The Book of Longings(40)

He appeared uncomfortable that he’d turned the conversation to himself, but I couldn’t cease my questions. “How have you endured their scorn for so long?”

“I tell myself their hearts are boulders and their heads are straw.” He laughed. “Lashing out at them did no good. As a boy, I was always coming home scraped and bloodied from some fight. You’ll think me soft compared to other men, but now when I’m reviled, I try to look the other way. It does the world no good to return evil for evil. I try now to return good to them instead.”

What manner of person is this? Men would think him weak, yes. Women, too. But I knew the strength it took to forgo striking back.

He began to pace. I could sense some stirring inside him. “So many suffer this kind of contempt,” he said. “I cannot separate myself from them. They are cast down because they’re destitute or diseased or blind or widowed. Because they carry firewood on the Sabbath. Because they’re not born a Jew but a Samaritan or they’re born outside of marriage.” He spoke like someone whose heart had overflowed its banks. “They are condemned as impure, but God is love. He would not be so cruel as to condemn them.”

I didn’t answer. I think he was struggling to understand why God, his new father, did not plead more insistently with his people to take these outcasts in, just as Jesus’s father, Joseph, had pled with the rabbi to let him into synagogue school.

“Sometimes I can’t bear what I see around me. Rome occupies our land; Jews sympathize with them. Jerusalem is filled with corrupt Temple priests. When I come to pray here, I ask God to bring his kingdom to earth. It cannot come soon enough.”

He went on speaking of God’s kingdom much like Judas did—as a government free of Rome with a Jewish king and righteous rule, but also as a great feast of compassion and justice. At our last meeting I’d called him a stonemason, a carpenter, a yarn sorter, and a fisherman. I saw now he was, in truth, a sage, and perhaps like Judas, an agitator.

But even that didn’t fully explain him. I knew of no one who put compassion above holiness. Our religion might preach love, but it was based on purity. God was holy and pure; therefore we must be holy and pure. But here was a poor mamzer saying God is love; therefore we must be love.

I said, “You speak as if God’s kingdom is not just a place on earth, but a place inside us.”

“So I believe.”

“Then does God live in the Temple in Jerusalem or in this kingdom inside us?”

“Can he not live in both?” he asked.

I felt a sudden blazing up inside and threw my arms open. “Can he not live everywhere?”

His laughter resounded off the cave walls, but his smile lingered on me. “I think for you, too, God cannot be contained.”

Having grown chilled in the shade, I went to sit on a rock in the sun, thinking of the endless debates I’d held in my head about God. I’d been taught God was a figure similar to humans, only vastly more powerful, which failed to comfort me because people could be so utterly disappointing. It reassured me suddenly to think of God not as a person like ourselves, but as an essence that lived everywhere. God could be love, as Jesus believed. For me, he would be I Am Who I Am, the beingness in our midst.

Jesus gazed toward the sky as if to judge the hour, and in the hush of that moment, in my exhilaration of being near him, of conversing with him about divine immensities, I said, “Why should we contain God any longer in our poor and narrow conceptions, which are so often no more than grandiose reflections of ourselves? Let us set him free.”

His laugh rose and fell and rose again, and I told myself I could love him for that alone.

“I would like to hear further how we might set God free,” he said. “But I must be on my way. I work now at the amphitheater.”

“No longer in the quarry?”

“No; I’m glad to be in the open air. I hew stones into blocks that will serve as seats. Perhaps one day you’ll attend the theater and sit on a stone I myself have chiseled and fitted.”

We’d found our alikeness, our bond, but his words, though meant kindly, reminded me of how we were divided—he was the one who hewed the stone; I was the one who sat on it.

I watched him fasten his tool belt. He hadn’t asked me why I’d come here—perhaps he thought it would be prying, or he assumed I was simply walking in the hills as I’d claimed before—but I wished now to tell him. Nothing hidden.

“I’m a scribe,” I said. The audacity of the claim momentarily stalled my breath. “Since I was eight, my father has allowed me to study and write, but when I was betrothed, the privilege was taken from me and my scrolls were burned. I salvaged what I could of them, and buried them in this cave. I came this morning to dig them up.”

“I could tell you were different from other women. It wasn’t very difficult.” He looked back at my digging tool balanced on the rock. “I’ll help you.”

“No,” I said quickly. I wanted to do it alone. I wasn’t ready for him to see my writings, my bowl, or the curse I’d written. “You mustn’t tarry. I’ll dig them up myself. I spoke of them because I wish you to know and understand me.”

He offered me a parting smile and strode off toward the balsams.

Finding the spot where my treasure was buried, I drove the tool into the hard-packed dirt.