The Blessing Stone (31 page)

Adding to the confusion were the many gospels that were being circulated in scrolls, letters, and books, each declaring to be the “true” message of Christ, though none had been written until long after his death. Compounding this confusion further was the fact that few men who had actually known Jesus in his lifetime were still alive. A new generation who had never heard Jesus preach were interpreting thirty-year-old events against contemporary issues and moods. The debate over conversion of the gentiles continued to rage: baptism or circumcision. Those advocating circumcision claimed it was too easy to join the faith, that converts were not giving up their old gods, merely adding Jesus to their pantheon. Gentile Christians were starting to praise Jesus’s name on the twenty-fifth day of December when they celebrated the birthday of Mithras, and followers of Isis, Queen of Heaven, said that Jesus’s mother Mary was the Goddess incarnate. Each person believed that it was
their
god whose kingdom Jesus proclaimed.

There was even an argument over the Lord’s name. He was Joshua, Yeshua, Iesous, or Jesus, depending upon one’s nation and tongue. Some called him Bar-Abbas, which meant “son of the father,” while others argued that Bar-Abbas, whose first name was also Jesus, was a different man altogether. And those who called him Jesus bar-Joseph were met with opposition by those who claimed that if the Lord called himself the son of God then he had no earthly father, like other saviors before him.

But Amelia wasn’t concerned with rules and ideology, or who was right and who was wrong, or what the Lord’s real name was, for unlike the others she did not believe in Jesus or his god or the promises he had made. Amelia came to the weekly gatherings for the friendship and good company, to be among people who did not whisper or gossip about her, who did not judge her on past misdeeds, who joined hands and sang together and shared a bountiful feast in the name of a crucified martyr. Most of all she came because as Rachel had promised, the evil phantom that dwelled in the blue crystal she wore beneath her dress was left outside the door—for the spell of an afternoon Amelia knew peace and love, and freedom from fear.

Finally, everyone had arrived and this Sabbath’s meeting was about to begin. Rachel was preparing to read from the Torah. She had chosen a passage from Deuteronomy: “What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near to us whenever we pray to him?” Rachel had finally made a break with the synagogue where it was forbidden for a woman to read from the Torah to the congregation. When the rabbi had told her she must stop this practice, she had reminded him that Miriam was a prophetess in her own right and that she had helped to lead the Israelites out of Egypt as her brother Moses’s equal, not as one subordinate to him.

Before she could unroll the scroll, one of her freed slaves came hurrying into the garden to inform her that a latecomer had arrived. When everyone heard the identity of the guest, great excitement erupted.

Amelia turned to the elderly Phoebe and said, “Who is it?”

“Her name is Mary, and she knew the Lord,” Phoebe said with reverence, and disbelief in her voice, that such a great personage would honor their humble assembly. “A woman of means, and of influence, who fed and housed Jesus and his followers that they might spread the message.” Amelia knew that Jesus had had many women among his followers, women who gave their wealth to him and to his cause, just as Rachel, Phoebe, and Chloe did today. But she hadn’t known that any were still alive. Phoebe continued: “Mary was his closest companion, his first apostle. When Jesus was arrested, Peter and the other men denied knowing him. When Jesus was crucified, it was only the women who wept at the foot of the cross. The women took his body down and placed it in the tomb. And after the tomb was sealed, it was the women who held vigil outside, because Peter and the men were away hiding in fear. When Jesus came out of the tomb, it was to this woman that he first appeared and told of his resurrection. It is my secret belief,” the elderly woman said with a light in her eyes, “that when the Lord returns, he will come to this woman first, to Mary.”

The visitor was unremarkable in appearance. A woman of extreme age, she was small and bent and draped in white homespun cloth. She walked with a cane and the aid of a young woman, and when she spoke it was in a voice as thin as a butterfly’s wing. Her Greek was the colloquial dialect of Palestine, and so her young companion translated into Latin for the gathered company. She spoke plainly, but from the heart.

The July day was hot; flies droned in the garden, bees filled the air with their buzz. A breeze hardly stirred so that people had to fan themselves. In the corner, an old man began to nod off.

