Woman of the Land: Mary, Mother of The Christ

By Louise Draper Colln

A journey through the life of Mary, from the innocence of childhood to Golgotha. Mary tells her story as her own person: a woman who believes - and doubts - but accepts both the joy and pain of loving. Louise Draper Colln's account of the spiritual and practical life of Mary narrates and makes real the needs and emotions surrounding those ancient events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ideas into Books: Westview
• Release date: Nov 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301350889

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Woman of the Land

Mary, Mother of The Christ

Louise Draper Colln

Copyright 2012 Louise Draper Colln

Published by Westview, Inc. at smashwords.com.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This book is available in print at most on-line retailers.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any fashion, either mechanically or electronically, without the express written permission of the author. Short excerpts may be used with the permission of the author or the publisher for the purposes of media reviews.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Claire Henry, Editor

Nancy Fletcher-Blume, Editor

Laurie Michaud-Kay, Cover Design

Other Books by Louise Draper Colln

Mountain House

A Place For Love

Falling Water Valley

Birdsong Road

This book is dedicated to

Mary

and to everyone I have loved

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all the authors who wrote the many books I read; to all the writers in all the groups I met with; to all the people who were patient, and who shared information and emotion with me in the creation of this book.

A special thanks to Claire Henry, Nancy Fletcher-Blume, Laurie Michaud-Kay and Editor Mary Catharine Nelson who gave freely of their time and support in the final preparation.

Thank you to Mary for her life. I have written her story the way it may have been.

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Questions for Contemplation

One

My first awareness of being was laughter braided with tears. The scene has drifted into the distant caves of my mind, from which it comes forth in the same soft, pearl shaded outlines as a dream I experienced just before waking at first trumpet this sunrise. But it was well over forty-five years ago.

It was a small thing. A young kid had managed to knock away enough stones from the wall of his enclosure to escape into the fields above my father’s farm. The goat and I ran together in the spring sun through a patch of wild grasses while my parents watched and laughed.

Suddenly hooves sounded as a group of soldiers clopped across the hill above us. Horsemen rode before a line of donkeys loaded with sacks of grain and squawking poultry hanging by their feet. They came so close they seemed about to run us down. I ran to my mother’s arms while the goat, bleating in fear, raced past the stone walls of a nearby sheepfold and disappeared beyond it, to the loud enjoyment of the soldiers.

Why do you frighten my daughter and chase my property away? My father shouted. His big doubled fists waved in the air above his red, bearded face.

Sh-h, Mother kept murmuring, as she tugged at his tunic. Joachim, you must not.

Father didn’t bother to brush her hand away, but reached to his side as though wishing to find a sword hanging against the rough wool of his tunic.

The young officer in charge of the supply party turned and halted his horse. He looked at Father more in curiosity than in anger. Who are you? he yelled, to question a Roman supply party?

An Israelite, a son of Abraham, and a former guard at the holy temple, Father shouted back, but a Galilean now, by the grace of Heaven.

And by the grace of the Emperor, the officer called back. It would be wise to never forget that.

He wheeled his horse and waved the party on. The sound of their laughing voices lashed back at us.

And not one who sells the good name of Nazareth by selling services and food to you, Father bellowed impotently after them.

Joachim, hush, Mother pleaded. You mustn’t anger them. And, see, you have made Mariam cry. She held me closer. Even through her roughly woven robe, I could feel her plump body shake.

Take the child to the house, Anna, Father said, still looking at the hill where the supply party had disappeared. I’ll go after the goat.

The rest of it slips away from me. I no longer remember whether or not he recovered the kid. I only remember that on that day it was impressed on my mind that my mother shook with fear when Roman soldiers rode by, and that I was somehow different from other children of Nazareth, because my parents were older and had once lived in Jerusalem.

It is the way of this beautiful land to streak the bitter years of slavery with the joy of living each day in its season, as the lines of darkness pattern the amber wood of our knurled olive trees.

