at the right hand of God the Father. Me, I don’t pretend to know what really happened that day, even though I was there, flying with him in my dove form as far as I could go until he walked through the Beautiful Gates of the Temple of Jerusalem and disappeared.
Yes, disappeared—because he is not apparent. Not to me. He is no longer here in the flesh, resurrection or no resurrection. And I miss him. Terribly. In my flesh. And it is all so confusing. Am I a widow? I don’t even know. Never mind how terrified and grief-stricken the men were at first, now they have decided it is bad form to mourn when there’s been a miracle and all the prophecies have been fulfilled. Still, no one has found a way to stop me from throwing up on a daily basis. There, that’s better. I think I’ll just lean back for a few minutes and rest.
“Mary!” Mary B called me Mary, as do most Jews. Ma started it; the angels got my name wrong. It’s not my fault that no one can keep all the Marys straight.
“Mary, just leave me alone for a minute,” I murmured. “I’ll be all right.”
“You are obviously not all right.” Her bony knees cracked as she squatted next to me and tucked a loose strand of my bright hair back under my head scarf, her touch more tender than her tone. “You’ve missed another meeting.”
“Why do we have to have so many meetings, Mary?” I complained. “We never used to have meetings. We had parties.”
“Come on, get up, Mary,” she ordered me, and she put her hands—very large for a woman’s—under my arms and helped me to my feet. “You can’t sit here in the alley next to your vomit, like some drunken….” She stopped herself before she could say whore. “It’s not seemly. If you don’t care about yourself, think about him.” I won’t bother to capitalize; we all know what him she meant. “He would hate to see you like this.”
“Well, he’s not here.” I snapped.
Mary B grabbed both my shoulders and turned me towards her, her eyes black and fierce as when I first met her one moonlit night in Bethany.
“How can you say that?” she demanded. “How can you of all people, say that!”
I didn’t answer; I know a rhetorical question when I hear one. It always means there’s more coming. I was too tired to resist.
“Don’t you remember what you said the morning he went on before us?” Notice her careful phrasing. “Peter asked where the Master went. What did you say to him?”
Mary B knew as well as I did, but that was not the point. This austere woman who knew the Torah by heart, who had patiently and impatiently explained to me all the fine points of the Law whenever my beloved held a debate, she was as vulnerable as a child. She needed me to tell her the story again—and not change one word.
“I said: ‘He’s here.’” And I gestured as widely as I could in the narrow alley, a gesture more dramatic in the Kedron Valley where we had been at the time. “And here.” I touched Mary’s heart. “And here.” My hands came to rest on my own.
Her eyes were shining now, the way eyes do when tears stand in them.
“And what did he say?” she prompted.
“When?”
“You know. Just before he left.” Her exasperation with me was familiar and comforting, part of the story.
“He said: Love is as strong as death.”
“And?” She scowled at me.
“And he said: If you don’t remember, ask her. Maeve of Magdala knows.”
“There!” she said as triumphant as if she had just bested the chief Pharisee in an argument. “That is why you have to be present at the meetings, Maeve. He doesn’t want everything left to Peter and the men. He wants you to speak for him.”
She took my arm and started leading me from the alley.
“I’m not sure that’s what he meant,” I fretted. “Anyway, Mary, I don’t understand what exactly it is we are trying to do in these meetings.”
“We meet in his Name. To decide how best to continue his work.”
“What? Healing people? Loving people?”
“Well, yes, that of course. But more than that, restoring the house of Israel.”
I was quiet a moment. “I don’t know if I am welcome in that house, Mary.”
“That is one of the questions under debate. Whether Jesus’s message is for Jews and proselytes only. You have a duty to speak, Mary. You were his wife.”
I noticed she used the past tense this time. It was confusing. He wants you to speak for him. You were his wife.
“But I wasn’t given the gift of other tongues,” I reminded her.
In case you are wondering where I was when the tongues of fire ignited the apostles, turning them multi-lingual in a flash, I was in the same alley. I did see the men spilling out onto the street, jabbering and staggering, laughing wildly, rushing up to strangers on the street. The word on the street is they were drunk, despite the early hour.
“You already speak five languages,” Mary countered.
“Not particularly useful ones,” I objected. “Lots of people speak Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. It has not been given to me to speak the languages of Parthians, Medes, and Elamites. And almost no one in Jerusalem speaks the Celtic dialects I know.”
Mary didn’t bother answering, just stepped up her pace and kept a firm grip on my arm.
“Where are we going?” I changed tack.
“Peter is going to preach at Solomon’s Portico.”
“But I’m hungry,” I protested. “I need to eat something.”
“Mary, you were just sick. Don’t you think you should give your stomach a little rest? It seems as if all you do lately is eat and throw up and sleep. You’re not yourself at all. I wonder if you have worms,” she speculated with as much curiosity as distaste.
I could almost hear her brain sifting through Leviticus for advice in such a case. The Most High concerned himself with minute details of diet and health. He not only numbered the hairs on your head but he knew if you had dandruff and what to do about it.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just a little overwrought.”
Mary B still hadn’t guessed my condition. No one had, so far as I knew. I wanted to keep it that way for as long as I could. A secret that only I knew. A secret that I contained. Literally.
No matter how many times I’ve approached it, the Temple of Jerusalem always takes me aback. As you emerge from the warren-like streets with their pungent smells and donkey-cart jams and behold the vast southern steps, your sense of scale changes. All at once you are tiny, something to be swept away or crushed should that be the will of the invisible god who lives in the empty chamber at the Temple’s heart where only the High Priest enters once a year. But if you are accustomed to thinking of a temple as some place hushed and removed from the fray
