Isaiah 43:9-11 (New Living Translation)

New Living Translation (NLT)

Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright © 1996, 2004 by Tyndale Charitable Trust. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers.

9 Gather the nations together!
Assemble the peoples of the world!
Which of their idols has ever foretold such things?
Which can predict what will happen tomorrow?
Where are the witnesses of such predictions?
Who can verify that they spoke the truth?

10 “But you are my witnesses, O Israel!” says the Lord.
“You are my servant.
You have been chosen to know me, believe in me,
and understand that I alone am God.
There is no other God—
there never has been, and there never will be.
11 I, yes I, am the Lord,
and there is no other Savior.

A Tragedy

Theophilus Marzials

Death!
Plop.

Flop, plop.

Above, beneath.

Plop, plop.

And scudding by

And my head shrieks -- "Stop,"

And my heart shrieks -- "Die."

And the shrill wind whines in the thin tree-top
Flop, plop.
* * * * *
A curse on him.
Ugh! yet I knew -- I knew --
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from beginning to end --

My Devil -- My "Friend"

Ugh; and I knew!

Ugh!

So what do I care,

I can do,

I can dare,

(Plop, plop

The barges flop

Drip drop.)

I can dare! I can dare!

Drop.

Dead.

Plop, flop.

Figure: an experimental work of fiction
Inspired by Ken Krekeler’s “Icon” (2006)

I remember, on the day I met my son, the way the rising sun was blazing gold over the thin layer of snow on the ground. The way the sky was fading from the soft dark colour of forest moss to polished lightness of blue steel, the lilt of the sparrows outside calling and speaking in song over crisp morning air. It was one of those mornings where the world was just standing still. Just waiting for the sound of the day breaking into wholeness. One of those mornings where you could look into the tiny sky eyes of a baby lying warm there in your arms, and know for sure that all was as it should be.

I remember the way Yosef, my husband, was squatting next to me, all fumbling hands, so gentle and so awkward. Yosef, his grey beard uncombed, a layer of grime caked in the furrows of his brow. His face shining, one hand raised against the glare of light through the window, laughing eyes wet with tears. He was so happy. You should have seen it.

We hadn’t been expecting him. Yosef, in his own words, after all, was no spring chicken. His friends had egged him about it for a while. Others had gone the other way and asked my own father in hushed voices if he was really going to let his only daughter wed an artisan. Your daughter will sleep in a pile of wood chips, they said. She will have splinters in her food all the time. Why, think of the dusting she must do. And all those sharp tools lying about. It is no place to raise a child – if the man can still get it up at his age…

My father had told them that Yosef was of a good family. Down on their fortunes, perhaps, but of a good name. And Yosef, he said, was a man with a kind heart. They had laughed then, told my father that a kind heart never kept a belly full.

And Yosef, well, Yosef was a shy man. He didn’t talk much to me about his other wife and children. Never one for words, simple in speech as in manner. The kind of man who could come into a room and sit quietly with a cup of tea, and you would never notice that he was there at all. A man with a kind heart, but a quiet one.

But you should have seen him carve. Yosef could make wood come alive under his fingers and breathe, smooth it until it was as slick as water. Yosef could see shapes under the coarse grain, lying in wait to be born. He was a master. He would never speak to me without someone else in the room, it was true. But one summer night, out there under the sky crowned with a pantheon of silver stars, Yosef showed me a desert rose painstakingly carved and resting in the centre of upturned palms. Every thorn, every petal, perfect and polished into cryptic immortality by moonbeams.

He didn’t have to say a word. Neither did I. We both already knew.

There was no need for desert roses when Yosef finally did ask me to marry him. It was one of the longest speeches I ever heard him make. Looking my father straight in the eye, he told him, he said, “Jehoiakim, my friend. I am a very simple man. I would give the world and more for your daughter. But I am only a craftsman. All I can promise her is the best furniture in the land.” My father smiled and laughed, clapping Yosef on the shoulder. And so we were engaged to be married that autumn after the wheat harvest.

