Illuminated

On Holy Saturday, the monk had a tradition he had cultivated for himself over the years.

He was one of the monks who labored illuminating the Bible, a painstaking task very few would ever see, and yet he had always considered it a special privilege. 

On Holy Saturday each year he always set the day aside to contemplate Christ in the tomb. The point of all these illuminations was to glorify the faith in all its visual splendor, and yet he gave himself the challenge, each year, to imagine the darkest moment of the faith, when all seemed to have been lost.

He was aware of how the world saw the faith, in his time.

Most of Europe had been won to the faith at this point. The fall of the Roman Empire had brought about a seismic shift in the balance of power, away from its centralized nature, previously, and into the regional hands that had labored to cultivate themselves over the centuries, which in recent years had encountered a menace worse than anything they had confronted before, a horde that sought to sweep over their lands, assimilate them into a different faith, a different culture entirely. Many strongholds had resulted, many vanguards, and perhaps a few of them had perverted their roles. The Church, too. Perhaps.

He didn’t care. His faith was strong. There were always challenges. His faith told him the truths of civilization would endure. There were among his number those whose sole task was to copy the treasures passed down from previous generations, well beyond the scope of the core interests of the Church, what in other hands would be hailed as rediscovered, as if they had been lost. He knew the Church was considered oppressive. He knew there were those who agitated for autonomy, who wanted to break its power up into regional interests. Given all the forces at work it was inevitable.

He knew much of the Church was being condemned. He also knew he had one job, and that was to paint the Bible, not in works of art that would be collected and displayed in the homes of rich men, but would be sealed forever in pages that hid them away. 

That was his faith as he understood it.

On this Holy Saturday, he tried to relax. His faith was strong. He spent most of the day in quiet contemplation, his brushes set aside, his inks in their pots. 

When evening drew, he selected black. Red was the color most often used, in this work. He sketched, at first, his Christ in the tomb, hidden beneath a shroud, in the darkness. Then he focused on the outline, the highlights in the dark, a suggestion of an angel, seated patiently, and in the far corner…a finger, the hand of the Father, reaching out. 

His faith told him, Christ truly rested, was truly dead, had not yet descended to the pit, was nowhere but in this body, the portrait of defeat. 

He had always treasured this day for precisely that reason. The believers had often, from the very beginning, been defined by defeat. They had persisted in their belief anyway. They had seen that there was always a way forward, a belief not so much in another world where they needn’t fear their fellow man so much, but in this world, itself, the ability to push past difficulties, if not to solve them but to move past them, to keep going, to endure. No matter where it led. Even unto death. To believe all men might rise above themselves. As Christ had demonstrated even on the cross.

The scripture he embellished had very little to say about what Christ experienced after his death. It was a record of man’s experiences, and no one had witnessed Christ in the tomb. They had placed a body there, and then they had sealed it away. The next day it would be opened and the scriptures had plenty to say about that, who had witnessed the risen Christ. In the tomb, in the darkness, however, all was silent.

That was why the monk gave him company. His faith told him no one was alone.

Star Trek: The Emissary’s Return…

 Many years later…

Kasidy sat in her cabin, alone, feeling her bones, feeling alone, feeling…lost. Something told her to go digging in her closet.

She’d moved into the old cabin recently. It’d sat at the edge of the property where she had built their home, in Kendra Province, when she had still hoped for his return, when she would take Jake’s daily transmissions in the spirit in which they were intended. 

There had always been…something that drew her to it. Certainly not the state in which she’d found it. Abandoned even before the Occupation, by the look of it. Ancient. Waiting to collapse. Like she was, when she finally moved in.

Rubbish, refuse, decay…Yet she found herself…digging. Someone had told her something of the history, in town, how there had been a vedek retreat here, long ago. 

There were…crawling insects. She slipped on a pair of gloves, reminded herself that she used to be captain of a cargo ship, long before she ever met him, before she had adjusted to…

Near the bottom of all the detritus, there was a scroll. In the old days on Earth, there was something called the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hers was sheltered in much the same way, preserved, lost to time. Waiting to be found.

She’d taught herself how to read such things. Of course she had. She’d married the Emissary.

Yet she still couldn’t…

The Emissary had returned. In the distance past…When the Prophets had first spoken to the Bajoran people. The forgotten origins…Her Benjamin. 

He’d known, somehow, all along. He’d known she would find out. He’d known she would find him. Again. 

She felt her heartbeat.

She could…feel his presence. If she just turned around…But she couldn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to. 

She held the scroll to her chest. She could feel his heartbeat, too. 

The Last Judgment…

In her final moments Jisoo labored just to breathe, forgetting all else, a lifetime, and then…

There she was. 

There were no longer doubts in her head. She knew everything that there was to know. She knew where she was. She was in purgatory.

She was remote from him. Remote from God. That was how she knew. But she could still feel his presence. Here, there was the Holy Spirit. Here, she was aware for the first time, the Holy Spirit had always been somewhere close by…Elusive, but there.

And it was Judgment Day. It was always judgment day, on the day someone died. Everyone skipped immediately to the end…

Christ was the aspect that understood time, that experienced its passage, although God otherwise saw all of it, all at once…Christ was presiding. She saw him, in judgment. An inversion of how his life had ended. 

She did not feel judged. She didn’t feel pure, either…She’d known, in her life, but had always been able to find…excuses. To believe she was, ah, good enough…

The judgment had been rendered. There had been two judgments, under Christ, one upon his death, and the other, at the end. 

In life she had always feared this. In life she had been led to believe in fire. But she found that she was cold. And those…elsewhere, surely colder still…Remote, removed. Knowing what they had turned against, no longer able to deny it. Run fresh out of excuses. 

Judgment, not condemnation. What had been earned freely. The judge, Christ, the human aspect…sad. Disappointed. The only real judgment.

She waited. She didn’t know how long it would be…

But she supposed it didn’t matter anymore.

Star Trek: Ballad of Dartog

Worf stayed awake late into the night watching over the body of Jadzia…It had been many days since he had slept. Sisko, Bashir, O’Brien…they’d all tried convincing him to rest, even Martok. He couldn’t. And he did not know how to explain it to them, not anymore. Their patience had ran out. His had not.

The silence, though, had become oppressive. Jadzia had never…allowed space to be filled with so much of it. In that moment that was what he missed most. He needed to hear…

He requested the computer play the Ballad of Dartog. Since he was a boy he had always found comfort in it, a connection to his lineage that often proved…elusive. Dartog was a warrior of the generation after Kahless, whom many Klingons honored with establishing the foundation of the new way Kahless had introduced into their society. Kahless had been unforgettable…Dartog hadn’t had such luxury. In fact his role had been thankless, and for three generations he had been forgotten. 

A playwright brought him back into polite society, and then the opera had been composed, and from it, the Ballad. 

