The Damascus Road

by Jay Parini

  “You can’t stay,” Luke said. “They will find you soon. The city is small.”

  That evening at sunset he and a few others lowered me over the wall in a wicker crate. There was a violet glow on the western rim of the desert, and clouds stretched in broad blue-vermillion lines like veins in a wrist. I landed in high grass that smelled heathery and sweet, then hurried away into the dusk, following a crease through scrubland. A path opened beneath my feet, with the moon casting a shimmer on the pink limestone walls that receded. Where to go?

  A return to Jerusalem was unthinkable. The Jews, my former friends and allies, would consider me a traitor, a blasphemer, no better than Stephen and perhaps worse, as I had been an agent of the Temple Guards, sent on a distinct mission. It seemed unlikely that Peter and James, who worked patiently and with ingenuity to maintain good relations with the Jewish community, would find it in their hearts to forgive me for everything I had done. The Jesus circle would never open their arms to one who had so recently been their persecutor.

  I must go into the desert, as Jesus had done.

  Ananias favored this plan and explained that I would find a stream after two days of walking beyond Damascus, and I should follow it into Arabia. But the wilderness spread in every direction, and I wondered if I could find this rumored stream or, in the end, anyone at all. The company of friends seemed like an impossible shore, and I could feel my body softening, breathing from every pore, as if changing into air as I moved forward. Scuffling sounds in the nearby brush alarmed me, and I feared I could be torn apart by jackals before dawn.

  It was all unfamiliar, and I couldn’t think how I had stumbled into this situation, whatever it was. What had actually happened on the way to Damascus?

  Possibly I should never have left Jerusalem.

  I replayed the scene again and again, but the truth eluded me. No matter, I told myself: I was not the same man who had rushed toward that city with a few comrades, eager for vengeance against those who lived by the name of Jesus and threatened to disrupt the Law of Moses. Now I had been touched by Jesus himself and turned in another direction. And I could not tell where any of this would lead.

  From my earliest years I had been enamored of Mosaic Law. It had built bones in me, created my body, and formed the foundation of my soul. I had become its knowledgeable defender. Yet I was a new creature now, a kind of Christ myself—that was my distinct feeling, however hard to understand or fully absorb. Was I deranged, unstrung? Had my companions really not heard the thundering voice that afternoon on the road to Damascus?

  “Jesus has spoken, the Lord himself, the Christ, and I’m blinded,” I had said, and wept.

  They stood above me, a haze of concern. What did I mean? How could I have lost my sight, and without apparent cause? Who had spoken?

  I would often recount what had happened that day, trying to understand the meaning of this holy encounter. I needed to find a narrative sufficient to the experience itself. But what language could suffice, could hope to describe and embody what happened to me that day? A spiritual wind had whirled the desert of my own heart, scattered the sands of my soul, but how could I explain those feelings, which even now churned inside me? How could I account for the radical intervention of God’s presence in my life?

  The elderly Ananias had prayed beside me with his nephew, Luke the physician, a dear man from Antioch. They had told me more about Jesus of Nazareth, about his simple birth on his mother’s farm in Galilee, and his long apprenticeship to his father. He and Joseph walked from nearby Nazareth, a tiny village, to the major city of Sepphoris each morning, where masonry skills were in demand, as it recently had become the seat of Herod Antipas, whose royal court drew visitors from distant parts of the Roman Empire. Ananias had any number of anecdotes about the Christ, some of them contradictory. But I was eager to learn more.

  Others told me that Jesus had gone off into the Arabian desert by himself, encountering any number of teachers along the way, including magicians who unlocked secrets and recited sutras from hidden scriptures. After forty days of fasting and prayer, and a fiery encounter with the Adversary, Jesus assumed a ministry of healing and teaching, having been immersed in the Jordan by his cousin, John the Baptizer, a man who lived on dry, salted locusts and wild honey and wore only a sackcloth made from the long, bristly hair of camels. He lived in prayer, rejoicing in each moment of life, saying that every step he took was an answer to God.

