This Is Why I Came

by Mary Rakow

  When he prayed, which was rare, it was to tell God, in case he’d forgotten, “Send me no more of your dreams.”

  11

  Finding Jesus in the Temple

  JESUS SAT BY himself often, trying to understand his family, the murder of his uncle, Zachariah, and the murder of his male peers. He was five, he was eight, he was eleven. He had no answer. Sometimes he wished he’d been murdered, too. At those times he was angry with his father for having dreams and for obeying them. Angry that his father’s dreams had twice saved his life.

  WHEN HE SPOKE in the Temple, though he was only twelve, he spoke of unhappiness, destiny and the web into which, though we don’t design it, we are born. He spoke with great conviction and little emotion. That he knew about human suffering was clear to those who heard him.

  HE DIDN’T SPEAK of the night visitors who came bringing gifts. That he still had the kite, his mother, the gold. He spoke of what he’d seen, of the limit of riches to bring happiness, that gold did not lift his mother’s despondency when he watched her stand before the mirror newly clothed in fine garments and wept. The dress that still hung at the back of her closet, unworn. Riches could not prevent the slicing off anymore than righteousness could. Her righteousness, his father’s, his uncle’s, the parents in his neighborhood.

  “The Son of Man will bring division,” he said because this was the nature of the puzzle he was trying to solve, the severing he’d already seen and had set in motion. A family of four children had three. A family with two sons had only one. That knife blade. That sickle.

  “Who is my mother and brother?” Mary quizzed him.

  “Those who hear the word of God and do it,” he answered and spoke the same that day in the Temple.

  Those present listened with amazement and some said, “Surely this boy is a prophet.”

  AFTER SEARCHING FOR Jesus three days, Joseph and Mary found him in the Temple and Joseph instructed him to come home, but Jesus answered, saying, “Here I am doing my father’s business,” rebuking his father, which offended Joseph. And the Elders, witnessing the exchange, said among themselves, “Is he the boy’s father? This carpenter? The one who can’t read? The one who makes chairs?”

  Mary did not hear the insult, so that Joseph bore the full weight of the humiliation without her.

  In that moment he saw the degree of his uselessness to both her and their son and felt anger again toward Jesus. He thought of Abraham’s rage against Isaac, a story he knew from childhood, his father telling it to him with sadness, saying, “I hope we never have that strife between us.”

  His wife and son had eyes fixed on something greater that he could not see, something more important than being a family, even a holy one. And Joseph fell away from them, so that there was no repairing it. Once they reached home, he would gather his possessions and move away.

  They seemed unconcerned with happiness, which he held as life’s greatest gain, a true measure of the spiritual life. Life was made for joy, after all. And he did not take it for granted much less devalue it as they seemed to do. He looked at them as they walked ahead, feeling how keenly he wanted a simple life, a life without the supernatural in it.

  They walked so closely that their steps almost matched, the boy almost as tall as his mother, each occasionally looking away at the landscape, the hills to the left, the wide, flat expanse of sand to the right. By the time they reached home, Joseph wondered if their quest for some higher meaning that he did not feel or feel drawn to was a kind of gluttony or greed.

  12

  Elizabeth

  WOMEN FOUND ELIZABETH noble in her widowhood. Some envied her because her son lived, others because her husband had hidden them, still others because he had given his life for them.

  Zachariah achieved remarkable stature among them, his face drawn in chalk on the walls, leading the slain children to a safe place, a beyond. It was a myth in the village, and a comfort, and for Zachariah, each anniversary, the tallest white candles were lit.

  The story was singular among the families of the slain and told everywhere on the anniversary of that night, so that at times Jesus envied his cousin.

  When Elizabeth dreamt of her husband, which was often, he wore ochre, vermilion and gold, rich fabrics befitting a martyr. She existed as if in his presence so that she saw herself in that same way, on her fingers sapphire and ruby rings where there were none, wearing a crinoline head piece and dressed in an ermine-trimmed gown embroidered in gold.

