Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (18 page)

We know that the missionaries stayed with the N. for many months, as long as three years, introducing them to the customs of the church. “They gave us wine to drink, and read to us from a book they carried. They sprinkled our heads with water they collected in coconut shells.” The missionaries slowly learned the N. language, and in time they were able to participate with the N. in their storytelling ceremony, the central ritual of the tribe. Every evening, after the sun had dropped, the people would gather around the common fire and exchange stories—true stories and legends, folk tales and fantasies, the saga of Bird and Lizard, the romance of the sun and the moon. Ten or twelve of the N. would speak each night, taking privileged seats within the ring of stones, and when the final voice had gone silent, the teller of the best story would extinguish the common fire and the N. would sit in the coal-light and ponder his tale.

The stories the missionaries told were new to the N., and the N., it is reported, were shocked to discover that the missionaries actually believed them. From a tribal document: “They told us about Noah and the parade of animals. They told us about Joshua commanding the sun to stand still. They told us about Jonah and the whale, Elijah who would not die, Jesus arising from his tomb and flying. We were solemn when they finished. The insects were loud in the trees.”

Within a year, schoolbooks inform us, the N. were all Christians.

The things I describe happened long ago, of course. N. is a modern country now, a nation of the world, with glass buildings and highways and libraries, just like our own. Though the people still perform a version of the storytelling ceremony during the four seasonal holidays, it is only a shadow version, enacted when their families gather around the table to eat. A candle or a lantern replaces the common fire, and the youngest member of each family is permitted to blow out the flame and make a wish. In this and other ways, the N. honor their heritage. They fast once a year, on the day the sea turtles climb ashore to mate, and on the day their eggs hatch, digging their way up through the sand, they feast. They hold a festival of kites each spring to remember the missionaries who sailed to their land (as the annual Kite Day speech declares) “like a bird from out of the sunlight.” And on their thirty-third birthday, for a month or a year, they take a sabbatical from their jobs and families to write their stories of the life of Jesus.

It is these stories—the Jesus Stories—which are the central achievement of the N. culture. They are regarded as a treasure by church scholars and anthropologists, and are kept bound and cataloged in the Gospel Archives of the N. National Library. I have read over 14,000 of them in the progress of my research, and I can testify to both their great pinwheeling surface variety and their deeper unity of vision.

Many of the stories take as their genesis incidents described in the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Christ’s forty days in the wilderness is a popular point of commencement, with the dual attraction of his fasting and his temptation. There are stories that relate his dialogue with Satan, that depict his hunger visions and the weakening of his body, and one which hints that he in fact died in the wilderness and only then became revealed to himself as God. Various stories concentrate on his castigation of the Pharisees, his healing of the sick, his burial and resurrection, his grief on the Mount of Olives. There are new treatments of each of his miracles and parables, lending to them a thousand different shades and nuances. One story takes as the defining episode of Jesus’s life the killing of the children of Bethlehem precipitated by his birth—an incident that the story designates “the slaying of the ten thousand,” recalling perhaps the song of the women of Israel: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” It suggests that the record of the days of Christ (and, subsequently, of Christianity) is one of blood and suffering, that the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem left a mark on Jesus’s life that could not be erased. It provides a detailed account of the crucifixion, lasting several pages, and also describes the subsequent torture of the apostles. It concludes with a litany of the deaths of the saints. The final line is one of the most famous in N. literature: “Spare us, O Lord, the pain of your turning away.”

Another story inspired by the same incident tells of a Bethlehem schoolteacher who spends two years in an empty school building waiting for her next class of children to come of age. Called the Teacher’s Story, it was written only a decade ago and became hugely popular among the N. A mass-market printing by a major publisher spent upwards of thirty weeks on the national best-seller list.

It is not unusual for the more visionary of the Jesus Stories to take their own places within the Biblical tradition of the N., adding to Christian mythology and touching off new stories, not unlike the Gnostic Gospels of Saint Thomas and Mary Magdalene. The Story of the Slaying, for instance—mentioned above—is widely believed to be the source material for the Teacher’s Story: both depict characters found nowhere else in the Gospel accounts (Thaniel the merchant; the angry Samaritan) and both make use of the same epigraph, from Matthew 3:10: “And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees.” Another example, perhaps more telling, is that of the Young Man Stories. In the early years of this century, a tailor from the coast of N. wrote an account of the life of Jesus that centered on the young man who followed him when he was taken by the soldiers at Gethsemane, an incident mentioned briefly, and exclusively, in the Gospel of Mark.
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The story presents the young man as an angel of the Lord, at hand to witness the fulfillment of the prophecies. A second tale, written a few years later, gives the young man a more robust role in the drama, as an angel who is present at Gethsemane to
release
Christ, should he ask, from his duties as the Messiah. This story opened the floodgates. Later versions depict the young man as a thirteenth apostle, as one of Christ’s brothers, as his adopted son by Mary Magdalene. The most recent addition to the Young Man Stories suggests that he was Christ himself, traveling during the days of his burial to revisit the events of his life. This story grafts the young man like a bud onto the central episodes of the Gospels, and it takes as its main token the linen cloth that he wore at Gethsemane, suggesting that this was the selfsame cloth that Jesus later (earlier?) cast off in his tomb.