Worf found the idea of Dartog’s rediscovery…comforting. Perhaps a part of him yearned to be found by his own people…But that had never happened. He joined Starfleet, and his debut in Klingon society was…complicated. He met his brother, he fought for the honor of his late father. And he met his son.

Listening to the Ballad now…Worf realized he’d heard that voice before. It was Alexander’s. He’d had no idea. Their relationship had been repaired, but they had never again lived as father and son. He still missed…much of his son’s life, it seemed.

It was a good voice. He opened a communications link, and found Alexander…busy. So he left a message. He talked about the Ballad, he talked about Jadzia, he talked about the war…Alexander’s service had become…acceptable. He didn’t mention how he appreciated his son’s talent. He thought it was implied.

When he brought it up with Martok, it was only in recommending the recording. Martok recognized Alexander immediately. Worf ground his teeth. Of course he had known…

After this war, he knew now the path his son would follow. He felt…pride.

Star Trek - The Human Adventure

In a quiet corner of a salon there was a little girl.

This was not just another girl and this wasn’t just any salon. The salon was in the city of Kambata, in the planet the Federation called Delta IV. The little girl was called Ilia, after her mother.

Ilia had been born before her mother reported for duty aboard the Enterprise. She was a product of her mother’s affair with the human, Will Decker.

Deltan society had room for Ilia, had a place for her when her mother went away, but it didn’t account for her mother never returning, or never meeting her father. She was lonely, all the same. Among Deltans, their peculiar pheromones work differently. In their society, they had mastered themselves. With the child, it was a little different. She found it difficult to process her impulses. When she was in public, she was at the salon, where she could study her people at their most uninhibited.

And they were her people. She was never made to feel any differently. She felt isolated, all the same. When she was told what had happened, it hardly made things easier. She was young, but not too young to know the yearning she had felt when her mother told her she would return.

It was a blessing, then, when she closed her eyes for a nap, one day, and saw her father.

“Hello,” Will Decker said.

“Hello!” Ilia replied.

“Sorry to drop in on you like this,” Will Decker said.

“That’s okay,” Ilia said, in her sleep.

“I really didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” Will Decker said. “Not your birth! That’s not what I mean. Ilia didn’t tell me..I don’t mean to make excuses. I had placed my career first. Always so ambitious…That’s what brought me here in the first place, the ‘impossible assignment,’ they all said. No one could have the discipline. Well, I did. Mostly. Until I met your mother. And then I was given command of the Enterprise. It was a big assignment! They wanted the ship totally overhauled. It was practically a new ship, by the time the work was done. Some of the crew from its prior mission was retained, some had moved on. I asked for your mother. I needed her by my side. I didn’t know how selfish that would…Listen, something happened. You were told, but no one could really explain. That would’ve been, well, impossible.

“I will try my best. Your mother was killed by a machine. This machine was going to, it was going to destroy everything. It was headed toward my home planet, Earth. You have family, there, too. Someday you’ll meet them, I’m sure. The machine was something Earth had sent into space long ago, before humans had begun living amongst the stars, before we had visited other worlds, before we’d met any of their inhabitants. Before we knew Delta IV existed. Before we knew your mother’s people. The machine encountered a problem we couldn’t have anticipated, or hadn’t accounted for. It became confused, in its programming. It went in search of its creator. But it had forgotten what it was. 

“It absorbed your mother, really. It transformed her into a kind of emissary, a representative, and it…had all of your mother’s memories, but it didn’t understand them any better than it knew itself. I knew her, though. I chose to accept what had happened, and to bring those memories back…

“I stepped away from things. I don’t really know how to explain what happened, better than that. I was absorbed, too. It was the only way to explain to the machine what its creator was. This time, the machine didn’t destroy, though. I remained in control of myself. 

“And a very curious thing happened. This was the moment I learned of your existence. Your mother hadn’t told me, but the machine knew, and didn’t know that I didn’t. It was just information. It devastated me. I fell in love with you instantly. I was able to see everything, the moment of your conception, your mother’s pregnancy, your birth, the whole of your life that she witnessed…That was how I met you. I just couldn’t be part of your life. This is what I tried to explain to the machine. Your mother, the version that existed, the memory, the echo, she became herself, again, when she saw you, too, for the first time, all over again, and that was what convinced the machine…

“I’m sorry, this is a lot. You’re not going to remember…Anyway, I think we taught the machine…love. And that’s what I want you to feel, now…I hope you can. I can’t cross back over…I realized, later, that I died, too…I love you so much. I’m sorry for everything. I should’ve been there. I should be there now. We should both be. The machine learned something about selfish impulses. I did, too. Too late. Or maybe not.”

Ilia woke, and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. It was exactly the kind of dream that lingers. She woke happy. She thought about talking about it, but decided to keep it to herself. 

She murmured, “I love you, too,” and then went to explore other corners of the salon.

Night of the Jergen

It was past midnight, but that hardly mattered…

In the wastelands, where only the jergen thrived, had learned how to survive, where even the Tuska had never penetrated, the man who called himself Polycarp, although that wasn’t his name, waited.

Jergen were the fiercest predator. The Tuska sometimes told themselves the Danab had adapted so as to challenge them. This was folly. The Danab were Danab before they had ever called themselves by that name. Danab were tall by any standard, but even they looked up when a jergen emerged. The Danab had come before anyone knew dinosaurs had once roamed the planet Earth; this was a different world, a savage world, where their prehistoric creatures hadn’t died away. They had instead given way to the strongest, the largest, the fiercest…the jergen. Who stalked in the wastelands throughout the millennia. No one knew how they endured. Nothing else grew there. Except the jergen.

Polycarp was armed with a single axe. He brought no provisions with him, no shelter, no armor, not even his helmet. He stood truly exposed. He had been in the wastelands for a week. He was at the limit of his endurance. He had begun to hallucinate. As such, when the jergen first reared its head, Polycarp at first thought he had conjured it. At last. He had been relieved.

Then, even he began to panic.

The jergen advanced, slowly, as if dismissing Polycarp. Polycarp knelt in prayer, placing his axe down, voluntarily relinquishing its safety. The jergen sniffed and then snorted, scratching its paw in the sands. A cloud bellowed, engulfing Polycarp, who didn’t stir. 

Then the jergen roared, and Polycarp’s hand reached for the axe.

He swung upward, faster than the jergen could react, slicing into its thick hide, and the jergen didn’t even notice. He swung again and connected again, and the jergen snorted.

It was a cold night. The wastelands were unforgiving. The jergen charged, the very short distance punishing Polycarp his impudence, knocking him over. He held onto the axe. He swung again, across the jergen’s flank, and there he drew first blood.

The jergen paused. Polycarp knelt again. The jergen began to pace.

Then Polycarp threw the axe aside, and leaped on the jergen’s back. He laced his arms around the jergen’s throat, and began to tighten his grip.

