be upon you.”
When He said that I felt as it were a gust of wind rushing through my body. And I was no longer shy; and I said: “Sir, I am betrothed to a man of Cana in Galilee. And I shall be married on the fourth day of the coming week. Will you not come to my wedding and grace my marriage with your presence?”
And He answered: “I will come, my child.”
Mind you, He said: “My child,” yet He was but a youth, and I was nearly twenty.
Then He walked on down the road.
And I stood at the gate of our garden until my mother called me into the house.
On the fourth day of the following week I was taken to the house of my bridegroom and given in marriage.
And Jesus came, and with Him His mother and His brother James.
And they sat around the wedding-board with our guests whilst my maiden comrades sang the wedding-songs of Solomon the King. And Jesus ate our food and drank our wine and smiled upon me and upon the others.
And He heeded all the songs of the lover bringing his belovèd into his tent; and of the young vineyard-keeper who loved the daughter of the lord of the vineyard and led her to his mother’s house; and of the prince who met the beggar maiden and bore her to his realm and crowned her with the crown of his fathers.
And it seemed as if He were listening to yet other songs also, which I could not hear.
At sundown the father of my bridegroom came to the mother of Jesus and whispered saying: “We have no more wine for our guests. And the day is not yet over.”
And Jesus heard the whispering, and He said: “The cup bearer knows that there is still more wine.”
And so it was indeed—and as long as the guests remained there was fine wine for all who would drink.
Presently Jesus began to speak with us. He spoke of the wonders of earth and heaven; of sky flowers that bloom when night is upon the earth, and of earth flowers that blossom when the day hides the stars.
And He told us stories and parables, and His voice enchanted us so that we gazed upon Him as if seeing visions, and we forgot the cup and the plate.
And as I listened to Him it seemed as if I were in a land distant and unknown.
After a while one of the guests said to the father of my bridegroom: “You have kept the best wine till the end of the feast. Other hosts do not so.”
And all believed that Jesus had wrought a miracle, that they should have more wine and better at the end of the wedding-feast than at the beginning.
I too thought that Jesus had poured the wine, but I was not astonished; for in His voice I had already listened to miracles.
And afterwards indeed, His voice remained close to my heart, even until I had been delivered of my firstborn child.
And now even to this day in our village and in the villages near by, the word of our guest is still remembered. And they say: “The spirit of Jesus of Nazareth is the best and the oldest wine.”
A Persian Philosopher in Damascus
I cannot tell the fate of this Man, nor can I say what shall befall His disciples.
A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible. Yet should that seed fall upon a rock, it will come to naught.
But this I say: The ancient God of Israel is harsh and relentless. Israel should have another God; one who is gentle and forgiving, who would look down upon them with pity; one who would descend with the rays of the sun and walk on the path of their limitations, rather than sit forever in the judgment seat to weigh their faults and measure their wrongdoings.
Israel should bring forth a God whose heart is not a jealous heart, and whose memory of their shortcomings is brief; one who would not avenge Himself upon them even to the third and the fourth generation.
Man here in Syria is like man in all lands. He would look into the mirror of his own understanding and therein find his deity. He would fashion the gods after his own likeness, and worship that which reflects his own image.
In truth man prays to his deeper longing, that it may rise and fulfil the sum of his desires.
There is no depth beyond the soul of man, and the soul is the deep that calls unto itself; for there is no other voice to speak and there are no other ears to hear.
Even we in Persia would see our faces in the disc of the sun and our bodies dancing in the fire that we kindle upon the altars.
Now the God of Jesus, whom He called Father, would not be a stranger unto the people of Jesus, and He would fulfil their desires.
The gods of Egypt have cast off their burden of stones and fled to the Nubian desert, to be free among those who are still free from knowing.
The gods of Greece and Rome are vanishing into their own sunset. They were too much like men to live in the ecstasy of men. The groves in which their magic was born have been cut down by the axes of the Athenians and the Alexandrians.
And in this land also the high places are made low by the lawyers of Beirut and the young hermits of Antioch.
Only the old women and the weary men seek the temples of their forefathers; only the exhausted at the end of the road seek its beginning.
But this man Jesus, this Nazarene, He has spoken of a God too vast to be unlike the soul of any man, too knowing to punish, too loving to remember the sins of His creatures. And this God of the Nazarene shall pass over the threshold
