For literary geeks only: This is a chapter from the novel I am currently writing. It includes an ancient literary technique called chiasmus. The structure begins with, “I will tell you what helped me,” and the middle or turning point is “For a moment of charged clarity. . .”
Once when I was a young girl I held an old wineskin under water to see the bubbles that floated up like a twisting necklace of air from the tiny crack on the flask’s surface. But as it became wetter, the skin became slippery and I could hardly hold onto it. The air inside it gained power as I lost the ability to grasp and it seemed something alive inside, mysterious and unmanageable as it shifted and eluded my fingers, beneath the slime of the skin.
I know that feeling, I thought, the first time the child within me slipped against the wet wineskin of my womb. At first I felt delight – the realization my body was not singular but inexplicably plural –and then a great powerlessness, a now-familiar nemesis: the absence of words.
But as I stitched that day, I began to write a poem to share with Cordelia.
This writhing inside me entreats in silence,
Groping for words through lips that have never spoken.
Child of few yesterdays and all tomorrows:
Through the muffled stillness of the waters
Only the echo of my blood rushes
Through hollowing chambers to you.
(“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard. . .”
And yet, I know you.
Why can you not speak as I speak?
Will your love ever match mine?
Will the light of birth open
Your unused eyes to my yearning?)
I, too, move restlessly through terrestrial waters
As conscious of self as a child.
Above, a Father waits for me, to
See as I have been seen, to
Know as I am known;
Wanting me to
Push my way out of this dark world-womb
Into His light.
I was afraid to read this to Cordelia, but to my great relief she embraced it as if she had written it herself; in fact, seemed to draw it to her own permanently-distended belly as if it were a blessing of oil poured onto her.
“We share our children,” she said simply, and at the time it seemed she was claiming an ownership of my child, which thought quite unsurprisingly seemed right and good to me. But later I began to wonder in what way I shared her child as well, a child who rested immobile inside her, a leaden and covert entity that must be accounted for in all matters of daily life though never actually seen, an arrested process with no end result at all.
One Sabbath at the synagogue a brother newly arrived from Ephesus brought some correspondence from others, including a scroll from John. Though I had heard many stories about this man, the one who Jesus loved, he seemed one of the facelessnesses that surrounded the Chrestos, who walked with Him and emerged here and there on the stage of the drama of His life, but who, I confess, receded after saying their lines and thus seemed to have little relevance for me personally. In fact, since the time that I had last heard of him in the house of Pudens, John had never entered my mind again.
That is, until I heard that he was preparing a comprehensive account of the life of Chrestos. Though I had spoken in snippets to Paul about whether he should begin writing an account of his experience on the Damascus road, and I knew of James beginning to write, until I heard that John was writing too, these seemed to be pearls drilled for a necklace but scattered on the workman’s tray.
When I saw that man behind the lectern in the synagogue, holding the scroll from John, I began to feel a sense of kinship with these men, and almost simultaneously a sense of pretentiousness – Had I seen the sweat on the brow of Chrestos as he labored up a hill? Had I ever heard Him speaking on a knoll or in a thatched hut? Not even in vision, and certainly not even at a time, and on a road, and in a place like Paul.
“Brother Paul,” I said to him urgently the next day. “Tell me of what is on the scroll from John.”
“He’s writing his account of the Chrestos backwards, it seems to me.” He paused and wiped sweat from his forehead with his arm, still holding tightly to the fabric that threatened to cascade down from his workbench.
“Backwards?”
“Perhaps it is my own training, but I wouldn’t do it the way he has.”
I waited patiently until, tucking the fabric under his chin and gathering it in his arms to lay on Aquila’s outstretched forearms, he was ready to speak again.
“He speaks often of the eternality of the Chrestos – that He existed outside of time, that He was equal with the Father.”
I struggled to remember what Philo said. “Yes. The Chrestos as Logos.”
He nodded. Aquila hefted the tent section and together they turned it over on the bench. Aquila set to work stitching a new section, and Paul leaned back against the wall.