The jergen thrashed. Polycarp, weakened by his ordeal, knew even in peak shape he should not have been able to hold on. He did anyway. The jergen bucked, and Polycarp held. He wiped all thought away. Long ago, a lifetime ago, when he was young, his father had told him about the jergen, how in the old days, the Danab had held them as pets. Long ago. Ancient history. The long wars with the Tuska had changed all that. It became tradition to hunt the jergen, instead. To try and prove something.

Polycarp’s reasons were his own. No one knew why he was out here. No one knew he was even here. He could die, and no one would know. 

The jergen slammed its own body into the sands. Polycarp held. Then it was his advantage indeed, since a jergen cannot easily right itself. It had in a sense already conceded defeat. Polycarp did not allow himself to believe it.

Through the jergen’s thick hide, he could feel nothing. The jergen betrayed nothing. Polycarp lost all track of time. He tried to read the stars. He couldn’t feel his fingers anymore. Still, he held.

He became aware that the jergen was no longer struggling. He held still. He held until it was daylight, and then for a little while longer. Then he let go. He couldn’t feel his arms anymore. He circled around the jergen, until he could look it in the eye, and then he knew. He picked up the axe again, and knelt. When he was ready, he swung the axe one more time, severing the jergen’s head, slung it over his shoulder, and began the journey…home.

The Boy Who Grew Up

Marty Sale found himself daydreaming in the middle of a haircut…

He was retired, by then, not from cutting hair, but from his optometrist office, the one he’d had in the city. He wasn’t there, now, in the city, or even in the suburbs, but in the very outskirts, way back in small town life, what he thought he’d escaped long ago. But this was the Midwest. No one ever escaped. You just kind of forgot it for a while.

Marty never forgot the boy. That would’ve been impossible. His folks brought him out to the city all in a panic. The boy had just started school and the teacher was already complaining, saying he was a constant disruption…Not because he was unruly (he surely was nothing like the president’s…son, who certainly didn’t attend a public school, but who, like his father, was…inescapable; Marty’s firsthand experience was because they condescended to using his office, too), which was obvious enough, just from how patiently he sat in the waiting room, how he didn’t even fidget in the chair, how when they brought him back with his new glasses he actually apologized…

No, the boy hadn’t needed glasses, and truth was…Marty never did figure out what was wrong, and in truth stopped worrying about it before too long, but he also couldn’t help but notice…the boy never stopped wearing the glasses. Marty never asked. Would never even had crossed his mind…

He watched the boy grow. When he showed up in the city, as a man, Marty found his name in the bylines of newspaper articles. Otherwise he never saw him. No one did, probably. There was plenty to keep everyone busy, though. 

Marty’s specialty had always been eyes. He never forgot them. He wondered…

What else had that boy experienced? He imagined that even then, the boy could fly. When had it all emerged? Probably he’d always had those gifts. His parents had never let him feel less than…loved. Rare enough. Certainly the president’s son…Too many others. What Marty saw was exactly what he’d always seen in the boy. Being…decent. 

He’d simply grown up. Maybe even as a boy…Some of us, Marty thought, are born grown. That boy was surely one of them. It just took a while for everyone else to notice. Or, maybe, stop noticing. Just started taking him for granted, even with…That paper he wrote for, sometimes about his own…It was just about selling copies. Almost turned into a tabloid, with all those pictures…The editorials, bought by the former president, penned by that son of his…It didn’t matter. Truth and justice, however elusive, and whatever the American way was supposed to be, now…

Marty shivered. The barber asked if he was okay. Marty didn’t know how to reply.

And at that moment, the boy who’d grown up, flew past.

Must There Be a Santa?

There comes a time when…you don’t believe.

It happens to everyone. For some it’s at the very beginning. They never even get the chance; someone made the decision for them. For most it’s later. They think they grow too old, too smart, or simply outgrow the idea.

And I’m not talking about Santa.

So what’s the need for Santa?

Marty was at that point. Santa was presents, of course, he was the very symbol of the holiday, he was the jolly fat man with the reindeer and the impossible task of visiting…everyone, on a single night. But never caught in the act. That was one of the central tenets. If you saw him it was your dad, your mom. Or some guy at the mall, ringing a bell. The real Santa?

That was an act of belief. That was how Marty understood it. Until he didn’t. He started making his own lists, the way these things go, and gradually realized the gifts he found under the tree…didn’t match. So it was your basic disappointment.

This year was going to be different. He’d been obsessing about it all year. It was the running dialogue in his head, the thing he told no one about. Santa wasn’t something you talked about with friends anyway. He wasn’t even something you talked about with mom and dad, not after those first few years, anyway.

No, he was a private matter, something you thought about late at night. Well, if you were Marty, anyway.

For Marty it was a kind of torture. He didn’t need Santa to know there would be presents under the tree. He needed Santa for…What? That was the crucial question.

He was old enough to know what Christmas was all about. He’d seen a few versions of the Dickens story at this point. Good will toward men. Whatever that meant. Being…happy.

But Marty wasn’t happy. He needed to figure out Santa.

If you take away the proposition that Santa exists to deliver presents, what does that leave? Must there be a Santa?

His dad must’ve heard him stirring, because he stuck his head in Marty’s room. Marty pretended to be asleep, but his dad knew.

“Hey, kid,” his dad said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worried,” Marty said.

“Oh, I’m not talking about gifts,” his dad said.

“I know,” Marty said.

“So what it?” his dad said.

“I don’t understand Santa Claus,” Marty said. “What’s the point?”

“Well, you know the story,” his dad said. “Saint Nick.”

“Yeah,” Marty said.

“Then you know what Santa is about,” his dad said.

“Well, no,” Marty said.

“Okay,” his dad said. “Not so easy. Okay. Let’s see. You want to know why bother with him. Why you ever needed to believe. Well. That’s…that’s a big one. Sure you don’t want to sleep on it?”

“Sure,” Marty said.

“Sure you don’t want Mom to handle this one?” his dad said.

“If she needs to,” Marty said.

“No!” his dad said. “I mean, it’s okay! I can handle this…He’s kind of the spirit…You know what that is, right?”

“Yeah,” Marty said.

“He’s the spirit of the thing,” his dad said. “Not like…a mascot. Angel. He’s like an angel. Hark! And all that…Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Maybe?” Marty said.

“Saint Nick,” his dad said, “And then…Well, Christmas as we know it is kind of…a pretty recent invention, really. We imagine Santa to be very old, but in…ah…relative terms? He’s actually quite young. But that would be…weird. A young Santa would be weird, but kind of cool, if you thought about it…No, he looks the way we imagine him to look. He’s not an idea…Don’t get me wrong.”

“He could be an idea,” Marty said.