I think of my childhood as happy. I learned to turn the wool from our sheep and the flax from our fields to woven cloth, to sit quietly while Father spoke the morning and evening prayers, and to help feed the fowls and animals, which I knew by name. It was a great satisfaction to me when I became old enough to go alone to the village well for water. With all my duties I was given hours for playing and walking, alone or with my friend Judith.

I used to love to climb the hill behind us and look down on my own whitewashed home. It was built up against the side of the hill, where a cave hollowed out of soft limestone served as a store room and stable for two small donkeys, Ribbon and Little Mouse. The original square of the house had been turned into a rectangle by an open stable where Father’s old horse usually stayed in solitary and lazy aloofness. When the weather was bad the cow and her current calf was brought in from the stone enclosed pasture and the chickens and ducks were shooed in.

I had a special closeness to the birds that filled the sky and fields. Sometimes I felt that I was covered over by hovering wings, a sibilance, a movement in the air above me, though there was never anything visible and even when I stood as tall as I could and stretched my arms straight up, they touched nothing. Yet there was a presence that was as solid to my mind as were the tiny bowls Mother molded for my pretend cooking, to my hands. I would stop my play and stand silently, careful to not move from the warm, protected spot below the tawny realness of the unreal wings. The feeling would soon fade away but the rest of that day would be happy and filled with soft whisperings within myself.

I was especially happy when I was allowed to walk across Nazareth to spend an afternoon playing with Judith and Rebecca. The way to their house was a game I played with myself. Down to the end of the stone wall that kept my father’s curious goats from running wild into the fields and woods; on past the identical wall of the widow Huldah, whose farm joined ours. Sixty steps to the box tree and twice around the tree to say, Hello, to the sparrow, hiding her nest behind its dark little leaves.

I WILL NOT TELL. I WILL NOT TELL. I WILL NOT TELL THE HUNTERS, I sing to it, trying to imitate the repeating sounds of its own song.

One hundred and twenty long steps to the nearest corner of the garden of Eban, the metal worker. Around the square of the garden plot to come out by his workshop and into the street of the artisans, follow this street for more steps than my mother had taught me to count and turn away from the market place, down a street lined with trees. Many, many steps down this narrow lane and the clean smell of cut wood tells me that Judith’s father, Josephus is working in his long carpenter shop and has the front wall open to the street. There will undoubtedly be men sitting beside his workshop talking to him as he and his younger sons work.

But it is not to Josephus that I am to deliver the bundle of herbs I clutch in my hand, but to Adah, the mother. I walk past the men, who ignore me as they should, and around the end of the workshop. Thirty-five steps through the courtyard and into the kitchen through the small side door, rather than the wide one that opens to the workshop.

Adah and Judith are bending together over a group of herbs scattered about the surface of their eating table and fail to hear me come in.

You see, Judith, this is the herb of choice for the unnatural heat of the body that sometimes comes with illness, Adah is saying to Judith and I end the game in my mind to listen to her.

Made into a drink, she went on, it is very bitter and your patient may not want to drink it, but you must insist, for it will make the body sweat, and so throw off the poisons that the heat causes. But you won’t use it in the heat that turns by itself to sweating of heat and shaking of chills. In that case, the sweating seems to be as bad as the heat and often seems to bring the heat back tenfold. You will see this illness often and will have to accept that you can only offer comfort and a soothing drink.

She looked up and straightened her thin body slowly, her hands kneading the muscles of her lower back, through her well-worn tunic. But here is Mariam. And you, Judith, have studied enough today. You may go now and play in the fields with Mariam. Keep your eyes open for the little flowers and plants that help us in our work. What do you have, Mariam?

My mother sends you this bunch of cumin. We found it, this morning, in the fields above our house.

Thank Anna for me. Judith, take Rebecca, and you may play until the sun goes behind the big oak tree.

Rebecca is there already, Mother. Remember, you gave her permission to go with the Hazzan’s children.

Of course. So I did. Go and join them now.

