Bethlehem

Wife

The way that the rainstorm can turn sideways and knock me off my feet is the way that he came into my room that night.

I had felt vulnerable all that day. Joseph seemed to forget me. He didn’t see me. We were going about the business of managing the farm. Feed the chickens. Feed the goats. Manage the wheat. Fill the cart and drive the mule, moving the crops from the fields into the barn. It was an ordinary day. The sun climbed slowly up into heaven and seemed to sit there over us, melting us. I felt naked with my clothing rendering to my skin. We moved through the heat and finished our chores. As if the chores were ever finished, we still made the moves and the motions to keep the wheels of the farm turning like the dry rotted cart that we used mercilessly until it seemed the sun would crack it into kindling.

I felt like kindling, but Joseph only saw me as the beast from the same species as the mule or the geese or the hens. He was a beast, too. An ox. A bull. A thing that pulled and pushed and turned his shoulder into the work. We were this way even when the wind and the rain came. It wasn’t a cool rain. It was like the sweat of the sky sent to marry with the ache of our arms and legs. It was work. We labored this farm from the first breath of the sun until its death at night. Long days equalled black nights. Even the sky, packed with stars, didn’t light us enough to keep us awake. We slept and dreamed of the work until the morning when the dreams became the crow’s call and the rooster’s song and the calves in their pens, trembling themselves awake.

But the night of the day when I felt invisible was not so easily forfeited to sleep. I was awake in my bed. The shutters flew open and I saw a face before I saw the body. I knew that the room was my body. And that my mind was the shutters, slamming open and closed like a drum loud in your ear, too close to find its rhythm. A sound like torture.

The face was a thought that I could not keep out of my imagination. It was a perpetual thought. It took up space inside of me the way it took up space inside of my bedroom. The face was a man more beautiful than anything my barely used eyes had ever seen on earth or in dreams.

He was forceful and took me like a husband even though my husband slept in the room next door to us. The moment he was inside of me, I could see my own birth. It was painful and frightening, and the whole time the angel (for what else could he be but an angel?), he was with me. I was living as a newborn. My head was dented as I came out of my mother. I felt the blood and the waste cover my body as it hit the fresh air for the first time. I took a breath and screamed. I was terrified but I was alive. “Do not be afraid, Mary. Your womb is blessed by God.” My eyes slowly opened, and I saw his wings fill the open window. I felt alone. It was a new feeling, and I was afraid. I was certain at that moment that I would never feel any other way for the rest of my life.

The unrelenting night eventually led me down the dark tunnel of sleep. I dreamed of childbirth…something I never knew but now knew forever. A feeling I would know for the rest of my days. It was endless, but it slipped into the back of my spirit, hidden in my mind, and became just a dull ache in my womb. I slept this way with the pain like a pillow. I slept with its endless trestle under my body, awake or asleep, alive or dead. It was a succor that would guide me for the rest of my days. I slept almost floating on the dull throb of pain. I would wake up feeling this way, too. Nothing in the day ahead would hurt me as much as this miracle shifting and tumbling inside of me. A blunted soreness. A sharp and gnawing miracle, a miracle nonetheless.

Joseph woke me. He was surprised to see me asleep since I was always the first to leave the room and heat the water for our tea. He shook, and I felt heavier to him. It spread across his face, the awareness that I was not one but two, but his place was in the fields and the furrows and the barn. He was not made to see me as two. I was his virgin wife and his partner on this farm. He shook me and ignored the persistent thought that I was pregnant. But I was, “I am” were my first words to him minutes after I had wrestled away the deep sleep filled with it’s vision of an amorous angel who took me as an innocent and left me to my womanhood.

I stood behind him as he split the bread for me. “I am, my husband.” I took my piece of bread. I ate it with words crowding my mind and my mouth. “Behold, husband Joseph, I am the servant of the Lord, now: let it be to me according to your word.” He just sat, chewing and drinking from his silver cup, the only thing of value that wasn’t living or dying for food or coins. The cup came to us from a deep hole we needed to fill, but the sun pointed to the cup in the ground. We took the cup and cleaned it and used it daily to drink the clear water from the river that we owned for at least a mile of its sinuous body, slithering over the last quarter of our land.

