Caiaphas

April 7, 2012April 11, 2013 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Night. From the windows of his house, Joseph Caiaphas can sense how full the city is. His view is obstructed by the courtyard’s wall, but he knows that if he were to go up to the roof he would see the campfires and candle light flickering from every house. But more than sight, there is the sound of the city, a continuous drone of voices. He listens for the sound of the temple within it. It would be easier to hear during the daylight, when the workmen are building in the outer precincts and the Court of the Gentiles is full of milling people. He can’t hear it now, but if he closes his eyes he can sense it. The living heart of holiness, in the holiest city in the holiest land in the world. He alone has entered the Holy of Holies during the last fifteen years, and then only once a year, on the Day of Atonement. He alone has stood at the center of the universe during all of that time.

Annas, his father-in-law, stood there once, when he was high priest, before he was dismissed from the post. It is a link that binds them. Annas has known the presence of God, just as he has. He turns from the window, goes to a table, and pours a cup of wine. Annas has waylaid his prisoner this night. The guards have taken the Galilean carpenter to Annas’s house first. Why? Caiaphas wonders. What does Annas want with him. What special question does he have to ask that he thinks he couldn’t ask in front of the council.

A servant stirs in the corner, sensing his master’s annoyance. Caiaphas beckons to him. “Go to the gate and see if any of our guests have arrived.” The servant bows and leaves the room. Caiaphas returns to the window and looks towards the temple.

Something about the mood of the night, the quiet waiting, takes him back to when he was young, and stood by a window, looking out. He had no focus for his anticipation, then. It was general, just the feeling that something should happen – must happen – in the world. Those were days of excitement. Herod the Great was dead, and the people were rising up everywhere against Rome. He remembers his father’s anger at the uprisings, his feeling that they threatened everything that the Sadducees had worked for, the precarious peace with Rome, the safety of the temple. But Caiaphas had been young enough to thrill at the reports of peasants who declared themselves king, particularly the shepherd, Athronges, who fought the Romans in Judea with the help of his four brothers. Caiaphas had wanted to leave Jerusalem, to slip out under the noses of the Roman legions who patrolled the city, and go and see this shepherd for himself. He had thought, during those glimmering days, that it might be possible to hope. He had stood by the window and pretended to himself that a few brave shepherds could vanquish the Roman legate and his Syrian troops.

When it was over, when peace was restored and crosses dotted the countryside, his father told him not to mourn for the crucified rebels. His father took him to the temple and led him into the Court of the Israelites. They gazed across the low stone wall that separated it from the Court of the Priests, and Caiaphas watched the priests move about the altar, where the perpetual fire burned. Many of the priests’ arms were splattered with blood as they slaughtered and flayed the sacrificial animals, and the smell of the blood hung thick in the air. But the priests moved slowly, prayerfully, with decorum. They exuded a vast sense of peace, and it mingled with the scent of seared meat from the altar fire and lifted into the temple air.

“You see what they’re doing?” his father said. “They are giving thanks to God. They are remembering the covenant. They will make sure that the fields are fertile, that the seasons come and go as they should. It’s the sacrifice that Noah made after the Ark. It’s because of this sacrifice that God keeps the covenant, and the world isn’t destroyed. It is because of our work that Rome exists, that Babylon exists, that all of the peoples who live along the sea exist, that the world exists. It is because of this work that we exist. This place, this temple, it is the most important thing in the world. Nothing can threaten it. Do you know, son, how close it came to being destroyed this year? You weren’t here when the Roman troops came into the temple. You didn’t see the priests continue their work, even as the soldiers moved through the inner courtyards. Those soldiers, with their swords bared, they didn’t understand. They didn’t understand that the work we do here keeps them alive, keeps Rome alive, keeps the world alive. We must keep it from danger. And if that means that we must let Rome rule the land outside of the temple, so be it. It doesn’t matter who rules Palestine. It matters that the temple is safe.”

Two years later, Caiaphas was made a priest. Twelve years after that, he was made high priest, and went further than his father ever had, entering the Holy of Holies by himself, standing within the very heart of the sacred. The temple draws him. It draws his attention during every moment of every day. It is his lover, his hope, his life. He is its steward. He will keep it safe no matter what. But standing by the window, he feels a strange sense of loss. He thinks again of Athronges the shepherd and his four brothers and remembers what it was like to hope for something more than preservation, what it was like to be young.

His guests are coming in, but the sacrifice has yet to arrive. Annas is delaying it. Caiaphas pours wine for his guests, these men that he knows so well, fellow priests, fellow members of the Sanhedrin. For fifteen years they have done what he’s asked of them. He has sat with them for long hours and made rulings. There are a few pharisees in the Sanhedrin, but none of them are here tonight. He has summoned only those who he knows will agree with him. He knows, and they know, that they have no real right to sit in judgment. If they were to try the Galilean legally, it would have to be before the whole Sanhedrin. But it is the night before the Passover, and the men of the Sanhedrin are preparing for the feast, and some of them don’t understand the full danger. They don’t remember Anthronges the shepherd, or if they do, they don’t understand the threat that he posed. Not because a single man and his brothers could ever overcome the Roman legions. The threat wasn’t in their military might. It was in their hope, and their capacity to spread that hope. Caiaphas glances impatiently at the door. He wants Annas to come in, leading the Galilean. He is sure that when he looks into the Galilean’s eyes, he will see that hope.

At last Annas enters, smugly, pompously, as is his way. He nods at Caiaphas, believing that it is his right to make the High Priest wait. Behind him there is a jostling in the doorway. Some Levites, dragging the Galilean behind them. He is bound and looking at the floor. The priests in the room fall silent. They glance from Caiaphas to the carpenter, waiting.

Caiaphas doesn’t say anything. He goes to the window and looks out. There are people in his courtyard now. They have lit a small fire. The night is cold. Caiaphas lifts his head and listens for the temple. He sniffs the air, trying to catch the scent of the perpetual fire. He smells the charring wood of the fire in his own courtyard, and wonders if it is enough of a sign. Behind him, he can feel Annas’s impatience. The stars are very clear tonight. They are numerous, but he wonders if they are as numerous as the people who have come to the city for the passover. The people who lined the roads a few days ago, declaring that the carpenter on his donkey was their king. The crowd is full of fools, but they are his responsibility. He will protect them, if he can.

