the mikvah after touching that girl? The crowd outside the house had informed Peter of the girl’s —woman’s—condition. He knew he worried about too many things for Yeshua’s sake, but really, there needed to be no controversy about this, about whether or not she was a full woman, in her unclean state. Yeshua had already caused enough consternation healing a man’s hand on the Sabbath, and now this had happened at the house of a Pharisee! If his Lord kept doing these healings there would be trouble with the authorities. He turned to see John behind him, looking back at the house. What he saw was Yeshua’s favorite exchanging looks with that girl.
John, however, trailed like a straying and distracted sheep. He glanced up at the hard blue sky, feeling the dryness of the last several weeks in his mouth. He looked again at the group of three moving away from him, then glanced again at the house. Aviel’s house was quiet, impressed upon his mind. He came along tighter to the others, falling in and listening as Yeshua talked.
As the four of them walked back out of the town, a young man in a robe covering caved-in shoulders skulked near by, hovered, and when Yeshua passed nearby he spat at the healer, turned, and ran. A neighborhood boy cried out and chased the man, throwing a few stones at him, while some other villagers standing in doorways as Yeshua moved past said out loud, “Don’t mind him.” “We know the good works you come to do—we see! Never mind the crazies.” James came a little closer as they walked and spoke in low tones into Yeshua’s ear. Yeshua’s mouth turned up at the corner, and he looked sideways at his brother as they padded through the dust. They needed rain.
When Yeshua spoke again, his words swam over John, seining in the disciple’s loose ends, pulling his heart back to the feel of the group. John’s elation rose, filling like a balloon made of papyrus sheaf and filled with hot air from a delicate light lit underneath. It floated up into the deepening Galilean dusk. Still, he couldn’t forget the young woman he had just seen. Coming up close beside Peter he found comfort in his large presence. Not wanting to betray the light of interest in Aviel that flickered in him, he nonetheless felt compelled to get any information he could about her.
“Did Yeshua know Jairus from before that Sabbath we came through Capernaum?”
Peter looked sideways at him.
“I don’t know—but I don’t think so. Does he interest you?”
“I am still stunned by some of the things Yeshua says and does,” John hedged. “I wonder about the family. I wonder how what Yeshua does affects them later. Especially the women. The young woman—what was her name?”
“Aviel, he told me.”
“Yes, Aviel, that’s right, I heard her mother. Aviel—what will her life be after what Yeshua has done for her? What becomes of these people whom Yeshua touches in the ways he does?”
Peter only shook his head. His concern was less with the people Yeshua healed than with how the healings had an impact on Yeshua’s message and mission. As a whole, the disciples had become as accustomed to the miracles as any human being could, but still, doubt would ripple through them on occasion. Apparently John had been more affected by this one than some of the others. At least, that was what he hoped was the cause for John’s interest.
They had come to a stopping place for the evening near the lake once again, and the followers that had adhered to them once they left Capernaum began to find places in small groups to lie down for the night. This time lack of rain was in their favor, so they had decided not to go all the way to Nazareth that day; they would have enough time to arrive by sundown for the next day.
The disciples placed their blankets on the dry ground and began to pull out the wine and water skins and the bread that had been patted flat by women’s hands and baked on the large inverted metal ovals used for baking. Having said the blessings for wine and bread, and only sprinkling droplets of water in lieu of fully washing their hands because water was so scarce, they tore off and chewed the thin, crusty pieces, added a few olives, and washed it all down with the wine. Once the simple meal was concluded they began to chant the Hebrew thanksgiving prayers, and this easily continued for an hour. Their song carried out across the water on the dying wind as the stars began to appear in a crystalline cool sky.
Reclining on his blanket, John looked up at the evening star and laid his head on James’ shoulder. He felt his brother’s breathing, his chest rising and falling, and he wondered if the young woman to whom he had been so drawn was rejoicing in seeing the stars again after so nearly dying.
That night, John dreamed of blood washing up on the shore of the lake as a wind whipped the blood-water into a pink froth. Fish beached by the thousands, and scores of lepers, demoniacs, cripples, people with every kind of disease, came to gather the fish, throwing them in the air and catching them with their mouths, then eating them. Yeshua and Aviel loomed large together, coming down out of black billowing clouds, Aviel clothed only from the waist down in exotic foreign yellow silk, and her long hair. Yeshua disappeared; Aviel settled near John, stars all around her, as he lay like stone, unable to move, on the beach. Then, feeling himself between his legs, he woke throbbing in the early dawn. The sense of her in the dream stayed close with him throughout the morning as the group continued moving and talking alternately of the old prophets and the political situation on the way to Yeshua’s home town.
5
Madison, Wisconsin
“Oh for chrissake!” Back in her apartment in Madison, Anna slammed shut the laptop and turned to the cat, who had just about figured out the rudiments of speech. “What good does it possibly do to be ‘saved’ if you’re so depressed you fall over your own feet?”
Anna kicked the cat’s green jingle play-ball and swept away some coffee cups and crumpled papers from her third-floor apartment desk as she continued to spout off about the e-mail from her high school girl friend Paula. Like her thoughts, Anna’s personal belongings took on a whirlwind life of their own. She was a pigpen unto herself.
“Anti-depressants, maybe? Therapy? Ya think? Might help a little. Why is it so many Christians have this disconnect between what they say they believe and how they conduct their lives? It’s as if once they’re saved, people expect Jesus to do all the work for them. Don’t they realize they’re creators within their own lives? I mean, if they can accept that Newton’s laws of physics work to keep their feet on the ground,” and here she paused in her tirade to make sure the cat was still listening, “why can’t they accept that the new laws of physics might actually work too, in terms of how their thoughts affect their lives? The observer has an affect on what is observed! The metaphor is so elemental! It’s not like if you say you have the power to create a lot in your own life that there isn’t room for Jesus anymore. Or like saying that you’re actually God. If God had meant us to fly he’d have given us wings, right? So goes the thinking. Man. People need to get help. Like psychotherapy, for example. Understanding how quantum physics works is a tool, just like therapy and medication and surgery are tools. God gave it all to us.”
If pressed here, she couldn’t have given a concise set of her beliefs about God, but she continued on her private rant. “That includes the ability to think creatively and positively. Which is something you’re definitely not capable of,” she said to the cat. The cat, if he had been able to think, would have wondered about the contents of the offending e-mail.
Anna shoved back her chair and headed for the shower. She didn’t really expect an answer from the cat, who showed large incisors in a yawn while stretching out a paw in her direction, but she had gotten so used to talking to herself out loud that she didn’t worry anymore about her sanity. The cat certainly didn’t seem to be a cocreator in his reality. After all, his brain was only the size of a tennis ball, so how much processing capacity
