chapter 16

“One true God.”

That was enough to send Jesus into a rage. But he was sitting at a table with his parents and Sarah was sitting on his lap and I was sitting across from him.

“Mother. There is no one true anything. True is related to context of perspective, perception and most of all, blind ignorance. Moses was, if he ever really was, a true liar. And like all other dictators, he liked to believe he was God. And because he was smart enough to know he was mortal, he sold the belief that only he could interpret the voice of god. Which was the rumbling of thunder in the clouds. Or the voice in the fire. He kept a fire of animal parts and fat burning all day and night and made a religion out of sheep herder rules. He set up a holy dictatorship and perpetual war with the Gentiles. A promise of genocide for the Palestinians. He was a venomous lying deceiving snake of hell. Being Jewish is taking pride in ignorance, genocide and blind obedience to hate laws of inbred warlords. And I will not teach such a horror story nonsense to my children.”

“But they will not get a place in heaven.”

“Mother, have you read the scriptures. Do you know anything about the characters. Do you know that they have cursed women, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. And they did it to play a myopic game of tyranny. It is an outrage. It is world wide rape, murder and plunder.

“Our children have a place in heaven. What is left of it after the thieving tyrants have plundered it. There is no other heaven. We need to take this one and make certain that we protect it like gardeners protect their fields and vineyards. Like a forest ranger protects his forest.”

“Mary Helene, do you believe what he says.”

“Jesus is the father of gods. He is an angel with a host of angels who love him and share his ideas and hopes for a world without tyranny and slavery. And he is a wonderful father and a divine lover.”

The children pulled us out of our dead end debate with other more compelling needs, like games and story telling. Mary and Joseph were happy to have them around and managed not to make long prayer before eating. We simply avoided talking about anything controversial.

My parents were less receptive. If Jesus insisted on keeping the company of anyone he pleased, he was not welcome in a respectable Jewish house.

If Moses, Abram, Isaac and Jacob, all true biological bastards. Children of raped women. If they said they were the chosen race, who was the king of the Jews to say he wasn’t king of the Jews.

It was all really quite funny. Or it could be if people would stop believing what they were told to believe and open their eyes and see what is, open their ears and hear what is being said.

Fighting the war against ignorance with words seemed a futile occupation. Jesus could have been a salesman and earned a better living. But he was earning great sums of love. And that is what fed him.

Almost everything was impossible. Even the inevitable.

“Jesus save me.”

A little woman, a young woman, with sexual appeal flowing from her like light from the sun. She was with her mother and her grandmother and her father.

Jesus fumbled with some dry fruit and hissed to warn the little woman that the salvation she wanted would be there when she left the protection of her family and came to him.

When the young women saw me, they almost always went away.

I was not possessive of him. It was fun to watch him flirt. It came naturally. He didn’t know what he was doing. And that made it even more attractive. But I discouraged as many as I could from taking too much from him simply because I wanted him for myself and our children.

chapter 17

Jesus didn’t like to talk about it, but the time was getting ever closer to the time when he would have to hang on a cross. Not talking about it didn’t make the inevitability go away. I didn’t like it and Jesus was afraid to talk to me about it.

“I know all your thoughts, Jesus.”

“I know you do, Helene.”

“Let’s take Susanna and Fau and the children and go away and forget who we are for a while. Let them miss you for a while. Let me have your attention.”

Jesus didn’t argue. He put his trust in other people every chance he had.

So with three women and seven children, Jesus returned to Eritrea to touch the old magic of the children of the mountains. Instead of saving people from their artificial sins, he would allow the people and the land to save him and load him once again with the magic he would need to draw on when he stood before his kingdom of fools and let them nail him to a cross.

After a long journey over the desert and down the river to the Red Sea, we took a ship to Eritrea and hiked up a mountain to the small village of Acoma with a goat herder and his goats.

It was in many ways a village like any other village. In many ways it felt like we were on top of the world and could look out to see thousands of years of our ancestors struggling and playing, fighting and loving.

The children touched us. They wanted to touch the strange people who came to visit with no swords, walking with a native goat herder.

It had been a long journey and it was so very much still the beginning. I watched and listened to the men talk with Jesus into the night.

Mostly I listened to the sounds but not the words. And I wondered how long, how many generations, we had been talking into the night and how many more generations were ahead of us.

And how long would it take before we understood the futility of war and plunder for gold and silver and religion to steal life and make death cults.

If giving up were a choice, it would be easier. But our children were going to grow and have children and their children would have children and they did not want to live forever in a hell made by holy tyrants. Jerusalem wanted a bastard king to nail to a cross for the crime of bringing heaven down to earth for every creature to embrace. And Jesus wanted to beat them at their own game.

Even if it took getting nailed to a cross and starting yet another brutal religion and two thousand years to get the icon of a man down off the folk’s yoke. I was so looking forward to the end of religion. The beginning of the new age of enlightenment.

Like Karl and Borus often said, 2,000 years is not a long time to fight for the chance to open the gates to heaven.

“We could stay here till we die but they are waiting to nail me to a cross.”

“I’m going to kick your ass for the next two thousand years if you don’t get right back down from it.”

Jesus smiled.

And I knew I would be kicking his ass, or someone or something would be kicking his ass until he finally got down off the cross.

To land the virtual ship in plundered paradise. To know that the animal rule was back. The beasts in heaven aware.

A mad plan. No one would ever suspect it until it happened.


chapter 18

It felt like eternity and only a few moments since we had been in Jerusalem.

The priests and lawyers were a little surprised to see Jesus back in the synagogue. He was on fire and challenged every law and custom. They were being played at there own game. They were forced to plot the roman protected protagonist Jewish king’s public execution.

“Kill another prophet. You lying, gold loving, snakes of hell. I will scream bloody blasphemy at your death cult until you slugs of hell have been written into history.”

I dressed as a man and went into the synagogue to take Jesus out of his den of torture. So he could have his last supper before incarceration.

His think team where making preparations with Pilot’s soldiers while Jesus had an evening meal with his disciples. The women fed the children and made last preparations for the main event.

My brother Lazarath and uncle Joseph where making final preparations for the tomb of Jesus. I had been assured by Borus and Fau many times that Jesus would not die on the cross. But it must look like he was dead when they took him down. And a tomb was part of the show.

There was nothing more to do than play it out how it had been written. Written in the holy scriptures of lies and our theater of antideathcult.

Joanna stayed with Susanna and me. Mary, my mother-in-law and her mother Mary stayed with us. And on the morning of his sentencing we went and stood among the crowd that cheered with the snakes of hell in their chanting to crucify the man who had given all of his soul to them.

And I cried. I cried for the thousands of years of submission to the men’s club of hate of life and love of war and gold. I cried for all the blood spilt from the wars that kept us groveling in fear. I cried for all the suffering of women and children for so many generations.

And I cried for the children who would be taught the lies that priests and lawyers would wrapped around the Jesus who loved me and our children.

I cried when I watched them whip Jesus and nail him to a cross.

And I cried for joy when the brutal show was over and we were leaving Jerusalem. The capital of hypocritical lies.

I finally stop crying when we were eating fish from the Lake of Galilee and making plans to return to the Toscana. It was a time of celebration. The wars would one day come to an end and man would stand beside woman and beside the children and a new day would dawn.

The age of awakening would come. Karl and Borus drew the diagram in the sand and convinced us that we were going to win the war against war. It was written in the stars. I was in our blood.


mary helene chapters 19