The Line of the Cross (part 3)

The next day, Riolin and Laedril came without her. Both of them walked slowly, their heads hung. The tree’s sap ran cold, and it asked what was the matter.

“The sword of summer begins to cut us all,” Riolin said. “The time is short, even as men reckon it; the time from Easter until Samhain is a moment’s whisper to the Faire Folk.” He paused. “Eärdressa…” He stopped, throat dry.

Laedril put a hand on his shoulder. “Middle-child, oldest of the common Folk and youngest of the wise, lovely elf-maiden of the See, has been chosen as the Tithe.”

There was little time to waste. The months were already breathing down their necks. Riolin and Laedril cried. Eärdressa came later that night and smiled sadly at the tree, dressed in a pale shroud. She said nothing. But the tree had an idea.

The tree turned its attention to itself. Perhaps it prayed. When its first leaf fell, it put its plan into action.

The sun set, and the tree’s leaves took on a fiery hue. The four friends were gathered. “Why did you call us?” Riolin asked.

The tree only said, “Close your eyes.” They did. The tree reached within, and tore out its own heart, leaving it on the ground. “Now.” The tree’s friends opened their eyes, and gasped as they saw the hole rent in the tree’s trunk.

“Eärdressa. Riolin. Laedril.” It called them by name. “Hide inside me.” They looked to each other, then crawled into the tree. It seemed to them to have become a portal into heaven.

The night came on in full, and boggarts and bean-sidhe and sadist-smiling leprechauns and all manner of Unseelies crawled out of the shadows. Endlings crawled right up to the tree itself.

“The sacrifice, the sacrifice,” they said. “The tithe. Where is it?”

“What value is faerie flesh and faerie blood?” the tree asked. “I offer you wooden flesh and running sap, the bones of the earth and memories of the third day. You know that three is a number of power. My heart is your tithe.” It pointed to the wooden heart on the ground. “Take it.”

They all turned to look at the one who was leading them: a Deeping pixie, whose eyes seemed to absorb all light. The pixie nodded. Like wolves running across a night sky they descended, grabbing the tree’s heart in their hands and tossing it back and forth between them like children. They did not notice as it burned their hands.

The Unseelie had a revelry then, dancing and screaming and hissing like snakes. The little Deeping pixie flew high into the air, his fist raised in rude defiance against the stars. But when midnight came—when the blackest was thickest, what should have been their hour—the Samhain night became the day of Saints. And all who had touched the tree’s heart with evil intent gasped, and wretched, and were undone. The tree covered the hole with branches, protecting its hiding friends from the sounds of their screams.

When it was done, they walked out of the tree, trembling but safe.

A Man was standing in the field. The faeries bowed to Him, but the tree did not recognize Him. He walked forward, smiling gently and placing His Hand on its trunk.

“I can never forget the feel of this wood on my back,” He said.

“Your back, sir?” the tree asked.

“It is good wood, strong and hard. It was rough and drank my blood. That was your mother tree, it was—many have come between you and her, but you are her son truly. You proved that tonight, protecting the ones you loved from a tithe that should never be paid and taking the price on yourself.”

“Lord?” the tree whispered. “I do not understand.”

He kissed the tree. “Actually, I think you do.”

He healed the scar and turned to the heart. He knelt and placed His hand on it, and it became a second tree like the first. The trees saw each other and fell in love. Then the Man turned towards the first tree and smiled. He reached out His Hands again (the tree saw the scars there) and reshaped the tree in memorial of what he had done. Three branches grew from the one trunk.

Then He made Eärdressa, Riolin, and Laedril lords of the Fair. And that tree endured, and the pact between that tree and the faerie lasted forever. Even the Unseelie would come and awe at it, for that tree had carried the touch of love in its wood for generations, to demonstrate it to them.

To this night, each spring the Courts come and revel in front of that tree, and the hole that is a testament to love and friendship, where the faerie captives hid from hell, can still be seen.

And in the morning, the faeries leave.

