The Book of Feasts & Seasons

  “This is a dream. I fell asleep in the waiting room.”

  “No. But Earth itself is a dream of the abundant life beyond life. You think we departed dead sleep in the ground? It is you who sleep. And when you wake, your child shall live.”

  Virginia said nothing, but her face spoke volumes of her doubt and anger.

  The bishop tilted his head, and frowned, and said. “Nothing is taken from an unwilling giver. And nothing is given to an unwilling taker, not even life eternal. The Father loves you too much for that. He will not overthrow your liberty, because we are like Him in this.”

  Virginia said, “How can I forgive you for not answering a little girl’s prayers?”

  “They are answered. Here am I.”

  “And what of all the other children in the world?”

  “I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land; But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lazarus died, for all that he had been raised, when he was old and stricken in years, and likewise Dorcas, and likewise Eutychus, and likewise the widow of Nain’s son.”

  “Are you going to grant me a miracle? What about those who pray and get no answer! Why did you wait? Why did this happen in the first place? What—look at what you have put me through!” She shouted at him, and then she broke down and began to cry.

  He rose and came down the stairs at a run, so swift it seemed as if he were falling, though not a platter nor cup of all the feast of food and drink along the stairs was disturbed. Perhaps his feet did not touch the steps at all.

  Then he was next to her.

  “Your daughter will live,” he said. And he put out his hand as if to embrace her.

  She shoved him away. “At the Last Judgment! On the world’s last day. Is that what you mean? When I wake from this dream called life?”

  “When you wake from the sin called death.”

  “But that is not good enough! Even if this is a nightmare, why does a God who calls himself good allow it? Why do children die? Why do the innocent suffer? Why does anyone die? Why can’t God fix it?”

  “It is done. It is fixed. He makes all things new.”

  “No! My little girl is in the morgue! All her hair fell out! Her father does not even know yet! All this suffering! The pain she went through—and I could do nothing!”

  “Except fast, pray, and give alms.”

  “My prayers were not answered! It is too late now! You cannot make the pain Ginny suffered into something that never happened! Not even God can do that! Oh, she was so brave! That was almost worse than when she sat and demanded to know why it was happening to her, and wondered if it was her fault. You are such a damnable liar! All of you! Why do you want kids to believe in Santa Claus?”

  “Let them believe what is so because it is so. Saint Nicholas is real; I am he.”

  “That is not what I meant!”

  “Let the children practice their belief in a generous and jovial saint, if their minds are to be trained to the greater belief in a more generous and more joyful sovereign, one whose generosity and joy cannot be believed or measured. There are no words of men to encompass the joys.”

  “Why is there pain in the world? If I could bring God here, and find a judge to judge between us, and force him to answer–then I could punish him for all this pain!”

  He raised his hand. “Touch the hem of my robe. Come, and see.”

  And then they were standing upon a gray desert where never water had been, and the sky above was black as pitch, and the sun an intolerable shriek of light. Craters, as if all the guns of all the wars of man had torn this land into something like leprosy, there were craters, small and large, reaching all the way to the horizon, which was unexpectedly close.

  In the sky was a blue crescent.

  “This is the Earth’s moon.” He pointed. In the middle distance was a tower. It had five-sides and rose to sharp point, and a row of small round windows ran down its length. “That tower was not built by Man, but by those who dwelled here in eons past. No astronaut of Earth, no astronomer, has yet seen this tower. Do you know who built it and why?”

  She said, “How could I know that?”

  The sky changed. Now they fell through endless space, and before them like a plate of jewels was a galaxy, seen face-on, its mighty spiral arms of light stretching out through the universe. To one side was another galaxy, on edge, and beyond it a third, but this third galaxy was irregular, and streams of stars, thin and wandering like vapors of mist, reached from one to the next.

  He said, “Here are three galaxies, each one ten times the size of your Milky Way or more, that recently collided. Countless solar systems, each one containing one or two or five stars, most stars much larger than your own, and each solar system holding scores of habitable planets, or hundreds, was thrown into confusion for millions of your years as all the stars were disturbed in their orbits around their galactic cores. It is a vast and mighty disaster beyond any reckoning of any natural disaster, whirlwind or flood or hurricane your little world could ever know. Why was this permitted to happen?”

  Before she could answer, the scene again changed, and now she saw the galaxies as small as tiny stars, gathered into crowds and swarms, and these swarms formed bands of bright cloud outstretching far to her left and right.

  “Those three galaxies are part of an Abel cluster that makes up a macroscopic structure called the Great Wall. This wall is a collection of superclusters extending for one-twentieth part of the length of the entire observable universe. It is a billion light years from Earth, and over a billion light years long. Why was it made? What purpose does it serve?”

  Virginia said in a frightened voice, “No human being could know such a thing. It’s impossible to know.”

