Saturday, April 7, 2012

Holy Saturday

I've got to say what a beautiful day it has been today. I got up earlier than I would have liked, but that was my last complaint. I rushed to get the props for the rehearsal of the play I wrote last year which will be performed on Tuesday evening, got to dress up actors and play with my own language with them, and we had to go outside in all our finery for a fire drill, which was just added absurdity (and a validation of my plan to overestimate the time I needed for rehearsal). Then I had just enough time to come home, eat lunch, and set up the crochet set before Amanda's bridal shower - which was just epically lovely. So many people that I love, SO much good food I couldn't finish all of it, three rousing games of crochet with lots of blowing bubbles to accompany it, the retelling of everyone's favorite Dan and Amanda stories (which, seriously, "they are like a Ryan Gosseling movie"), and a truly epic round of gifts. Then I made the risotto stuff I get from Kroger for Clara and Amanda while we talked about our past shows and current lives (Amy also present for talking but not eating). Now I'm trying to get some work done with the gold of the sunset peeking between the leaves of the tree outside my kitchen window.

Thank You, Lord, for such a glorious day.

I've been thinking about what kind of entry to do today. I don't want to start another woman, but I'm not sure how I'd even begin a retrospective of all the women that I've looked at here. Wait, now I know where I'd start! I think I will pick my favorite line, paragraph, etc. of each woman (or perhaps each day? each monologue? Will that be too long? We'll see!). Hopefully, they will end up somewhat artfully arranged. Here we go!

ELIZABETH

I bore the weight for him: my son whom all the things of this world could not touch.

JOANNA

Salome danced when she thought she was alone. But she was never alone. I used to stand transfixed whenever I saw her. Most people in Herod's palace did....when she danced, all her silken chains fell to the floor, and she was bursting forth, pouring forth from some deep font deep within. Bursting to live. She never felt their gazes, but they were there. And one day, her uncle-father and aunt-mother demanded that she dance for their guests. Did she guess? Guess that they were binding her up in new chains? At first she danced as freely as before, but then she stumbled, just for a moment. And in that moment: she felt them. Hundred of male eyes devouring her, as if they were one leering trap. For all her bursting, flowing movements, she only weaved their gazes more and more around her own body. And when she fell still, she fell silent. Everyone did. She silenced everyone with her dance. Herself most of all.

WIDOW OF ZAREPHATH

The sins that start to come easier and easier, to fall faster and faster, as everyone begins to slowly starve to death. The charity refused, the crumbs stolen, the hope crushed under your heel. The advantage taken. The slow contraction of whom you consider it your responsibility to save.

PILATE'S WIFE

I had seen the world, more than most Roman women, and I knew that there was real suffering. But I did little, because I was waiting for a singular moment of clarity. I was waiting for a message, a sign, or just some understanding of what was beyond myself. I was drifting, waiting, straining my ears and blocking out everything in the world around me.

WOMAN OF SAMARIA

With the second wedding there was more gossip than bustle about me, but they were approving. Less sympathetic when he died. My third marriage ended in divorce, and that's when half the talk became whispers in ears and behind backs. By the fourth, whom I never actually married though I began to claim I had, I was like some attraction, some foreign seller of wonders barking in the streets of Jerusalem. I swear I saw money exchanged on the fifth. By then they were shunning me. The glares and lectures had died away into contempt and silence. I admit I took a perverse pleasure in how I could silence them, cut through the crowd and take my water quickly because no one wanted me there. But such things lose their charm quickly. Soon all you see is what they intended: the rejection.

MENSTRUATING WOMAN

It had been so long since I had touched even members of my family. You cannot imagine what that was like - to live at home, sequestered and shut up from the world, and even among my own family too unclean to touch. Impure and unclean. When the doctors stopped coming, it felt like the walls were sealed shut.

MARY MAGDALENE

I was possessed by seven demons. That's enough for a civil war between your wrist and elbow. They had tormented me so long I began to think of myself in terms of them - as if the several demons were my component parts. And I had forgotten myself long ago.

MIRIAM

I thought my mother had finally gone mad, bringing our baby to the river. I was screaming, she told me later. She had to put her hand in my mouth almost to the wrist to quiet me, and I bit right through her hand, still screaming. Trust in God? Where was God, she told me later that I screamed. Where was God when Pharoah came for our babies?

