YOCHANAN
CONTINUED
As evening set in, an old Samaritan couple waved them off the road, and Mary and John traveled through the growing wheat to meet them.
“Where ye be headed?” the old wrinkled woman, head wrapped in a bundles of white asked.
“Down south,” John said. “To see the Baptist.”
“Everyone goes to see him,” the woman marveled, and the man said, “If I were younger, I might go myself.”
“I had a dream that I was pregnant,” the woman said, “and I gave birth to the whole world.”
“Stay the night with us,” the man said.
“We were hoping to meet a caravan headed south,” Magdalene said.
“There was one, Came two hours earlier. Doubtless if you rise early in the morning you will catch up with it tomorrow, But night draws on now and you are one man and one woman. Best it seems to me to retire for the night.”
They were a well of couple in an old house with mosaiced floors which had seen wealth once upon a time. John marveled over a scriptorium filled with old scrolls and there were some servants, mostly Greek, in the house.
“I will not say that we were great once upon a time,” the man said. “But we were not insignificant.”
“You are not insignificant now,” said John. “For your hospitality is everything.”
The man’s name was Philemon and his wife was Doris. Before John was ancient, he would hear things about his homeland and his people that had never been true, tales of pure Jews and Jews who were not true Jews, tales of rivalry between Samaritans and Jews that were never really true. There were some, even then, who said the Samaritans were the descendants of the Israelites who had been left after Assyria had destoryed the ancient kingdom of Israel. Others said they were Assyrian transplants put there after that destruction and unlike the people of Judah—from whom the Jews of Galilee were mostly descended—they were not pure. But these were odd things to say, for a Jew was a child of Israel, and that was a matter of the heart, of the spirit, and anyway, hadn’t Jacob known four wives? Judah was Judea and Judea had born the Jews. The Galileans linked themselves to those Jews, and the Samaritians did not. And then there were were the people of Gerasa, pig farmers! But all were of Israel. Philemon was Samaritain and his wife was Greek, as was John’s own grandfather, but all were Israel. Were not even the priests in Jerusalem Greek? John longed for a purity, a simplicity, a holiness, and so did God. But that simplicity and purity had nothing to do with blood.
As night approached, Philemon asked if they would like a tale, and Magdalene said she always loved stories, and Philemon said, “There is a Greek one, though the Romans call it theirs as they cal everything theirs, and it is the story of Eros and Psyche.”
Magdalene loved the Greek tales. No one ever told the Jewish ones that were written down in scrolls, not for fun. For in Israel there were no gods and heroes. There was David, murdering Philistines and raping women, and there was Jacob, tending his sheep. But no one journeyed to the otherworld to brave demons, and no glorious gods swept down to marry mortal brides. And why not, when the world was full of demons and gods? The old men in Jerusalem set out to make a world where none of these, including the Great Mother, existed. And yet here she clearly was. The wild pagan tales were a door into the otherworld, and Magdalene leaned into that door.
Cupid was a god, and, as beautiful as he was, he did not want his mortal wife to see his form. Psyche's sister didn't know he was a god, although they may have suspected it. However, they did know that Psyche's life was much happier than theirs. Knowing their sister well, they preyed on her insecurities and persuaded Psyche that her husband was a hideous monster. Psyche assured her sisters they were wrong, but since she'd never seen him, even she started having doubts. Psyche decided to satisfy the girls' curiosity, and so one night, she used a candle to look at her sleeping husband.
John sucked in his breath, but Magdalene, knees drawn to her chest, nodded and said, fervently, “But how could she not! How could she be so close to her beloved, whom she had never seen, whom she touched in the dark, but had never seen, and not look?”
When Philemon looked on her like a man who took a woman seriously, and was waiting for her to continue, she said, “That is how I feel right now. How I have felt for some time. Like I am on a journey to a husband I have never seen but heard all my life. But please, good Philemon, continue your tale.”
He told of Cupid's exquisite form, and how Psyche stood before him, transfixed, staring at her husband with her candle melting. While Psyche dawdled, a bit of wax dripped on her husband. Her abruptly awakened, irate, disobeyed, injured husband-god flew away.
“See, I told you she was a no-good human," said mother Aphrodite to her convalescing son Cupid. "Now, you'll have to be content among the gods."
Cupid might have gone along with the separation, but Psyche couldn't. Impelled by the love of her beautiful husband, she implored her mother-in-law to give her another chance. Aphrodite agreed, but there were conditions. She devised four tasks. The first was sorting a huge mount of barley, millet, poppy seeds, lentils, and beans. Ants helped her sort the grains within the time allotted. Next she must gather a hank of the wool from the shining golden sheep. A reed told her how to accomplish this task without being killed by the vicious animals. Next Psyche was to fill a crystal vessel with the water of the spring that feeds the Styx and Cocytus. There an eagle came to her aid.
But last, Aphrodite asked Psyche to go into the Underworld to beseech Persephone, Queen of the Dead and bring back a box of Persephone's beauty. Having done so, and knowing she would see Cupid again, she opened it to take just a little of the beauty, and fell into a deathlike sleep, as Aphrodite had secretly predicted.
