Sermo In Monte

A man reflects on love and family, death and beauty while recalling a past life in which he was close friends with the historical Jesus of Nazareth

Aaron Calvin is a Midwestern-born writer and journalist currently living in Vermont with his partner, son, and two cats. You can read more of his work at www.aaroncalvin.com

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Out my window, I see Death standing in the mist below the maple tree, fiddling with something unseen in his pale hands. I turn away from him.

My child sits before me, laughing at the exaggerated baritone of my voice as I try to goad him into eating. Cottage cheese drips from his lips. Golden hair vines down the boulder of his head. His mouth is small and black. He is beautiful and frightening. 

I’m reminded of my friend Jesus, with whom I once walked the shores of the Kinneret, poking at stones and shells that had been bundled together and discarded by the tide. When the water was clear and calm, shelled creatures could be seen scuttling along in the shallows. We took these walks often, Jesus and I, occasionally stopping to watch a boat moving slowly across the blue horizon. 

An early memory of our days together: The wind had kicked up the sand and dust devils turned along the beach. The tide had receded from the shore beneath the drying sun, the stench of the dead fish left behind was on in the wind. 

Harsh weather today, my friend, Jesus said. This was how he addressed me and nearly everyone else. He spoke in a sort of loving shorthand in the common language, an intermingling of Greek and Aramaic. 

Brutal, I replied.

But still I opened my eyes this morning and looked out upon the stricken land and thanked God for my life, he said. His eyes were wide. Why did I do that?

Jesus often spoke of the experience of his waking life with convincing bewilderment. Sure, I witnessed some of his miracles. The awkward healing of the blind, the mortally or strangely wounded, an occasional leper moaning beside the road that would get up, suddenly without pain, after he touched them. I was not present at the resurrection of Lazarus, but I heard about it. I know how embarrassed he must have been, how sheepish the expression he must have worn at the revelation that a man might rise from the dead at his bidding. How he must have realized, as the man stood up and walked out of the world of the dead, that he had only granted him a brief reprieve, and how cruel that was. I can hear his voice as though he were next to me — what have I done? he must have said.

I think the Bible got his tone right in a general sense. Though this depends on the writer and the translation, of course. The synoptic gospels follow an imagined man, stitched together from the words passed among travelers moving through the dirt streets, long after he died and rose and left again. I like Mark the best, how simple and sad he wrote, but the Gospel of Matthew has its own flair for the literary, a painterly flourish that I find endearing. None of them knew Jesus as I did, and it would’ve been impossible for them to know him as he was. Above all, I knew him as a kind man, a little confused at times and often bashful, self-conscious but considerate beyond reproach. One thing I can say for certain: He enjoyed a nice, long walk. 

• • •

At midday, my son and I return to the kitchen. Alice — my beloved Alice — enters from the garden to find us, his hands squeezing a mush of orange in a bowl before him. Black soil covers her hands. Her left hand is tightened into a fist and in that fist she holds a clutch of pink radishes by their green leaves. She washes away the soil from her hands and the radishes in water that streams forth from the faucet. Black water mingles with the unwashed breakfast dishes. Our son gurgles in recognition of his mother.

What are you two up to? she asks. 

Just telling a story, I say.

She smiles. Her eyes are clear and green, the way a forest canopy appears reflected in a pool of rainwater. Small lines have formed from the repetition of her smile, her laugh, the furrowing of her brow. I do not tell her about Death, who I saw standing in the mist that morning. 

Don’t give him too much to think about at once, she says. 

Alice could tell it all better than me, but it’s my story. Alice has an ear for proverb, an eye for koans; she gives me more words I can use. She can’t stand a traditional point of view. She keeps her own rituals and superstitions, amalgams of pagan and new age strains of thought, whole-cloth inventions. They’re little lanterns that illuminate the dark landscape. She respects my past lives and doesn’t demand I bring her understanding; she always wants to make her own world. 

I think of Death. What was he fiddling with in the distance? Briefly, unbearably, I think of Alice gone. I attempt, as she might recommend, to sit with this consideration, allow myself to know it fully, but I can’t, not now. But Death does not stop by simply for a chat. 

She raises the clutch of radishes from the sink. With the black washed away, they’re purely pink. Judith holding Holofernes’ head but with his mottled skin stripped away to reveal the blood and muscle beneath. I see reflected in the way she holds the gathered leaves the way I have at times gathered her long hair in my fist. Desire shifts between us as we share a mutual gaze. She comes to me, holds my head to her breast, leaves a kiss on my forehead. She sets the clutch of radishes on the table. Our son’s eyes widen. I place my hand on Alice’s thigh. We hold one another in silence before she returns to the garden. 

