Trials of the Vagabond-King

There were many years of preparation for the act. Many years of hearing the stories told and telling them back correctly, of affirming that I did understand, did believe, had indeed invited the sweet bearded vagabond-king into my heart and only him. It was after the otherwise ordinary crackers and juice had been spiced with the unique terror of ritual, the necessity of the true-heart's test, "Be sure! If you doubt, you will die," that I took communion.

The lights were dim and pearly. My head did not yet reach over the seats. The blood and body came on silver trays, borne by ordinary ladies I had seen on other days in ordinary places. I wondered if the grown-ups were afraid for me. I was not afraid for myself, having that certitude children have of passing all trials of purity of heart. I picked the biggest piece of Saltine cracker and the fullest thimble of Welch's grape juice. The room was silent. The blood lipped the lily cup, blue-sheened, lights on it. The body brown, salty. A tiny amount. No feast. A modicum of meat and moisture, an inoculation.

I had found, creeping around the church on Wednesday evenings with my best friend the pastor's daughter the boxes of Saltines and jugs of Welch's kept in a cabinet under the sink for this occasion. We helped ourselves. At home my parents called it grape juice and crackers. So the fact was no scandal. The realities of the juice & crackers and body & blood existed beside or upon or within each other. It was the mystery of the single object that draws to itself by its power a number of stories which move through it without tyranny, a mystery I recognized from a game I played with my mother in which we listened to wordless music with our eyes closed and told each other what we saw, and also from this fresh, cryptic realm of letters, whereby marks represented sounds which referred to things. Later I would learn one of its names: metaphor.

I was a great lover of science in those days. I passionately declared my intention to be a scientist and deal in mysteries. Likewise I was a great lover of the divine, and declared with equal passion my intention to run after the vagabond-king with white lilies, cup of blood, and dust in my shoes forever.

Science lost me first, sometime in late junior high, when it wedded itself to strangling, monochratic mathematics, which quietly squeezed mysteries into hypotheses and sieved the still slightly warm hypotheses through the seven severe layers of interrogation which were supposed to produce, through repeated refinement, a lump of pure truth. I could not believe it any more than I could master the alchemy. Christianity, though, with its dark capacity for transmutation, god to man, water to wine, wine to blood, retained my ardor for a long time. It lost me only when its grip tightened, when it demanded certainty instead of curiosity, when it had more answers than mysteries, and a dearth of silence and simple terror.

When the multiplicities that must move are fixed, the vivifying, electric, scandalous, mystery-cult collision of unlike substances proceeds elsewhere. Walk on, vagabond-king.