  She existed in this state of mind. Resolute. Unafraid. Composed.

  WHEN HE WAS young, she knit John a raven of black yarn and left notes and snacks outside his door, a fig cookie, a paper airplane, “To Elijah from the Raven.” It was their game. John knew and loved the story of the prophet fed by ravens in the wilderness and made her tell it again and again. Often he stood on the kitchen chair, pretending to ride up to Heaven in a chariot of fire. He demanded she admire him. “You, my little Thunder-Bearer!” she said playfully.

  He cut out large paper wings and she tied them to his arms, first pricking the paper with her needle then pushing through the string. “Oh, you have the wings of a messenger!” she exclaimed as he opened them wide and jumped from the table, calling out, “I’m the Angel of the Wilderness!” then running around the room.

  But sometimes she saw streaks of gold on his paper wings and through the window gold on the trees. She watched his feet grow into the shape of the prophet’s. She’d seen the paintings. It seemed more than a coincidence. And then, the same elongated, spade-shaped face, so extreme on some days that for a moment it looked like the face of a dog.

  She thought, these are ascetic features belonging to one with an austere message, a preacher of penitence.

  13

  John and Jesus as Children

  BOTH FATHERLESS, JESUS and John spent time together, their mothers devoted to each other and to them. Mary made puppets from small pieces of wood, string, scraps of cloth, and they played “Three Kings,” riding the rake and broom like camels.

  They played games they would not play with other children. “Turn the other cheek,” John said, thinking of his father succumbing to the soldier, and Jesus said the same, thinking of the women who barricaded his mother from the well. “When someone strikes you, turn the other cheek,” was their code and they played different versions of it, Father and the Soldier, Mother and the Women at the Well. They practiced fighting with swords, one turning the cheek while being slain. Other times they fought to win, loud and shrieking, pretending to stab each other, to fall dead, to be the victor. And sometimes real anger emerged. John crying out, “If it weren’t for you, I’d still have my father!”

  JESUS ALSO WANTED Zachariah. He imagined growing up to be like him, to give his life for something. A priest in the Temple, then a martyr. To be heroic. To return to the world something that already seemed like a debt.

  “People don’t become martyrs because they want to be heroic,” his aunt instructed him. “They become martyrs because they love something or someone to a heroic degree.”

  BY THE TIME Jesus was eighteen, his father had been gone six years without coming home. John knew this, yet he envied Jesus because his father lived in some particular place and spoke real words and ate and drank like other men.

  Hearing the longing of her nephew, Mary opened the box in which she’d kept the notes Zachariah wrote to her when he could not speak and gave them to John who loved the small papers because they had touched his father.

  AS THEY GREW John longed to meet Joseph and begged Jesus to look for him. “Let’s find him,” he said, wanting touch, roughness, something more than memory, a hunger for the visible in his fingertips.

  So they packed food and rolled their blankets and went searching for Joseph through Nazareth and all of Galilee. It was his voice Jesus heard, loud and boisterous, sitting at a table with other men, his back to the door.

  “Weren’t you the one who married that girl?” one man said, laughing, and others
joined in. “You look like that man, but older.” The room was dark, the men dejected.

  “It wasn’t me,” Joseph said.

  “You aren’t the one whose wife ‘saw an angel’?” another man laughed.

  “I’m telling you,” Joseph’s voice rose, “it wasn’t me.” He glanced over his shoulder then and through the open door saw the back of his son.

  Jesus walked away but John walked in.

  14

  A Colloquy

  “HOW DID YOU know to go to Egypt?” John asked, pulling up a chair, touching Joseph on his forearm, the first of many questions.

  “God used to speak to me in dreams,” Joseph said. “Then I didn’t want his dreams anymore.”

  Joseph often sat at the inn. He had papers and John saw that there were more jammed into his pocket. “I want a world like other men,” his uncle said. “That first, before anything fancy’s added on.” He signaled the waiter. “This morning, for instance, I saw a bull being led to the Temple for sacrifice.”