Though many of the N.’s stories attempt to elaborate upon incidents mentioned in the Scriptures, others more closely resemble the folk tales and fantasies of the early storytelling ceremonies. Most of these tales take place between Jesus’s twelfth birthday and his immersion at the age of thirty in the river Jordan, a span of years for which there is no record in the Bible. One, for instance, tells of Christ’s journey to the Americas, where he lives with the native inhabitants and develops into his manhood. Another tells of his transformation into a bear by the demons of Hell, who, though they cannot destroy him, are able in this way to conceal him from himself: in this story, Jesus wanders as a bear for many years, “bedding in the caves, eating of the trees and streams,” before he sees his reflection in the eye of a dove and remembers who he is. Another story tells of his descent into the Great Sea to deliver his teachings to what the text calls “the people of the water,” or “the people of the ocean.” A hero tale in the classical tradition, it presents Jesus as a man of adventure, favored by God, who helps the people of the water do battle with the beast Leviathan. Upon his leaving, the people furnish him with an amulet that will give him power over the water and the creatures of the sea: “We give you this gift, O Man of Earth, so that you might summon the fish from their hiding pools, and multiply them for food; so that you might still the tempests, and calm the waters, and walk with ease upon them.” Certainly the members of the N. who first listened to the testimony of the Jesuits were struck by the fantastic—and often miraculous—nature of their accounts, for many of the earliest of the Jesus Stories are built on just such fantastical transformations as this.

It would be impossible in this preliminary report to provide a comprehensive record of the writings of the N., for their literature presents to the reader a boundless variety of stories, as inexhaustible as the imagination of mankind, which is the imagination of God. The following, then, is only a small sampling of the Gospel Archives’ most recent acquisitions:

A story that depicts Jesus as a man of great solitude, given to silence and isolation, who hides himself from us in mountains and deserts, who speaks to us only in puzzles, who weeps plainly at any daily sight. The story has a refrain, “See that no man know it,” which Jesus says after each parable and to all those he has healed. Though God loved us and wished to redeem us, the story suggests, he suffered greatly in our company.

A story that portrays the Lord as a builder of houses. The first of his houses, which he names Adam, he builds on a foundation of sand: “And the rains descended, and the floods came, and it fell: and great was the fall of it.” The second of his houses, which he names Jesus, he builds on a foundation of rock (i.e., the church): “And the rains came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell not.”

A story that presents a series of dreams about Jesus, each belonging to a different apostle, or to another of the figures from the Gospels—Lazarus, Pilate, Simon the Cyrenian. The most interesting of these dreams is that of Judas Iscariot, who imagines himself as an insect climbing the body of Christ, unknowingly stinging him with his poison, in order to place a crown upon his head. Each chapter ends with the same verse: “And he awoke and knew that it was holy, for the dreams of men belong to God.”

A story that consists of only one word: Yea.
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A horror story, based on Matthew 27:52–53, in which the graves are opened and the bodies of the saints walk into the holy city. For three days, between the hour of Jesus’s death and the hour of his resurrection, the saints wander the streets of Jerusalem, heavy on their feet, walking blankly into houses and market stalls, massing at sundown on the temple steps. When the stone is rolled from Christ’s tomb, they collapse into piles of dead men’s bones.

A story that emphasizes as the first message of the Gospels the value of forgiveness. This story also sees many of the parables of Jesus enacted in his own life. In analogy with the parable of the two debtors, for instance, Jesus forgives the debts, both monetary and spiritual, of all his apostles, and Peter, who owed him most, loves him best. In analogy with the parable of the friend at midnight, Bartholomew the apostle appears at Jesus’s door one night while he is sleeping, and though Jesus tries to stop his ears to his friend, the knocking persists, so he arises and lets him in.

A story that depicts the fever dreams of Jesus as he hangs on the cross. Jesus imagines that he has forsaken the path of his calling to live a life of human pleasures, that he has wed and founded a home outside Jerusalem, that he is a contented old man surrounded by the generations of his family. At the end of the dream, he awakens in great suffering and rejoices.

A story which suggests that God became flesh not just to redeem us, but also to understand us, “the most bewildering of all His creations.” To redeem us he became Christ, who contained in himself all that was righteous and pure, but to understand us he became Judas, the betrayer, whom the story describes as “the most frightful sight of his time” and a man “unvisited by any virtue.” The drama of Christ’s last days, then, is presented as a contest between these two aspects of God—between God who wishes to save us and God who wishes to know us.

A story which proposes that Christ has
already
returned, that he transported his elect to heaven shortly after the resurrection and that the rest of us are living, without understanding, in the epilogue of human history. The story presents the entire record of the modern era as a single strand of the Tribulation: “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all these things be fulfilled.”

The literary quality of these stories varies greatly, as do the theological principles that inform them. They seem to speak to both sides of every moral issue, and they subscribe to no one set political or economic doctrine. For every story that champions socialism (“Make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise”), another story champions wealth (“For unto every one that hath shall be given: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath”), and another story champions ambiguity (“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”). At first glance, in fact, the Jesus Stories may seem merely a hodgepodge of ideas, as formless and contradictory as the motions of birds in a storm, hopelessly irreconcilable with one another and with church tradition—and indeed, the N. have often been misunderstood. They have been charged with violating the decree of Saint John, who wrote in Revelation 22:18: “If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.” They have been denounced for lacking piety. They have been mistaken for heretics, atheists, and antinomians by church leaders.

The N. do not seem concerned by these accusations. I asked my good friend J., curator of the Gospel Archives, who has been so helpful to me in the five years of my research, for his stance on this dispute. He smiled and spoke for his people when he said, “Just like you, we are trying to understand.”
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Indeed, I believe this to be true. The stories of the N., examined with generosity, enrich our tradition rather than