Both trees still stand, still in love with each other. They cast shade that gives rest to all who stay there.

And a girl, with her Bible and her little book, relaxes under them, reading and studying and worshiping the Three-in-One God.

The Line of the Cross (part 2)

Every day the parson would come, and every day the fruit would tremble as they wanted to believe something they did not understand. They asked the tree questions it did not know the answer to. So the fruit listened, and wondered. Until the war came, and the fires burned down the church with the parson still inside, and the tree was hewn down. One fruit escaped, however, and the seed took root and grew. When it bore fruit, it tried to tell them of the parson, and teach them what he had said, but the tree did not understand, and the fruit’s memory was a jumble of half-understood whispers and engrained memories of the mother tree.

----

History repeats itself, and fruit merchants would pick and sell the fruit, shipping it half-across the country as new technologies and new paths to the West opened up, farther and farther away from the rising of the sun. That line of trees spread, and the memories of trees are longer than the memories of man. So it was that one young tree was planted in a field, and thought every day of the parson, and wondered what the meaning of his words were. The tree would dream of such things, confused and twisting images in its poor little tree-mind, and every dream would be haunted by the whispers:

“We have killed love.”

The tree would ponder these things, and wanted to believe, but would pass each day in confusion and longing.

The first of March approached. The first refrains of Spring’s song could just be heard, and the earth began to wake up. The Folk walked out of their tunnels and mounds, and found the tree. The pixies squealed in delight and raced to climb its branches. Wisps and sprites flew to the top, curious.

The tree watched as the court parted, glory preceding from them as one of their wise ones came forward. She had no eyes, but could see, and she touched the wood of the tree. “This tree,” she said, “is of a line we have not seen here. There is something special in its wood, in its memory. This tree has touched Love.” She turned to her king and bowed. The Seelie Court had found its new center.

Each night that spring, the wisps and the pixies and the faeries and the elves would come and hold their court before that tree, resting in its shade and playing in its branches were no men could see. The wiser of the fey would sit and speak with the tree, learning what they could.

“Why ask me questions?” the tree asked. “I am a young tree, and some of you are old as the bones of the earth itself.”

One elderly wise fey stroked his chin, and pebbles and leaves fell from his beard. “I remember,” he said, “first opening my eyes in the mud, taking my first breath as the deluge waters subsided. And there are those who are older than I. Still, all dwarrow know that wisdom upholds the earth, and the bones of mountains and forests still remember something of the between times of the second and third days. If we hold our own young among the wise, then surely, little baby tree, we can learn something from you.” He turned, indicating an elf maid with his hand. “This lass here, we call her Middle-child, for that is what she is—there are fey elder than she, and fey younger, but no fey the same age. She is one of the youngest of the wise, but we count her among our number.”

The elf-maid bowed. She did not look away from the tree, not even as they all feasted and supped, and remained when the other faeries left. “You,” she said, “are a good tree. I believe this.”

“I have little wisdom to teach you,” the tree said.

“Who said anything about wisdom?” she replied. “I have my fill of all the wisdom I need every day. I have little friends.”

“Friend, Middle-child?”

She put her finger on her lips, shushing him. “My name is Eärdressa.”

The tree thought. “Why didn’t the other wise call you by name?”

“They do not know it,” she answered simply. And then she was gone.

She came back the next morning, holding the hand of another elf. “This is my friend,” she said, bowing politely before the tree. “You may call him Starbrow, because of the way his eyes shine.”

Starbrow smiled. “Middle-child speaks highly of you, tree.”

“And she rarely speaks at all,” said a third voice, surprising the tree. A third faerie appeared in its branches, making itself visible. “I am Laedril, friend tree.”

Eärdressa looked surprised. “Laedril?”

“What?” He shrugged. “You gave him your name. That’s good enough.”

Eärdressa looked to Starbrow. He nodded. “Laedril is right.” He turned to the tree. “Forgive me, friend. My name is Riolin. Eärdressa and Laedril are the only ones who know it, so pardon me if I’m not used to giving it out so soon. But as Laedril says, Eärdressa trusts you to know her name, and she is counted wise. Riolin I shall be.”