  John immediately thought of the wide and detailed fan of the Law. The bull would have been a male without blemish, the sacrifice of a wealthy man, not a mere lamb or goat or turtledove. He would place his hands on the bull’s head to recognize its innocence, that it would be killed in the man’s place, to make atonement for him.

  “So I drew the bull,” Joseph said, bringing John back from his reverie. “I draw a lot lately.”

  “May I see?”

  “I did a series. I’m trying to work something out.” Joseph spread the papers out on the table.

  But it was not what John expected. His uncle had not drawn an altar or the sons of Aaron taking the blood and sprinkling it. He hadn’t drawn the priests skinning the bull, cutting it into pieces, laying down the wood, laying the parts onto the wood, the head and the fat in that order. He hadn’t drawn the priest washing the legs of the bull or its entrails. Or the meal offerings of cereals and vegetables sacrificed in addition to the bull, their preparation, the wheat flour baked, fried or cooked in a pan, the dough with oil and salt but no honey or leaven. Joseph hadn’t drawn the incense the wealthy man would bring.

  “This was the first one,” Joseph said, tapping it. Instead of the lush elaboration of the Law, John saw that his uncle was going in the opposite direction. Trying to find in the bull what was essential. To remove the rest. To see who he really is, John thought, in each drawing, the bull facing the same way, but more details removed than in the drawing before. Six drawings in all and the last, one simple curved line. And he admired what his uncle was doing and wanted to find a way to do the same thing.

  As he headed home, John thought again of the laws of slaughter stipulated in Leviticus. He knew exactly how the bull had been treated, the many details to inflict as little pain as possible. That the slaughterer could not be a deaf-mute or a minor and must be of sound mind. That the knife must be perfectly smooth, tested on the flesh of the finger and then on the fingernail. That the flesh of the bull would not be consumed if pain had been inflicted in any of five ways: by delay or pressure or digging or slipping or tearing. The knife must move in a continuous forward and backward motion without interruption, the cut made gently without force, the knife drawn across the throat only and not inserted into the flesh, the cut made in the prescribed section of the neck so that the windpipe and gullet would not be dislocated.

  These elaborations are signs of love, John thought, just as his uncle’s drawings were signs of love and the press for understanding. And John sat on the side of the road and wept in anger at Herod for not giving to his father the courtesy and honor and compassion that was given, that morning, to the bull.

  15

  John the Forerunner in the Wilderness

  “WHY DON’T YOU go back to the wilderness?” Elizabeth offered, seeing the restlessness of her son. “God can be found in anger,” she added, reading his heart. “He can be found everywhere.” And in the spaciousness of his mother’s words, John could feel both the intensity of his anger and his fondness for the mountain that had sheltered him and his mother and for the angel who had led them home.

  SO JOHN WENT back to the desert’s dryness, its allure, to the ant and the bumblebee and lion, to the snow leopard, the raven and the ram.

  HE CRIED OUT to the wilderness, crying out for his father. And the wilderness answered saying, “I am he.”

  16

  The Baptism of Jesus

  JESUS WENT TO be baptized, to confess the sin of his being born. The pressure bore down, a past he could neither escape nor repair. “If it weren’t for me,” he told John often, “you’d still have a father.” The wound bright, vivid and sparkling.

  The villagers called him the crippled boy who carries his past on his shoulders like a house.

  FROM A GREAT distance he heard John calling, “You breed of vipers!” in a voice fierce with certainty.

  And Jesus told himself, John is right. I am a viper.

  17

  On the River Bank

  TINY BIRDS WALKED at John’s ankles, held by delicate gold chains, rumor being that the birds bound themselves to him. The bees gave him honey and the camel its coat. “You’ll be like me someday,” the camel had warned him. “They’ll take your voice away. I’m saying this as a warning,” then died. John skinned it with a knife, burned the carcass, wore the camel’s hide and never ate flesh again. Until the locusts came and said, “Let us be the great exception,” dying at his feet in great numbers and in his hair and beard and on his shoulders in swarms. He wrapped them in muslin and carried them in a pouch at his waist, eating the locusts, guaranteeing their distinction that way, as they had hoped. To not be forgotten, along with the honey.