DELILAH

I lay beside him in the night, this beautiful fool lying beside me with no fear. Naked, utterly exposed, and yet at peace - not one whit of the terror I had summoned the courage to face every day of my life. I watched his chest rise and fall, and I told myself that whatever the propaganda said, he was not the entire Israelite army. The chance that he killed them was still small. And I wished, as I looked at his beautiful face in the moonlight, wished that the chance was smaller.

LAPA

I love that Catherine stands so strong. That she sees the world so clearly. I love that she of all my children shows the light I saw insider her father to the world most clearly. I love watching her stand with my strength and practically and think at last, Jacopo, between us we got the balance magnificently right. But I can't help thinking what Giovanna would be doing now. How close she would be. Infinitely closer than Avignon. I can't help thinking of Giovanna. The girl I thought that Catherine would be.

PRISCA

Aquila and I knew our job was to be the still, quiet voice keeping everyone from bedlam. Paul was the voice crying out in the marketplace, calling from the rooftops, making trouble. That's what you need at the start, and the rebuke you need when things have gone south. But there's a place in between, where the building of the Church happens. That is where we worked.

MARTHA

If I had sent for Him sooner, He would have come in time. This is the thing I know, deep down in my bones, as I prepare my brother for burial. That this is my pride. And my foolish fear for the man who is also the Son of God. Because He is my friend, and I want to protect Him. Protect the man I know is protected by God. Protect the man I have seen do wonders. Protect the prophet who walked through a crowd of people who wanted to stone Him with no harm done. Protect the Messiah and Son of God from mere petty men.

RUTH

And when Naomi spoke of her God, it was as if He told her every day how much He loved her. Not in some great spectacle down at the temple sacrifice, not in a blaze of fiery glory, nor with the amorous intentions of the Greek stories, but just like her husband did, a small moment before she went to sleep, a quick reminder in the morning before she rose to go about her day.

WIDOW OF ZAREPHATH

I had kept it guarded as a kind of close secret, lest they beg for food I could not take from my son's mouth. Lest a more worthy of the town take Elijah in and leave us to starve. Now I shared my joy. My blessing. The abundance of grace and peace I had been shown, when I was willing to settle for so little.

DELILAH

I watched him chained to the pillars. I watched him pulling against the chains, his face serene as it had always been in prayer, but every muscle in his body struggling as he never had before. In pain, as he never was before, but fighting all the same. Fighting still, still in love with His God. The strain of a miracle written across his body, suddenly so exposed to my view. The pain that could not stop him from fighting or loving. God never did abandon him. And all I could say as the walls came tumbling down was, "Oh, my love, my love."

MARTHA

When I heard that He had come, that Jesus was here, I was off like a cat out of an oven. I didn't notice that I dropped five pots and scrambled over them in my haste. I didn't notice that I bowled little Rachel over as I bolted out the door. I didn't hear the shouts of surprise when I leapt over the low wall at the edge of our house. I don't believe half the stories I heard later. All I knew at the time was that He was here at last. My Jesus. My Lord and my friend. The man at whose feet I would find peace. The peace I had been too busied to be wise enough to seek before now.

MIRIAM

That's how it always felt to me, when I spoke for God and His people. Like the rest of the world becoming something of a blur, not quite so real. There was a quiet, like a numb disbelief and then a prayer answered anyway. And suddenly, I knew what I had to do, saw it so clearly, and, the greater miracle: I had the courage to do it. The world went away, and it all became still, and grace appeared in the least likely form imaginable. That's how it always felt, when God intervened.

NAOMI

Ruth was a woman built to love: built to bear any weight, shoulder any cross, and fight any battle to love. She spent her life as if in search of an object worthy of the fierceness of her love, and I was surprised as she could never seem to understand to find that it was me. And through me, my God. I knew that whatever came of it, I would not see the fire of that love crushed even if it meant continuing on - even if it meant tethering myself to this life. Because it was a fearsome and beautiful thing to behold - the way that Ruth loved when at last she truly loved with all of her soul.

WOMAN OF SAMARIA

I am shocked to realize now what a small measure of grace I would have settled for. What an insignificant blessing I would have cradled like salvation itself - which is what He came to offer me instead.