And so they were bound, by trust and by names, the four of them. And the three fey would come every day, when the rest of the fey were still sleeping, and rest in the tree’s branches, speaking with it and with each other of matters great and small. And the tree would ask many questions on love. Eärdressa considered it. “Tell me what you think love is,” she prompted. And the tree told its half-memories of the parson’s teaching.

“But it makes no sense to me,” the tree said.

She jumped to the ground, tracing symbols in the dirt with her finger as she thought. “It will not be real to you,” she decided, “until you do it.”

“Can I love,” the tree asked, “and not know what love is?”

“What is love?” Eärdressa asked. “What is goodness, or beauty? Are they lies, or truth? What is God? You’d think that if anyone in creation knows, it would be the faeries. But we are a curiously amoral lot. And the Folk have their own difficulties.”

The tree thought she sounded sad, but the moment passed.

The next day, they did not come. The tree began to worry.

The Line of the Cross (part 1)

“Speak not to us of love,” the tree said. “For love is gone, we have killed love. There’s no such thing as love.”

The parson, with his Bible and his little book, walked through the yard on the cool spring day, choosing his favorite tree and relaxing in its shade. Sitting down, he opened his Bible and began to read.

Overhead, the fruit hanging from the tree’s branches looked down, reading over his shoulder. But the tree pulled back, so that the fruit could not see. “Be still, my children,” the tree said to its fruit, “and pay no attention. For love is gone, we have killed love. There’s no such thing as love.”

----

This is the generation of that tree, and how it came to be planted in that place. The mother tree, her roots digging deep, was cut down by the soldiers. And her fruit fell to the ground, crying—for she had been a good mother. Before their eyes, the mother-tree was chopped down, and hewn into boards, and assembled together in the shape of a cross.

“Why cut down our mother?” the fruit asked. But the soldiers did not answer. The wooden beams that had been their mother was laid on the shoulders of a Man, and the fruit watched Him die. They were young, and did not understand, but this they knew—their mother was gone. And deep within, they understood that love was dying. Thus, their love for their mother faded—or so they thought. But love was not dead, and would rise again; and their love for their mother ruled the secret places in their hearts.

So the fruit rotted, and their seeds took root in the soil and sprung up, becoming new trees. And as they bore fruit, they would tell their children, “Love is gone, we have killed love. There’s no such thing as love.”

Those fruit were picked, and eaten, and those seeds planted. And when they grew into trees, they remembered what their parents had told them, saying to their own fruit:

“Love is gone, we have killed love. There’s no such thing as love.”

So it went on, the trees teaching their fruit this phrase, and being passed on from seed to seed. As time passed further on, the fruit would ask the trees more questions, but the trees could not answer, for they did not know. They could only repeat what they had been told when they were fruit themselves, and the reasons of how and why were lost to that line of trees.

----

The trees would be cut down, and new trees would grow in their places, and the number of years passed grew. Empires died that the trees outlived, passing on their knowledge and stories to their fruit. The fruit of that line was desirable, pleasing to the eyes and good for food, and so the fruit was picked and sold in the market places, the seeds spreading. The line of those trees spread across Europa, separated by time and distance but bound by wood and chlorophyll and roots—half-remembered fever dreams of an ancient and loved mother-tree that even now the great-great-great-great-great-descendants of her fruit mourned.

----

It so happened that eventually, a merchant passed by where several of the trees had taken root, and picked the fruit and sold it. The fruit was bought by a captain who was setting in order everything for his party’s expedition. They needed supplies—food, water, raiment—and thus the fruit crossed the ocean and into the New World. It was a hard winter that year, and the stores were low. The soil was fertilized with buried bodies, but the crush of winter’s hammer was heavy, killing man and tree alike. But winter is not eternal, and the colony survived. Most of the line died that winter, but a few seeds took root and became trees that grew and lasted for years, always enduring, always teaching their fruit what they had been taught before.