Joseph’s silence heard me, but he tossed the news off of him and hunched over his meal of cheese and bread and goat’s meat. I moved to my chair and reached for the cup. He would always have enough water for me, but today he held the cup back and slipped the bladder to me so I could drink right from its spout.

“I will work the fields. You will stay here and scour the floors and walls and make bread. Your work is no longer outside, my wife. Do you hear?”

I did. There was no way to protest, although words were shooting into my louth that wanted to counter his commands. But there was no point. He was right. Whatever the angel put inside of me was real and it was already growing, minute by minute, second by second. Labor in the field could never match the labor that I would bear as the fruit of this transcendence. This would be our only fruit as the lemon trees we once kept all died in the vicious stare of the sun.

I wanted to speak, but my husband could not look at me. His shoulders slumped and he headed to the shed to hoist his tool and the tattered cart. He pushed it out into the field and walked toward the barn where our mule slept but roused as he heard Joseph approach. Every living thing on the farm could sense the change in him. It was only the respect of habit that allowed them to follow him, but his power over them was shrunken. He felt the evening, too. His sleep was just as tumultuous as mine.

Husband

The shutters slammed shut on his window as a spirit slipped in through the slats. The spirit held him down and kept him mute. Joseph knew his wife was in trouble. That’s how he felt it. He struggled with the spirit. His arms are strong from hauling hay when it was too hot for the mule to do the work, but even his strength was no match for this immortal creature. The thing was shrouded by shadows that it wore like garments. It was regal in that. He could feel the rain, too, but for Joseph the rain was a lock on the shutters. This room was his jail. He could do nothing as his wife was being violated by God? An angel? A spirit like the one sitting on his chest so heavy that his heart felt pressed beatless against his spine. He was dead, he was sure of it. But the spirit left him, and his heart leapt back into place, slipping into it’s normal thump-thug, thump-thug.

It was hard to work the fields without her, but the mule seemed charged as if last night’s visitors were not limited to the humans on the farm. Every living thing seemed to know the changes in his wife. They all filled in the gaps left by her absence…her change. Everything including the sun seemed to know there was another one on the farm, in the house, inside the wife, stretching itself this way or that, turning her into a mother. They all worked the land and finished with more harvest than if she were alive with them instead of locked into her new obligation.

Days and weeks and months slid down the sides of the mountains far in the distance and rolled like a river into their home. She noted that time was speaking to her, guiding her, whispering about a journey to Bethlehem. The mule knew that his work would change, but he kept at it with Joseph. It wasn’t until she was showing that Joseph took his wife and the supplies they would need for a long journey. He wrote to his older son’s, delivered by his widow from a previous union. James responded and came to the farm with his young family. More hands would be needed since the mule would be gone.

The trip was long, but Hashem was with them the whole way. Every stop was in an inn that had one room left where the windows were secured snugly with shutters of its own. The three of them found sleep after their long journey. Letters from Paul assured that the stumble into winter was met with even more hard work. His children were plenty and all knew the work of the farm. The mule was missed, but seven pairs of hands in all sizes could move the old cart just fine. Joseph’s eldest son, Simon, also climbed down from his meditation and joined the labor. The farm was alive. Joseph felt the pressure of the journey and the buried pain of being cuckold by God, but he was humbled by his sons and their efforts to keep the farm alive for the eventual return of this bastard family.

They visited her cousin who was also pregnant. “Hello Joseph.” Elizabeth was a mirror image of his wife. After a few late evening conversations it was revealed that both women were impregnated in the same way on the same night, the night when the rain moved sideways.

Elizabeth’s husband rarely looked up, but when he did he locked eyes with Joseph. They were the only two men who knew that the nearly born babies, Jesus and John, were impositions on their manhood, but what could they do? It was heaven’s will that stole their own. They were prisoners in this rape of their wives. It was anger that was fruitless for both of them. Zechariah was a man just as Joseph was. Hard working. Loyal. Men who worked the earth or the wood of the trees. Elizabeth’s husband was a carpenter, a job Joseph admired. In fact, he spent time learning the tools and how to use them. Joseph found the work difficult but dignified. He would not live long enough to see his son take over this craft from his second cousin. Trees turned to clean wood and carved into beams from homes or heavy spikes for crucifixion (the streets to Jerusalem were decorated with these deadly warnings to strangers or enemies of the Roman state).