“Sure,” his dad said, “but he’s not. Some ideas are too real to be imaginary. You know what? Never mind, that’s…a little much. What I mean is, he’s the version of the story that makes the most sense to us, so that’s…that’s why he exists. Maybe in another hundred, two hundred years there’ll be a different need, and…Santa will get to relax…Now? He makes his visits…to bless us. You know, like the Ghost of Christmas Present. That’s…ah, the real gift. Not what’s under the tree. Do you understand?”

“I guess,” Marty said.

“Listen,” his dad says, “give me a hug.”

“Sure,” Marty said.

It took him forever to fall asleep. But he wasn’t anxious. He thought maybe he really had understood. 

Voice of God...

In the beginning...

She didn't speak of it.  She never spoke of it.  She couldn't...

The day that changed everything, that changed humanity forever, right from the beginning, when Eve spoke with the serpent, who convinced her to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she was shown...everything.

She felt instant shame.  That was what God had wanted her, and Adam, and humanity, to avoid.  To remain eternally...innocent.  Innocent wasn't the same as pure.  Innocent meant to be free of the burden.  The serpent had attempted to be cunning, to convince her that God had meant to coddle them, to keep them docile.  But Eve had lived in Eden.  She had seen everything there was to see.  She simply hadn't understood...

He had shown her everything.  In fact, in his pride he really had...and it had nearly overwhelmed her.  He had shown her everything possible.  He had shown her...everything.  What had so blinded the serpent was that it had seen everything, too, and it hadn't understood.  It had blinded itself, perhaps, or perhaps it had been incapable of such comprehension, such things.  She had, though.  Oh.  

She had been second.  For a very brief moment, Adam had been alone, and then God had decided there should be more, that Adam needed a companion, and so he had drawn Eve from out of him, and...Without the serpent, perhaps, even then, humanity would have run its course.  The serpent showed Eve such a potential, and perhaps, in all the possibilities, it had shown her lies, because, of course, all possibilities are lies, and the serpent didn't know that, had believed its imagination spoke truth, and that was a kind of truth, if it had imagined with wisdom, so of course it had not.  Only what happened was true, and only one course was true, and in its folly, the serpent had shown Eve not only possibilities, but the future, the one true course, and it had shown her...

A manger, and a man and a woman, somewhere down the course of history, what, in the beginning, would have seemed magic, impossible, what to God was simply another quirk of existence, what to the serpent was folly, and to Eve, capable of being grasped, at least for a moment, a fleeting glimpse, and a baby...

What child was this?  

Later, Eve very much wanted to explain all of this to Adam.  Surely not in the moment, not when Adam felt shame, not when God spoke to them, banished them from the garden, when they had lost all their innocence...

And what was that?  What was this thing they now had to fill their days attempting to contend with, to understand?  

The knowledge that they had to worry about consequences...That they could choose to ignore them, to be crippled by them, or to use them as guideposts...And who was that child?  God, as Adam never failed to remind them, was no longer a step away.  He was an eternity.  They were cut off forever.  Or, perhaps, not.  Eve, in the very back of her mind, saw the thread.  She saw her children, she saw the murder, she saw the communities of mankind, she saw the struggles forward, the denials, the betrayals, the...hope.  Not for what they would someday have again, if they were good.  What they might have, if they chose to do good, what it might mean in their everyday life.  

It wouldn't be easy.  They would certainly need guideposts.  In her moment of weakness, Eve had already proven that.  Too easy to be led astray.  But her moment of weakness had shown her, as would always be true, what strength could look like.  

The child she saw was God, and the clarity that what they'd lost...They could reclaim.  Not like before.  They would have to rely on...faith.  Not faith to make their lives better, as if through magic.  Faith, so that they could navigate the guideposts, make the right choices.  Had she made the wrong one?  God had already seen it.  He had seen everything.  The child had already been born, since He was God, and even before His birth had been in existence...And Eve had seen that, too.  She had seen Evil, and she had, surely, seen Good...Evil, the chance to use her thoughts for selfish reasons, Good the chance to...

In the days after the expulsion, she kept all these things to herself.  Adam forgave her, and they made a family, and in the years that followed, when they had understood death, she wondered about...pride.  If she would be...remembered.  If she would be condemned, if she would be understood...

She supposed it didn't matter.  She had glimpsed a new beginning, somewhere very close to the beginning, and also very much in the middle of a drop in the vast expanse of eternity...A light in the darkness.

The Colorado Kid’s Haven

“Cos not.”

Of course not.

Most of the other times Marty spoke he would’ve elaborated in his calm, almost academic manner, at length, and that would’ve been that, but on this occasion…he just didn’t have the patience to get into it. There was just too much, and it wouldn’t have been near as simple as when he’d explained why he no longer shot squirrels (surely his best, simplest story), and…this one was really for him, and that was kind of the point.

He was a widow, now, and these things were important. The years weren’t advancing anymore, they were in retreat. Some things you kept to yourself. When you’re very young, nothing’s yours. Then you get a few years, and you almost live for the idea. Put a decade or two under your belt and most people forget…But you remember, late.

And so he remembered, for himself.

A great many years ago when he’d been one of those kids, when his folks had taken him on a vacation somewhere off the coast, on an island, where a lot of Mainers thought the real life of the state existed, and most vacationers, at that, he’d made a friend. 

A somewhat long story short, later he discovered his friend, who had also been on vacation, but from way out in Colorado, had had a son, who was very happy with his life, except his dad had died, a phone call happened, and that’d changed everything.

This man sounded nervous. They didn’t know each other, the man had never heard his dad talking about Marty, had only discovered his existence in an old scrapbook, which featured a picture of the two, Marty’s name, and the name of the island that had improbably introduced them. The man had done some digging, and while Marty himself and few enough of his acquaintances thought of him in relation to a job, that’s how the man found him. And arranged to meet, on that island. Or near-abouts.

He had clearly been nervous. He’d never done anything like this before. He had a wife and a newborn son…But he didn’t talk much about them. He just wanted to reconnect with his dad…or the closest he could. Which would be Marty.

Marty arranged everything. The man showed up hungry, practically twitching. As it happened Marty had a friend who lived on the island, who agreed to let them stay at his home (this was decades before anyone had thought of airbnbs, mind you), and that’s where Marty prepared the steak, but the man, being so nervous, had insisted on eating at a diner, and so the steaks cooled in a refrigerator, and Marty and the man had fish and chips. 

The man showed Marty a pack of cigarettes he thought Marty might enjoy, but Marty hadn’t smoked in decades. Played around with one to be polite, set it aside when it only made things more awkward. The man showed Marty a coin that had belonged to his dad, just some silly knickknack…

And it ended badly. They moved things to the house, and the man, late at night, went trudging through its dark interior, and Marty listened as first the fridge door opened and then the front door…

And then later, when he was back home, in that lonely place where his kids were all grown and his wife’s side of the bed was cool…he learned that the man had choked to death.