  Suddenly they were standing in midair a mile above the sea. Storm clouds were gathered, and rain lashed the waves. The sun was low against the horizon, but whether it was the dawn or dusk she did not know. Below them was a fleet of sailing ships with slanted sails. A great whirlpool of froth reached from one horizon to the other. The waves were taller than mountains, thousands of feet of water rearing up, and as the great waves strode across the sea, the ships of the fleet were flung up and thrown down, and many were capsized. A bulk as large as a continent rose up from the deep, and torrents sluiced from its horns and bony back. Seaweed and coral bed grew in the silt collected between the plates of its shell. The whole body beneath the shell was so large that all the ships were taken up upon it, and grounded and wrecked. As its limbs writhed, hills and mountains formed in the flesh, and rivers greater than the Mississippi were gathered in the crevasses of its wrinkles. In the far distance, above the storm clouds, there was a yellow orb like a full moon rising, but there was also a second next to it, equal in size to the first. In the flash of lighting created by the atmospheric friction of its neck, Virginia saw that these two moons were eyes within a vast reptilian face which bulked too large for her vision to hold.

  It opened its mouth, and there was a hurricane of cloud between the upper and the nether jaws; and there was a thing like a sun in its throat and lights like the lights of lamps, and sparks of fire, issuing from its jaws and nostrils.

  “Behold the one creature of all created things which fears no other created thing. Upon the Earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. He beholds all things with a firm and unshaken heart. He is the king of all the children of pride. Can you put a hook through his nose, and draw him up to the surface? Can you play with him as with a songbird? Do you know who can?”

  Virginian felt her sanity about to melt, and she put her fist in her mouth and bit her knuckle so that she would not scream and attract the gargantu
an monster’s attention to her.

  Saint Nicholas smiled and said, “Fear not. This is a shadow of things to come. In your day, not even the deepest submarine vessels have not discovered him. He cannot survive in the lesser pressures above the ocean’s deepest abyss. There hath he has lain for ages, and he will lie, battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep, until the latter fire shall heat the deep; then once by men and angels to be seen. In roaring he shall rise—and on the surface shall he die.”

  The vastness threw back its hideous head, and as it roared the sun in its throat erupted into a nova and spread across the sky.

  Then they were standing on the rocks and sand of a hilltop in the blazing heat of the tropical day. Below them were the brown squares of houses made of brick and clay of a walled city, from which a great smell of offal and sewerage rose. From every house and tower smoke trickled up, but from small holes or tents on the flat roofs, not from chimneys.

  Virginia, her ears still ringing from the roar of the dying sea monster, thought she was deaf at first. But no, then came the sounds of a celebration. She heard cheers and shouts, like a crowd gathered for a football game.

  Up the hill into view came a group moving slowly. In the front marched bored soldiers in bright helmets and leather coats, carrying octagonal shields and vicious-looking spears that were a yard of iron topping a yard of wood. Behind, garbed in rags or tunics or long, shapeless garments, came the jubilant crowd.

  “What are they celebrating?” She took a deep breath, and smelled the smell of blood. “What is this place?”

  “These are shadows of things past. This is the Place of the Skull. Golgotha. Not far from here, on that peak yonder, Abraham was told to sacrifice his only true born son Isaac, where the archangel Tzadkiel stopped his hand.”

  A man came into view with a heavy beam of wood across his shoulders, bent almost in two by the load. The man had been in some sort of accident, because his flesh was torn and dripping with many long parallel wounds scraping across his bruised and bleeding back, his chest and torso, his arms and legs. He should have been on a stretcher, being rushed by ambulance to an emergency room. His face was a swollen mass of bruises and cuts, so that his face seemed hardly human. A second man was helping him carry the heavy wooden bar. When the wounded man stumbled and fell, the crowd cheered again, whooping, and children threw stones or donkey turds, of which there were many along the road. A young woman pressed forward, and wiped the man’s face with a cloth, and helped him to his feet, before one of the bored soldiers, without looking up, struck her in the head with the butt of his spear, felling her.

  Then a voice called out in fear. The crowd stopped laughing and calling. A woman no longer young in a plain white homespun robe stood on the rocky path, waiting for the crowd to approach. Those in the front of the crowd, as if they knew her, slowed and stopped, and the whole mob hesitated.

  Even the soldiers stopped. The old woman stepped forward and put her face to the face of the condemned man. What she said, or what he said back, of even if they spoke at all, Virginia could not hear.

  Virginia said, “Who is that woman?”

  Saint Nicholas said, “Weep for her, Virginia, for she shares your pain. She too is losing a child. She is the mother of that condemned man.”

  “And who is he?”

  “He is the one you wanted to see punished. That bar across his shoulders is the cross bar of his death. From it, he will hang naked on a tree for three hours and more, his arms and legs pierced through with spikes, and each breath will be agony. Why do you turn your eyes away? This is he whom you blame. This is he with whom you are wroth. You wanted a judge between him and you to make your accusations. But the judge in this case has washed his hands, and the Son of Man will make no answer to your accusation. Watch! He goes mildly to his death.”

  “What has he done?”

  “He has done no wrong.”

  “Why are they mocking him? His mother is right there! Why? Why so much suffering?”