He turns back to the room and finds that the carpenter has lifted his face and is looking into his eyes. It’s not hope that Caiaphas sees there, but something else. Something startling, and he glances at Annas, to see if his father-in-law has seen it, too. But Annas has gone to the table with the wine and poured himself a cup and is slurping it impatiently. Caiaphas looks back at the carpenter, and it is still there. The silence in his eyes. The quiet, waiting peace that Caiaphas has only experienced in one place, on the Day of Atonement these past fifteen years. How did it get there? Caiaphas wonders. How did this man come to have the Holy of Holies in his eyes.

The men are waiting. Everything is decided, and there is very little to say. Caiaphas clears his throat. “You have done several things wrong,” he says to the carpenter. He pauses, trying to remember what they were. “You said you were our king…”

“I didn’t,” says the carpenter.

“You said that there is a resurrection…”

“I did. But the Pharisees say the same.”

“You broke the law of Moses.”

“I fulfilled it.”

There is a hissing breath from the assembled men. Caiaphas can’t look away from the carpenter’s eyes. Annas finishes slurping his wine and puts the cup down. “He said,” Annas tells Caiaphas, “that he would destroy the temple and raise it again in three days.”

Caiaphas’s eyes jerk away from the Galilean and back to the window. “Destroy the temple,” he mutters. Then he turns back and addresses the room. “We have seen this before,” he says. “Some peasant claims that he is king, and the people believe him. The Roman legions march, the innocent suffer and die. Which is better, to allow an insurrection, where many will die, or to have this man executed for his blasphemy? Isn’t it better that one man die for the people than for the whole nation to perish?” There are murmurs of agreement. He has made this speech before. They all agreed with him then. Nothing has changed. “We know what we must do,” he says. “This man should be taken out and stoned. But the Romans have claimed the right to perform executions. We must send him to Pilate.”

He sleeps, after the men have left and the fire has gone out in the courtyard. He dreams a single dream. Nothing happens in the dream. He is in the temple, in the Holy of Holies, in the eye of calm and peace. He remains in it all through the night. But when he wakes up, he is as shaken and afraid as if he had been having nightmares.

They must crucify the carpenter before sundown, before the start of the Passover feast. Caiaphas must go to the temple, must fulfill his duties for the day. Already his house is stirring, the servants at work preparing the feast. But as he dresses he is stilled locked in the dream. He is still in the Holy of Holies, and his active mind tries to shrink away from it. For the first time he wonders what it would be like if that holiness could flow out into the entire world. It would be too much for the world, he thinks. It would be too dangerous. Even now, he finds it suffocating.

A servant comes in with his breakfast. He inquires after the Galilean and is told that Pilate has sent him to Herod, and that Herod has sent him back to Pilate, and that Pilate has condemned him. They had a busy night, Caiaphas thinks to himself, as he washes his hands in a bowl of tepid water. He sent members of the Sanhedrin to shadow the carpenter, to influence events when they needed influencing, to stir up the crowds and frighten Pilate if he needed frightening. Now those same priests will be out among the crowds, whispering to them, twisting their opinions of the carpenter.

Caiaphas goes to the temple, his servants and retainers following in his train. As he walks through the Court of the Gentiles, he can’t help glancing towards the platform where the Galilean has been sitting, these last five days. The other platforms are filled. There are always teachers who are anxious to claim a space, to sit and discourse to the people who settle at their feet. But the Galilean’s platform remains empty, as if even the Pharisees are afraid of it, afraid of what’s being done now. He glances at the position of the sun. By now the carpenter should be on the way to Golgatha, like any common criminal. Caiaphas brushes at a speck of dirt on his priestly robes. He crosses the Court of the Women and is aware of a certain disease in his mind. He can smell the sacrifice from the Court of the Priests, but he doesn’t feel the reassurance that he’s used to whenever he catches the scent of it. Its as if something in the flavor of the smoke has changed. He frowns and glances again at the sun, but it hasn’t moved in the sky.

The temple priests have already drawn their lots and discovered their assignments for the day. He pauses inside the Court of the Israelites and watches them over the low wall. All around him the temple, his temple, clicks through the mechanisms of its life. He raises his eyes and looks past the altar, at the golden doors that lead to the Holy of Holies, the inner tabernacle. His eyes study the woven pattern of the fine Babylonian tapestry that hangs from the door’s lintel. He can’t shake the feeling that something is happening inside, at the heart of the universe. He wishes that today was the Day of Atonement, and he could go inside. He closes his eyes and tries to picture its interior, but all he can see is the Galilean’s eyes. And he becomes suddenly and shockingly certain that the carpenter is inside the Holy of Holies, is standing there, as if he were high priest. He shakes his head and opens his eyes and glances at the sun. By now, surely, the man has been nailed to the cross and hoisted into the air. He glances back at the tabernacle. The temptation to go through its golden doors is suffocating. He drops his gaze and watches the priests at the altar slaughter the animals. He looks into the flames of the perpetual fire and waits, as he once waited at a window, allowing himself to indulge in hope. But why does he need hope, now? He is standing near the center of the universe. He is watching men, his men, perpetuate humanity’s covenant with God. Surely he is immersed in holiness.

Lazarus

April 6, 2012April 11, 2013 ~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

He is still wrapped in burial clothes as he exits the tomb. He sees the world come back to life around him through strips of cloth that are white and loosely woven. The faces around him are ghostly, as if they were wrapped in gauze. There is a one thick thread cutting across his vision. It makes him think of Martha, his efficient sister, the spinner of competent threads. As soon as he thinks of her, he hears her. He hears her voice, saying his name, but there’s something odd about the way she says it – its choked with tears at either end. “Lazarus. Lazarus.” And he hears Mary’s louder, more emotive weeping. Hands are touching his face, pulling away the burial wrappings. He wonders who it is, who could be brave enough to do it.

Once he found a dead man beside the road. He dug a hole in the earth, yards away from where the body was lying, and even the act of digging made him feel a little sick. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to touch the body. It was unclean. It would make him unclean for seven days, and he would have to purify himself with water on the third and seventh days. But he knew that he couldn’t leave the man to the birds and the scavenging beasts, that it would be an act of charity, to touch the dead.