“John has many interests in common with you, Priska. Perhaps sometime the Lord will permit you to meet. He is well-read in the Greek philosophers, and a deep thinker.”
I could hardly breathe. I wanted to go find Cordelia, to shake Aquila, to say, “Listen to what Paul just said about me!” But I just looked down.
“John began to write a history of the Chrestos, starting with the Logos idea. But then he said he thought it was most important to concentrate on the last week of the life of Jesus.”
I looked around for some words. “In a way, that is like what you are doing. You never tell about His birth, or His early ministry either. Mainly I hear you speak about His death.”
Paul looked up at me. “That is true. And purposeful.”
“So what does that section of scroll say? The one that John sent? Is it a letter, or, or,” I tried to find a proper word, “a chronicle?”
To my surprise Paul walked over to the earthenware jug in which he kept some scrolls and pulled out a roll of papyrus.
“Read it for yourself, sister Priska.”
I could hardly believe it. And as I began to unroll the scroll I saw that it was not written in Paul’s looping letters (not a right angle to be found, piled one atop another, as if someone had shorn a curly sheep and left its locks on paper.) Instead, the sheet was crammed full of slanting lines of thin letters like a forced-march of war prisoners, starving and bent forward against an unseen wind.
“Begin here.” Paul was pointing to a section near the end of the unrolling. “It is an account of the last time Jesus and the others were together before His death.”
“Read it aloud to us, Priscilla.” Aquila’s voice was quiet but proud.
Many times I had to hold the scroll up to the light to make out the crowded letters and saw again what I often remarked upon about the words of Jesus: They were unexpected and often startling. Aquila and I exchanged a secret-bearer smile over the promise of Jesus that He would build us a mansion; and it was then that I knew of Cordelia’s entry into the room as she sighed herself through the doorway.
At one point I put the roll into my lap – or, better said, onto the mound the size of a washerwoman’s bundle.
“How do those who heard these words, people like John, how do they maintain faith when it has been so many years since Jesus left?”
“Many met him right away.” Paul was matter-of-fact.
“Like you on the road to Damascus? Were there others who had such an experience?”
Paul shook his head. “No. Well, at least none others I know of. But that’s not what I was speaking of.”
I was disappointed. I wanted to meet others who had such extraordinary experiences. Would any of them be like mine?
Paul went on. “I mean that they were reunited with Him in the kind of meeting we all will have, someday.”
I picked up the scroll and continued to read:
A little while and ye do not behold me; and again a little while and ye shall see me, because I go away to the Father.
Some of his disciples therefore said to one another, What is this he says to us, A little while and ye do not behold me; and again a little while and ye shall see me, and, Because I go away to the Father?
They said therefore, What is this which he says of the little while? We do not know of what he speaks.
Jesus knew therefore that they desired to demand of him, and said to them, Do ye inquire of this among yourselves that I said, A little while and ye do not behold me; and again a little while and ye shall see me?
Verily, verily, I say to you, that ye shall weep and lament, ye, but the world shall rejoice; and ye will be grieved, but your grief shall be turned to joy. (DARBY)
I paused and looked ahead at the following sentences. I closed the scroll, though, because two Jewish men were bursting through the front door. I placed it under the fold of a piece of fabric I was stitching, but need not have worried – it was Paul they wanted, and, along with Aquila, Paul they lured. I knew that they would be arguing for hours, perhaps until the next day. I knew not to ask, as they went out the door, if anyone would be home for dinner.
At that moment, I came to realize that what I had seen as our home was no longer a private place, but an intersection.
An hour later, as Cordelia and I sat eating and poring over the scroll, I turned suddenly in my chair. It felt as if someone had approached me from behind and had reached around and gripped my stomach with insistent fingers. But there was no one there, and Cordelia looked at me with questions in her eyes.
A few moments later the feeling grew fingernails. I jumped to my feet and found that a watery red flower had painted itself onto my tunic and the seat of the bench where I had sat. Cordelia’s eyes widened and she stepped outside into the street, grabbing a young man by the arm and pressing coins into his hand, sending him to summon some of the other women, to find Aquila.