Do you know so much about herbs, now? I asked Judith as we walked across the courtyard of the leader of the synagogue that stood on the high cliff overlooking the town. In the field behind his home Rebecca and his five daughters were already circling with locked hands to a little song they sang. We stopped near them, but didn’t break into the circle.

I must know more, Judith answered. Much more, before I can be a healing woman like my mother.

Oh, you are the lucky one, I said wistfully. Everyone will look on you as a helper.

Judith looked at me in bewilderment. How can you say that I’m the lucky one when your cousin has arranged for you to go to the temple school in Jerusalem? You’re to study with the daughters of those rich Judeans.

I? You’re laughing at me, Judith.

But it is true, Mariam. My mother thinks I go to sleep as soon as I lie on my pallet, but I don’t. And I heard her talking to Father last night as they lay together. Father thinks it is wrong to teach girls the things that only boys need to learn, so I know that even if I had a rich relative in the priesthood at Jerusalem, I could never go to the school. Not even if Brother Jacob sent for me, which he won’t. But you’re the lucky one. Mother says that there is much written in foreign scrolls on the arts of healing. If I could go to Jerusalem maybe I could learn to read scrolls here.

Judith, you know there are no foreign scrolls to read here. If there were, the Hazzen would search them out and keep them from ‘corrupting the eyes of the young people’. I daringly mimicked the Hazzen’s voice. Judith giggled, but looked around quickly to be sure no one heard us. But, Judith, Mother and Father haven’t said anything about Jerusalem. Are you sure?

I’m sure. Joachim and Anna will tell you soon. I heard Mother say that they put it off because they dread to give you up. Don’t you want to go, Mariam?

I stood stiffly, thinking that I might not ever move again, while the sound of the children singing seemed to be drifting so far across the fields and roads that I could barely hear them. To get the knowledge and learn fine weaving, yes. But…. I felt tears come to my eyes. But, I can’t leave my parents now. I know I would cry at night.

For shame, Mariam. For shame to cry about living in the city of Jerusalem. You know my brother Jacob is there, studying with the rabbis, and he says it is only to fulfill Heaven’s commandment to own the whole land of Israel that anyone is willing to live anywhere else. Her hands went straight out from her shoulders in an unconscious imitation of her older brother’s Pharisaical pronouncements. Of course he does leave Jerusalem often and walk about the country, she added truthfully, but that is only to be sure he finds the best teachers to study under.

But when your parents make pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Adah always tells my mother how good it is to be back in the quiet of Nazareth. And Father says that he and Mother chose to live here away from the intolerant Jews of Judea.

Anyway, Judith said firmly, Jerusalem is the best place to live if my brother says it is, and I wish I were you. After all, your cousins are there.

Oh, yes, but Elisabeth and Zechariah are ancients. They will never pay attention to me.

I don’t care. Just wait until everyone knows you’re going. Oh, how they will envy you.

I put my hands on her shoulders, standing closer to her than I had ever done before, feeling some comfort from her body. Judith, I promise that, if I do go, I will teach you all I learn when I come back.

She leaned back from me, and I dropped my hands from her shoulders. Promise? Promise on our hands that we’ll be friends forever, and you will teach me?

Promise on our hands.

Solemnly we kissed the palms of our right hands and touched them together.

And, I added, if I see a foreign scroll that tells about the herbs, I’ll bring it back to you.

You? How can you buy a scroll in a big, expensive place like Jerusalem? You’d have to steal it and run, and then they’d stone you. Like this. She picked up a tiny stone and chased me through the high grass of the field and we giggled together as I ran from her. Then I suddenly felt serious again.

Let’s not play with the children now, Judith. Let’s just walk and look for herbs.

I was feeling sober when I walked back to my home. I must be too old to play games. Was I really to go to school in Jerusalem? Would I ever want to go? If Judith was right it would be a grave sin against Heaven to not want to live in the city that the Most High had chosen as the dwelling place of his Presence in the temple.