The person who touches him now isn’t concerned with uncleanliness. Maybe it’s Martha or Mary. They would be unclean already, from having had to prepare his body for burial. But he doesn’t think so. These hands feel different, somehow. They don’t tremble or shake. They aren’t the hands of someone who is weeping. But when the gauze is pulled away, the first thing he sees is tears. Tears against sun-weathered skin. He concentrates on them because there is too much light. It comes pouring in, drowning his vision and shifting even the tears out of focus. But a voice speaks and he knows who has unwrapped him. “Take off the grave clothes and let him go,” the voice says, and he feels other hands, touching his arms and shoulders, his waist and ankles, pulling away the bands of cloth.

Everyone wants to know what it was like to be in the grave. Did he travel to the land of the dead? Did he see their pallid faces? They tell him that Sheol is a gray place, a place of wanting. That the dead stand in pits with uplifted faces, that their faces look like they’ve been molded out of wet clay. He tells them that he doesn’t remember what it was like to be dead, and he doesn’t. But because of their stories, he begins to picture the faces as they say they should look, dark and gray and waiting. He doesn’t remember sights or sounds, only a terrible numbness, and because of this, he imagines the faces as numb. Not longing for anything, not waiting for anything, not looking at anything. That is what he wants to forget.

He never wants to feel that numbness again. When he is entirely unwrapped, he sits by himself on a stone and looks at the sunlight on the skin of his arm. His sisters cleaned him well before burying him. His skin looks virgin, like an infant’s skin, pale brown in the heavy sun. He lifts his eyes and watches the way in which the sunlight makes dense shadows fall from rocks and feet and scrub bushes. Heavy shadows against the light tan ground. People are pressing food at him. He sees white dust against the sheen of grape skins, and flour dusting flat pieces of bread. He isn’t ready to eat yet. He’s surprised that they’re not afraid of him, that they’re not standing at a distance, but pressing close, and he knows that it is because of Jesus. If he had come walking from his grave under his own power, he would have been accursed. Children would have run from him, women would have screamed and fled. It’s because they know the reason for his new life that they want to touch his bare arms, to press cups of watered wine into his thin hands.

But he feels the fear that they seem incapable of. He looks for Jesus’s face in the crowd, but he sees Mary first, moving along the fringe of the press of people. He tries to stand. Immediately Martha is by his side, asserting order. “He doesn’t want the food,” she says. “Thank you, but he doesn’t want it. Give him room.” They stand aside for him, although some can’t keep themselves from reaching out to touch him. Martha walks beside him, echoing his slow step, but she doesn’t touch him, and he realizes that she feels the way he feels, afraid and uncertain of the miracle. Mary’s face bobs up in front of them. She is smiling and holding a crown of flowers. He gasps when he sees it. Tiny flowers with open faces, white and red. She lifts it to put it on him, but he jerks his head away.

Then Jesus is there, taking his hand. His grip is strong and leading, and as they walk he keeps his face down, as if his mind is elsewhere. His eyes are unfocused, as if unaware of the adulation of the crowd. The crowd keeps gathering. Children run through its fringes. All of Bethany has come out into the street.

Then they are ducking through a doorway, entering a cool, shadowy room, and he looks up and understands that he is home. Martha has gotten there ahead of them, and is already laying out a clean tunic for him. She has taken it out of a trunk, and he realizes that she has packed away all of his possessions, that her efficiency emptied the house of him, even as she mourned. He sits on a carpet and Jesus sits beside him. The other disciples crowd in. Light falls into the room from a high window, and he remembers being a boy and standing on top of stacked boxes to gaze out of that window. Nothing had been preventing him from going outside, but he had wanted to see the world from the window, to see if it looked different from that vantage point. He eats food when Jesus hands it to him. He glances at the faces of the disciples, and sees their wonderment, and realizes that now he is different to them, that he won’t be able to just sit and listen and be part of the crowd. “He wept for you,” Andrew tells him, and that fact seems as amazing to Andrew as the resurrection itself. Lazarus turns and looks at Jesus, who has raised his head and is listening to the sounds of the crowd through the open window. And Lazarus thinks, ‘I didn’t know that he loved me that much. That he would weep for me.’

He finds that he can’t stand to be far from Jesus’s side. Thomas implies that the world is dangerous for him now in a way that it wasn’t before. “The pharisees are talking about you to the chief priests,” he says, and smiles, because Thomas wants a fight with the pharisees as soon as possible. But Lazarus isn’t worried about the danger. He is trying to understand why Jesus raised him, and why Jesus wept.

He asks Martha about it and she says, “He was late in coming here. We sent word to him when you got sick. You remember that, don’t you? Do you remember how we waited, how we prayed that he would come? But he didn’t. They say that he told the disciples that God would be glorified through you.” And now Martha’s hands begin to shake as she straightens the room. “And He is, Lazarus. Your being here is a sign from God.”

He wakes in the night and hears the disciples talking. Word has reached them that the Sanhedrin has met, and that Caiaphas and the other chief priests are planning to murder Jesus. Jesus sits quietly and looks at the ground. He lets them talk. He lets them make decisions. They will go the Ephraim, where they can hide and be safe. Lazarus wants to go with them. He knows that he will always be safe when he’s in Jesus’s company, near to Jesus’s love. Martha wants him to stay. Mary wants to go with him. He goes, and Mary stays.

He is always by Jesus’s side. When he feels nervous, he reaches out and touches Jesus’s clothing. He thinks that he can remember more of what it was like to die. That gradual unmooring, that slipping away. He wants Jesus to anchor him to this world. But Jesus’s gaze lifts to more distant horizons. It is a dark time in Ephraim. The winter is long. There are only twelve hours of daylight. The Passover is growing near.

Six days before the feast in Jerusalem, Jesus tells the disciples that they are going back to Bethany. He says it while looking at Lazarus, giving him a little smile, as if Bethany still means anything to Lazarus, as if he cares about any particular place. He doesn’t care about Bethany. Its safety, its familiarity, are empty things to him now. Only in Jesus is there safety. He’s sure of it. Jesus will keep him safe. Jesus cried for him, and raised him from the grave. The disciples murmur and worry, afraid that Jesus will suffer in Jerusalem. But Lazarus knows that he won’t. Jesus will keep himself safe out of love of Lazarus. He will keep himself safe so that he can keep Lazarus safe.