Mary first asked everyone to pray with her. They stood with their arms outstretched and heads back in imitation of the Crucified One, their eyes open and heavenward as they chanted loudly and in unison. Afterward, several crossed themselves. Then Mary began her story. “My Lord was the kindest of men. He loved little children and his heart wept at the sight of sickness and poverty and injustice. He healed and blessed and taught goodness.”

The heat of the day settled in the garden, like a guest wishing to hear the story, bringing with it a kind of magic warmth, a soporific effect that transformed the old woman’s words into hypnotic chant. Lulled by the heat and the cadence of Mary’s words, Amelia felt herself slip into a kind of altered consciousness, as if she had drunk unwatered wine, and after a while she began no longer to hear words but to see images instead. She saw herself walking with Jesus in the green hills of Galilee; standing at the lakeside and watching him preach from a fishing boat; she sat among boulders and grass as he spoke from a hillock about mercy and kindness and turning the other cheek; she tasted his wine at a wedding and felt his smile brush her cheek as he passed by.

Mary spoke of money changers and priests, a little girl in a coma, a man named Lazarus. Amelia saw a feast of fish and bread, smelled the dust of the roads and byways of Palestine, and heard the clip-clop of hooves as Roman soldiers rode by.

Heavy air and heat and the buzzing of bees, and the garden slipped into another age, another place, taking Amelia with it. Mary’s frail voice painting vivid pictures. And then suddenly—

He was here! In Rachel’s garden! The renegade Jew and the peaceful preacher, the armed zealot and the son of God, his multiple images swirling up from the hot paving stones, shimmering like phantoms, finally coming together and coalescing into a
man.

Amelia was transfixed. Mary’s words, riding on the turgid air with the bees and dragonflies, had brought the man into their company and Amelia
saw
the flesh and blood and sinew of him. When Mary spoke of how Jesus wondered why God had placed this burden upon him, Amelia saw the doubt in his eyes and the sweat on his brow. When she told how he prayed, Amelia saw the glory radiate from his face. All the Jesuses that had been preached about and debated over were here now among the blossoms and greenery of a Roman peristyle garden, in the form of a man, no longer a myth or mystery, but a human born of a mother and burdened with all the hopes and doubts and foibles that were humankind’s lot.

“And then he was betrayed,” Mary said, her voice breaking. “Roman soldiers stripped him and mocked him, pierced his brow with thorns and flayed his back with whips. And then my Lord was forced to carry the beams of his cross through Jerusalem as people jeered and threw dirt at him. Nails were driven into his wrists and feet, and then he was hoisted high for all to see. My precious Lord hung there like a pitiable animal, bleeding and helpless, humiliated and shamed. As flies began to feast upon his wounds, as the air began to leave his lungs and his face was twisted in the utmost agony, he spoke. He asked the Father to forgive the men who had done this to him.”

Some in the garden began to weep, a soft whispering sound, more anguished in its suppression than all the loudly wailing mourners of the earth. Others were too shocked to even breathe. Amelia found herself profoundly moved. Not any of Peter’s preachings nor Paul’s exhortations, nor reading of scrolls and letters and gospels had achieved what the softly spoken words of the elderly Mary had done: brought Jesus to life.

Amelia pressed her hand to her chest for the breath was caught in her lungs. When she felt the necklace beneath the fabric, she wondered what it was. Then, remembering, drew the pendant out and looked at the blue crystal in the diffracted light of Rachel’s garden. As she gazed into the crystal, she saw the poor creature who had been tortured by Roman soldiers, his body emaciated from months of self-denial and sacrifice, his face streaming with blood, his tender skin bruised and torn, his feet slipping and staggering on the rough stones of a Jerusalem street. So many crucified criminals Amelia had seen, yet she had never seen the
man,
she had never stopped to think about the mind and heart beneath the tortured flesh. How many of them, those poor creatures hanging on beams along the Via Appia, had been innocent of crimes? How many had had families, women they loved, children they had dreams for? How many had hung on their undeserved crosses while their families wept at their feet?

“Yes,” Mary repeated, her voice strained with the memory of that tragedy thirty years ago, “after all he suffered, our Lord asked God to forgive those who had tortured him.”

