will get a horse from the count’s stable and cross this river into the pagan wood! And my father’s heart will ever wonder and wish for me, but I’ll never think of him again.

         Need I remind Thole he isn’t that good at crossing the river with a horse. Or maybe I will just save him from the water again, and hope the horse can swim.

         I answer, “Our crossing will be easier without the horse. Let us walk to the boat landing in the morning.”

         Dear God, You can see both of us in our separate pains are imagining new lives, new friends, new family, new place to live that surely must be better than the old, even though we have no idea what a different life may be.  Stay close as we make an earthly plan of it. Amen.

(Continues Wednesday, December 1)

Post #26.12, Thurs., Nov. 25, 2021

Historical setting: 588 C.E. The Count’s Mansion

         A victory feast at a fine estate is a great spread of meats and bold porridges, an abundance of saved melons and dried berries, honey and cream spreads, wine and mead flowing free. Possibly, in the other room at the women’s table they have these same indulgences as we have; only they, in their modesty, would prefer men not see them in such bliss. Here with only men is the great wolfing, and gnawing, belching and snarling until the great feast is in bare bones and shatters, and we sit back and paw the juices from our jowls then the servant comes in and says, “There is more.”

         Now the women come in, fed and ready to slide their thighs between the men’s seated on the benches at the board. (I did mean to say, seated together, facing only the board as for a meal.) New sounds, women’s voices, giggles, delicate glassware, setting a new ding of note. A tray of honeyed wafers passes among the takers again and again, reaching and longing for more, yet the desert seems ceaseless. A thick sweet brandy wine fills each glass sticky and fragrant.

         I watch as Thole watches his father’s hand finding the delicate edging on the hem of the widow’s tunic. This farm roughened hand has a comfortable place on the pallid knee, but then it slips ever so slightly onto the thigh of the widow of Saumer, and in an instant of rage Thole flees the table and the house, a child’s tantrum on a grown man with a great flood of tears and howls, and shaking, quaking from his shoulders to his belly, slamming him to earth like a swat to the back of his knees. I see this.

         I’ve followed after him. I have a hint of a fear that he would prefer the bottom of the river to the great and sumptuous feast of victory. He sees me, and gathers himself to his feet to run again, toward the river.

         “Thole!  Stop!  The river won’t take your hurt away. If you go in that water I will come in and get you, and we will both just be shivering on the shore! It won’t fix the hurt!”

          I’ve rescued him from the river once, and I can do it again, with the help of God; but I can’t save him from his grief.

         He shouts back, “Go away.  You don’t know!  Leave me alone!”

(Continues Tuesday, November 30)


Post #26.11, Weds., Nov. 24, 2021

Historical setting: 588 C.E. Forest Primeval

         The long board for men dining at this feast is in the main hall amid a décor of a sword and the yellow banner. I’m seated here mid-table with this multitude of men.  Count Bertigan is at the head. The women here will join us later for the biscuit and the cup when we have all finished the rude gorging of the meats.

         Thole who calls me Ezra at his father’s demand asks if I’ve heard any stories of our war?

         “Only Rumors.” I answer.

         Thole confides this war should be about our loss and so few of us even knew Eve. He is stewing in the hurt of betrayal.  “No sooner is Auntie Eve in the ground than my father is off with the widow of Saumur. He loved Auntie Eve! He begged for her marriage not for her utility, she was blind after-all, but he begged for her as a woman. All my life long he waited for her then in the moment of her death, there he is with another. He doesn’t give her a second thought.”

         “Thole, I just think it is Jesse’s way of grief. I’ve seen it before.  On the night you were born Eve walked back home in the sleet and snow, all alone, sorrowing that she couldn’t save your mother; yet on that very night with your mother just wrapped for burial, your father begged Eve to be his new wife. She told him to buy a fresh nanny goat to provide for his child. She feared that if she married your father she would live her whole life only as substitute for your mother.”

         “Well, she certainly came through as a mother for me. I was with her through all of my childhood. But we could have been three of us as a family – complete, not just me and her.”

         “You must surely know that she was never one to be ruled by anyone else’s expectations. If she didn’t have one foot on the Pagan side of the river, and the other on the Christian she wouldn’t be Eve. She would be pecked over like a wounded hen by the likes of Colleta, don’t you suppose?”

         “My Papa would save her from the gossips. He wouldn’t let Colleta come near her.”

         “So then, you’re saying she would always have been alone.”

         “She would have me.”

         “I miss her too.”

         Dear God, you bring solace to the banshees and the ghosts, please stay with us through this strange maze of grief.

(Continues tomorrow)

Post #26.10, Tues., Nov. 23, 2021

Historical setting: 588 C.E. Forest Primeval

         I ask Colleta what the rumors tell of our encounters with the banshee.  She seems to know all kinds of new things about our so-called war against the Pagans but there is no mention of the banshee. Colleta’s rumors are spun stories not facts.  Legends are shaped by rumors purposed by ancestors seeking connection with a valued history; or in this war it is a mother who wishes accolades on her children. But when it comes to the banshee she seems to have no idea what I am talking about; and it was the Pagan idea of a banshee that most touched our hearts and thoughts that night.