  “Because he puts fear into the fearless monster's heart. The monster is no beast, but an angel of the highest order, the brightest before he fell. He has no name in heaven, but here he is very great, and this is the day of victory over him. That is the man who defeats him. Behold him.”

  The beaten man fell for the third time. A low mutter of laughter started at one side of the mob and rippled to the other, as if a joke or witticism was being repeated. The mob crowded forward now, and the old woman was lost to view, hidden in the shouting multitude.

  Virginia could not stand the sight or the smells. She closed her eyes. “Spirit, or Saint, or Santa, or whatever you are. Take me home. I can see no more.”

  Then it was cold. Her feet were on a hard floor. She could tell from the echoes of her breathing that she was in a close, windowless room. The smell of disinfectants and death was in her nose. She knew before opening her eyes where she was.

  Virginia looked. she was in the morgue. Beneath a low ceiling, lit only with a few dim and dusty neon tubes, was row upon row of metal plates set in the concrete wall. These were drawers.

  One was open. The sheet had been turned down. There Ginny lay. She looked asleep. That was the cruelest thing about it. She just looked like she was sleeping.

  Nicholas was still there. “Have you any more to say?”

  She shook her head. “I have questions, but not–I am not angry. But I do not understand why all this happened to me. Or to him. Why was it needed?”

  “The enemy is terrible and there is no other way to defeat him. Man is lost, and there is no other path back to paradise.”

  “Why did my daughter suffer?”

  “For you. Out of love for you.”

  “What? What does that mean?”

  Nicholas said, “I am come in answer to her prayers, and with the news that she is granted more than she asked. She wanted to see me, Saint Nicholas. Instead, she now, right now, is in the presence of all the saints, myself and many of greater stature, and she is with the blessed Mother, and she is holding Our Lord as an infant in her arms, as she—and many others—always secretly wish to do. There is no sun and no moon in the place where she now dances, but the light of the perfect source of all being, the perfect love that is beyond words. That joy enters her soul now, so that when she returns to this valley of mourning and weeping, to suffer many more pains and sorrows, when she is old and gray, and war and famine come, and she suffers losses, one upon another, she will endure them because she has seen the light. The true and perfect light. She will forget all but the very smallest sliver of all she now in fullness sees when she wakes, but that remembered sliver will be enough to sustain her in the dark years ahead.”

  “And my prayers? Why where they not answered before all of my pain?”

  “Because you receive more than you think to ask.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “To a woman of faith, a saint can answer any question without answering, because she trusts in the Lord. To a woman of no faith, no answer is an answer, since it merely leads to more doubt, more perplexity, more desire to cross examine God. You cannot cross-examine Him. You are at the bar, not He. Why do you scoff at Santa Claus? Here am I—I stand before you, Nicholas of Myra, a saint of the Lord and His humble servant. Yet you call me a lie. Why?”

  “Because you are not real.”

  “No, woman. Because you are not real. You cannot pretend, even in play, to believe in a sweet dream like Santa Claus, who brings sweets to children, because you do not believe in the sober truth in Saint Nicholas, or in the Lord I serve, who brings you the bread of heaven and the precious blood, that you may have sweet life, and life more abundantly.”

  “It was Frank’s idea to tell Ginny that Santa was real.”

  “And it was the idea of Francis, when you were married, that the two of you should be of one faith. Yet where is your faith? You see me and still you do not believe. So how can you ask why we do not show ourselves to men to see? Those who know the saints do
not need to see us to see our actions in their lives. I am come because of the faith and prayers of Francis.”

  “My husband? He does not even know Ginny fell sick. I have not spoken to him for a year. Since last Christmas! What did he pray for?”

  “He prayed for Ginny. And for you. Virginia, do you know why Abim, Antonius, and Alimus died?”

  “Who? Oh, the children in the pickle barrel. No, why did they die?”

  “To save the innkeeper, their murderer. I told you of his fate. He was immersed in the water that drowns earthly life. The children died to save him. Your daughter died to save you. Now you shall live again, and so shall she.”

  Nicholas turned away, and bent over Ginny. He took a small pot of oil from beneath his robe and anointed her, saying, “Through this holy unction and His own most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed by sight, by hearing, smell, taste, touch, walking…”

  Music came into the room. Virginia jumped, she was so startled. Then she recognized it as the special ringtone set aside for only one number.

  It was Frank.

  Virginia held the phone to her ear with trembling hands. His voice was small and tinny and wonderful. “Honey! Great news. I’ll be home tomorrow. Or, actually, later today. I’ll be in time to see the tree. Don’t start unwrapping presents without me.”

  She took a deep breath. Ginny had not opened her eyes. She lay there, still and silent. Could she be sure of a miracle, now? “That's wonderful, Frank! I have good news too, Honey. Ginny was sick, very sick, but she’s better now. She’s all better. This is the best Christmas ever.”

  Saint Nicholas raised his arms, placing one hand on Virginia's head, and the other on the head of the motionless girl lying on the shelf with her eyes closed. Nicholas said softly, “Let not this cold place of death be what this child's eye first sees when she wakes, O Lord.”