They return to Bethany in the late afternoon, and it is as if Martha and Mary have been expecting them. Perhaps Jesus told them that he would come back on this day. Martha has prepared a feast, and Mary flits around the room, speaking quietly to the disciples, a secretive smile on her face. They recline on rugs to eat, sharing the dishes that Martha has made, splitting the bread between them. Near the end of the meal Mary emerges from the shadows, carrying a small box. She kneels in front of Jesus and he watches her quietly, waiting. Lazarus reaches out and touches his sleeve, hoping to have a share in his sense of calm, his obvious peace. She opens the box and, smiling, turns it over. Oil washes out of it and over Jesus’s feet. The smell of nard fills the house. Lazarus gasps with the others. Where did she get it? Nothing of its value has ever been in the house. She bends over his feet and begins to move her hair back and forth, taking it in her hands, scrubbing at his skin with it, and the oil shines on her dark locks.

Judas is angry. “Gifts like that should be sold,” he says.

But Jesus says, “Leave her alone. It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial.”

Lazarus feels his breath go out of him. The day of Jesus’s burial? Is this it? He glances quickly around at the shadows, looking for assassins. But then he catches Jesus’s eye, and sees Jesus’s reassuring smile. ‘No,’ that smile says. ‘Do not be afraid. I am with you.’ And Lazarus relaxes, reassured. Jesus won’t die. And if he won’t die, then Lazarus won’t die. He will be kept safe.

There are crowds gathering outside of the house. Thomas reminds the people inside that crowds mean danger. There are spies from the Sanhedrin in those crowds. Jesus turns to Andrew and Philip and gives them special instructions. They leave, carrying the smell of nard with them into the night.

Its scent follows all of them when they leave the house in the morning. Andrew and Philip are waiting in the predawn light. Andrew holds the bridle of a young colt. The crowd hasn’t dissipated in the night. They are sleeping on the ground, leaning against the walls of the houses. They stir and begin to stand as Jesus emerges. He places a hand on Lazarus’s shoulder and steadies himself as he swings up onto the back of the colt. Andrew hands the bridle to Lazarus. The smell of nard dissipates slowly in the cool air as they walk towards Jerusalem. It spreads out among the crowds who walk and murmur beside them.

As they come nearer to the city, the crowds grow and line the way. People are carrying palm branches, waving them in the air. They shout loud hosannas. Their faces are strange to Lazarus. Everywhere he looks, people have their faces raised and are staring up at Jesus. Small children have climbed into the trees. Lazarus clutches the bridle. It’s alive in his hand, connecting him to Jesus on the colt.

Philip is walking beside him. “Why are they all here?” he whispers.

Philip looks at him strangely. “Because of you,” he says. “Because they heard that he raised you.”

‘But,’ Lazarus thinks, ‘I don’t want them here. This isn’t for them. This is only for us, for those who really love him.’

Jesus spends the day sitting on a raised platform in the Court of the Gentiles, teaching. Lazarus stands by his side, watching the faces of the people who come to speak with him. He feels them pressing all around the cluster of disciples. He feels their weight on his shoulders. He feels bound by it, as rigidly bound as he was when he first came from the grave. He doesn’t know how Jesus can bear it. When he feels the weight grow to much, he reaches out and touches Jesus’s shoulder. And the weight lifts, the smell of nard comes back into his nostrils.

At the end of the day, Jesus goes off by himself. Lazarus follows and sits at a distance. He watches Jesus kneel and pray, and he sees the tiredness of Jesus’s face, and knows that Jesus, too, bore the weight of the pressing crowds. But as he prays, the weight seems to lift, the tiredness to lighten and fade. And the next day he is back with the crowds, speaking and listening to them, walking about the temple. He argues with scribes and pharisees when they approach, but always gently, as if more saddened by their arguments then angered by them. This goes on for three days.

On the day before the passover, Jesus leads his followers into the upper room of a house. The wind brings the scent of seared lamb from the temple. Mary and Martha are there, and so are Joanna and Mary Magdalene and the women of Galilee. The disciples are there, and others, old followers and new people who have been beside him in the temple these last few days. Jesus reclines on a rough rug, eating from a small table. Lazarus reclines beside him, and tries to eat when he eats, to dip his bread into the same small bowl of oil. Jesus begins to talk, telling those who are nearest to him that one of them will betray him. Lazarus stares at his face, and then stares past him, to Peter’s stricken eyes. Peter lifts his hand and gestures to Lazarus, and Lazarus understand.

“Who will betray you, Lord?” he asks.

Jesus mutters, so that only Lazarus can hear. “The one who I hand this bread to, after I’ve dipped it in this dish.” Then he reaches out, dips the bread, and hands it to Judas of Iscariot, who smiles as he accepts it, thinking that its a sign of special favor. “Do what you have planned to do,” Jesus tells him, and Judas’s eyes change. His face looses all expression, and he stands and leaves the room. Lazarus stares after him.

Before Lazarus can act, before he can stand and follow Judas and prevent whatever he is planning to do, Jesus begins to speak. He talks about where he is going and what will happen to him. Lazarus wants to look away from the utter calm on Jesus’s face. He feels a gauze across his vision, and realizes that it is his own tears. He watches Jesus and sees his eyes scan the room, resting on every face. Spending the same time studying features, looking into eyes, the same time on every face. “Before long,” Jesus says, “the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.” But Lazarus understands that Jesus is talking about his death. That the dark time in Ephraim has come to stay. He still smells the nard, but understands now that it is the smell of loss, a perfume made from the death of flowers.

“How can this be?” he wonders. “How can this be?” He watches Jesus look into every face, and realizes that he is not the only disciple that Jesus loves. That they are all beloved, every one. He looks towards the window. The smell of sacrificial meat pours through it, invading the room. It is met by the scent of nard. The scent of nard pushes past it, overcomes it, and flows out into the city. As if the weeping of Jesus was for all of them, not just for Lazarus. As if the miracle of Lazarus’s resurrection was a universal miracle. As if he, whom Jesus loves, is meant to represent everything there is, the whole world.

Mary Magdalene

April 5, 2012December 5, 2025 ~ KPB Stevens ~ 2 Comments

Magdala was a town of almost forty-thousand. It was a town of white pigeons hatched from three hundred shops, birds for sacrifice that sometimes escaped to roost in eves and on rooftops and descend in flocks on a piece of dropped fish. Magdala was a town of fish. Mary watched the fishermen heave them from the sea in shaking nets and deposit them in the midgals, the little stone towers in which layer upon layer of fish flopped and died.