They loaded the burrow and left the mule behind. The donkey had fresh legs and wasn’t bent from years of plowing and hauling the cart. As they said goodbyes, his wife touched Elizabeth’s stomach and Elizabeth did the same to her cousin. Their eyes brimmed with tears. Joy? Pain? Sadness for a future that they both saw that ended in death. Joseph held out a small shoddily carved baby in a manger and placed it in Zechariah’s hand. The two men knew a pain that was invisible to any other eyes but their own. Two blessings. Two babes that would grow up to change the world. The men wanted to weep, but the dust caked in their eyes made that impossible.

Bethlehem

As they began their long walk to Bethlehem from Judea, they followed the old roads, surrounded by Pines and Oaks like the long fingers of God, protecting and guiding the three.

Somewhere far away, three men were gathering gifts to bring to the baby Jesus. They too would travel far to witness the birth of the outcast baby, born in a barn, cuddled by a dry trough. Nothing would drink from the manger tonight. It would be where Mary would place the bloody, crying child. The only other noise was the unstoppable sound of crickets and the laughing doves and the partridges. Nature sang God’s song for them. The wisemen’s gifts leaned into the hay bed where Mary sat alone in many ways.

Joseph found himself standing off to let the other visitors see the miracle. For Joseph, this was the moment when he let go of the crime and gave in to the mystery of the prodigy of love. There was no way he could not love him as his own for wasn’t he? Hadn’t Joseph given as much of his body as his wife? Hadn’t he split himself away from the physical world in order to see this tabernacle of shocked and blessed faces surrounding the transformation of his son from the noisy, trapped baby in his wife’s womb into the Son of God? Joseph touched the silver cup he kept in his pouch. It made no sound, but the new Messiah was a piercing noise in the night.

His cries went up to heaven, and the Angel had led the shepherds from the fields, singing the good news “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” Joseph was a man, and he let the good will of all the angels surrounding the stables pierce his heart. He found his two feet and stood up straight for the first time in months (maybe years). He listened to the songs of nature echoed in the angelic voices that now blanketed the stable like a roof of stars and darkness. He looked at his wife for maybe the first time since their wedding. She was worn to the bone, but she was a blessing that reached out to him with her smile and her glassy wet eyes. She said she loved him with that look, and he mouthed the words to her.

It was the end of their marriage as they had known it. It was the end of her humility. From now on, she was the Mother Mary, the Virgin Mother, and no longer his wife. She was the lover of God. She was His wife and not his. Not Joseph’s. He looked at the babe in the woods and let the dusty tear escape. Soon the sun would show its face, reminding Joseph that his farm would need him especially since they traded a mule for a donkey. The heavy lifting would be his as his wife would raise the child of God, the same God that now entered Joseph and hugged him from the inside out. Alone with himself after God left him, he marveled at the child. He wouldn’t see the boy become a man, but at least he was here to witness the first breath, the first trembling of his new hand. The first smile. The first of everything that even God could no longer say was His. He belonged to everyone gathered here on this crisp cold December night.

Mother

The babe was swaddled and held as Mary laughed with the Angel Gabriel. “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is still with you.” Mary remembered the comfort of Gabriel, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus.” Mary looked to the Angel and remembered. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most high. And as she remembered these words from the night that the rain moved sideways, she held her son tighter, afraid to give him the world. He was his and Mary fed him with her mortal body. Her warm milk nurtured him, nurturing the Son of God. Feeding her son as mothers had been feeding their children for thousands of years since Eve first gave birth in the wilderness outside of Eden. Since the first birth of Cain and then Abel after their parents had been driven from paradise. As she took in a deep breath, she could feel the barn pull tighter around them, a new Eden in this humblest of homes, the first her son would ever know or love. Bethlehem. Praise be to God.

“Praise be to Him,” Mary whispered. “Let Him live forever.” And He did. He surely did.