There are things you can’t explain. Did Marty feel a twinge of guilt, as if he’d abandoned the man during some midlife crisis? Cos he did. But these are the things you keep to yourself.

Cos they are. That’s life.

He wasn’t about to have a whole conversation about any of that. He moved on to some other topic. Most of life was like that. Some things anyone can find out. He gave that man’s wife better peace not explaining any of this. Her and everyone else. A kind of safe haven. Even if the mystery of it seemed otherwise.

He's Dead, Jim: Ballad of a Redshirt

There was a significant gap, or so I grew up believing, between our ages, my brother and me.  It kept growing, the older we got, seeming less when we were younger, more, later.  When he successfully enrolled in the fleet, I was still in high school, and he was already aboard the flagship as I continued my education at Coon Prep, counting down the days to graduation.  And he just kept stealing all the attention, up to and including the day we were informed of his death.

     My name’s Donny Silo.  It seems crass, even to me, still living down a relic of an imagined rivalry, to continue thinking of it that way, given what happened, and my attempts to make sense of it.  I continued chasing him, right into the fleet, doggedly pursuing the same path, never failing to mention my ambition to serve aboard the flagship, always hearing all about my big brother, never feeling worthy, never having found out anything about his actual service, until the day I was given the assignment.  Well, both of them, including the red shirt.

     Red shirt, as in security.  Engineers and communications also wore red shirts, while command wore yellow, and the sciences blue.  My red shirt could’ve come up with any number of duties, but mostly it was waiting around to be needed, waiting and listening.  Everyone talked about my brother.  Not the captain, not the doctor, and certainly not the alien (I don’t mean to sound xenophobic or anything, but aboard that ship, while I was there, anyway, everyone else was human, and it was just the one alien, and the way I heard it, even he was half-human, though you wouldn’t know it by how he behaved), not the holy trinity of elites aboard…But everyone else?  They loved my brother.  He was a legend.

     He was also, as I believe I’ve already stated, quite dead. 

     All the security officers volunteered for missions aboard this ship.  They were eager, I guess, to share time with the trinity, desperate to prove they were worthy to be there, too, just as brave, or maybe even more brave, than even the captain, who didn’t need to expose himself to so much danger, so much unknown, to the mysteries of space, and all the variables of civilization we were meant to explore, along with the stars, and yet kept doing so, every chance he got.

     A lot of security personnel chased this dream to their deaths, my brother among them.  There was a legend that the doctor had grown so inured to this constant stream of death he merely stated the fact and they all moved on, until the mission was completed, enemy conquered, friend made, the fleet once again made safe for the future of humanity (and everyone else).

     The rest of the crew wasn’t so resilient, I guess.  They came up with all manner of explanations, and there were memorials to all the fallen, and my brother was prominent among them.  This time it wasn’t just me; in the mess hall even when I wasn’t there they talked about him, and I’d hear about it in the corridors, in the lifts, in the sickbay, the armory…everywhere.  No, the big three didn’t think much about him, but everyone else did. 

     And it had nothing at all to do with how he died, or his willingness to volunteer, although he’d racked up an impressive forty-seven missions in his time, including the last one. 

     No, he treated everyone with respect, with dignity, he took others under his wing, even when his mood was dark, which apparently had been often, or so it seemed, and he was difficult to be around…He never stopped taking the job seriously, though, and when he was gone, they all knew because suddenly there was so much more work to do…A hole to fill, a void.

     Tough shoes.  I wasn’t up for it, and nobody expected me to, either, but they were happy to see me, because I was his brother, and for a little while it was easier to forget what they’d lost.

     The longer I stuck around, the more I saw past the illusion, found my real brother, the one I’d never allowed myself to meet, the one they never talked about.  Most of his missions were grunt work, no danger at all.  He’d merely showed up.  He was easy to take for granted, until he wasn’t there anymore.  They didn’t miss him; they missed him taking up the slack.  Well, honestly, that ended up how I viewed it, anyway.

     It didn’t seem so glamourous anymore, this flagship.  Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I applaud the heroics of the captain, and his best friends, I see what they contribute, what they mean to the fleet, to everyone, to all the people who will probably never even hear of him, even though to those who work under him, he’s inescapable.  Ask anyone in my hometown, they’ll remember my brother as well as anyone who ever met him, but the captain?  Not a chance. 

     Which is how I’m going to try and start thinking about it.  In the end, you have the friends you make, but you will always have your family.

     I started putting my name up for missions.  I’d avoided it, afraid I’d meet the same fate, how my brother died, all those faces up on the wall, the ones the officers in the other colors never even think about, or so it seems.

     The alien, when I boarded the shuttle, asked me some questions about the mission, nothing personal (although even with his friends he never seemed overly involved, except to acknowledge the implied intimacy, the only thing he shared with the doctor, the name they used to refer to the captain, which no one else did), and I checked my equipment, just to look busy, and when we landed on the surface of the planet for this assignment, I headed out immediately on my own, which I thought of as taking initiative, but was really what all the red shirts do. 

     And I walked around, took scans, secured perimeters…and that was it.  I never saw the big trio, until it was time to head back, and I listened to their banter, and that was it.

     At the debrief, they never so much as called on me, and I was a bit player, and I wondered, for the first time, if that was how my brother felt, which I had never before considered.

     Actually, it was kind of comforting.

     Then I waited to do it all over again.  I didn’t plan on putting my name up for the next one, or maybe I would simply be assigned, and anyway, it didn’t matter.  I headed to sickbay for the obligatory post-mission physical.  The doctor was there, and while he didn’t take charge of my examination, he nodded in my general direction, and when it was over, stopped by and asked why I looked so familiar, and I muttered my brother’s name, and he paused a moment, dropped his head, and then looked me in the eye.  He didn’t have to say anything.

     In that moment I found peace.

Wonder Woman: For the Man Who Had Everything…

Steve Trevor grew up without a mother.

In fact, even both his grandmothers had been dead before he was ever born. He had no aunts, no nieces, and certainly no sisters…He inhabited, in some respects, fully a man’s world.

In school, his good looks made him popular with girls, but he always kept aloof from them. He fled to the army life in an era when there were few enough women serving in the United States military. He lost himself in the fraternal life, had never known anything else. 

Then one day he crashed a plane into Themiscyra, Paradise Island. Home of the Amazons, where no man had ever stepped foot. And he met Diana.

Meaning, you understand, their story was parallel. Steve, when he brought Diana to Man’s World, where she became known as Wonder Woman, was quickly overshadowed. Diana herself never forgot him, but the rest of the world did. She considered them soulmates. He was made liaison, a token gesture. If there was a romance, it was never consummated. They never married. They never fought, either, never danced around the exact terms of their relationship, hopelessly intertwined, something they both just understood, the hole they had both plugged in their lives, the exact missing shape.