• • •

Jesus and I looked out at the waters of the Kinneret, the clear surface a huge mirror turning away the midday sun. His profile against the cloudless cerulean, the acute arc of his nose. He took my hand, as he often did when trying to emphasize something. 

Love is like a boiled fish, he said. Part of its beauty is the falling away of it all.

I contemplated this for a moment, looking out at the water. 

And the living fish? I asked. 

That too is love, he said. Bless-ed is the fish, both living and boiled. 

He was always proclaiming the blessedness of the world. In Matthew’s Beatitudes, a section of the scripture formed off notes recorded in some of the larger gatherings Jesus spoke at on the way to Syria. It was a collection of sayings I heard Jesus state many times, in one way or another, with Matthew’s trademark embellishment of course. The actual words he spoke were lost to history. Blessed are the meek, earth inheritors… Blessed are the comforted mourners… Blessed are the mercy-obtaining merciful. Historically beloved and sanctified, certainly, but as I recall he was always sort of just saying things like that. 

The meat of a boiled fish is warm, very tender, I observed. 

This was typical of the kinds of conversations Jesus and I had as we made our way along the Kinneret in those days. The miracles were always just images reflecting and obscuring meaning. I knew it then, but the stories sometimes make them something else. The way he spoke about the world—the way he made those around him see it—revealed its true strangeness. There was something in the witnessing that could never be translated, never be truly shared. 

The boiling hot flesh of love will rend your skin and your eyes will roll back to heaven if you touch it before it cools, Jesus said in the way someone might say that the sky is blue. 

He was always speaking like this, showing me how ripped up and spilling over with love the world was. 

• • •

When Jesus spoke of ghosts, he was not speaking in metaphor, I say to my son. 

He is lying on his stomach. He can’t yet stand on his own, though he has made himself steady and upright against the coffee table on a few incredible occasions. I have been telling him stories since he was born. Though he cannot yet wield language for himself, Alice tells me it’s important to tell him these stories. 

He wanted us to have authority over unclean spirits, I say. Those spirits live in everyone, even you and me and your mother, even.

Alice is outside where the April sky is plastered away behind gray marble clouds. She makes ready for the summer garden while tending to the spring one. She exists in separate spaces in time. 

It just makes you want to rip your own heart out and bury it in the ground, doesn’t it? I say, watching her. Freely received, freely given.

My son looks at me. He burbles. These words mean something to him maybe, but it’s impossible to say what. In a week, a year, a day, he won’t remember what he doesn’t even understand. But our time together feels important, if only because I know that there is no replicating the present, that the moment of our existence is singular even if it’s woven tightly within the repetitions and movements of all the similar days. 

Could Death be standing in the distance waiting for him? I cannot bear this thought either, the idea that Death might arrive for a boy even before he has the language to describe the world he’s leaving. Though I know it’s possible, I cannot face the idea that Death might come for my son. 

Let me tell you a story, I say to him. Once I was a man who died five thousand years ago, three thousand years before the birth of my friend Jesus. I was walking up a mountain. I died when the snow was thick, white, untrammeled. I was alive before there was a history to tell me what came before me. I felt the wind on my face, softly at first, before it picked up and began whipping my cheek red with motes of ice. I cannot say where I was going, only that I had to get to higher ground. 

I was uncertain what danger awaited me, but I had seen Death walking with me through the valleys in the summer, before the winter came. I was alone, a shepherd to my flock of sheep in the grassy hills that lay between the mountains. It was there I saw Death standing solemnly beneath a birch tree. He was pale and thin and knowing. I did not recognize him, having never truly met him before this life. But still, I knew his desire. Death lingered, slowly drew closer. The grass grew richer and greener and my lambs grew lanky and brave, the adults sturdy and full. 

In the autumn, I returned to my village with Death near. The village was just a small collection of fires and fragile structures I had known all my narrow life. The craftsman sharpened my arrowheads for the hunt, though I knew there would be no hunt. I ate unrisen bread with my neighbors and kin. To the elder woman, I brought an offering of salted goat meat and sweet pine sap; she gave in return a burning of incense and smeared ink beneath my skin in ouroboros shapes to ease the pain in my lower back. The shapes were to bless me with lengthened life. Even she could not see Death stalking me even as he waited just outside.