  I enjoyed all stories about this wild man of the desert, this ascetic who lived on the simplest food, who had no pretense or worldly possessions, whose fasting drew him closer to God each hour of the day. I, too, must rejoice and pray without ceasing. “This was the way of John the Baptizer and the Christ as well,” Luke had said.

  “And what was the nature of Jesus’s teachings?” I asked him. “What did our Lord ask of us?”

  I knew so little about him then. But one must begin somewhere.

  “He went among the Essenes,” Luke had told me. “They are a mystical group who live in desert caves, who read the scriptures, every kind of scripture. They meditate, and they sing hymns of their devising.”

  I had heard of this sect, a gentle people devoted to reading and all-consuming prayer. They lived in small communities, and would chant together from ancient writings, and had in their possession many versions of the holiest books, as well as esoteric texts, and believed one could find eternal life in death itself, dying into the flesh to emerge in the spirit. I had heard such language before from Greeks in Tarsus, who sometimes carried stories of Eleusis, where sacred mysteries had been celebrated from the beginning of earthly time. Those who worshipped Mithras understood these mysteries as well, which centered on renewal of the spirit.

  “It’s like Persephone,” I said to Luke and his uncle, “the descent into death, the awakening in spring. A kind of rebirth.”

  His uncle laughed when I suggested this, tugging my ear as if I were a child trying to speak like an adult.

  “You’ve spent too many years in study,” Ananias said. “Go into the desert, where all things begin. Luke is right. You will find guides, and they will instruct you in the Way. I can only begin, pointing my finger in a direction that may help, but you must walk that way yourself.”

  Ananias told me about a particular community of Essenes who lived near Mount Sinai in the eastern desert. A number of them belonged to the Way of Jesus, and they had key insights that would help me along my own path. “Go there,” he said. “Ask for Musa. They will take you to him. And he will know you are coming.”

  “How will he know?”

  “Don’t ask this,” he said.

  It made no sense to question him, I could tell. But I did wonder how many people in the desert near Mount Sinai might answer to the name of Musa, a common name. On the other hand, Ananias knew something, and this was part of my humbling. I must withdraw and not wish to understand. Nor should I attempt to control outcomes. Instead, with effort, I must learn to pray as Ananias taught me, after the manner of Jesus, crying, Thy will be done.

  This concept dizzied me, as I had lived by getting my own way from earliest childhood. I might as well have prayed, My will be done.

  “Jesus emptied himself out,” Ananias said.

  The phrase played on my ear, beautiful and mysterious.

  I found myself thirsty for instruction, having only begun to empty myself into Jesus the Christ, who had emptied himself into me. I would go into the desert, as Ananias suggested, although this would not be undemanding for someone who had spent most of his life in cities. I had never slept like a shepherd under a shower of stars in the company of wild beasts and biting insects. I had never crouched in caves or moved through evergreen forests or across silent deserts. My life had been spent in churning streets and noisy markets, in schoolrooms and synagogues, in the society of rabbis, scholars, merchants, men of trade.

  A lett
er to my father needed writing, that much I knew. I must explain that I would not be shipping hides from Jerusalem to Tarsus, not for a while. I would tell him that Amos could manage. Amos understood exactly where those hides came from, and the supply would not shrink without me. My father would be furious with me, of course, having raised me to meet his expectations, and disobedience never entered his mind as a possibility. Sons did what their fathers required of them. Just in case I felt tempted to stray, he often quoted one of the Proverbs of Solomon: A foolish son is a grief to his father.

  But I must seek the face of God, my real father, going into the wilderness as prophets had done for centuries: Ezekiel and Ezra, Miriam, Aaron, Isaiah and Huldah. I must go among the gazelles, jackals, lizards, sand cats, vipers, badgers, scorpions, and fire ants. I must learn to listen for God in the roiling midst of his creation. Live in the whirlwind, listen to the icy choir of stones.