I held my hands in tight fists at my side. When my parents tell me about the school I’ll act like the nearly grown up person I am, I promised myself. I will not cry to stay in Nazareth just because I’ve lived all my eight years here. I tried not to remember the times my mother had wakened us crying out in distress, after a dream.

That evening, my parents and I sat on thick slabs of wood that Josephus had fashioned into our benches and table. They may have been quieter than usual but I couldn’t see anything really different as we ate rounds of bread covered with vegetables freshly gathered and cooked outside in Mother’s brazier. I wondered if Judith had been teasing me about Jerusalem.

But after we went to our beds to sleep, Mother had her dream again. It was always the same; thin, scratchy noises ripped painfully from a tight throat, built to a quivering scream before I heard the comforting, half irritated sounds of father coaxing her awake.

There were a few minutes of silence, and then Mother parted the curtains to my sleeping cubicle and took me in her arms. It was only a dream, she whispered. Your foolish old mother letting a dream disturb our night. Let it go, Little One. Let it go.

But, Mother, while Father is waking you, I hear him say that you’re no longer in Jerusalem, but safe in Nazareth. What is so frightening in Jerusalem that it makes you cry to dream of it? I must know so that I can watch for it when I go there.

When you go there? When you go there, Mariam? Who told you that you go to Jerusalem?

Please, Mother, it was Judith. She heard her parents talking about it and she told me. I meant to wait, Mother, until you were ready to tell me.

She knows, Joachim. The child knows. Mother’s shouts were as loud in the quiet night as her screams had been.

What is it now? Father grumbled. Do we no longer sleep at night? Are we to tell the animals to wait for food tomorrow because we have decided to sleep in the daytime?

Joachim, Judith has told her. About the school.

And she is as unhappy as I expected her to be. Father’s bulk made a darker blot in the dimness in front of my curtains. Never mind, my dove, you need not go. As my good friend, Josephus, says, it is a foolish thing to send a girl child away to fill her head with things she need never know, will never use, and is not expected by Heaven to know. You may stay here with us. No use getting that look, Woman. You know it tears your heart out to send her.

Mother swiveled about to face Father’s dark form, without removing her arms from me. But you know you don’t think as Josephus does about the wisdom of teaching girls, Joachim.

I think more as he does when teaching sends our Mariam away from us, Father answered stubbornly, coming in more closely to us.

Mother turned back to me. Mariam, we haven’t spoken of this because your father changes his mind daily about sending you away from us. But you are being offered such a great opportunity to study, as I did, at the old Queen Alexandra’s school. And only because our cousin speaks for you. You insisted on learning numbers so that you could count steps. But I am no teacher, so how can I teach you the many things you will learn there?

Tell her, then, Father shouted, why you dream the dream that makes you cry out in fear. Jerusalem is still dangerous.

Oh, Joachim, not like it was in those days. There is only an occasional street fight now. We have that much here in Galilee when some young zealots think to deliver us from the Romans in one day. I’ll tell her when she is older and has learned more of the history of our Land.

If she is old enough to leave us, she is old enough to know now, Anna.

Mother sighed. It is only your heart insisting, Husband, because you don’t want to give her up. It’s time for sleeping now, as you said. Mariam, we’ll make our decision soon. Go to sleep now, and don’t think about my dream. It is just a foolish thing that comes in the night. We will all sleep now.

But I was too excited and insecure to sleep. Jerusalem, where all good Israelites longed night and day to be, seemed to be a very frightening place.

Two

Many people now think that we girls of the school lived in rooms off the women’s court of the temple like those temple virgins of pagan religions, but that was never true. Only a few rooms were set aside there for those women who had served faithfully for so many years that their womanly courses had left them. But most of them were widows who had raised families for Israel’s glory. Mothers were honored.