         This terror, this voice of a woman up from the dead keening for lost souls struck the chorus of all of our hearts together through the night. [Footnote] Some of us are missing Eve and others just know a woman’s throat was slashed and a child was stolen. So we went there as a band of swordsmen set on vengeance yearning any destruction we could call justice. We went to have our mountains of hurts smoothed over into some kind of blissful flatness named “even.” That was all this war was about. We rallied for a slashing, a kidnapping and a fire.

         Then came the chanting and howling of the Pagan ritual. It was at our campfire where we heard the response to our own hurting grief. The ritual of a keening banshee sharing our woes was the chance to pour our own suffering out in the wailing songs. On that night, every name of our grief was spoken, Pagan names and Christian names, names of murdered children, names of elders dead of plague, the name this father came to hear spoken — that name of my own daughter ‘Eve.’ A mother was screaming her grief for a Pagan name we didn’t know, or maybe she was named “Blessed Mary” weeping for her children.  The deep world of earth and heaven wept with us, as God is always a parent grieving for her child.

         The feast of victory: There is a separate dining board for the women in the hearth room as is custom. In that room Celeste is the host and Colleta the grand matron. Daniel has a guest at the women’s table, no doubt hearing of his dragon slaying. And Thole’s father, Jesse, also has a woman here.

         At both tables are the rumors.

[Footnote] Rosen, Brenda, “The Mythical Creatures Bible: The Definitive Guide to Legendary Beings.” 2008, New York: Sterling p.202.

(Continues tomorrow)

Post #26.9, Thurs. November 18, 2021

Historical setting: 588 C.E. Count Bertigan’s estate

         As the great victory feast is being prepared rumors of our so-called war are swirling. I can hardly affirm any truth to the rumors – I was there. I saw we had a campfire all night and watched and listened as the Pagan tribe performed rituals of Samhain on that night of the rising, when the dead are said to cross through the haze from the otherworld deep in the earth where the gods of the Celts have their home.

         Colleta wants my affirmation of rumors to serve her children’s interests. I can only agree that Daniel would be slayer of a metaphorical dragon as he is surely a good man.

         As for her other child, Celeste, she wants my advice on fixing up the meat of gossip that surrounds Celeste’s husband, Count Bertigan.

         I ask Colleta what she’s heard of Bert’s adventure at warring.

         Her answer, “He was near death, and he said the Pagans summonsed his dead mother up from Hell.”

         “I’m not sure the pagans would say it was ‘Hell.’”

         “Where else would you think they would find his mother? Don’t argue. At any rate, Celeste was concerned, and she went to the village priest.  She could have gone straight to the bishop with something this important, but she only asked the priest.”

         “And what did the priest say?”

         “He said it was the Pagan influence on Bert’s vision. Bert is a fully baptized Christian, so it would not have been a visitor from Hell, but more likely it was the Virgin Mary herself.” (Colleta makes the sign of the cross.) 

         I answer, “It was hard to see in the smoky darkness whose mother it was who brought him the cup of tea that healed him.”

         “Oh, it was the holy mother Mary of course. How could you have missed noticing the glow around her and the golden crown?”

         “It was dark and smoky, and I might have drifted off – it was late after a long day, but I really didn’t see anyone glowing with a crown. All I saw were Pagans and us.”

         “Of course you wouldn’t recognize her anyway. Just don’t say anything at the feast that might ruin the appearance of the count as the amazing and miraculous Christian that he is. He could even be a saint. If anyone asks about the Virgin, just say you were sleeping.”

         “So, what should I say about the banchee’s screams in the night?”

(Continues Tuesday, November 23)

Post #26.8, Weds., November 17, 2021

Historical setting: 588 C.E. The vineyards of Ezra

         Colleta is reciting rumors of the war so I won’t refute these details with actual fact. “We’ve heard you encountered a dragon. And we’ve heard that my son-in-law Bertigan nearly suffered death. And that my own son Daniel was the dragon slayer.”

         “Are you asking me if the rumors are true?”

         “I know what is true. My son is a hero. I knew that before he ever went into battle; but now everyone knows it. He’s been courting the daughter of a wealthy and literate aristocrat in Tours. Daniel, tall and handsome, intelligent and wise only needed the credential of war hero to be granted the hand of that maiden.”

         “Are you asking me if the rumor is true?”

         “I’m telling you that what matters is that it is believable. And I’m telling you dare not challenge that it is said that Daniel is a hero.”

         I mean to change the subject. “Do you know, Colleta, what is the substance of dragons?”

         “’Substance’ you ask.  I know of substance as that which is the same in the Father and the Son, God and Christ.”