  As night settled, with a full moon, the desert opened before me, and I sank happily into the accumulating silence, grateful for the directions of Ananias and the encouragement of his nephew, whom I knew I would see again one day. For now, I would walk myself out and sleep in full exhaustion, spent of myself and my small worries for personal survival. I was nobody, nothing. And it was good to know this in such a visceral way, with the world around me a reflection of my emptiness.

  What little I understood of wild places I could trace to Simon, the friend of my youth, who once suggested that a man could live for months in the desert as long as he found something to drink. “You won’t notice at first, but water is everywhere,” he said. He showed me how to suck at the roots of the saltbush for moisture, or tear into the soft bark of the boras tree. He forced me to fill my mouth with juicy red-and-yellow insects and to sip at rock pans in the shelves where water pools at dawn.

  I had done all of this in the country beyond Tarsus, though it was long ago.

  Late on the second day of my journey, when I had seriously begun to worry about quenching my thirst, I heard the flourish of a stream behind a thicket. A trail moved beside it, and I assumed I could follow this route into the desert. It was the path by the stream that Ananias had mentioned, and God had led me here, as promised in the Psalm: I sought the Lord and he answered me.

  I kept to the north side of the stream, stopping occasionally to dangle my feet in the cool water, letting it catch and frill around my ankles. One evening I stopped well before sundown, falling asleep on a patch of moss, drifting in a timeless time. When I woke, I drank as much as I could from the stream before filling my waterskin. I told myself that God had opened his hand for me, and I could nestle in his palm. I felt safe in his presence.

  But was I fooling myself?

  After eating a handful of nuts and dates, I bathed in a pool where the stream had caught in a backwash of silt, and I remembered Simon, who had plunged headfirst into a swirl. I would never forget how I found him, his limp body in the reeds, and how I lifted him to shore. After the briefest rest, numb with grief, I pulled him over my shoulder and carried him into Tarsus. For a while blood continued to seep from his wound, where the bone of his head was exposed. Then it clotted and caked. The eyes stared ahead, as if he had begun to look beyond his life on earth. Perhaps he had seen eternity, its ring of light. My forearms and hands were stained, sticky and somehow burning. After a couple of hours of walking, I brought my friend to the doorstep of his family house and knocked, wishing myself anywhere else in the world but there. His father opened the door casually, with a slight frown, as if annoyed by having to deal with a visitor.

  He looked at me without fear. The poor man.

  “Simon has drowned,” I said.

  The dead body of his son lay on the ground beside me, where I had gently put it down.

  There was a pause as he gathered into himself this blunt and brutal fact, allowing it to seep into his bones and sour the honeycomb of his brain. Like all grief, it had to become physical in order to become real. And yet I never knew horror could take such proportions. In an instant, Simon’s father understood his life was utterly changed and could not settle again into its former texture. He would never sleep without the horror of dreams that could unmake him and never count on eating a meal without thoughts of an absence, a hole ripped in the tissue of his spirit.

  He fell on his son’s body with alarming force, burying his face in the child’s stomach.

  I caught sight of his mother in the dark shadows of the house as she peered from behind a curtain, her face covered with a shawl. She would never recover, as one does not recover from such a thing.

  Some impossible phrases by way of explanation stuttered from me. These fragments hung in the air, dissolving as I stepped backward, eager to get out of their sight.

  That afternoon, when I told my father about Simon, he said nothing for a while, walking into another room to collect himself. When he returned, he told me to follow him to Simon’s house. I admired this aspect of my father, his willingness to step into the anguish, not hide from it. “It’s our duty to go there,” he said.

  The forlorn parents grieved in silence with a few other friends, the body propped on straw cushions on a table and covered by a linen burial cloth. I could smell the cinnamon and cumin, eerily fragrant, perhaps too sweet, which had been pressed into Simon’s skin. He would be put into the dirt and covered before sundown, as was our custom from the time of Adam and Eve, who had been taught by a raven how to bury Abel, their beloved son; the black ragged bird had scratched in the dirt, and they knew what they must do.