MARTHA

I didn't know how strong I was, how much I could bear, how deep my faith ran, until that moment. Until I stood before my God and could say it. You chose that my brother should die. I believe in You, I hope in You. You know better than I. Twice in my life, I have thought I had to make a place for death, teach my heart how to survive its ravages. Twice in my life, I have sat by a dead body and made myself accept it, made myself forge a self that could live without my brother or my Lord. And twice, You have shown me that it is unnecessary. It is only a parting. It is only a temporary parting. It is only the first blink of sorrow that presages the reunion to come.

NAOMI

The tears of relief but also shame - shame to think that I had so insisted that I was alone - that I had been abandoned by my God. Shame at the gentleness of the rebuke that was the plenty in her arms. The love of God, and family, that I had forgotten. The Love I should have seen and known for what it was that day on the road with Ruth. The love I had overlooked as something extraordinary about her alone, rather than an arm of the love of God.

MARY MAGDALENE

I was the woman he rescued from the tower. But He also taught me to fight the battles when He was gone.

MARY OF BETHANY

They will never understand, on the outside. Only those who have felt that moment, when the truth of what God has done for us overflow the bounds we use to keep it in check so that we might live our lives from day to day. Only they will understand why three hundred denarii is mere dust on His feet - that it was foolishness to do it not because the money was better spent on the poor but because but for the love of God we are all dust on His feet, however much men would covet us. It cannot look like anything but foolishness, because what God has done, in coming down, in taking human form, looks like a kind of foolishness to us. And the only way to answer divine foolish kindness is with human foolish thanksgiving, knowing that even that is made beautiful only by the love He pours into us.

RUTH

Strange little things we do because the mind of God is unfathomable. Strange little things that remind us He is watching over us.

JOANNA

The wind that came from heaven was deafening. The flame was blinding. It burned away everything that had held back my voice. I could not longer see or hear anything but the still, quiet voice in my heart. I scarcely knew when it filled my throat and poured from my lips and when I remained silent, transfixed with the love of God coursing through me as I had never known.

WOMAN OF SAMARIA

Come see a man who told me everything I ever did and loved me anyway. Come see a holy man who did not look down on my fallen state. Come see a prophet who knew my every fault and treated me only as a fellow child of God. Could this be the Messiah? Not a figure of fire and judgment and punishment and war. Not a purging of all that steps outside of narrow precepts. A man who extends love to all, even knowing every fault. Could this be the Messiah? Could we possibly be that lucky? Could we possibly be that blessed? Could we possibly be that loved?

ELIZABETH

Anything that would have kept him from the divine message he bears - that lights him up like a Christmas tree - I bore it for him.

Friday, March 6, 2012

Good Friday

I thought I would have to tackle the perspective of the Queen of Heaven today. I have noticeably avoided doing so, mostly because I can't even begin, and secondly because the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven and Earth...really shouldn't be someone I imitate when I'm tired and trying not be cranky after a long day (yes, I'm aware it's ironic - at best - to complain today).

So I'm going to punt and write from her sister's point of view. All we know is that Mary and her sister were there when Jesus was crucified according to John's gospel.

MARY'S SISTER

I am supposed to say that it was hard to be Mary's sister. I suppose it's hard to be anybody's sister from time to time. I am supposed to say that it was hard to be Jesus Christ's aunt. I suppose it's hard to be anybody's aunt every once and awhile. They were no great exception to the rule in either direction.

It was hard to be Jesus Christ's aunt the day my sister realized she had left her child in Jerusalem and was beside herself with worry. It was hard to be Jesus Christ's aunt on the day an angry mob in our hometown tried to throw Him off a cliff. It was hard to be Jesus Christ's aunt on the day He walked to Calvary, carrying His cross, and was hung from it on Golgotha.

It was hard to be Mary's sister the day she came back from our cousin Elizabeth's visibly pregnant and gave confused, ridiculous answers to our parents' demands to know the father. It was hard to be Mary's sister the day we went to see Jesus while He was preaching and He turned us away. It was hard to be Mary's sister when she followed Him as He walked the long march to His suffering and death.

Most of the time, it was a blessing to be a part of their lives. Even that day, the strength and love of my sister was something breathtaking and soul-affirming in the midst of such ugliness and pain and the stink of suffering and death. They were like that - the ray of light, the tearing of the veil, on the worst day. They were the beauty in the blood and tears. They were impossible people. The kind of people we almost can't bear to admit exist in the world, because we will never be like them. So we don't like to admit that being like them is possible.