There was a little girl who was hungry, and her father gave her fruit. She ate it, and planted the seed in a secret place in the field that only she knew.

And that was how that tree came to be there, and the parson would come every day with his Bible and his little book and study under the tree.

----

The tree would lean back, pulling its fruit away, but every day the parson would come—doing his devotions, praying, reading aloud, writing his sermons. And the fruit heard it. They heard it all.

But what would trees know of shed blood and incarnated flesh?

Death's Victory

Hi. I’m Death. No, really.

I’m older than you think I am. Seriously. The reputation I get is so bad now, you’d think I was born when Eve bit the apple. Or whatever kind of fruit it was; it’s been so long I can’t remember. Anyways. People forget that the Tree of Life was there before the Fall. Even without sin, man wasn’t going to live forever yet. He had the chance to, sure, but part of being human is being mortal. It’s what makes you what you are.

So, when He first breathed His Breath into Adam and Adam became a living soul, I was part of the deal.

It’s different with things like us. By “us” I mean, you know, those non-physical things that you can’t see or touch and all the rest. Our creations are more off-stage. You don’t see them in Genesis 1 the way you see the physical things being made. So while He shouted out the physical, He whispered us. So there, as He was making Adam and breathing that new, unique and incomprehensible life that only Man has, I felt myself being made alongside. He stroked my invisible head, as it were, and warned me not to take things too personally. Then He called me by name. “Death,” He called me. And Death I am.

I was sad when Adam and Eve fell, really I was. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d eaten from the Tree of Life at all. But they didn’t. I waited a long time, but after a little more than 900 years, it was time. I took my time with everyone back then, thinking I was doing them a favor. But longer life is more opportunity to sin, it seems, or at least back in those days. I don’t know about now. So when things got so bad that the Lord was weeping, I was ready. I swept over the globe, surfing the flood waters, taking both man and beast that hadn’t boarded the ark. When it was done, I cried. I cried a lot. But it was okay, because He was crying too.

So, after that I just tried to look at it like a job. People live, and they live for as long as they’re made to, and then, well… me. It’s like I say, every time some asks “why now?”: You get a lifetime, same as everyone else. No more, no less. But then everyone was afraid of me. Self-preservation instinct, or something? I don’t know why. Like I said, being human equals being mortal. Tolkien got it. Really, all fallen and sinful like that? Without me the world would have been tragic. I think He knew that too, and that’s why He kicked them out of Eden, to keep them away from the other Tree. But then…

It was a long time, you know? No one knew when it was going to end, not even me. And I was getting so tired of it all. It was a hard job, keeping tabs on every one alive like that. Exhausting is bad enough, but when you add “thank-less” to that, it’s unbearable if you think about it too much. So I didn’t think about it. I happen. That’s it. I settled into a routine and carried on. When someone was born, I’d be there, and He’d tell me how long, or how, and I’d just know. Then I’d come back at the right time.

At every birth, I was there.

So I knew. I knew. I felt it. Even the physical world knew, so on my end, you couldn’t miss it. Now, I’m confined to the sphere of the Earth, and I don’t see much of the area beyond it. But when He came down into it, you couldn’t miss it on our side. Like a fire, He was, coming down—you’d think the world was about to burn from the spirit-side-in. But it didn’t. I don’t know how He did it, but suddenly He was human. Or Human, I should say. I felt Him being born. So even before I got to Bethlehem I was already sweating bullets. Oh no. No. No no no no no no. NO. It couldn’t be. It didn’t make sense.

I got to Bethlehem and knelt before His cradle. It was Him, I knew, but it was hard to believe. Here, this little pink and screaming ball of flesh, the same as every other baby I had ever seen (which is all of them)—the Lord? My Lord? I had heard that voice before; it had called me “Death” and I was. Now that same voice, reduced to the screaming wails of a wet and hungry infant.