Wonder Woman became inescapable. Steve followed in her shadow. He never put on a costume. He was never accepted by her family, never welcomed as part of it. He became an outsider in both worlds. He wasn’t even welcome in her heroic community.

He never resented this for a single moment. 

You might find this hard to believe, I know. Somewhere in that heart surely lurked a chauvinist. Where did his story go, in his most private thoughts? Where might his deepest yearning have gone? Could he really understand, let alone accept, this woman suddenly thrust into his life?

For the man who’d had everything, only to discover, in a sudden shocking revolution, what he’d missed, his eyes filled with…wonder. Not at the idea. But Diana herself, so full of power, and also, so…humble. Because of Steve, thrust into the world, learning all of that, so much of it…alien to her. Learning what men were like…and what women were, in Man’s World. And wanting it to function as well as, well, Paradise.

And Steve, who had grown up in a world without women, to integrate the idea in the most perfect way possible. He couldn’t ask for anything more. 

Star Trek: "A Eugenics War Story"

He was living in a hovel by the sea.  

If he'd thought about it, probably he'd be living in a hovel by the sea regardless of the wars, because he lived in a poor country, a country unlucky enough to be unlucky in the first place and then on top of that one of the countries that had been overrun by the supermen.

The supermen swarmed much of the world without anyone much noticing.  Much of the world doesn't care about much of the world, the misfortunes that plague other nations, especially if there isn't much in the way of public interest, some angle that provokes sympathy for reasons other than the plight of people actually trying to live there.  This made it easy for the supermen to show up and take power.  No one cared.  They appeared like warlords, in many of them, and as such were little different from what had been happening for many hundreds of years anyway, and only those at the top of those populations had any clue what was happening, and there was surely plenty of talk in those circles, though the boy didn't exist in such circles.  To those circles he didn't exist at all, of course.  In the hovel by the sea he could at least catch fish to sustain himself, though trying to find markets where he might sell excess catch was always a problem, even before the supermen.

In those countries where the supermen had sufficient international clout, some claim to territory in a neighboring nation, or perhaps merely inconvenient residents within their own, they were noticed well enough, but the relationships between the supermen were hidden for a long time, although even those who lived in hovels in those countries, were privy to the truth.  It's hard to escape the truth when it's important to you.  Difficult to do anything about it, but what else is there to talk about?

So for years he lived under the regime of one of the supermen, and when the wars began and he found even his hovel was good enough to be caught in the crossfire, the boy would slip onto his boat into the sea and sometimes wonder if he should even bother finding harbor again, if such a thing would even be possible, later.

Then the wars ended and all the supermen were rounded up, and the boy did return to his hovel, and on the whole, found that it wasn't so different from how he'd left it.  Well, it was a hovel.  Hard to get much worse.  He resumed his life, such as it was, and tried to find markets for his fish.

One day, in the village square he overheard a conversation about the fate of the supermen.  Someone claimed they were going to be sent into space.  Sent into space!  In his country there had never even been a glimmer of a hint of a space program.  Very far from it!  Somehow this hadn't prevented one of the supermen from claiming it, and yet, the result of that usurpation had granted this man a ticket that was unimaginable to anyone living in the country, where advanced science was something that maybe looked like a water filtration system or plumbing in the village just beyond wherever you personally happened to be at any given time.

He kept listening.  He wasn't entirely ignorant, nor illiterate, though good material was scarce, along with everything else.  He imagined the supermen being sent to a colony, where they would probably establish a beachhead and send envoys back to Earth for reconquest...

No, no, the speaker said, someone else having thought about the same objection.  They would be placed in suspended animation.  

Huh.  Well.  He didn't know how to process that.  The conversation around him circled around the idea that it was a virtual death sentence, without the willingness to admit it, without the will to carry it out.  Given what the state of the space program was in even the most advanced countries, anyone undertaking deep space journeys was hardly likely, even if they were supermen, to emerge from it in a state to do much about it, even if they woke up somewhere along the journey on their own.

If they did?  He made his way home, thinking about it.  They'd be up there, among the stars, for many years, and they'd never even know time was passing.  If they did wake up?  They'd finally know what it was like to live in a hovel by the sea.

Yes, they'd learn that much.  He considered it a perfect irony.  And he thought no more about it.  

Holy Days - Easter

She kept asking herself throughout the night, on Thursday, on Friday, did they believe? Did they believe he was the messiah? 

And as much as it hurt, Mary had to admit, of course not. That was the whole point. Even the disciples hadn’t believed. Not really. Not even Peter. John? Had John believed? At least he’d been there. In the end.

And she asked herself, all over again. Had she? 

Since she had first been told. Yes. Yes, she had believed. It had been a terrible burden. She’d known, all his life. She’d known how it would end.

For the world, his death was just another crucifixion, just another dead messiah. It was easier to end the story that way. Everyone was happy, then. Everyone would forget. That was how it always went. The day they died, that was always difficult, but then, there was always so much company.

She wondered what motivated them. Why so many boasted in the streets. It was a deep yearning, of course, an ancient one, and a horrible burden of a tradition. Their people had escaped from bondage many times. But the world always set another trap.

She’d known. She’d known from the start. And even if she hadn’t, he spoke openly of it, eventually, and eventually even in terms others would understand. It did not blunt watching it play out. Watching him torn. Watching him pierced. Watching him. Die.

Listening to him. She had spent his lifetime listening to him. To the end. To the very end. He’d always had something to say. She always had the time to listen. He spoke to her, from up there. He spoke to John. He spoke to others. He allowed himself to grieve. For him it was a moment he was experiencing for the first time, too, despite a lifetime of anticipation.

She wondered how she still managed tears. Watching it. Holding his body, later, when it had been taken down. While she waited, his body in the tomb. One night. Two nights.

Then this morning. She wasn’t among those he appeared to. That burden, among others, he had passed on to John. Perhaps that’s what he’d meant. Perhaps he knew that if she saw him, again, she would never be able to let go again. She had spent his lifetime giving him to the world. It seemed too much. Because no one had seen him the way she did. 

She waited, still. She waited to see him. She knew she could wait the rest of her life, and she wouldn’t. But she had lived with anticipation before.

She had her faith. It sustained her.

Holy Days - Saturday: An Easter Tale

By then he was dead. 

Some things, perhaps most things, are on a relative scale. Joseph’s doubts about Mary, his difficulty accepting the circumstances of her pregnancy, of needing to be persuaded by the visit of an angel in a dream, none of this should project an image of a man who was in any way unworthy to raise Jesus. In another age, in another context, a fictional one, Joseph is Jonathan Kent, adoptive father to Superman. 

Superman, Clark Kent, is often depicted as gaining his moral character from Pa Kent. Jesus didn’t find his character through Joseph. What he learned was how to be a man.