No, it was more blessing than curse to be Mary's sister. But, on that day on Calvary's hill, I did not envy John. My nephew turned to His beloved friend and said, "Woman, here is your son. Here is your mother." Now those are sandals I would never want to try to fill. But then, there was more blessing the more either of them were in your life. And Mary and John were beautiful in the years to come.

So what do I know, for all that?

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Holy Thursday

I am trying to convince myself that having volunteered to help Amy out tonight and tomorrow are also a good way to observe Holy Week - even if they prevent me from attending Holy Thursday Mass (for the second time in my life) and a Good Friday service (I have no idea of my overall record). I console myself with the fact that they are (unbelievably) apparently not Holy Days of Obligation?

My Catherine of Siena book today told the story of how Catherine drank from the blood that gushed from Jesus's side, and the author took the time to say this:

"People of our own time may consider the story of Catherine and Andrea more horrible than edifying, and feel that her ecstatic contemplation of the blood of Christ - a motive which recurs continually in her visions and her letters and her teaching - discloses an unhealthy love for the least attractive feature of Christianity. In our own lifetime we have learned to know the smell of rotting corpses on battlefields and in bombed towns; we know of the stinking sores and boils of prisoners from concentration camps, where dead and dying were made to lie on beds as wretched as the one Catherine had chosen for herself. We have poured out oceans of blood and tears, both of the guilty and the guiltless, while we hoped against hope that this blood and these tears could help to save a world reeling under the weight of its miseries. And how little have we achieved of the great things we dreamed! Yet we ascribe it to the confused ideas of the time she lived in and her own dark vision of Christianity, when Catherine intoxicated herself with the blood of Christ - that blood which would put an end to human bloodshed, if only we could agree to receive it as the redemption from our bloodthirsty passions, our insatiable lust for imagined gain for ourselves projected onto other nations or classes. Indeed, many Catholics think in this way. The strong-willed, brave and strangely optimistic girl who handled the powerful men of her time so masterfully, who had such an unusual understanding of the characters of the men and women among whom she lived, who really succeeded in making peace between many of her unruly townsmen, who in fact on one or two occasions prevented war, and on many put an end to bloody feuds - she would answer us as she answered her contemporaries in her letters and conversations and in the Dialogue: that the blood of Christ was the only source of her own courage and strength and wisdom, of her amazing and indomitable joy of living. She would say to us, Drink of it with the lips of your souls, as the saints in their visions seemed to drink it with their lips of flesh; assuage your thirst in the love which streams from God's holy Heart - then there will be an end to the vain shedding of man's blood by the hand of man."

- Sigrid Undset Catherine of Siena p. 69-70

Also, someone has apparently published the abortion question version of "A Modest Proposal", which I think I may need to review here once I've had a chance to read it properly. At least, I hope that's what's going on.

I wanted to do something related to Holy Thursday, but there aren't any women mentioned in the Last Supper or the Garden of Gethsemane, so I am going with a similar moment: before Jesus washes His disciples' feet, a woman washed His.

MARY OF BETHANY

There are things you cannot understand from the outside. Things you cannot understand looking in. Things you could not explain to someone who stood outside looking at it. They are only equipped to see the three hundred denarii you could have showered upon the poor.

They find your sincerity, your blatant metaphors, your unintentional foreshadowing, embarrassing. They find your faith, the nakedness of your faith, awkward. I suppose it would be disconcerting. People dance so many rings around things like faith.

Sometimes it is not enough to sit, drinking in every word of the Son of God. He is here. Present, in a human body. He limited Himself for us. To be fully visible to all, even those who would not see Him. He became less, to be closer to us. Later, He would join the human experience even to unto death, to bring the human pattern of life and death into the house of God, forever. Sometimes, that realization cannot stay in your head, it cannot stay a kind of mental confusion. Sometimes, you cannot bear that feeling - of gratitude and wonder and just sheer disbelief at the amount of love being poured in your lap - in check. You cannot be still in the face of it.

That is when you go and get the most precious thing that you own, the most expensive and rare and beautiful thing you have and offer it to Him. You try to wipe away the grime that has collected on the human feet He has taken upon Himself. Your hair brushes it, and you are in awe that your hair has touched God Himself, and you brush away the grime of the world, knowing that you are grime just the same as the dust on His feet. But He loves your bit of dust enough that it is a precious act.