The next morning I cloaked myself in fur that had been washed in the cold river and dried over the embers. I carried fresh arrows in my deerskin quiver. A small reserve of dried goat meat in my pannier would last me to the mountain summit. After several days of travel, I was beset by a gale. My vision was taken, replaced by the blank whiteness of the blizzard. Then, for the first time, I saw Death standing before me, not behind me, his pale arms outstretched. There came a sharp whistle through the storm and pain erupted in my left side. It was not Death that felled me, for Death does not do the killing. It was an arrow shot by another man, a man I had never met and never would. Still, Death stood above me all the same.

My son looks up at me, his eyes just starting to change to green, like his mother’s. 

When I first met my friend Jesus on the shores of the Kinneret, I say, the first thing he did, even before speaking to me, was approach me and place his hand on my side at the exact place where I had received the arrow wound in that previous life.

Oh dear, Jesus said. Oh my.

• • •

Alice comes in again from tending the garden. I have washed the dishes, but soggy bits of bread and vegetable peelings still float in the pools of water formed around the drain. 

I watch Alice from the entryway. Our son is wrapped in a sling against my chest, sleeping. A bowl of small and medium-sized radishes sits on the counter beside the sink. Alice cuts and peels away the outer coverings of three white onions — onions just formed, undersized and sweet. She spreads soft butter on two slices from yesterday’s loaf of bread. She cracks a little pepper over the slices of onion. She pulls back a chair and sits to eat at the table. 

When I first told Alice of my many past lives, how they come to me in dreams, how many of my dreams involved an intimate friendship with Jesus, she said: that’s interesting. 

Maybe it was the lateness of the hour or our youth that prompted my confession. Maybe it had something to do with how stoned we were at the time in a dark corner of a mutual friend’s party. Neither she nor I particularly liked this friend, but he was well known for the parties he threw in a lush garden behind an inherited brownstone in the city where we lived. At this particular party, there was served a stupefying punch — hibiscus flavored but mostly vodka — in depression glass bowls. Long plates of hors d'oeuvres were continuously replenished. Someone was nearly always rolling a joint or handing around a house key to sniff. But the company was loathsome and boring, artists with cushions of inherited wealth that insulated them from the world. They spoke words so bound up in irony that often what they said didn’t mean anything at all. 

In an effort to escape a singer-songwriter who had trapped me in a discussion about Bob Dylan’s gospel albums, I came upon Alice, hiding beneath a blighted pear tree that, miraculously, was still bearing fruit. She drew on a one-hitter and exhaled upon a shriveled little pear as I approached. 

Isn’t this incredible, she said. A pear grows in Brooklyn. 

It’s beautiful, I said, in a sort of stunted way.

Isn’t that so much more relatable, though, than its healthy country cousins?

She was fresh from dropping out of Harvard Divinity, harassed by an older professor until she was forced to abandon her studies. A co-worker at the art supply store where she worked had invited her along to the party. She had a round face and a cleft chin. In the light-polluted night, I could just make out her green eyes. I fell in love immediately then tried to deny it as long as I could. But before the party was over, I somehow found myself nonchalantly confessing what I had never confessed to anyone before. 

So you see your past lives in dreams? she said.

Yes.

And that’s how you learned you were friends with Jesus in a past life.

Yes.

Well then, let me ask you this, she said. Was the historical Jesus the son of God?

I took a moment. It was a question I had often wondered myself. But how could I know, in our friendship in the flesh, if he truly was a holy being? In our conversations together, alone and with others, we were just two people discussing the mysteries of life. Sure, there were the miracles, but mostly he was simply a man living with intention and kindness. He was not even, it seemed, all that popular. If he was ever with a crowd, it was just he and I along with some of the other Galilean poor, who had gathered, more often than not, simply because they were hungry, alone, and bored. 

I’m not sure, I said. We cooked together a lot.

What did you cook?

Fish, mostly.

She laughed. Her laugh was abrasive and loud, a laugh she had probably spent her whole girlhood trying to reject and perhaps only recently embraced. It broke my whole heart open.

The early Christians had a word for this phenomenon, she said. They were quite mystical in their sensibilities. Anamnesis. A sort of epiphanic eradication of forgetting brought upon one by the holy spirit. The remembering of your past self.