His mother, Mary, spent her life encouraging him, believing in him, knowing all the while the destiny that awaited him, in this world, in this life. She was, and Joseph was, firmly rooted in this world, this life. This is what they knew. Mary had extraordinary faith. Joseph, meanwhile, was the first model of what a good life could look like.

In those days it was usual for the husband to be older than the wife. Joseph was in his thirties, and Mary not yet in her twenties. This is to say, Joseph was established in his practice, as a carpenter, when Jesus was born, when they made the journey to Bethlehem.

When Jesus was a boy, Joseph was approaching middle age. When Jesus approached his thirties, Joseph was, for that time, an old man.

He had already done everything he could for his son. He led a life of quiet dignity. Joseph didn’t understand the larger concepts of faith any better than anyone; he knew them as well as Mary, certainly, whose faith was less informed by temple worship than in her son, in his destiny. 

Joseph saw how wise his son was. He didn’t try to understand it himself. In fact it was something they never really talked about. They spent their time together in idle chatter, Joseph about the many people he knew, Jesus often quietly, or sharing mutual jokes. They had an easy camaraderie that maybe wasn’t easy to see. It wasn’t for others, anyway. Maybe Joseph took it for granted. He wasn’t alive when his son went out. Perhaps his death was necessary for it to happen. They shared the work together, until it was time for different work.

Time didn’t have as much meaning, in the place where Joseph found himself, after dying. At some point he found himself face to face with his son again.

They didn’t say anything. Jesus hugged him. Joseph tried to understand what he saw in his son’s face. It wasn’t the face he remembered. It wasn’t so much older. But it was sadder. It was also filled with a kind of joy Joseph couldn’t begin to describe. It reminded him of the face his son had had when he was a boy, when he had been found after lingering in the temple. That had been the day everything had changed, when the whole family knew, for the first time, what lay ahead. That is to say, when Joseph knew his son understood his destiny for the first time.

Joseph hugged his son in return. He didn’t want to let go. Not again. Jesus gave him a gentle smile.

Then he was gone.

Holy Days - Good Friday: An Easter Tale

He was an old man, then. He’d been the oldest of them, all those years earlier. He’d known about the Hebrew culture, had studied it somewhat extensively, out of idle academic curiosity. That was why he’d chosen myrrh, then. He’d been led to believe they were going to find a king. He’d chosen it so they could anoint him.

Today, he was a much older man. His bones ached. It hurt to move much at all, and so he was content, most days to not move much at all. Today, though, Balthasar thought about other things. It was early, yet, still very early in the morning. But he’d received news. 

They’d found themselves talking about the old days, this week, revisiting that journey, all those years ago, the baby they’d found in a stable, whom they’d paid homage, even in such a state, to whom they’d given their gifts, the gold, the frankincense, and yes, the myrrh. They’d all had a sense of foreboding. Nothing they’d seen, no signs. They’d heard the rumors of the authorities in Jerusalem.

It’s not true, what they said even in those days, that no one talked about the man, that he existed in a vacuum, that his life was unremarkable in his lifetime. There are remarkable people you treasure whom no one would think to record for posterity. That will always be true. The scale shifts. The everyday kindnesses that are so easy to take for granted, the wisdom that comes from sources outside traditional roles. These are things that can leave a profound impact on the world. They called Balthasar a wiseman, but he thought, he hoped, you didn’t need to be one to understand such things. He knew he was wrong about that. He knew that was the true distinction.

This man had made an impact, and he had inspired fear, not because he led an insurrection, either against Rome or his own people. No, never anything like that. Those are the things that wind up being recorded. They don’t talk about love, about compassion, the things so many people yearn for, so easy to ignore, why they’re so precious.

But that was what had happened to the man. All through the night he’d been undergoing a trial. He’d been arrested. Outside, in the worlds untouched by the circles within Jerusalem, it had quickly become a scandal. Word reached Balthasar quickly, much more quickly than the distance should have allowed. He was worlds away, in so many ways. None of this should have concerned him, and yet it had, many years ago, and even a wiseman couldn’t really have appreciated, then, the implications, so seemingly regional, irrelevant.

The man was going to die. He was going to be executed. He would be long dead before Balthasar could muster himself to undertake another journey. The Romans were a bit too predictable. The authorities there knew how these things worked, all too well. They’d conspired to rid themselves of a pest, who had threatened their peace of mind, their complacency, a man who had dared gather the lost flocks of their society and given them hope. He would end up on a cross. The landscape had begun to look naked, Balthasar was told, if there weren’t at least a few of those about on any given day.

No, he hadn’t considered the myrrh for its other applications. He’d gone in search of a king. Depending on how long it took the man to die, if somehow his family still had the myrrh, it would be used for something very different, before this day was done.

Balthasar found himself ashamed. Ashamed for humanity. Ashamed for his own weakness. Weakness in body, now. Weakness in spirit. Then. Weakness in spirit even this week. They had all undergone a journey when this man was born. They hadn’t bothered, when they knew he would die. No one had. He would die alone. He deserved so much better.

He felt very old. He still didn’t understand faith.

Holy Days - Thursday: An Easter Tale

In those days he had been young, and when he looked back, now, he felt he must have been a child, and he could still remember his elders in the fields, with him, except they were old men, now, and he was in charge, and had been for years, and struggled to remember when it had been any different. When you’re a shepherd you know how your day’s going to go. There’s not much mystery.

There had been, that night, all those years ago, that star shining so brightly, and the angel…Later, he’d told himself he’d imagined it, dreamed it. Anything but admit that it had really happened. Alone, or alone now among those who had experienced it, it was easy to pretend. It had been a lifetime ago.

Anyway, he still occupied the same fields, still there in Bethlehem. Today he was asked to sell one of his sheep. The request came from people he’d been hearing about the last few years, people who had been traveling about, a network, agitated people. It wasn’t hard to find the like. Everyone was agitated these days. No one was happy about the Romans. If he kept to himself, paid his taxes, he’d found he didn’t have to worry about it too much. 

Why someone would want one of his sheep over in Jerusalem, he couldn’t say. Seemed like a lot of bother. He assumed it was for the Passover, but it was a little early, and they’d seemed to be in a rush. “The master needs it now,” they’d said, “He’s in a rush. Never seen him like it.”

There were a lot of masters about, but the one spoken about had tended to inspire a different response. Normally he inspired calm. The shepherd knew these people. These were common people, for the most part, some of them important fishermen from Galilee, sure, who operated in circles similar to his, but who had spent their lives in the same daily fashion as him, busy about their work, hardly the like to change the world. In normal times, anyway. These weren’t normal times.

And this was not a normal day. He wondered. What was so different? What so urgent? 

There was something in the air. A desperation. Something was going to happen. The authorities were frequently given to sudden gestures, to assure the population of who was in control, to solidify their position. These things followed patterns. Troublemakers were rounded up. The shepherd wondered if the master’s luck had run out. 