Magdalene sucked in her breath like a child, and Philemon smiled saying, “Never fear, little Mary,” as if she were a girl again.
“Cupid himself found her and woke her, and with the permission of Zeus, against Aphrodite’s will, he brought his wife to Olympus, where, at Zeus's command, she was given nectar and ambrosia so she would become immortal. On Olympus, in the presence of the other gods, Aphrodite reluctantly reconciled with her daughter-in-law, and in heaven Cupid and Psyche lived on and on for endless days, to bear many happy children, little gods and goddesses all.”
In the night they lay drifting into sleep on the roof Philemon’s house and the stars were bright white torches in the blue black heaven.
“She stood transfixed on the beauty of his form,” Magdalene said.
“That’s how it should be. When one meets their true love.”
John remembered the day they had come for him in Palmyra, the night when Jesus had lifted his gown and John almost wept for the beauty of him.
“I do not mean the husband a girl marries, for I am too old for marriage by now and never longed for it, but I mean God, or the future, or whatever this thing is I want. That is the true husband, and when I see him in his beauty, all of him. Oh…” She shook her hair and it moved like a black curtain, “I do not know what I’m saying, not really.”
Something about what she had said nearly made John cry. He longed for the body of Jesus, for his arms around those limbs, his chest and breasts pressed to his, that tongue in his mouth, that kiss. For a moment, in the dark, he was so overcome with longing for him, the scent of his hair, the smell of his sweat, the scent of fragrant oil on his skin, John had to ball up his cloak and stuff it in his mouth. He touched his wrist where the copper bangle glinted, cool on his skin. If Magdalene noticed, and she noticed everything, she said nothing.
At last, out of deep things to day, John said:
“You’re not too old.”
“Come again?” Magdalene murmured from the cocoon of her pallet.
“To be married. You’re not too old.”
The next afternoon they neared the great city of Pharsaelis, and though they might have finally joined the caravan, by now it made little sense.
“The road to Jerusalem is filled with people,” Magdalene said. “You’re never alone on it, and we are only twenty miles away. If we could get a donkey or a horse or even if we simply set to walking, we’d be there soon enough.”
They traveled ever arid and stonier land to where the river, that had been broad, became small streams and pools among the rocks. They followed the faded river until they noticed they traveled in the same direction as others who were curious, or who were half hiding their longing, others bearing wagons or carrying all their lives on their backs, steadily tramping toward the a voice harsh as a crow’s and loud as a lion’s, to a gaunt and desperate man, his once black hair, sun struck and sticking out in coils from his head, skin blackened by the white sun that gleamed in the west.. His clothing was as wild as his hair, patches of animal skins, and he bore a great staff with which he struck the rock where he stood over and over again so that Magdalene fancied the water all around them had come from the striking of the rock. Yochanon the Baptizer’s voice roared:
“Repent! Oh, repent! For the kingdom of God… it is at hand!
Every place she looked was full of that special light that comes in the late part of the afternoon when the world is still full of sun, but there is nothing left to the day but the night. While the Baptist cried out, there was a line of men and women in various states of undress, but no shame, standing in a ragged line on their way to be baptized by him, and as each one came he interrupted his speaking to look fully on them, to hold them by the shoulder and stare into them before dunking them deep into the waters once, twice, a third time and lifting them up.
All around on the rocks there were others, not milling, but dancing, moving with purpose. Three naked women stood on rocks, swinging their wet hair in unison to a rhythm of drums, and six naked young men moved in and out of the water in a revolving train. Still, on the edges were those who were simply gathering water or turning a water wheel, and while on one side there seemed to be those looking on with curiosity, even priests and Pharisees from Jerusalem—you could tell by their robes—,on the other side were those building fires or setting up tents, coming in and out from cave entrances as if they were their houses. And little children were there, and sheep and goats were there, and they were no longer in Judea. They, it seemed to Magdalene, was stepping back in time. It reminded Magdalene of the stories about the Children of Israel before they came into the Land, not the way the Five Books of the Law recorded it, the people always squabbling, God always punishing, but the way the prophets had sang:
“Therefore, behold I will allure her,
and will lead her into the wilderness:
and I will speak to her heart.
And I will give her vinedressers out of the same place,
and the valley of Achor for an opening of hope:
and she shall sing there according to the days of her youth,
and according to the days of her coming up
out of the land of Egypt.
And in that day I will make a covenant with them,
with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of the air,
and with the creeping things of the earth:
and I will destroy the bow, and the sword,
and war out of the land: and I will make them
sleep secure.
And I will espouse thee to me for ever:
and I will espouse thee to me in justice,
and judgment, and in mercy, and in commiserations.
And I will espouse thee to me in faith:
and thou shalt know that I am the Lord.”
Yes, but there it was, to enter the future one took the door to the past, and as she and John looked on, an almost timid man approached and said, “Have you come to join us?”
Magdalene did not speak, for she had no words. It was John who said, “We did not know what we were coming to, but we longed to come.”
“You are coming to the New Israel,” the man said, holding out his hands and gesturing so they followed him across a ford in the river they had not known was there.
“You come,” he said, taking them to the settlement on the other side of the river, “to those awaiting the New World.”