The air seemed thick and suspended in the room. As we waited, I asked Cordelia the questions I had never asked, about the last time I had been in labor.
“How long did it last, the time before?”
She would not look at me. “A long time.”
“How long?”
She was shoving all the furniture in the room to the walls. She looked for a measuring moment at the mens’ workbench, then piled all their tools and fabrics in a heap. And then put her kneading trough on top.
“Three days. But because you were unconscious, you could not help. Your… your.. child did not want to leave your womb. It will not be that way this time. This child is vigorous, and wants to come out.” She looked at my stomach and the fabric of my robe rippled across the surface like an uneasy lake.
And so it began: The ancient fellowship of the deep groans, the unbroken chain from Eve to me.
Cordelia’s eyes watching me were full of tears.
“I will tell you one thing that helped me,” she said. Then she looked at her own still-ripe abdomen and nearly swallowed a sob. “Who am I to tell you anything.”
My body was for the moment placid, and I reached for her arm.
“Stay with me. Tell me what helped you.”
She gathered herself and nodded. “I thought of the times that you and I, young girls, sat on the seashore.”
“Yes.”
“And as the waves came, we could see that the sea was drawing in things, treasures from the deep, we thought, bringing them in the foam to us, and we strained our eyes, remember? to see them from afar.”
“Yes.”
“But whatever came in, had to stay atop the waves. If it didn’t, it sank to the bottom of the sea.”
My womb seemed at once to try to wring itself out. I could not speak, could not listen. It was as if I were in the middle of the crackle of a pitch-filled fire, explosions of stars riding on the crests of flaming waves.
Somewhere beyond the heat of that fire I heard voices and knew there were other women in the room. I shaded my eyes and saw tunics and legs and feet.
But I was at sea, again and again. I began to crave for the imposition of a beat that would make the rowing regular but a thousand oars slapped all around me. Then I could hear only my own breath and began to feel a hoarseness far deeper than my lungs. I gasped, long deep breaths that seemed as if my body were beginning a cough and then changed its mind.
I could hear Cordelia’s voice. She was commanding me, and I wanted to listen.
“Priska, each wave will end. The waves will each break on the shore. All of them. Every one. They do not stay out to sea once they have begun. You understand this? You must remember this.”
I nodded.
“You must stay on top of each wave, let it bring you and your child as treasure to the shore.”
My lips were too dry to speak, my tongue useless. She brought me wine, dribbling into my mouth. I found some voice there in the moist places of my throat.
“I can do it if you read John’s scroll to me.”
I heard a rustling, a rearranging of people around me. I saw Aquila’s face in front of mine, his black hair hanging straight out from his temples, and I realized he was on all fours beside me on the mat.
“Sit up for the surges, sit up for the surges,” the women’s voices whispered. I stumbled forward and he caught me as he helped me squat onto the birthing stool. Then Aquila’s face receded into the shadows.
Cordelia began to read, but I only heard parts.
A little while and ye do not behold me; and again a little while
The reading stopped – or I could not listen. I thought of Cordelia’s birth phalanxes in tight rows, determined and faceless and implacable. Again they came. And again.
But mine were the bright-eyed assaulting ones of Habakkuk: Their horde of faces move forward.
Cordelia’s voice, reading from John’s scroll, would rout them:
What is this he says to us, A little while and ye do not behold me; and again a little while?
Sometime late that night I passed a threshold into a world that was only air. I could hear my breathing more clearly than anything else I had ever heard. Each breath shuddered at its own exhalation.
What is this which he says
What is this which he says
What is this which he says of the little while?
We do not know of what he speaks.
A rooster crowed, and I wondered where Peter was. Would I ever see him again? And did a rooster crow in his heart every day?
But then everything in the world contracted itself into the exact size of my abdomen. There were women’s hands beneath the stool.
Cordelia read.
Jesus knew therefore that they desired to demand of him, and said to them, Do ye inquire of this among yourselves that I said, A little while and ye do not behold me; and again a little while and ye shall see me?
Verily, verily, I say to you, that ye shall weep and lament, ye, but the world shall rejoice; and ye will be grieved, but your grief shall be turned to joy.