Sometimes sitting is not enough. Sometimes, you must strew everything that is beautiful at His feet and stare at it as foolish dust, foolish dust no more than the mud caking his heels, and cry that God so loves you He has made you worth more than the dust. Sometimes, you cannot sit quiet in the face of that love.

They will never understand, on the outside. Only those who have felt that moment, when the truth of what God has done for us overflows the bounds we use to keep in check so that we might live our lives from day to day. Only they will understand why three hundred denarii is mere dust on His feet - that it was foolishness to do it not because the money was better spent, but because but for the love of God - we are all dust on His feet, however much men would covet us.

It cannot look like anything but foolishness. Because even what God has done, in coming down, in taking human form, looks like a kind of foolishness to us. And the only way to answer divine foolish kindness is with human foolish thanksgiving, knowing that even that is made beautiful only by the love He pours into us.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

MARTHA

Lord if You had been there, my brother would not have died. Lord, You must have known if You went here, You would die. Lord, if You will it, even now You will not die. Why do You lie here cold and dead? Why did I dress Your broken body? Why were we not even given the chance to finish the burial rites before the Sabbath demanded that we part?

You were my friend, Lord, but I never could wrap my head around anything You said. It was one of the reasons it was easier to serve You at the table than to sit at Your feet.

We came to say goodbye. We came with our spices, our burial perfumes, to acquaint ourselves with the idea of You dead. It’s what I did for Lazarus once. I washed his limbs myself, and I wrapped his limbs myself, and I watched every second as they rolled the great stone into place.

I watched them hurried washing your body, fumbling with wrappings, fussing that there would be too little time. Too little time to get the stone in place before the Sabbath, before there would be no man willing to work at sealing the smell of the dead away from the living.

You need the time. To teach yourself how to live in a world where your loved one is not. You need to take in their dead body, the reality of their death, and feel the time continue passing. Yourself still living, breathing, growing older. To accustom yourself to living without them. Living in a world where they are dead.

Twice I did this. Twice when it was unnecessary. Your Magdalene, so strong, came rushing back to tell us: we did not have to accustom ourselves to Your death. Although later we did have to adjust to a world without You in it.

Twice in my life, I have thought I had to make a place for death, teach my heart how to survive its ravages. Twice in my life I have sat by a dead body and made myself accept it, made myself forge a self that could live without my brother or my Lord. And twice, You have shown me that it is unnecessary.

It is only a parting. It is only a temporary parting. It is only the first blink of sorrow the presages the reunion to come.

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

MARTHA

When others began to ask why Jesus had not saved Lazarus, His dear friend, when He had saved so many others, I wanted to explain to them. I wanted to say that sometimes that is not what God does. That Jesus was a teacher. That it was enough that He cried with us. That God Almighty cried with us for our brother.

People always thought that there were two paths. The stories were told so many times we became almost like one of His parables. There was the Martha Path and the Mary Path. There was the worker bee and the woman who sat at His feet. The things of this world and the choice to work toward a better one. Or to sit and pray and dwell on the world to come.

I thought that way once. It might even be a useful little parable. I do not mind being a part in it, not even the part of the misguided sister of the morality tale. But I understood, when Jesus rolled the stone away and I leapt forward to tell Him there would be a stench – it wasn’t that I was too focused on this world to see the Next clearly. That was part of the test. Part of the miracle. Part of the wonder. How could we know that the rules had changed, that the world had remade itself, that God had intervened in our lives, if we never look at the world around us to know its rules?

God is in the stone that keeps back the terrible smell of the dead and rotting. God is in the mummified figure of Lazarus emerging. God is in the horror of the wrappings that enclosed my brother’s dead body as much as in the glory of Lazarus stumbling toward me. Alive again.

The miracle is in the world. The Martha Path is one of even greater wonder. I sometimes wondered if Mary was even surprised. If it even seemed a thing of great consequence that we would have a little more time on earth together. To me it was a moment of wonder and awe. To Mary it was, in its way, a matter of course.

Surely not, of course, but the Martha Path and the Mary Path is such a charming little narrative, even I get sucked into it. But I can’t help thinking of my path as the one full of more awe and more beauty and more consolation. Mary sat quietly at His feet, went to greet Him, and welcomed her brother back as if He had never been gone. I fell at His feet, spoke my true heart to Him all in a moment declared and discovered my faith, and saw my Lord undo all of the cruelties and efforts of the world that I had undertaken in the past four days. Like they were nothing. Like my griefs were nothing. But only after He worked and grieved alongside me.