He was. I could smell Him, feel His heart beating like every other heart ever beat, heard His lungs pumping like every other lung ever pumped. And I, the stopper of hearts and lungs and brain impulses,… it couldn’t be. This was God. He couldn’t die. But He could. I knew He could. I’m Death. I know these things.

With His little baby hand, He patted me on the head the way His Father had those years before in Eden, and whispered my name comfortingly. Then He cried, like all babies cry. And I cried like a baby, too.

He told me to stay in Bethlehem while He escaped. I did. That day…. I’m sorry, I can’t talk about that day. Suffice it to say, It had ceased to be just a job.

Fast-forward. Friday. I… I… I saw the blood pouring from every sweat gland, and they hadn’t even found Him yet. “If it be possible,” He prayed, and I prayed right there with Him. I wanted with all I was to be somewhere else, anywhere else. But I had to stay for the whole thing. With each blow I felt Him coming closer to me. I wanted to run, to simply say, “NO!” and not take Him. I’m Death. What if Death wasn’t there, huh? What then? But I didn’t dare.

He hung there on that cross, pouring and dripping like so much meat, and I still didn’t want to believe it was Him. It’s not like there hadn’t been other crucifixions before. I should be able to handle this. But this was Him. There He was, God-in-flesh, wholly Man. And humanity equals mortality.

I hemmed and hawed and delayed as long as I could. Then I took Him. He was dead. For the first time, I wished that Death were someone else. I pulled Him to me like a mother hiding her child, and I screamed and cried. I kissed His forehead where the thorns had pierced, and wrapped my arms around Him, feeling the hole in His side. He hugged me, and it tickled when my hair went into the holes in His palms. I rocked back and forth all Saturday, holding Him and wanting to let Him go but not daring, curled up in a fetal position and only kept sane from His touch. He didn’t say anything, but He didn’t need to. I knew He understood, and that was enough comfort.

Then, slowly, He drew away. I gasped and reflexively tried to hold Him, but He was too strong. He smiled and began to glow. Then I realized what was happening and let go, laughing. I watched as His body coloured and heard the heart and lungs pumping, and knew nothing would ever stop them from pumping. I was undone. He was too strong for me to hold Him, and I was never happier.

“Oh Death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?”

Every so often I go back to that tomb and see it empty, and remember. This is my victory: my defeat by Him. And now for those who trust Him, I have become the Door by which they go to Him. That’s not so bad. Pretty darn good, even.

He submitted to me, and by that He conquered me. No, not conquered—subsumed. “Sweet death,” I’ve been called, “beautiful death.” Maybe. But in my heart, I’ll always be His death. There is nothing sweeter or more beautiful. I cling to that old rugged cross. I’m not stupid. Whenever they stare at the cross and remember me, it’s not me, not lil’ ol’ Death they love. They’re looking past the cross and past me to Him behind us. He’s the reason why it’s called “Good Friday,” really. Celebrating lil’ ol’ Death? Death is undone; I am nothing without Him. But then, none of us are.

So now I wait. Because when He comes back, even the endless things will end. A new universe, and He said that there would be no more Death. I can’t wait, you know? No Death. I’ll finally get to join Him in that rest He started on the seventh day. That’s all we really want, isn’t it? To rest.

Oh, for that new Heaven and new Earth… my Sabbath.

Well, I’ve said enough.

See you soon.

Brush-Strokes: A New Exhibit

Here in this foolish, flawed frame of Hell,
We fell and felt the fall,
Not mindful that we were made
With the widest of brush strokes.
Is it the frame or the painting that shows the value of the piece?

Within this black, cracked square
Of rat-eaten rotten wood
Is contained a canvas coloured
With all the marvels of twilight.
The artist displays the piece---
---Is it art?

The brush-strokes reveal the beauty
Of the design, defined by the divinely inspired desires
Of the artist, and
This wretched wooden frame
Frames the beauty and contains it.
The colours and the canvas encased in corruption:
The picture-frame and the painting are together one piece.
The eye takes them both in---

---Is it art?