Mary hated the arrogant purity of the pigeons. They were supposed to be without blemish, but light itself blemished them, catching out the iridescent colors in the fibers of a wing. The same colors she saw on the enamel of the seashells she picked up on the shore. But seashells never claimed that they were clean. Seashells were allies of fish, whose scales caught those colors also, the oily blues and greens that looked like bruises turned to water.

Mary left Magdala like she always did. One moment she was squatting beside the boats, a small, disquieting figure with her long face and chewed over lips. The next moment she was gone. The fishermen shrugged. She was unclean. She belonged to no one. No Jew would touch her, and no Greek either, unless he was insane, unless he heard her babbling out the voices of her seven demons and found it, somehow, exciting. Who could know. Since Herod Antipas had built the city of Tiberias, with its pagan gods and Roman baths, many unclean things came down the road.

It was summer. The hot winds had already come and killed the blue and red anemones. The plain of Gennesaret had turned gray, dead with too much light. Mary carried this seer landscape within her, even though the land had rebounded, even though figs and olives hung on green trees. The memory of the dead ground was like a veil that the demons had settled over her. A long veil that fell past her face and then blew outward, draping the landscape. She laughed at it as she walked, held up her hands to shake it, tried to bite it. People ran away from her, except for a group of children who followed, daring each other to run up to her and try to step on her shadow. They were called away by their fathers, who told them that she was unclean. Everything she saw had too much light. Not gentle light, but imposed light, light that denied the colors that it touched.

She came to Capernaum without noticing it, without noticing the huts on the outskirts, the goats and sheep that spread across the road. She didn’t even notice the others who were like her. Bedraggled, slouching shapes. Women and children. A man, tied to a litter, was carried past her. A wan girl fell to the ground and shook against the dirt. Mary’s demons didn’t leap to see the demons within these others. Her demons lay still, and that is what she noticed. And because they were still, she suddenly noticed the town around her, the small basalt houses, the returning smell of fish. But no pigeons. The bleating of goats, but something more. Something the demons had blinded her to. Small glittering pebbles in the road. The fleece of a passing sheep, its dirty gray nap, the small resilient curls of its wool. She saw the exact lines in the weave of the shepherd’s cloak. She saw a surprising number of faces, too many for a town this size. Too many people, and yet her demons lay silent. Cowed.

She remembered why she had left Magdala and walked through the orchards. She remembered a name. They said that a man had been lowered to him through the roof of a house. She turned to study the roofs. She kept turning, her eyes seeking, unaware of the circumference of her steps. A body brushed past her, then another. She was borne along, still turning, her eyes trying to take in every angle of roof, looking for a pile of masonry, a slab of broken stone.

The crowd slowed. There were others before them, and there was nothing they could do but stop. The sun beat down on them. Mary lowered her eyes from the roofs and looked at the coarse grain of a nearby man’s cheek, the varying colors in a nearby girl’s hair. She wanted her veil back. She wanted these details to be bleached and neutered by light. But the demons were not only quiet, they were crawling away. She hissed at them, trying to get them back. A woman standing next to her began singing in a high, soft voice.

She didn’t see him that night. She let the crowd move past her and stood alone in the growing cold of the darkening street. Someone gave her bread, which surprised her. It was in her hand and the man was moving away before she could see his face. She ate it, and then thought how easy it would be to do what she had always done. She hunched her shoulders, drew her face down and stared out, darkly, from under her brows. She chewed her lips. No one noticed.

She saw him the next day. She shuffled into the house where he was staying, one in a line of many others, but he looked at her and saw her. “Seven demons,” he said. She stopped and stared at him. “They’re gone now,” he said, “but it isn’t enough.”

“Rabbi?”

“Your house has been swept clean, but they’ll only find that more inviting when they come back.”

“Rabbi.”

“You need something else. Something else has to happen. A singing breath entered Adam.”

“Rabbi!”

“A singing breath entered Adam. Let me breathe on you.”

But really, he was already breathing on her. As he spoke the whole room became breath.

It is not enough to merely lose our demons. We must experience resurrection, be filled with the Holy Spirit. Joy. Joy is at the root of it. The great carved places inside of Mary were filled with joy.

She followed him up the mountain and sat in the diminishing evening light with the other disciples. They were silent for a long while, listening to the voices from the lower slopes, the people who had come out the cities to see him. At last he spoke. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Every word he spoke terrified her. He spoke of light and she knew that light, but she also knew that she had been Mary the Skulker, Mary the Unclean, and she feared for the light inside of her. In the dusk, as his voice continued and the profiles of the seated disciples became blurred with shadow, she feared that there was something in the world that could take her joy from her.

He wasn’t speaking to her alone, but she knew that he meant her to hear him. His face turned towards her and she lifted her head to look at him in the semi-gloom. She clutched her knees to her chest. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in Heaven.”

“Lord,” she mumbled in her rough voice. “Lord, I pray for my seven demons.” And she felt surprising pity for them. They were wandering over the plain of Gennesaret, looking for a home. They were shaking the long black veil out to cover the trees, insisting on the insulting light that had no interest in the sheen of green olive skins. They would be despised beside the fishing boats, and pecked about by holy pigeons. She began to laugh, but not maliciously. She began to laugh because she knew, in her pity for them, that she was free of them. They could never pity themselves.

And when he told her and the other disciples not to worry about their lives, she laughed again. She had never worried about her life. The demons had never allowed her fine clothes, or the taste of good food. And now that they had left her she was a lilly of the field, a bird of the air, trained by desolation not to care for vanities and suddenly given into the keeping of God.

As they walked towards Jerusalem, she noticed patterns on the ground. The scuffed over prints of many feet, the calligraphy of mule droppings. There were grasshoppers in the grain fields. She paid attention to the way the husks of wheat rasped against her fingers when she picked them. There was a slow design to the way the disciples walked. Matthew held his slight wrists at his side and swayed them back and forth like the beads of an abacus. Philip pushed his face slightly forward. Joanna, dressed in plain clothes that she’d bought to be plain in, was still aware of her neck’s length and softness. Her hands still gestured to show their beauty. “We are so small,” Mary thought. “Every one of us. We are like heads of grain, or ripe olives, or the rain. And God knows every hair on our heads.” She thought of God’s attentiveness. She thought of her mother, who surely hadn’t remembered every loaf of bread she’d shaped with her hands, and her father, who couldn’t have remembered each net he’d woven. She looked at the sky, and it was as if it was speaking to her. She knew the sense of the words, but not their phrasing. God was in His creation, complete. Human beings might create, but no one created like God.

