The Holy Innocents

I dream myself as Moses this time, as the year comes ‘round again.  Moses is a different dream, one I cannot recall having had previously.  In the dream, I am triumphantly leading from Egypt those holy innocents who had been passed over by the Angel of Death, their lives saved by the blood of the lamb.  I do not, as is more customary, dream myself a witness to the slaughter of those countless other lambs, the children of Israel, in the days following the birth of Christ Jesus, their blood flowing in a wailing sacrifice, a vain attempt of a vain king to prevent his defeat by the Prince of Peace.  Nor do I dream myself cast as a companion in the flames to Shadrich, Misrach and Abdenago, consumed unlike them, my faith found wanting, wavering in the moment of judgment, my failure flattering to the vanity of Nabuchodonosor and his pagan idols.

No, it is as Moses that I lead the innocent on their Exodus, vouchsafed a vision of a promised land that I will never enter, though I wander the desert for forty years in search of it.  Rather than parting the waters, God parts the flames of our testing, that they may march forth from them—Benoit, Anne, Hugh, Jean, Mathilde, Remi, Mary, Simon, Wilfred, Guibert, Hildebert, Judith. Charles, Renaud, Arnaud, Richilde; poor, dead Theodatus, soon to be exhumed and desecrated; behind and exhorting them all Etienne and Lisois; and, stretching into the shroud of memory the countless others, some with names famous to all and others who died as unknown as I will die.  God parts the flames and then He parts the walls of the proud city, its king, his allies and his adversaries, some called holy men, vanquished as were Nabuchodonosor and his idols by the piety of those facing the flames.

And why not?  Moses is, in some ways, my mirror image.  Born of royal blood, I was adopted and raised by a commoner, raised to farm and be part of a family, to perpetuate the cycle of birth and death, fecundity and sterility.  Yet my birth marked me and I entered into the church, escaping destitution and the crudity of my mother’s life, awakened by the knowledge of letters and texts, embraced within the bosom of the Church to serve her, and to serve her patrons, and so to become a witness to the struggles over who exactly was serving whom.  Then, granted a vision of my own, I fell afoul of my Church but, for reasons to be revealed, was not destroyed rather cast in, as it were, an ark, sealed in these monasteries I have encountered in my forty years of wandering, wondering whether there is a promised land for me.

This, then, is my dream as the year comes to a close.  It wakes me as such dreams always do, filling me with dread purpose.  That I should someday die forgotten is just.  But that they should pass from human memory unremarked ranks as sin.  For they were remarkable, those men and women with whom I broke bread and explored the truths of scripture and the world.  Unafraid to face matters others considered best left unspoken, willing to risk temporal and eternal damnation for what would be viewed as their sins, they sought only after truth and to know the mind of God on its own terms.  What each found is known only to them, and they took their insights and their visions to the grave, their scant writings burned along with them.  Wretched memory could never contain all that they knew, but it does encompass them, and that immortality I can seek for them.