was the essence of the religion. To become simple, humble, meek, loving, that was the gist of it.
Now step back a moment and see the whole picture. Not only was this god amazing and this story amazing; the whole question of the relationship of the tale to writing was amazing.
As you can tell from this narrative, the one thing we had once shared with our barbarian neighbors was that we distrusted writing. Memory was sacred to us, and we thought that writing was not good for it. We knew how to read and write. But we still distrusted it. And here was this humble god who quoted from the sacred book of the Hebrews, connected himself with its innumerable prophecies concerning a messiah, and then charged his followers to write about him.
But long before I’d finished the last gospel, pacing, reading aloud, holding the big altar book in two arms, with fingers curled over the tops of the pages, I came to love this Jesus for the strange things that he said, the way he contradicted himself, and his patience with those who killed him. As for his resurrection, my first conclusion was that he was as long-lived as were we—the Taltos. And that he had put one over on his followers because they were mere humans.
We had to do such tricks all the time, to assume different identities when speaking to human neighbors, so that they would become confused and fail to realize that we were living for centuries.
But I soon realized through Ninian’s zealous instructions—and he was a joyful and ecstatic monk—that Christ had in fact risen from the dead. And truly ascended into heaven.
I saw in something of a mystical flash the whole picture—this god of love, martyred for love, and the radical nature of his message. In a mad way, the thing gripped me because it was so utterly unbelievable. Indeed, the entire combination of elements was cumbersome and preposterous.
And another fact—all Christians believed the world would end soon. And apparently—this emerged slowly from my conversations with Ninian—they always had! But preparing for this end of the world was also the essence of the religion. And the fact that the world hadn’t ended yet discouraged nobody.
Ninian spoke feverishly of the growth of the church since Christ’s time, some five hundred years before, of how Joseph of Arimathea, his dear friend, and Mary Magdalene, who had bathed his feet and dried them with her own hair, had come to England in the southern part, and founded a church on a sacred hill in Somerset. The chalice from Christ’s last supper had been brought to that spot, and indeed a great spring flowed bloodred year-round from the magic presence of Christ’s blood having been poured into it. And the staff of Joseph, having been put into the ground of Wearyall Hill, had grown into a hawthorn which had never ceased to flower.
I wanted to go there at once, to see the sacred place where Our Lord’s own disciples had set foot on our own island.
“Oh, but please,” cried Ninian, “my good-hearted Ashlar, you’ve promised to take me home to my monastery on Iona.”
There the abbot, Father Columba, was expecting him. Many books such as this were being made in monasteries all over the world, and this copy was most important for study at Iona.
I had to meet this Columba. He sounded as strange as Jesus Christ! Perhaps you know the story. Michael, probably you know it.
This is how Ninian described Columba. Columba was born of a rich family, and might have in the scheme of things become King of Tara. Instead he became a priest and founded many Christian monasteries. But then he got into a battle with Finnian, another holy man, over whether or not he, Columba, had had a right to make a copy of the Psalter of St. Jerome, another holy book, which Finnian had brought to Ireland. A quarrel over the possession of the book? The right to copy?
It had led to blows. Three thousand men had died as a result of this dispute, and Columba had been blamed for it. He had accepted this judgment, and off he had gone to Iona, very near our coast, in order to convert us, the Picts, to Christianity. It was his plan to save three thousand pagan souls to exactly make up for the three thousand men who had died as the result of his quarrel.