Jesus began to say that he would suffer when they got to Jerusalem. Mary was not afraid. When Peter argued, and when the Sons of Thunder tried to settle their place in the hierarchy, she walked calmly beside them. She measured her stride to Jesus’ own. She would have taken his hand if she could. Would have stood on her toes so that she could whisper in his ear, “I know what it’s like. There is a great hollowness, but then there’s breath.” Wherever they buried him, she’d go there to wait. No one should be alone in that hollowness. She’d wait beside his body until he rose.

But when they came to arrest him she ran like the others. She hadn’t expected the soldiers or the jeering priests. She hadn’t expected this evil to be accomplished by men. Maybe she had never known that men could be evil like this. The veil of her demons had protected her. It had turned the details of each day to chaff, had allowed the words and touch of men to blow away. She watched a soldier strike him and she wanted her veil back. She crept away. Maybe the other disciples hid together. She wandered away from the city, alone.

She moved across scarred ground, the seared slopes of the land around Jerusalem, and she tried not to look at anything. She wanted her eyes to fill with blank light that would deny the russet stone, the green scrub. She muttered to herself. “Unclean! Unclean!” But these words had no meaning. She wanted them to chisel her flesh, to create places for the demons to return to. But they were dull words, and she saw the world despite them, the white hairs of a donkey’s muzzle, the slim arms of the boy who waited, so patiently, for the animal to drink. The vision that Jesus had given her wouldn’t leave her. It drew her back to the city. It is impossible for us to ignore our resurrections.

She learned of his sentencing and was there at his death. She stood beside Joanna and the other women. She watched his mother, and was curious to know if the light could subsist even now, if she could see its varying shades settle across Mary’s anguished face. She turned to watch him as he died on the cross, and felt the smallest touch of his breath reach her. Was it possible that God was creating even now? She studied him and saw an iridescent sheen, his sweat laid across the bruises of his skin. A fish, a shell, a bird of sacrifice. But it wasn’t her who was sacrificing him. It was the men standing near the cross, the soldiers and the priests. How could God, who was aware of each husk of grain, each movement of her breath, demand the death of living things? She looked at the soldiers and the priests, and she said what he said. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

The women wept, but she remained quiet, watching with lifted gaze. When they took him down there was a commotion, argument over his body, the flashing of coins that moved from hand to hand. Somebody’s servants were carrying him away. The women gasped with consternation. They followed, walking quickly, pushing through the crowds, afraid of losing sight of him. Mary was swept along with them, her legs moving briskly, her eyes looking everywhere. She felt anger, and it was the first time that she remembered feeling anger. Her demons had kept her from being aware of other people, but now she saw that other people were blind, indifferent, lost within the empty light of their many errands. She wanted to grip them, to hold them to her and breathe on them. She remembered the young man who had come to Jesus in his clean robes and oiled hair, his slaves standing a little way off, and who had gone away weeping, and she remembered Jesus’ sorrow, and understood that now that he had left them she could finally see with his clear eyes.

They laid him in a tomb and she sat beside it until sundown. Sabbath, and the other women bade her come away. She couldn’t tell them how little it mattered, how no one could convince her that she was unclean even if she spent the night resting with the dead. She went with them out of pity for them. They needed her peace. And as they spent the long day in a dusty room, she tried to send her peace out to them, so that it could rest on them. She prayed for each, staring at every face, at Joanna, and Peter, and James, and Mark, and Mary, Jesus’ mother. And on the morning after the sabbath, she arose and went to the grave.

Can we be surprised by resurrection when each of us has known it? When, at some moment in our lives, we each have noticed the depth of light, familiar objects suddenly suffused with intricacies, with shapes and patterns we never knew were there? Can we be surprised by resurrection when we have felt the breath of grace arrive at unexpected moments, when we’ve done nothing to bring it and don’t deserve it, and yet its there? When we feel it enter into us and blow past the filaments of chatter, of every day life to show us something waiting beneath the world’s skin?

We have all known little deaths. The ends of relationships, of eras of our lives, of long-held dreams that we’ve finally put to rest. Or stranger, more subtle deaths. Incisions made in our souls to remove some tumor of doubt or anger. The exorcism of some preference for self-destruction that we’ve clung to because we’ve been afraid of what redemption might demand of us.

And yet we are all here. Resurrected at some moment or another, brought together to witness and celebrate the one resurrection with Mary and the other disciples. We are here because we know that, despite death and doubt, despite our desires to hide with our familiar demons, God’s favor is life, and joy cometh in the morning.

She met him in the garden. She was weeping because the resurrection had already happened when she arrived, because the tomb was empty and there were two men there. Or maybe his body had simply been moved, and she didn’t know where to go to witness the resurrection, to feel the breath of God, as she had felt it when he healed her and cast out her seven demons. When she saw him, she thought that he was a gardener. But she should have known, from the way that the morning light cast a shadow on the tomb’s wall behind him, a round shadow that circled his head, a halo, that this was her risen Lord. From then on she saw that halo everywhere, appearing on the walls behind the apostles as they ate and spoke and healed. Surrounding the heads of the people as they gathered together and prayed. She saw it on new converts as the apostles went out from Jerusalem, and the light spread, and the world’s cold, pitiable demons fled to wander in the barren places. The world was haloed with new light. Our world is haloed with new light. May it help us see and understand and love.

Simon Peter

March 28, 2012April 11, 2013 ~ KPB Stevens ~ 1 Comment

He and Andrew had just begun their night’s work. They had just heaved the dense, wet net out of the bottom of the boat and cast it out over the water. It struck the surface and sank. They were silent after the sound of the net going in, and then a voice called them from the shore. They were unused to hearing voices that called to them. They were unused to any sound but the small lap of the water against the side of the boat and the rustle of the wind against the sail. “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people,” the voice said. Perhaps it was the fact that they could hear the voice, that it carried to them from the shore, that made them pay attention to it. Perhaps it was the words themselves, the idea that people were like fish, as simple and flopping and elusive as the schools who swam beneath the boat. Or perhaps it was that Simon was already a rock, and he knew it. Rocks have no business in boats at night, floating in open water. Rocks sink. They’re stubborn and still. They don’t move through water. They make water run around them.