Amelia felt her throat tighten. She saw the blue crystal through tears; it seemed to turn liquid in her hands.
Jesus, after all that had been done to him, with his dying breath had asked his god to forgive the men who had so ill-treated him.
And suddenly she saw clearly the heart of the crystal. It was not the ghost of an Egyptian queen after all, nor Simon Peter in prayer, but Jesus, hanging on the cross, his arms open in welcome, ready to embrace her. As the Bird Reader had prophesied!

Amelia cried out. She had been carrying him with her all these weeks against her breast and had not known it—the man with welcoming arms.

She was baptized.

Everyone attended, all her new friends, and they feasted afterward, and prayed and cried and laughed together. Rachel had the honor of performing the ceremony in her fountain pool, with tears of joy streaming down her cheeks as the water streamed over Amelia’s head. It didn’t matter to Amelia that her family knew nothing of her religious conversion. They wouldn’t understand and so she would not try to explain. Perhaps in time, she told herself, she would start to speak of her personal experience, and perhaps she could bring one or all of her children into the new faith. That was her secret hope: to see Cornelia and the others kneel in joy in Rachel’s baptismal fountain.

“What is this?” she heard Cornelius say as he came into the garden. As was his habit, he spoke without greeting or introduction.

Amelia was tending her flowers and wondering if summer roses had always smelled so exquisite. She felt as if she were seeing the world through new eyes, as the evangelist Paul was said to have done when the scales fell from his eyes. Everything around her took on new color, new vibrancy. Like these roses. She decided she would cut a bouquet for Phoebe, who was down with a summer cold, and pay her a visit. It was one of the duties of house-church members to perform the Bikur Cholim—the great mitzvah, or praiseworthy deed, of visiting the sick—but Amelia didn’t think of it as a duty. She had come to regard Phoebe as a sister.

Amelia’s faith wasn’t firm yet, like Rachel’s. Although she felt empowered, she was still baffled. It wasn’t anything she could explain to anyone, there were no words sufficient. Total acceptance was not instantaneous. There was still much to think about. The concept of an all-seeing yet unseen god, for instance. He had no statues, no images. Amelia had never prayed to a spirit before. Her blue crystal helped, for she could see the image of the crucified Redeemer in it. Others in the house-church employed imagery as well, for people loved their familiar and comforting symbols and saw no reason to give them up: Gaspar prayed to his statue of Dionysus, who himself had been a crucified savior-god; Japheth continued to wear his old cross of Hermes; and a newcomer from Babylon, who had once worshipped Tammuz the Shepherd, had painted a small mural in Rachel’s garden depicting Jesus as a shepherd with a lamb on his shoulders. The concept of there being only God and no Goddess was also difficult for Amelia to accept, for was not all of nature made up of male
and
female? Therefore, like Christians who still prayed to Isis, Amelia retained her belief in Juno, the Blessed Virgin. Other tenets of the new faith were also new to her and a struggle to accept, but one thing she had no doubt about, that she had been forgiven by Jesus for her sins and weaknesses and that a new life awaited her.

“Amelia,” Cornelius repeated impatiently, “what
is
this?”

“Good morning, Cornelius.” She did not turn around.

“I want to know what this is.”

“It’s an interesting thing about summer roses,” she said, gazing at the fragile blossoms in her hands. “I was always taught to remove any spent blossoms to encourage the plant to rebloom. But not all roses rebloom. Did you know that? Some are spring-blooming only and for that type of rose, even if you cut the old flowers away, it doesn’t help. But for those that rebloom, such as these yellow tea roses, removing what is left of dead flowers will definitely encourage the next wave of bloom.”

“Amelia,” he said in exasperation, “turn around when I am speaking to you.”

She turned, and his eye caught the glint of blue sunlight on her bosom. She was wearing the necklace outside her clothing. “Don’t you find that interesting, Cornelius?” she said. “That by removing dead flowers you prompt the growth of new ones?”

“Tell me what this is.”

She glanced at the object in his hand. “It looks like a scroll, Cornelius.”

“It’s an accounting of the rents collected at the tenement block in the Tenth district. Or rather, the rents
not
collected. You have not pressed for these tenants to pay. Why?”