         “Yes, Colleta, I thought you might know that. And so a dragon is of the substance of metaphorical beast. It breathes, not the breath of God but the breath of evil. The substance of a dragon is fear and lies, and the hurtful hates invented from rumor and skewed values.  Didn’t you wonder why we didn’t bring back the meat of this monster or at least the head to parade on a pole?”

         “For a moment I wondered what became of the carcass. But more important is that Daniel is a hero.”

         “I don’t deny Daniel is a hero. I’ve always known him to be kind and honest and true. And even in my world of metaphor, that kind of hero conquers dragons. But what slays a dragon isn’t more lies and rancid rumor. The Ephesians knew Christian heroes are outfitted in metaphor – ‘the belt of truth the breastplate of righteousness and the sword in the Word.’ [Ephesians 6:10-18] Daniel is that kind of hero.

         Colleta begs, “Whatever. I’m asking you, Papa Lazarus, please say nothing about the missing carcass of the dragon. Maybe in all the celebration of victory there will be no thought at all that there is no dead dragon.”

         She continues, “And you should also know what we all know really happened with Bert away at the war.”

(Continues tomorrow)

Post #26.7, Tues., November 16, 2021

Historical setting: 588 C.E. The vineyards of Ezra

         Now on the home side of the Loire the count has immediately taken the command back from Daniel.

         “We will enter the lands of my estate as the proud victors! Ahead of my horse will go the banner, displayed fully with no tatter. I will ride first of the swordsmen; then continuing single file will be Daniel, then Thole, then the others of you who volunteered and you may arrive in any single file order you prefer.  We will enter the grounds at a proper canter, quick enough to unfurl the flag with the full enthusiasm of victory!”

         After all this instruction we are mounted, ready to make our awesome display of “winning” or at least surviving, and the count adds that we are all invited to a victory feast tomorrow at his table. And so we go along the road those miles and through the gate making a circle in front of the house before we take the horses on to the stable.  Celeste and her children step out to watch us circle around for no apparent reason, yet the count is very pleased.

         It is usually said that history is told by the winners. In the case of this count’s first “war,” the Pagan followers of the druid priest are not telling the history because druids notably don’t keep written records of histories. So everything that will be known throughout all posterity of this victory will have to be sprouted from the seeds of rumor we plant ourselves. And by the time of the great victory feast some of the wandering vines of heroic stories are overgrown and twisting and turning into valor none of us ever knew we had.

         The women of the farms gather for the spinning of wools and flax. It seems the spindle is the true source of yarn where stories are grown. Then Colleta brings these details back to me plotting the retelling, so I won’t say something that doesn’t fit with the so-called truths they’ve discerned. Despite the cold November air, Colleta wants us to walk the grounds of the estate so not to be overheard.

         “Papa Lazarus,” Colleta begins, “I know the truth of the war.”

         “And what have you heard of our so-called ‘war’?” I ask fearing the twists of rumor-authenticated “history.”

         “We’ve heard you encountered pagans, and ghosts, and even a fire-breathing dragon.”

(Continues tomorrow)

Post #26.6, Thurs., Nov. 11, 2021

Historical setting: 588 C.E. Crossing the Loire

         The ferry crossing with Thole and his horse ends in a disasterous upset with Thole and his horse and a ferryman all sliding into the river. The horse swims to shore as Daniel takes it’s rein and guides it onto the bank not far from the landing. The ferryman clings to the ferryboat, now righted and flat on the river again, and Thole is nowhere to be seen. Caught in a current I catch sight of him, and even though the river runs shallower near the shoreline he is floundering and calling for help.

         The water is stunning — near ice — taking my breath away in the first shock of it. The swim is an easy reach to Thole, but holding onto him flailing and fighting is the challenge. I find it is shallow enough that I can get a footing, though the challenge is sharing that calm with Thole, and allowing him to find a firm stance on the rocks beneath the river. It seems impossible.

         Dear God, stay close. I can’t let this fellow go from my grip now. He is the very soul Eve delivered to life at his own mother’s death so many years ago. How would I ever tell Jesse I couldn’t keep hold of him. 

          The ferryman throws us a line and in a moment Thole discovers he is safe though chocking and blubbering on the piece of river he swallowed. We make our way to the slimy bank. The shivers are wrenching and wringing. I left my cloak dry on the shore, and the ferryman stationed on the south side of the river provides a blanket for Thole. The horses and men waiting to follow behind us on the ferry are in panic now, and one horse has decided to make a swim for it with his man clinging to his withers. Seeing the success in that, another follows, and the last of them, until we are all across, so now most everyone is deep in these shivers. Thole had the fire start with him, so we can’t even make a flame.

         The Count is unchilled and firmly in command, raging over the cost of all of this when we could have all just swum it. The ferrymen are trying to make peace with him by providing the warmth of their fire and extra cloaks.

(Continues Tuesday, November 16)