This autumn, I will be eighty five years old. The body grows old, wears away like fine sand blowing eastwards in an early storm. The mind grows old too, our very being becomes fragile. But feelings are unchangeable, they do not grow old.
From the balcony I watch you running across the courtyard. You drop your books and gather them in an untidy pile before you hasten towards the staircase. The spray from the fountain shines in your glossy black hair. You are tall and handsome like your father and me, but unlike us, you do not have a liking for jewellery. This makes me smile slightly; I think that gold would look pleasing against your dark earthy skin.
You run towards my library to gather with your friends, the ones they call the Christians. I risk many things to let you use this house but when people grow old they are willing to gamble and the stakes grow with each year. I do this because I have an affection for these people, their simplicity and faith, but also because I am driven by my own memory of an encounter I had with your saviour many years ago, when I was young and reckless, light and serious and drunk with the array of possibilities that lay before me.
In the dim wine-house of youth I did not often think of the choice I had made, nor doubt it. How can we regret anything of a fickle youth which could so readily succumb to a passion with a single glass of wine. For a moment there lies in the eye a fantastic dream and yet another glass could as easily take it away. And now, more than sixty years after the man was put to death, the story of my choice has become local legend. This legend could fade and die like so many other new religions of our time or it could stretch for many generations. You do not know that the young man who could not follow your Christ is your grandfather. How could you criticise a choice which led to your creation?
Story-tellers and poets are not prophets. They are artists, but artists have a tendency to paint what they see rather than what is actually there. I went away sad, yes, I freely boast I was a beautiful man as well as a wealthy man back then and I am easily filled with dreams but can just as easily lose them. My sadness brimmed in my large doleful eyes and they would glow like wet olive wood with a terrible sense of loss. But my sadness was not because of my attachment to wealth. I could not follow the man from Galilee because I could not leave my home.
Home is not this house with its courtyard and fountains or the fields which give to us the bread and wine. Home is the shining sun in young veins in these, the last days of the world; that feeling you have when you wake up knowing that something about that particular new day is very, very good , but not being able to remember what it is. Home is the way the senses can posses a moment, how the whole world can be understood by the morning light that rubs warmth into the cold wooden limbs of the myrtle trees. Home is place you journey to when your eyes open to find the whole room bathed in orange light and the entire self is struck with the sense of today being the Sabbath with familiar patterns and internal memories and yet unlike any other that you have encountered before. Home is the perfect moment heralded by the call of wood pigeons at dusk as the sleepy evening retreats and drops off from the dry fields that slope to the sea. Home is every time you want to sink to your knees and cry because how can anything ever be this beautiful again but you hold your breath afraid you might break the spell.
What God would ask any of us to leave that?
It must be troubling for your God to know the strangeness of infinite possibilities. He knows the other man who married your grandmother and gave her a simple but happier life than I ever could, whilst I was brutally martyred in Rome. Does your God scratch his head and pace the cornfields as he daydreams about the other boy who sat at your desk in the schoolroom whilst you lay in the shadowy sleep of nothingness.