Our school was a temple school only in the sense that it was loosely watched over by the high priest. He had little time or sympathy for us and the Sanhedrin, the ruling council for temple affairs, was probably barely aware that we were there. It is closed now and only continued its existence after the death of Queen Alexandra because wives of the rich landowners of Judea who had attended her school themselves, pushed their husbands to use their influence; influence acquired with money and favors, with Israel’s foreign King Herod, to keep it open. It was available to a very select group of their daughters. I had little in common with them and though they were not entirely unfriendly to the cousin of the temple priest Zechariah and his wife I was often lonely during the four years I spent there.

We lived with our teachers, five graduates of the original school, in a house provided for us by temple funds. It was in the upper city near the temple walls. One servant, Phenica, prepared our simple meals with the help of two girls. Mads, who taught us weaving and sewing and supervised the household, assigned us duties by weeks.

Just the same time that the priests are assigned to take sacrificial duties in the temple, she reminded us if we complained, as we did, that it was a long week with Phenica making us do each task perfectly or do it over. So that you remember our work as a service to each other, as the priests work as a service to their equals, the people of Israel. The work of caring for a household is comparable, in its own way, to the work of the priests. Thus it is decreed by Heaven for women, and thus you must see it.

She cared little if we had trouble seeing our tasks as she thought we should. Only that we performed them with no outward protest.

Each evening, on hearing the great gates of the temple being swung shut we had to, without being reminded, get our sleeping mats and lay them, each exactly in line with its neighbor, on the floor of the sleeping room. When the short-long-short blasts of a trumpet called Israel to morning sacrifice, we rolled our beds, placed each in its assigned place in a wall niche, slipped into a clean tunic, banded it with a narrow girdle and hurried outside.

We must be lined up in the courtyard facing the temple, hands clasped in front of us, before the first sweet smoke from the sacrificial meat drifted past the rising sun toward Heaven. Led by our chief instructress, Rafaela, we repeated in monotones the prayers being chanted inside the temple.

I loved the prayer raised to Heaven by the sacrificial smoke: Be graciously pleased, Holy One, Our Most High, with your people, Israel, and their prayer. Restore the service to the oracle of your house; and the burnt offerings of Israel and their prayer accept graciously and in love.

I envisioned Heaven and the angels leaning to hear us better. And let the service of your people Israel be ever pleasing to you.

When a ray of the rising sun hit a newly applied patch of gold plating on the temple roof and fractured the air into shivering flashes around us, I felt the beating, unseen wings so strongly above me that I thought they must be visible if only I could look quickly enough.

On mornings when Heaven chose to drip rain or spit snow onto us, I sometimes stood with tears in my eyes, not only because of the cold seeping under my tunic, but because I missed the blazing holiness of the temple in the sun.

Breakfast was a bowl of porridge made from grain, and then, except for the holy seventh day of the week when no work was done, we sat in rows on classroom benches, just as the boys in the synagogue schools did, reciting in unison after our teachers the laws of Moses from our holy scroll. They merely taught us to recognize the immediate thoughts though, never expounding on the hidden meanings of the words as we sometimes heard the teachers of men doing in the porches of the temple.

If we did well, Rafaela would tell us a story of one of the great mothers who lived at the time of Israel’s founding fathers, and worked side by side with them to do the will of Heaven for their sons. Sarah, wife of Abraham, who waited impatiently for Heaven to send her the promised son who would make her the mother of a new tribe. That woman who tried to complete the plan that Heaven seemed to have forgotten, by giving her servant to be the mother, after her womanly courses had left her.

We understood that she laughed out of pain when told she would mother a child, believing the stranger was making a cruel joke. We understood how hard it was for her to believe the truth when she was miraculously with child; the son promised her husband.

Under Rafaela’s guidance we felt her heart breaking inside her as she watched that same son being taken by Abraham into the wilderness for such a sacrifice as he must have supposed had been ordered by Heaven.

We waited breathlessly to feel her celebration of the Most High when her husband returned the son alive and well to her. The wives of her descendants became familiar to us too, as did the prophetesses, and queens of Israel.

But our favorite was Rachel, who died giving birth to the great-grandson of Sarah, and whose