A rock, that’s what Jesus told him that he was. A rock who fishes for people. Rocks are not known for their ability to understand people. And sometimes it felt like understanding could only come through a process of erosion. He would only understand when he had been worn down, when deep grooves of understanding had been carved from him by the experiences that pressed against him and swirled around him like water.

Before Jesus called him, life had been simple. At night he sailed out onto the Sea of Galilee with his brother Andrew and their friends James and John. The wind blew and they listened to it. They watched it ruffle the top of the water. The weather could change suddenly. The wind could come rushing out of the surrounding hills, troubling the waters. All night long they lowered their nets and waited for the fish to swim into them. He lived with his wife and his mother-in-law in a one-room house made of mud bricks. Mud-covered reed mats served as a roof, and they would shift and rustle in the strong winds. In the morning the fishermen would send their catch to Magdala, where it would be salted and sold. In the afternoons, Simon, who would be called Peter, the rock, would sleep. Then, at evening, he and Andrew would meet James and John by the seashore, and they would squat above their nets, running their hands over the sodden ropes and finding breaks which they tied back together.

On the Sabbath he went to the synagogue, where he sat with the other fishermen, with the plowmen and traders, the carpenters and merchants. They all listened together to the readings from the prophets. They knew that their present world could never last. They had been promised a new world, a Kingdom that would be ruled by God. During the high feast days, Simon went to Jerusalem. He had been there many times, walking past the dried-fish dealers at the Fish Gate and looking at their wares, wondering which of these fish he had caught himself. The people in Jerusalem thought that he was a country bumpkin. They mocked him and his friends for their accents, even though Galilee was rich and fertile while Jerusalem was hard, dry, and dependent on the farmers and fishermen in the countryside. Simon’s labor allowed these people to live in their stone houses and speak in their posh accents. They made him impatient, these Jerusalem-dwellers. He disliked their rules and their fine sense of religion. He remembered the pharisee who had visited Capernaum and who had spoken in the synagogue. Someone had asked him if you were allowed to turn over a pot onto a scorpion on the Sabbath day, to prevent yourself from being stung. No, the man said, that was too much like hunting. Hunting! When had that pharisee ever hunted? What did he know about making a living and protecting your family? In the Kingdom of God, the wisdom of such men would be shown to be foolishness, and his wisdom, the wisdom of the sea and the salt air and the winds that rustled through the olive groves, would be admired.

But he didn’t know how to express that wisdom to people, at least not yet. He didn’t really understand people. They acted so strangely, clustering around Jesus, reaching out to him, touching him, calling his name, begging him for healing. Then, the next minute, they would be turning against him, furious at him, trying to drive him away. They were motivated by desires that Simon could not understand. They flopped like fish, they swam in shimmering schools, they were chased up from the deep by some sense of danger or some shift in the waves, and yet Simon could not think of how to devise a net that would catch them. Whenever he made a net and showed it to Jesus, Jesus would feel along its cords and find its tears and snags. Simon thought that if Jesus would just show people that he was God, if he would just allow his face to shine and his clothes to become a dazzling white, as they had on that mountain when Moses and Elijah appeared, then they would all swim into the net of his truth. But he wouldn’t do it. People had to understand the message without the miracle. It was the message that was important. The message was the true net. Jesus wouldn’t let Simon try to make a net out of miracles.

The message was that everyone, even the samaritans, even the gentiles, were Simon’s neighbors. Even the Romans. Even the Germanic mercenaries whom Herod Antipas hired to police Galilee and bully its citizens. He had never believed this before. He had always thought that his neighbors were his fellow Jews. Galilean Jews, people who knew him, who felt as he felt, who saw the world in the same way that he saw it. But Jesus caught Simon in his own net, in a greater understanding of neighborliness. “Your neighbor is the person who does good even though it doesn’t benefit him in any way.” Sometimes doing good had a cost. Sometimes, you had to die for your neighbors. Simon couldn’t accept this at first. Jesus said that he would go to Jerusalem and suffer, and die. He said this as if it were the price for neighborliness, the thing that you had to do in order to love your neighbor as yourself. Simon couldn’t stand it. “God forbid it, Lord!” he said. “This must never happen to you.”

Jesus’s response was hard. It slapped against him like water. “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

A stumbling block. Well, yes, that’s what a rock was, wasn’t it? Sometimes. An anchor, a weight, a stumbling block. But why did one have to die for one’s neighbors? A fisherman didn’t die when he brought in his catch, did he? Well, sometimes. Sometimes when the wind rose and blew from the west, and the water roared up all around the boat, and the sail came loose, and the mast snapped, and the boat capsized and the fishermen, like rocks, sunk to the bottom. If men were like fish then there was danger in trying to bring in a net full of them. There was danger even on the nights when the water was still and the nets were empty. There was always risk. There was always the possibility of disaster.

They went to Jerusalem for the Passover. The Paschal feast had always taught the Jews who their neighbors were. Their neighbors were their fellow Jews, the people whom Moses had brought out of bondage in Egypt, the people who had settled in the promised land, the people whom the prophets had come to, promising that one day they would all live in the Kingdom of God. Jerusalem was crowded during the Feast of the Passover, so crowded that the boundaries of the city itself were extended so that all of the pilgrims staying in the suburbs and the neighboring towns could say that they were in the Holy City for the feast. All the pilgrims were crammed in with their friends and relatives, sleeping side by side in the small houses. All of them were gathering their money together and buying sheep. In the morning, they would take their sheep to the temple, where the priests would sacrifice them and burn the entrails on the pyre. Then they would bring the lamb home and prepare it for their meal. Throughout the day, the wind would blow from the east, from the temple, and carry with it the scent of blood and incense and burning fat.

Peter sat at supper, there in the upper room, and the city, its scent and sounds, came through the open window and washed against him like a wave. He was paying attention, noting and analyzing everything, trying to understand the message, trying to piece together the net with which he would become a fisher of men. Jesus stood up and took off his outer garment and tied a towel around himself. He began to wash the disciples’ feet. And Simon Peter knew that their roles were wrong, reversed. He was supposed to be honoring Jesus. He was supposed to be washing Jesus’ feet. But Jesus wouldn’t let him. The water had to be poured against Simon the Rock one more time. It had to work at him, to erode his understanding. No, Jesus said, no, I am showing you how to treat your neighbor. Wash their feet. Be their servant.