I knew both, as Jesus did.

Monday, April 2, 2012

Martha

MARTHA

I had thought I would be angry. I wasn't. I had thought I would be bitter. I wasn't.

I wonder if I had known I believed in Him, truly and absolutely. As not just my friend the Teacher and sometime rabble-rouser Jesus. As the true Son of God. I wondered, from time to time, how deep my faith went. If that was why I was afraid to come out of the kitchen and sit, just sit, at His feet. That was when I knew. My faith ran deep. I couldn't tell you when it even happened, but that was when I knew it had.

"Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now, I know that whatever you ask of God, He will give you."

He chose not to come. For whatever reason. So often I did not understand Him, the things He said. Mary came closer. Perhaps she would understand more, but I knew in that moment that I was strong enough to accept. I had always been the strong one, bearing the burdens of this world as best I could. Bearing as much of others' loads as I could.

But I didn't know how strong I was, how much I could bear, until that moment. Until I stood before my God and could say it. You chose that my brother should die. I believe in You, I hope in You. You know better than I.

"Your brother will rise."

"I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day."

In my eagerness to show Him, Jesus who already knew, I had mistaken once again. Always too eager to speak to listen, as Mary did.

“I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

I think before Lazarus died I might have quibbled over the language, demanded it make more intrinsic sense. But now I knew. Now I knew how deep my faith went. Now I knew how deep my love went.

So I said simply, “Yes Lord, I have come to believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.”

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Martha

As if it was trying to be funny today of all days, the Internet in our apartment decided to go completely belly-up. Comcast does this occasionally. They are terrible here in Staunton. The timing was most inconvenient.

Because I don’t want to trudge up the university tonight to post this, I will take care of that (and everything else I needed to be in contact with my email for) tomorrow morning. Also: everyone please pray for my defense on Tuesday and, perhaps more importantly, that I get my appendices done tomorrow.

Okay, now to Martha (without the benefit of the stuff I’ve already written on her).

MARTHA

It never occurred to me that He wouldn’t come.

It was probably best He didn’t. I was full of recrimination, and just behind it was anger. Bitterness. Unfair, unrighteous, nasty bitterness. The terrible little thought: what good was it to be friends with the Son of God if He did not come to save your brother when he was dying? Had we been wrong all this time? Had we been wrong to think He loved us? That He depended on Lazarus? Was His smile for us, that special smile, false?

In four days many such nasty little thoughts can come to the surface. But they passed, along with the recrimination. I busied myself with the burial arrangements. I busied myself tending to Mary. I busied myself setting up memorials. I busied myself setting our legal affairs in order and double- and triple-checking with every official who came by hoping to take advantage of the poor bereft sisters. I busied myself doing everything and anything but giving in to the thoughts.

I busied myself, but all I wanted was to sit at His feet. Mary, she was wise. That was all she had ever wanted. I wanted to be busy. I felt useful, even powerful, when I was busy. I wanted to find God in the moments between the chores of my daily routine. I wanted to find Him in the faces of those I helped. I wanted to find Him everywhere but waiting around the next corner with His arms open to comfort me.

I wanted Him now. I wanted to sit at His feet. I wanted to feel His words wash over me, His words that I knew would slowly peel the heartbreak back, exposing the deepest wounds and washing them clean. I wanted to sit at His feet. I wanted to be held by my Lord. And I wanted my friend Jesus, beneath it all.

I busied myself because I could not sit at His feet if He had not come. But when I heard that He had, that Jesus was here, I was off like a cat out of an oven. I didn’t notice that I dropped five pots and scrambled over them in my haste. I didn’t notice that I bowled little Rachel over as I bolted out the door. I didn’t hear the shouts of surprise when I leapt over the low wall at the edge of our house. I don’t believe half the stories I heard later. All I knew at the time was that He was here at last. My Jesus. My Lord and my friend. The man at whose feet I knew I would find peace. The peace I had been too busied to be wise enough to seek before now. Before Lazarus’s death stopped me cold.

I was surprised to have beaten Mary to Him. I threw myself at His feet, remembering how Mary had knelt with precious oils and washed His feet with her own hair. I wished I had something of the sort, but I had only myself, in a soiled apron, with a heart broken under the strain of grief, finally ready to sit at His feet.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”