There come hours and respites when within, a deep abyss opens, terribly deep, of high, celestial skies. With bare, desolate peaks, solitary rocks, because only they have reached here... Will I find that path from the skies that takes us Beyond? In You.
When I was a child, one of my stories had a path of white canvas stretched through the high sky towards the Palace. The crystal Palace... It was a small, red book, in which children, travelers on the edge of the abyss, with the precipice gaping right beside them, walked ever so slowly, on a narrow path of a rocky mountain. They had to reach the palace on the horizon, where their Salvation lay. And there was no way. And the horizon was far away. Over seas and lands, through the customs of the sky. The Palace appeared beautiful, steadfast and redeeming in the light. Then, a white canvas was woven into a path over the seas of the air... so that the passing children could journey Home.
Will we reach Home? Will we find the Path of the white canvas woven with linen thread of light?
Why do I no longer remember if the path winding over the waves of celestial distances had been warped and braided by White, Angelic fingers, from the Palace towards the children... or, perhaps, from the wool roving they cast over the abysses, towards the Emperor, the flax they gathered a lifetime? And, in the air, it spun and braided into a thread – the white path on which they would have stepped Home.
Will we find the path that stretches through the skies towards Paradise?... I know that, constantly searching on earth for a way to Heaven, life, with all its earthly things, has constrained us and pushed us this far, to the edges of the world. And of the Time that was given to me and, behold, has passed... Therefore, I don't know, after so long searching on earth, how will I travel through the sky now?
Is it possible that sometimes even a foolish virgin might enter the Kingdom?
You know, Father, Who awaits me on the porch... in the antechamber of our Home, my good Parent... you know, when the chill of wandering and foreignness cools my blood through my veins, from the fear that you will tell me "I do not know you... Who are you?". And I quickly become frightened: "Who am I? I remained I, though I thirst to be You... out of complete Love...”
Then, therefore, the thought struggles in my chest that you know, if my son, however dirty, however lost, would turn his heart and face towards me, I would receive him in the antechamber, on the porch, in my heart, him, my son, woven from my longings, and pains, and love fixed with eyes on the path from which he always departed without looking back...
And now, if only he would remember my first love, I would quickly embrace him, immerse him in the Jordan of tears I gathered while I missed him, and place him in the room with those old photographs, where he was himself, as rosy-cheeked and pure as You had molded him. I would seat him at the Supper at the small round wooden table, on the three-legged stool beside the hem of Your garment.
Will You, truly Love Itself, receive me like this, ragged and torn by unworthiness and foreignness with which darkness, like in an unwitting dream, haunted me...
I sense You, I sense my brothers from Home waiting for me in Your paternal love. And the warm bread steaming on the table...
And Mother, Mother... Secret Tear, from timeless times, forever carrying me as a child, Her child... and giving birth to me in a child's cry after its Mother, in a startled coo of Paradise.
Maria Tudor
Photograph by Vadim Koza / pexels.com