The water rushed against Simon’s feet and he felt grit and grime wash away. The world was a different thing than he had thought it was. It wasn’t composed of Jews and Greeks and Samaritans and Romans and German mercenaries. It was composed of people. Longing people. Flopping people. Failing people. They swam in schools, silver through the water, frantic and lost and mindless. And Peter understood that Jesus had compassion on them. That he pitied them, even in their small, silver, darting violence. That he wanted to draw them up from the depth of the water. That he wanted to draw them into light. And Peter, in this sudden moment of insight, felt himself close to understanding everything. Everything that Jesus had done or said or predicted. He just needed some more washing, some more erosion. He just needed the water to rush against the uneven surface of his soul, to make it smooth and shaped so that he could become a perfect vessel to do God’s will. “Lord,” he said, “not my feet only but also my hands and head!” But Jesus said no. “You are entirely clean,” he said. Already shaped. Already in possession of the message that would make him a fisher of men. “Love one another,” Jesus said. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Far away to the north, schools of fish swam through the dark waters of the Sea of Galilee. On the shore, in the hills, in the dry valleys and the verdant farm land, by the river Jordan and in the small towns and cities, and in the great city of Jerusalem itself, the people swam dimly, moving in darkness, as the fishermen in the upper room were taught how to make the nets that would pull them out of the depths and into the light. “Love one another,” they were told, and with cautious, uncertain gestures, they began to weave a net of that love.

Life and Ideals

March 24, 2012March 25, 2012 ~ KPB Stevens ~ 1 Comment

Not everyone was happy about the resurrection of Lazarus. According to John’s Gospel, the fact of that miracle caused great crowds to flock around Jesus, and the chief priests grew jealous and afraid. They plotted to kill Lazarus, thinking that this would make the crowds go away. They didn’t just want to ignore his resurrection. They wanted to undo it. But they plotted impotently. The very next day Jesus entered Jerusalem, and those crowds that had been following him because of Lazarus lined the streets. More crowds gathered, and learned about the raising of Lazarus. And the plotters looked at each other and said “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!”

Included in that “world” that was chasing after him were some Greeks. They went to Philip and asked him to get them an interview. But when Philip and Andrew approached Jesus with the Greeks’ request, he launched into a short monologue about his glorification and his death. He ended by saying that “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” Including, presumably, the Greeks. But they never got to see him. Instead of granting them the interview they requested, he went away and hid from the crowds.

It’s clear that this story is all about the resurrection. Lazarus’ resurrection is the event that gets the story moving, that keeps the crowds engaged and terrifies the chief priests. But I think it is also a story about idealism. The crowds flocked to Jesus because they thought he could teach them how to escape death. In essence, they were right, but not in the way that they thought. Jesus didn’t become a renowned resurrection man, traveling from place to place, raising the dead. He taught people how to escape death by emulating his example – by presenting himself as an ideal for them to subscribe to, the ideal of the human being who truly is human, living a life that truly is life. In other words, he invited them into idealism.

Idealism is a powerful force. Robert Jay Lifton tells a story about a series of interviews he conducted with a young soldier in 1969. This soldier had been present at the My Lai massacre, that morning of terror in a small village in Vietnam when American soldiers killed more than five hundred innocent people, grandmothers and babies. The soldier whom Lifton interviewed had refused to fire, refused to participate in the slaughter. He didn’t think that this absolved him of the guilt of the event. “There’s no way I can feel that I was separate from the whole thing,” he said, “especially when I didn’t do anything to stop it myself.” But unlike the soldiers around him, his comrades and friends, he couldn’t bring himself to shoot. Lifton wanted to know why.

He discovered that the young man was a lapsed Catholic. He had drifted away from the church, but his childhood religious training had convinced him of the sacredness of life. He was a man who felt comfortable in his own company, and didn’t have much need for the approval of others. But most of all, he was a man who truly believed in the Army. He had joined the Army after flunking out of college, during a time when his life was falling apart. He loved it. He excelled at being a soldier, and was quickly promoted. He wanted to make the army his career. He had completely bought into the idealistic image of a soldier that the army presented to him. He believed in it. He believed what he had been told about what a true soldier would and would not do. And it was this sense of military honor that kept him from killing old men and women and small children in the tiny, innocent village of My Lai. He was saved from becoming a murderer by the fact that he was an idealist.

Christian idealism has the same scope and power. It can help us reach for life even when we’re surrounded by death. I heard a story this week about a man whose wife recently died. She was fairly young, in her late forties. They were a very loving couple, and she was an exceptionally good woman. A social worker for many years, she and her husband had adopted numerous children and taken in foster children. She knew she was dying, and she did her best to prepare her husband for this fact. He would come and visit her in the hospital, and she would try to send him away. “Don’t you want me here?” he’d ask her, and she’d say, “Yes, but I want you here,” gesturing widely with her hands. Meaning that she wanted him to go outside the hospital room and act widely in the world, attending to all of the responsibilities that they’d taken on together, fostering all of the relationships that they’d formed together. After she died, he grieved deeply. But he was also able to say that she had won. All that time when she was in the hospital, he thought that she was losing. Losing the battle for life, and maybe even losing all of the potential in her life, all of those possibilities that her disease was taking away. But after she was gone, he realized that she had won. Because she wasn’t afraid to die. Because she died so gracefully and beautifully. And because she was an idealist. She believed in living her life according to the idealism of Christ. Taking care of people, treating the world with love, worrying as much about the good of others as about her own good. And she believed in the resurrection. Her idealism went so far as to even deny the power of death.

Christ came to teach us profound idealism. But idealism is a funny thing. We rarely succeed in living out our ideals. The man whose wife died couldn’t fully accept, as she was dying, that she was moving into the resurrection, even though he shared her ideals. The soldier in My Lai couldn’t figure out how to make others act according to his ideals during those hours of terror and grief. Like Jesus, our ideals are always slightly elusive, slipping away to hide from the crowds. But that doesn’t invalidate them. An ideal doesn’t lose its power just because it can’t be fully lived up to. An ideal’s power come from being, well, an ideal. Always just a little beyond our grasp. Always the focus of our aspiration, even if it remains hard to accomplish. But we move forward, chasing the ideal, and we get a little better at it all the time. More than that, we’re protected from people and events who are anti-idealistic. From the chief priests. From screwed up judgment and false orders. From a world that would tell us that death is simply death, and that there is no possible response to it other than grief. We strive towards our ideals because, by doing so, we become the people who we are now and, step by slow step, the people who we hope, someday, to be.