I was prepared for anything from customers — violence, depravity, degradation, false piety, shame, sadness that the wives they loved had lost interest in carnality, loneliness.
I was always prepared for anything from customers, because you never could tell what was to come. Until the day he walked into his cell in the monastery, where they told me to wait for ‘my monk’ — the monk I was to tempt simply by being a naked woman, a test of his vows of self-control. Despicable, yes, but that was how they graduated from the sect, and it made money for my owner.
But I was not prepared for simple light. For eyes that looked at me and saw… me. Not flesh to be bought. Not an object for self-therapy. Not sin to be purged. Just a soul, “precious beyond measure,” he said.
He walked in and sat down across from me on the floor. He sat on the floor, not on the bedroll. Without closing the door as others do. “You have questions,” he said, in perfect Sanskrit and a disarming smile.
Not a customer’s demand, but a teacher’s invitation.
I must have stuttered in my mind because nothing came out of my usually quick witted mouth. I couldn’t look away from his eyes and my voice failed me.
“Why do you go by Mari?” he asked gently. “Is that how you see yourself?”
That I could answer - a question asked a thousand times before. “My father gave me that name. My other name died when I was small.”
He looked deep into my soul and nodded slightly, he understood. “What questions in your heart,” he prodded with a sincerity and ease that again caught me off guard.
“About suffering,” I answered into the atmosphere of his cell, the words escaping before I could catch them. “About the divine — that lets it happen.”
He looked at me with those piercing foreigner eyes. Blue eyes, looking so deep into me. Yet, I did not feel unsettled by it. Usually, we are disturbed by those foreigner eyes, but not his. His, had the colour and peace of heaven. Perhaps his stature calmed me. Unlike the saffron robed monks, had a full head of hair, long, black, strong, but different because of a slight wave in it.
His body. I was not interested in the male physique, but he was beautifully male by all standards. Tall. His body hard, muscled. His grey-white robe covered one shoulder, there was a big scar on his chest. Of course, it was from saving a damsel from a tiger or something. Calloused hands and feet, sun-drenched olive skin, like a worker. I guessed him to be about twenty-something years old, but his soul was ancient. His nails were clean, his natural fragrance was like a smoky agar wood, and of course, that smile; it can melt the sandals off the feet of a recently wedded.
Again, he smiled, and the room filled with such love I could hardly breathe. I was seated on his bedroll. “Come,” he said, holding out his hand for support. “Sit here. Let us seek those answers together.”
I hesitated only a moment. Making myself vulnerable to him by talking about myself. What was there to lose? I had already lost everything once.
But as I reached for his hand, I realized I was wrong. You can’t lose everything. There is always more to lose, more to gain, more to become. I know, having watched the same hand that lifted me from darkness in that cell, just yesterday it was hanging pierced and bloody on a Judeo-Roman cross.
They say you can’t look directly at the sun. Perhaps that’s why he came to us veiled in human flesh — so we could bear to see such light. But I saw it that first day, burning through his human eyes. And now I have watched that light seem to go out.
Three days. He promised three days and he will be back.
I touch the stone of his tomb, anchoring myself in the present moment as he taught me. The sky is lightening. Tomorrow, after Passover, others will arrive with their spices and lamps. But this day, this moment, belongs to me alone. This space between what was and what will be.
He didn’t touch me that first day. No man had ever been in my presence without demanding touch, but he simply sat, those extraordinary eyes holding mine, and waited. When I finally found my voice again, the questions I had hoarded like precious stones came tumbling out.
He answered in Sanskrit so pure it made my amateur studies seem like a child’s babbling. He spoke Greek, most of us had some Greek. But locals spoke a mixture of many dialects and languages south of here. Yet his Sanskrit wove in concepts I recognized from the streets of Srinagar — traders’ tales of Persian fire-worshippers, Buddhist wanderers’ talks of karma and dharma, even fragments of Greek philosophy that occasionally drifted up from the merchants’ quarter. When he mentioned God his Mother in Heaven, I was intrigued. He spoke of a Father in Heaven who was not like the stern, demanding gods of the priests — a Father of Light who looked upon all beings with infinite compassion.
“Even me?” I asked, the words bitter in my mouth.
“Especially you,” he said, and smiled in a way that made the room grow brighter. “Your soul has remained pure despite all attempts to defile it. Do you know how rare that is?”
I wanted to laugh, or perhaps weep. Pure? Me? But he was already continuing, speaking of things I had never dared to hope — of wisdom that comes through suffering, of light that burns brightest in darkness, of a way that leads beyond all this pain to something beautiful beyond imagining.
He spoke of a Butterfly Path, of being reborn in heaven to live with God the Mother of Heaven and all the gods and buddhas.
He spoke about heavenly family, the holy lotus family he called it. Spiritual beings who are beneficent by nature, they don’t judge and don’t punish or reward, they just love and protect.
God our Mother of Heaven. The divine feminine, a Yin-energy. He spoke about how all things, heaven especially, needs balance of energies. Deities don’t have humanlike bodies, spoken language or gender, we only imagine them that way. But they specialize in either yin-energy or yang-energy work, and the works are different. He said, “Because we can make our energies different, humans feel us as male or female, because they are male and female. And our difference brings balance.
My soul melted, softening its reservations.
“Your questions,” he said, “they come from a place of wisdom. You see through the lies men tell themselves about gods and power. You understand already that true divinity has nothing to do with the games of priests and kings, or words in books.”
“And what do you know of priests and kings?” I challenged, though something in me already knew the answer.
He laughed then, a sound like mountain streams in spring. “More than I sometimes wish to,” he said. “Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
“Now?” I asked.
“Now, and forever,” he said.
“To be your servant?” I asked, my voice hardening with old bitterness. “Your concubine?”
“To be my student,” he said simply. “My friend. My sister in The Way.”
He stood up, and I noticed for the first time really how tall he was. Or was it how his presence seemed to fill the small room. “You are no one’s property, Mari of Magadha. You never were. Those who bought and sold you will answer to Karma for that sin. And one day, your dead name will rise from its grave to embrace you. But now I offer you a choice — freely given, freely taken. Will you come?”
I looked at him — really looked. I trusted him, God knows why. I had not trusted anyone in more than seven years. But, for the first time in seven years, I felt my soul unfurl from its tight hiding place. “I don’t even know your name,” I whispered.
“I am called many things,” he said. “But you may call me Iesous.”
“It’s Greek?” I asked, “Like Yesu? Or is it Bactrian, like Oesho?”
He didn’t answer, he knew I was rambling just to not make up my mind. He waited for my answer, allowing me time to think.
Later, much later, I would learn all his names, all his titles. I would watch kings bow before him and priests gnash their teeth in rage at his words. I would see him heal the sick with a touch and raise the dead with a word. I would love him with a depth that transcended any human category of love.
But in that moment, in that small room that smelled of stale wine and old pain, he was simply the first person in seven years to speak to my soul instead of my flesh. And when he held out his hand again, to walk me out of there, I took it.
But then it struck me, and my soul sank to the floor where my sandals were, in the corner, “Sir. My owner will demand money. Much more than what you have.”
“Money is not the problem, but I will not pay him. You are no-one’s property to buy and sell. You are Mari and you belong to God our Mother and God our Father in Heaven. Come sister…”