When I first told Yosef I was pregnant, I remember how the lines in his face grew taut like bowstrings. How he clasped his chapped hands together as if in prayer. It was if I could see the thoughts slice through his head with glacial coolness. He hadn’t been expecting this. Could he handle this addition to our family to-be? I thought he would send me away. Force a break-up. For a moment I saw his shy eyes glaze over like ceramic under fire. Harden into diamond. I saw them mellow and well over with balmy tenderness, bubbling with vital determination. “What God gives, who am I to take away?” Yosef grinned at me. “I am old, yes. But we shall have this baby come, you and I.”

Like I said, Yosef was a shy man, but he was a man of his word and more. I never once saw him lose his temper, or his cool. There was the inimical cruelty of small-town gossip, and the disapproving frowns of the men who served at the temple. Of course, there was the piercing laughter of all those who made bad jokes about carpenters and screws, although Yosef didn’t use screws at all. Through everything that nearly tore us apart, he stuck by me. Defending us. Going for the doctor. Making the tea. Handling the taxes.

That morning, Yosef laughed sparkling wine, praising God. His cloak of shyness seemed to have fallen from him for that time. We cooed and we crowed. Made sounds of familial contentment.

“Down! Put him down!” I laughed as Yosef picked my son up to swing him about the room, and told him that the both of them needed some rest. “I’ll teach him to carve!” Yosef beamed. “This boy will be the best craftsman in the whole damn country. Did you ever see such eyes, woman? Such arms?” He would have danced and pranced around the room, had he not been so old.

My son yawned and burped sleepily in my arms, tiny eyelids falling. I thought I could smell the scent of sweet incense and hay in the air. Already, I could him shaping wood, carving desert roses into being.

We moved to a different town shortly after, and settled in a sleepy neighbourhood. Yosef quickly became well-known for his both his beautiful woodwork, and his beautiful baby son with the dark hair and sky eyes. Business was always good. In the mornings, I would walk our son to school. And in the afternoon while I cooked and cleaned, he would play on the floor of Yosef’s workshop. The neighbours who had prophesied to my father of accidents with sharp tools proved false. Yosef never left any of his tools lying idly around where a child could reach them. Every night after supper, Yosef would tell him a story while I cleared up the day’s mess.

We dressed him in clothes I sewed for him myself. Yosef would carve the most cunning of toys. For his third birthday, Yosef made a whole herd of little sheep. I remember joking then that if Yosef made a different animal every year, the boy would have a whole farm before he was ten. Yosef had roared with mirth, and then gave him a miniature fishing net the year after. Oh, how I smiled as if my heart would burst, watching the boy play at being a fisherman while Yosef worked in the shop. Father and son framed in the sunlight from the open doorway. The knotted twine being cast over schools of pebbles and netting all manner of wood chips. Over and over again.

I remember how I dreamt then. I dreamt while I swept the floor of our little house and while I kneaded dough with flour up to my elbows. Dreaming of how one day, our boy would learn make wood come alive under his fingers and breathe, smooth it until it was slick as water. He did so well in school, such a smart young man, all the teachers said. He spoke so well in all the languages, they said. I would imagine him taking over Yosef’s workshop, becoming well known for his own beautiful woodwork. And yet, I still saw him presenting to some exemplary young lady on a night different from all other nights, a desert rose of his own. Painstakingly carved and resting in the centre of upturned palms. And every thorn, every petal, would be made perfect and would be polished into cryptic immortality by moonbeams.

That’s how small I thought the world might be. The size of a tiny damask blossom in the palm of a hand.

The first time I heard of the movement, I was baking barley loaves for supper. Yosef was next to me, sitting on the sturdy bench our son had made the year before, beard now the colour of fresh snow. I think that we were in the middle of talking about the rising prices of Alder planks, when the neighbour next door craned her head over the back wall. She shouted so quickly I barely understood her, but pounding fear teased out her words into clarity for me.