  God teaches by symbol and semblance.

  I sat behind my father, avoiding the afflicted parents. Nobody spoke, but soon a broad-chested bearded man from the synagogue appeared, a beautiful singer from the tribe of Levi. He lifted a Psalm into the air. Oh God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

  In his anguish on the cross, feeling abandoned by heaven, Jesus himself had quoted from this poem by David.

  Why hast thou forsaken me? I would ask this question myself so many times in my life.

  But there is an honest wildness in such inquiry, facing into pain with an inward rage that works to equalize the violence coming from without.

  I wanted this for myself, a wild bravery of spirit.

  As I resumed my trek, I thought of Aryeh, who I assumed I would never see again. I longed to hear the timbre of his voice, the eruption of his laughter at unlikely moments, his bluff, easy approach to life. I liked the way he leaned against a doorjamb in his own fashion, watching others at work with a wry wincing smile. His childlike manner contrasted my own looping, convoluted thoughts, my tortuous ruminations, and I wished only to simplify what I thought, to live by a few bold assertions. But this seemed impossible now.

  Suddenly a pillar of sand swept toward me, whirling in midair, and I stood amazed before it. In the swirl itself, the black eyes of Aryeh burned, ice and fire.

  Was I awake and dreaming?

  “You disappoint me, Paul,” a voice said.

  Was it possible?

  “Why have you not come back to us?”

  “I have met Jesus,” I said. “He came to me on the road.”

  “You must kill him.”

  “He is my Lord.”

  “I didn’t expect this, Paul. I thought you and I would fight together—for the twelve tribes, and the one God who rules the universe.”

  “I’ve been called by Jesus,” I said. “Let me go!”

  He raised his arms in the air, and I could see the auburn hair under his arms, a bare torso. The wind rose in a girdle about him, absorbed him. And soon the air was clear, with no evidence of a sandy pillar.

  Was it Aryeh who spoke to me? Or had I met the Adversary, who had assumed this familiar and alluring form? No matter. I felt sure of myself now, and looked at the open horizon, and began to walk into my new life with fresh energies.

  Before my esca
pe from Damascus, I had filled a sack with bits and pieces of food, and could feed from this cache for any number of days, maybe weeks, eating as little as possible. Hunger was good, I told myself, as it forced an alertness. I felt nimble and adroit, quick-witted. I had met the Adversary, or some specter, and not been overwhelmed or deceived.

  The crude map of the desert that Ananias had drawn led me forward. I would follow this route, avoiding “soldiers and small gatherings,” as he warned me. The news of my change of heart would have traveled, and condemnation would greet me in territories governed by Aretas, who assumed that all of Judea was his. At least for the time being, I would stay far away from towns and villages as I moved into the pink sand and silence before me. The less contact with people, the greater my chances of survival.

  Surely my former associates in the Temple Guard would puzzle over my transformation, my apparently traitorous turn, and I did not doubt that Aryeh would feel betrayed, even furious. The fury I had just heard in Aryeh’s voice—real or unreal—rang in my ears.

  Stopping to pray by the wayside, I allowed myself to sink into God’s presence, saying nothing. I recalled that my father, a pious Jew, rarely departed from set prayers, which he recited in a low grumble, a scowl on his face as he rocked before a scroll that had belonged to his own father. I tried to imagine a different way of praying, allowing the flames of love to kindle inside me. And I would seek this fire in the desert.

  After a week or so, I stopped counting days and simply watched as constellations banked in the sky at night, and I grew more comfortable with sleeping under that luxurious canopy, wrapped in the blanket I carried as a bedroll, my head on a mossy patch or tuft of grass. Sleep enveloped me in its blessing, cushioned me, carried me to a space where I could escape from the hardness of life in the wild, could evade my own terrifying but exhilarating solitude.