All that was someone else’s problem. He tended his flock. He sold sheep. The urgency, though. These people. They seemed frightened. This was a movement of common stock. No one usually bothered to include men such as him in important affairs. His fields had been occupied by these people, though. He’d watched from a distance, too far away to hear, but surprised at the level of calm as the crowds listened. 

He decided he’d ask around, in a few days. He led a simple life. But he could involve himself in something like this.

Holy Days - Wednesday: An Easter Tale

Thirty years or so later…

The innkeeper hadn’t much paid attention, at the time, concerning the effect his decision to give a young couple some space to sleep for the night. He’d certainly noticed the effect of Herod’s decision, very soon after. So many innocents lost. He’d heard about the birth that happened in the stable, that to his shame almost hadn’t even noticed was imminent. The couple had been so humble, he’d felt shamed into helping them. The census had made everyone a little crazy. He’d thought, at the time, he’d done nothing to be proud of, giving them that, of all spaces. No dignity. They hadn’t seemed to mind. He had. It bothered him the rest of that night. Then he forgot all about it. Life went on as it always had, in Bethlehem. A quiet place. Certainly no Jerusalem. That was what he’d always treasured about it. Yet somehow he ended up in Jerusalem anyway.

Somehow. Right. He remembered their names. The husband had been a carpenter. The innkeeper remembered that. His line of business? He could always find value in such a trade. He obtained a variety of products from the man, over the years. In this way he learned about the son, the baby who had been born that night. Again, none of this was intentional. A coincidence. The son developed a reputation, over the years. Most of the time, he kept to himself, went about his father’s business. He spent much of his time ruminating, though. Not like a rabbi, although it was often said he ought to follow such a path, take up space in the temple in an official capacity. But he was always humble, exactly as his parents had been that night. 

The years progressed. The innkeeper heard how the son went out on his own, how he walked away from his father’s trade, found a group of friends who liked to listen to all that talk. On this day the innkeeper found himself talking with one of those friends. They said this man wanted to rent one of his rooms.

Passover was approaching. Space was once again at a premium. The innkeeper, all these years later, found he had a role to play in this family’s affairs, one more time. This time there was no hesitation. 

They needed it the next day. He’d heard about what’d happened a few days earlier. He imagined what it must’ve looked like. For a lot of men, for too many, it would’ve been too easy. Basking in the glory. Well, not the carpenter’s son. No, the innkeeper thought it probably felt embarrassing. This man would need someplace private. Strangely, the innkeeper, perhaps too aware of history, felt a certain foreboding. Something bad would happen in the days ahead. He made arrangements for the room to be fitted out in such a manner for a man who had merited such a welcome into town. Fit for a king, the innkeeper thought. In case it was his last chance for such treatment. 

There was another Herod, after all, and, the innkeeper found, names being collected all over again. Support, this time, for what he did not care to know, to be a part of. He was a humble man himself. Went about his work. Tried to believe he’d always done the right thing. He knew he hadn’t. 

The friend of the carpenter’s son gave him a shy kind of smile, upon completion of the deal. He wished he could be among them the next day.

Holy Days - Tuesday: An Easter Tale

Caspar, too, was old. They all were. That was how he saw the world, now. It’s easy to see everything the way you are. This is not a failing. Even wise men can suffer from such vanity.

When he was younger, he had traveled far, with his friends, to a humble place. He had presented frankincense to a baby.

Frankincense had particular significance to the Jews, as he’d gathered, a kind of offering to holy places, to sanctify them. So his gift was more of an acknowledgment. He’d done his research. He was paying his respects. Candidly, he thoughts his friends had been a little eccentric with theirs. But he didn’t have to understand. He let them carry on. They had different ideas, but united in their belief that the world held sacred mysteries. He didn’t pretend to understand the mysteries surrounding this baby. He didn’t need to, he’d decided.

Like all of them he tried to keep tabs on what followed. Not because he became a believer, once he’d learned just what kind of a life that baby grew into. Remember, in the early days it was a mission to the Jews, a matter for Jews. It didn’t expand until later, and by then Caspar was dead. But that’s later.

Now, on a Tuesday in the early days of a week that would change history, Caspar had a chat with his old friend Melchior, and that was when he found out what had happened that Sunday, and what his friend thought of that, the foreboding he felt, the certainty that far from portending good things, it singled the beginning of the end.

Or maybe not. These two certainly had a unique perspective on all of it, a scholarly one, and they were peering in from the outside. They were free to speculate.

So that was what they did.

His friend seemed hopeful. Caspar wasn’t so sure. Anything could happen, right? And the world often seemed determined for the worst outcome, even when he claimed profusely otherwise. He didn’t want to call himself a cynic, but sometimes it seemed the only rational approach. And, well, he was an old man, now. He’d seen many things. They all knew what Herod had done, after all. 

He had to laugh. They had both been so hopeful, then. His friend gave the baby gold. Caspar had brought the incense. A part of him says he knew better than he knew. That part of him was faith. And it was right for him to struggle with it. That was what faith was all about. 

It was only when he had grown so old, that he allowed himself to admit such things.

Holy Days - Monday: An Easter Tale

Melchior was an old man, by then.

Someone told him about it. They told him about what had become of that baby they’d visited, all those years ago, those long decades. 

Each of them, all three, had agreed to bring gifts. He’d chosen gold. At the time he couldn’t really have explained, except the stories had said the baby would grow up to be a king, and so it had seemed appropriate.

But what he’d heard, since, not just what they all heard, later, about what Herod had done, not even to say how he’d tried to trick them, seemed to contradict that. He didn’t really understand it, hadn’t back then, either, not that it had mattered. A different culture, a different world. But in the final analysis, none of that had mattered. What he understood, then, was that he was simply paying homage. He saw no reason, now, to think otherwise.

No, that baby had not grown up to be a king. In that world, in that Roman world, after he’d thought about it, that had never really seemed likely anyway, or in any sense that would’ve been interpreted in that way, then, trivial. He’d heard all about the culture the baby grew into, its vision of the future. He listened as it was explained to him, what that baby grew up professing. He knew a thing or two about some of that, surely.

But he had never seen any of that in quite the manner he saw it from this new perspective.

And then he heard about what happened yesterday. Yesterday that baby truly had, for a moment, grown up to be a king. Melchior had to laugh. In a selfish moment he even wondered whatever had happened to that gold. Many men would have at least laced their attire in it. He didn’t see that as a possibility, here.

He would never see this man for himself. He saw him once, as a baby. He worried about him. He knew that culture, that world, everything that man had already struggled against. Such crusades were not meant long for the world. Or maybe.

He still could not escape this man’s story. Just perhaps, it was a story that would endure. Melchior had first read it before any of it had even happened. He followed a star to see its first fruits for himself.

He decided it wasn’t so hard to believe.