Our son had uttered heresy and mocked the elders. Our son had started a riot. Our son had uttered compelling truths. Our son had spoken as no one had dared to speak before. What was truth? She hissed aloud, scratchy voice drunk on excitement, pricking my heart. Everyone who had heard him was seeking him to no avail. They all wanted a piece of him. Surely not the son of Yosef the artisan? Suddenly, just like that. Famous in an hour.

That is what an education does for you these days, nodded the neighbour sagely. Gives you these odd radical ideas. Puts you with these loony bins who don’t get out in fresh air often enough. Next thing, you are throwing out your traditions with the bathwater.

He came home by a shortcut. Just after sunset, before the crowds tracked him down to our home. Came home to pack his belongings, before leaving to meet the band of new friends we had only just had sat down to supper the other night. Sure, we had found it a little odd that he should be hanging out with men of such rough upbringing. Dubious background even. We hadn’t realised at the time that these men would eventually come to be the most loyal of his followers, the foam at the breast of the rising wave.

Yosef watched in silence as I shut the door and hugged our son hard. I thought I would hold onto him forever and never let go. My arms were a circle of linked iron around my son’s warm body, grown tall, trapped in the shape of a man. “Where have you been? Do you not know how worried we have been?”

My son held on to me with his strong arms, his voice soothing as Yosef’s had been on the day he had spoken to my father of furniture. The opalescent tenor washing over my terror and my ears like the cool waters of a healing baptism. My son spoke to me, spoke to us, as never before of freedom. He spoke of rejuvenation, and of voices crying out in the wilderness, calling in the night. He spoke of rewriting the scrolls of the ancestors and of the poor lying in the streets. Of new powers, of leading, and of doing away with the old. The ushering in of the world with no sovereign authority, and of God taking His rightful place.

“The people are oppressed, Mama,” he whispered with the gentle kiss of the zephyr that heralds the dawn. “They do not understand. They do not see goodness, or even the sky above them. They need me to open their eyes for them. They need to see with mine. They have to be set free. Do you not understand, Mama? I have to go to them.”

I remember then, how Yosef and I had looked across the room at each other, and then at our son. I think that was the first time when we really felt what was coming. That was when we all knew that our son wasn’t going to be a craftsman. At least, not of the kind of desert roses I had in mind.

I am telling you all this, because I want there to be something left behind. I want there to be something of my son as he was before he became more than the revolution he began, more than legend. Something apart from all the official records and writings. Something beyond the memory of one already larger than life in the memory of those who came to revere and love him, counting all else as dross. Something untouched by those who only knew of him as the renegade leader of the largest religious cult to arise out of the tired loins of a proto-nation at its knees. I want something that I know is still irretrievably mine.

Because sometimes people can get so caught up in the glamour of it all, just as easily distracted by the flashing scales of militant blue, as they are by the parchment cracklings of dried petals and the hacking coughs the old men behind the locked door of a house from long ago. They forget that there was a real person behind it all. And that before he was revealed for who he was, he had been a youth with sky eyes and a family.

Before the creator of new worlds, before the fisher of men. Before he did all those wonderful and terrible things that you are always hearing about, before he said all those erudite words that you read about all the time, he was just my son. And yet he was so much more than that.

I remember him as a child, learning to ride on the recalcitrant old donkey. How he used to get up early to help stoke the fire for Yosef’s cup of morning tea before leaving for school. How he once made a new type of table high enough for men to sit at, whereupon he laughed with Yosef and I when we told him it would never catch on. Every evening, the three of us sitting in the courtyard, watching the sun fling fiery scarlet and gold flamboyance across the peaked silhouettes of ancient mountains. Grilled lake fish and barley loaves for supper. Writing in the dust on the workshop floor as Yosef carved away, in the silent telling of a thousand stories never told.

I want others to know him. I want them to love him the way I do.

Let me tell you about my son.

Let me tell you about Yeshua of Nasarat.