The sun has not yet risen over the hills beyond Jerusalem, but I am already at his tomb. My body remembers other dawns, other stone paths, months and years of journeys beside him. But this morning is like none before. My Lord, my love, had died. He was murdered by people who censor speech, thought, and minds. He is in that grave carved into the mountainside, with that big stone covering its opening.
Today, the air in Jerusalem holds that peculiar stillness it wore in my hometown in Magadha before the Indian monsoons. That was way back, when I was a child and still believed in fathers and justice. Before I learned that men could look upon a young girl and see only coins. Before I learned that gods could look upon a broken woman and see only light.
I touch the rough wall of the tomb. Real. Present. This is a habit he taught me — to anchor myself in the moment when memories threaten to pull me under. “Feel the stone, Mari,” he would say, those blue eyes against his sunbaked skin holding mine steady. “Feel your feet on the earth. You are here now. You are safe.”
Safe. Such a simple word. I did not know its meaning until that day in Srinagar when he walked into the room where I waited. I was a child in a young woman’s tired body owned by a brothel, where I had spent seven years learning to make my soul small, to tuck it away where customers could not reach it. He looked at me — through me — and I felt naked in a way no client had ever managed. But for the first time, nakedness brought no shame.
“Come,” was all he said, with his hand indicating to sit on the floor beside him. And I did. I have been with him ever since, for almost fifteen years through desert and mountain, through rejection and acclaim, through miracle and mundane moment. Even now, I come, though they sealed his broken body behind stone.
The sky is lightening. Perhaps the others will arrive — Mother Mary, the teachers in training, the women who followed him. But its Passover, and the religious police… maybe the others won’t come today. They call me his beloved disciple, though they don’t understand what that means. How could they? They never saw him wash the dirt from my feet after a long day’s walk, never heard him laugh at my stubborn questions, never watched him defend my right to learn, to teach, to be.
We’ve been serving others for so long. But this morning belongs to me alone. This moment between dark and light, between cruel religion and beneficent heaven, between death and whatever comes after. I am here because I know him. And because he knows me — knows every scar, every failing, every secret place where shame once lived. He knows my naked soul, and loves anyway.
The stone blocking the opening has been sealed with cement!
It was like a lifetime ago. My home in Magadha, once the kingdom of the parents of Siddharta, who was destined to become the Buddha of the religion of male monks.
In Magadha, on a clear day you can see the Himalayas over Nepal. Dreams taste of mango and monsoon rain. Clear waters rush down from the mountains and create the mother of rivers, Mother Ganga. The boys used to lie to us and say, “If you fall asleep on your raft in the Ganges, you will wake up in Calcutta.” Even now, decades and thousands of miles from home, I sometimes wake with that sweetness on my tongue, that dampness on my skin. For a moment, I am ten years old again, watching the sunrise paint the stupas gold, listening to my mother’s voice rise in morning prayer.
But memory is a treacherous companion. The sweetness never lasts. It shatters, always, against the hardness of what came after. Against my father’s voice, tight with shame: “What else could I do? The official would have ruined us all. It is your own fault, playing dirty games with his daughter!” Against the rope burns on my wrists as the slave trader dragged me away. Against that first night when I learned how completely a human being can disappear inside herself.
These are not things I speak of often. Even now, when women gather around me to learn of theWAY, I tell them only what they need to know: that I understand. That I have walked through darkness. That light finds us in unexpected places.
But lately, I find myself returning to those memories. Perhaps because he warned us his time was growing short. Perhaps because I see in the eyes of Jerusalem’s religious people the same god-sanctioned righteous cruelty I saw in the faces of men who would visit the brothel where they kept us before morning prayers. Power corrupts the soul so quietly, so completely. I learned that lesson young.
Seven years in Srinagar’s brothels taught me to read men’s souls in their eyes as they sought their pleasures. The holy ones were often the cruelest. They would punish us for their sins, then purify themselves afterward with extra prayers, extra offerings, while we girls washed their sweat from our bodies and counted our cuts and bruises. Some of us died. Most of us wished we had.
“Oh, you must hate men so much,” some would say. “Why?” I ask, “I see the souls of people and I have seen good men and evil women of all sorts. Souls have no gender. Good people built this city, bad people prey on them and rape this city.”
I was different, they said. Too proud. I kept Sanskrit texts hidden under my pallet and taught myself to read by the light of ghee lamps, with wicks we made from lake grass. Most scrolls I had stolen from holy men, from priests and monks, temples, and pagodas where they took us for their pleasures. I asked questions that made customers uncomfortable, and then get beatings because it’s not my place to ask. “The Magadhalene thinks she’s better than us,” the other girls would whisper. They weren’t wrong. Pride was all I had left.
Some would buy me just to break me. Because I still had my pride, in their minds I was still whole, and they wanted to break something that is whole. Self-righteous people are the worst, no matter woman or man, the worst, because they take a moral high-ground and dehumanize us who are “the other”. The wealthiest, the Lord taught me, are the Predatorial class — they hate, and enjoy that they are so evil and call themselves the Elite, as if that will help. But it was not me they abused, the Predators; I was not there. I never did give them anything of myself.