  To others John appeared exotic but to Jesus he looked only more himself, coalesced, purposeful, all else fallen away, the city, his mother’s nobility, her fruit tartlets and his paper wings. John looked ancient and Jesus wondered if death brought this about, his father’s early death, or if it was the wilderness.

  JOHN SENSED HIS cousin was near and when Jesus stood before him with eyes full of sorrow and penance, John pulled away and refused the exact thing Jesus desired. “No,” he said. “I won’t.”

  The sky was quiet and the leaves on the trees shimmered nervously, waiting for a resolution, an eagle circled high above, eavesdropping, the sun sent its light equally onto both men, the waters up to their waist, the bystanders restless, until, at last, each spoke to the other.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” John said. “I’m clearing your path.” A dove landed in the branch overhead, carrying Heaven on its back, and a voice saying, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”

  JESUS SAW THROUGH the water the long head of his cousin the prophet, he smelled his sour breath, his beard and matted hair, the honey caught at his lips, the flies buzzing near it, all the ways physical beauty was absent, and he shuddered, not because John lacked comeliness but because he saw the large, magnificent head of his cousin resting in a pool of blood.

  John shuddered, too, greenish silt in the oiled curls of his cousin and he thought, you will soon be like me, little brother. My life has reached its purpose. And my end will be violent. I feel it in the wind. So will yours, my pretty little brother with your oiled curls and shopkeepers.

  Faces inches apart, the sour breath of one mingling with the minted breath of the other, they stood a long while, silence clamping its arms around them, forming a room, a vault, and in that vault they both saw the jolting arrival of a completely new kind of time.

  WHEN THE CROWDS had gone and dusk came, they sat beside each other on the riverbank and John said, “Now we know who we are.”

  “Today I am born,” Jesus answered.

  “I will perform no miracles,” John told him, “but you, little cousin, will raise the dead.”

  18

  Temptation

  JESUS LEFT JOHN and went further into the wilderness where he stayed, in solitude and fasting, for forty days and forty nights, aft
er which he was hungry. He heard from the wilderness in his heart, “If I am who John says I am, then this stone will become bread for me.” He paced, circling the stone, his mouth watering, his stomach cramped into itself. But then rebuked that voice and headed out of the desert toward the city to buy bread, saying, “I will not be a magician.”

  At the cliff edge he saw the glory of the city below and before climbing down thought to test God by jumping from the cliff as if he could fly. But again he thought, I will not be a prophet like that.

  Surveying the complexity of the city, he thought, if I leave this wilderness and go into the city people will flock to me and I will be greatest of the prophets. They will say that I am a god, surpassing even John. He explored the idea leisurely, admiring the details of it, a woman prostrate, an exultant following, zealous assistants. But then he stopped himself again, rebuking himself harshly because this was the hardest to resist, and said, “I will not bow down to my own vanity! I will not bow down to that throne, but will, instead, destroy it. I will be a servant.”

  In this way he sidestepped not only his vanity but also depression, and so laid down the burden of his life, for the fact of it, for the senseless shedding of innocent blood that had ensued, and only then did he feel ready to leave the wilderness and join, again, the company of men. Light, clear-headed and for the first time in his life, at peace, he offered prayers of thanksgiving. He removed his clothes and lay naked on the sand and rolled in it, front and back, pouring it onto his hair and feet, rubbing it onto his skin like a second baptism, a second birth, and covered in the dust of the sand, he rose and without cleaning it off, dressed again and descended the cliff. He saw a bride in the sky, her veil flowing from her head to her outstretched arms, her feet bound in white, and he knew she was the kingdom on its way, and knew that he would serve that kingdom and nothing else, her footsteps coming nearer and nearer, her perfume already alive in the dry desert air.