The world was splitting and ripping. It was dawn.
I heard the voices.
“A son! Aquila has a son!”
I was being lowered onto the mat. There was slipperiness everywhere: on me, sweat-soaked. The hands holding me nearly lost their grip. And then the slipperiness I had felt inside me was on my chest, writhing and crying.
Cordelia was reading, weeping.
A woman, when she gives birth to a child, has grief because her hour has come; but when the childis born, she no longer remembers the trouble, on account of the joy that a man has been born into the world.
For a moment of charged clarity, I felt a joining of eternity to me, stretching in both directions from the first intentions of God to the eschatologies of all things. I sought the haven of these heavenlies, the faraways, under my eyelids.
But my arms lost their strength and I felt my hands sagging over the child.
I could not hold the child, for the implacable sea had returned, and the armies, and the breath as coarse as sackcloth, ripped from my lungs.
I was back on the stool. Women knelt on each side of me, my arms held over their shoulders, their faces next to mine like a line of siege shields. This time the world did not rip.
“Aquila has a daughter, too!”
I was back on the mat and another child was there on my chest, holding herself up on her forearms and looking directly into my eyes, and the Holy Breath said her name.
“Tikveh,” I repeated. Hope. She seemed to look behind me then, as if summoned by another voice, and she sighed deeply.
And then she was gone.
The room was thick and still again. I held the limpness, still warm. Cordelia was crying. Outside, someone else was crying too, the first notes of wailing.
(This is what we do. This is what we women do when hope is gone.)
“Read what John saw to me, Cordelia,” I whispered. “Read me what else Jesus said.”
And ye now therefore have grief; but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no one takes from you.
My breaths were like raw edges of fabric, now overlaying one another, searching for a seam.
For the Father himself has affection for you, because ye have had affection for me, and have believed that I came out from God. I came out from the Father and have come into the world; again, I leave the world and go to the Father.
“The afterbirth, only the afterbirth,” one of the women was saying. The regiment of soldiers began to break rank, to wander off.
My son and my daughter were in my arms. I could not talk as the shrinking pain hummed, vocalized in my outgoing breaths. I knew that I was being emptied out.
The sunlight was coming in slits through our walls. Aquila was crying, stroking both children.
I sat up with both children resting on the triangle of my crossed legs. I kissed Tikveh, again and again, and washed her with my tears. Aquila wrapped her stillness with his strong hands in the strips of kidskin we used to make purses for rich people, and then he took her away.
As I lay on the mat beside my son, I wondered at how an unknown universe had been inside me those months. If I could open myself up, I believed, the entire studded night sky would be there, I was sure. And what Tikveh’s bright eyes now saw, was far beyond even galaxies.
I turned onto my side and spat out sea water, and then I fell asleep.
It was evening when I awakened with a pulling on my breast, and saw the boy in the circle of my arm. I looked up and knew Cordelia had put him there, and sure enough, she sat nearby on the bench. She came to me and put a pillow behind my head and pulled my matted hair onto it. She drew a comb from a bag.
Wordless, she began to comb my hair: first the surface snags, working them out so as not to break a single hair, then combing deeper, drawing strands out onto the pillow and my shoulders like a shawl.
“I was thinking, Cordelia.”
“Yes.”
“About Mary, and the birth of Jesus.”
“Yes.”
“How she did not have to go through her labor in front of people.”
“Yes.”
“At the inn, I mean. Where there was no room. Where everyone was crowded in, the criminals and rough men who had nowhere else to stay.”
“Yes.”
“How gracious God was, to keep her from their eyes, to give her privacy, so far from her home and the women who would have helped her.”
“Yes.”
“I never thanked God for that.”
“Yes.”
I fell asleep.
Once I awakened. It was just before nightfall, and I saw Cordelia rocking in silent grief, cradling my baby, holding my child atop her own.
For more information, see The Mormon Mirage 3rd Edition: A Former Member Looks at the Mormon Church Today(Zondervan, 2009). Also available as an audiobook and as an expanded-text E-book for Nook, Kindle and other reading devices.