But it didn’t happen all at once, I said. It felt like a slow erosion of my sense of self and who I was in my dreams, all these different people. But it’s my time with Jesus that comes to me again and again. Like waves lapping over me as the tide comes in and then recedes. I’ve had these dreams ever since I could remember. Sometimes there are other lives, but I see clearest the lives that I lived centuries ago, more clearly than any I might have lived closer to the present. It was only when I was a teenager that I began to think they meant something. I’ve never told anyone about them.

Why are you telling me now? Alice asked.

I couldn’t find the words to answer. I think it was clearer to her than to me why I chose to confess to her. So she decided to ask a different question.

Were you with him?

When?

When he died?

• • •

Jesus had seldom returned to Galilee in the weeks before he left for Jerusalem for his final Passover. There was a week in the summer when I heard of his return from some fisherman as they sorted their catch. The fisherman had been out in the Kinneret that morning, struggling against the roiling waves, the moon high and full but the lake beset by fog. Jesus had appeared before them on the water and led them ashore. They said he appeared as though a ghost.

I found Jesus along the shoreline at the place where he often took his midday rest. He was eating a fig. He didn’t look up but addressed me as I approached. 

I’m going to die soon, he said. 

That can’t be true, I said.

But it is true, he said. His teeth looked like gnashing tombstones against the fig’s purple flesh. His bare feet were half submerged in the glimmering water. He kicked against the waves. I could tell his thoughts were elsewhere, his mind wandering as it often did. So bright and lively in his flesh, it seemed impossible to imagine him a corpse. 

If it is true, I said, are you afraid to die?

Oh yes, he said without hesitation. 

Then don’t go. Don’t go to Jerusalem for Passover, I said. Stay here in Galilee with me. We’ll celebrate Passover as we always do and you won’t have to die.

He looked neither pained nor angry, though I had seen him express such emotions before. He looked almost wistful.

You know I cannot, he said. And you know, as I do, that death is neither an end or a beginning. It is a passing through the shroud. Nothing but a moment. Do not weep, my friend. I will prepare a place for you.

I smiled at this. He was his usual self and I had no cause to believe he would truly die. Jesus was just my thoughtful friend.  

What would you like as your last meal, then, before you go off to die? I said. 

A boiled fish, eaten with you.

But we had no fish nor the tools with which to catch one. So he handed me another fig from his pocket and we ate together silently, the waves tickling our feet and sweet fig juice dribbling down our beards. When finished, we leaned against each other as we washed away the stickiness in the water.

Jesus left and he did not return. Those same fishermen who told me of Jesus’ miracle on the water told me he had died, mutilated at the hands of the Roman state and those wretched Pharisees. I quickly traveled to where he was buried so I might know for myself that what was said was true. When I arrived, I found the stone had been moved away from the tomb and there was no body. In the shade of a nearby olive tree, I saw Death, his pale face and pale hands fiddling with something unseen. The face he wore was a mask. I called out as he turned to leave, but had no words for the question I wanted to ask.

Two visitors came and found me at Jesus’ empty tomb. One saw me and called upon me as a man. The other thought I must be an angel. They asked what had happened there and where the body had gone.

I don’t know, I said.

• • •

After the party, Alice accepted an invitation back to my apartment. On a second-hand mattress in my small room with walls entirely bare except for a framed portrait of an imagined Jesus, we made love for the first time. When we had finished, the pink sunrise cast a holy light through the blinds. The sweat on our bodies had turned cold. We barely fit beside each other in the small bed. She propped herself upon her elbow and turned to me. 

Since you’ve lived so many lives before, she said. Do you know what it’s like to die?

Not exactly, I said. I’ve seen dying, but haven’t seen what comes after.

She turned slightly, her expression obscured by the light. 

Are you afraid to die? she asked. 

Of course, I said. Even Jesus was afraid to die.

Good, she said. Me too.

She fell asleep beside me and snored softly into the afternoon. 

• • •

There’s a day I return to again and again in my dreams. 

Jesus nudged me awake as I slept on a hay mound in the barn of the man I served, the place where I often slept. 

Come, he said, today is the day.

Come back later, Jesus, I said. I’m trying to sleep.

But he wouldn’t have it. He made me rise and together we gathered and dried all the flotsam and kindling we could manage from the shore of the Kinneret. We waded out into the lake and gathered all the meager netfuls of sardines we could haul in. We carried it all to the summit of a small hill that looked out over the water and over the sky. We made a large fire to cook the fish. Jesus left and returned with clay jars full of barley flour. We worked it with water to form lumpy dough and stuck it along the walls of the fire pit we had dug. Once cooked through, we stacked these flat loaves in woven baskets.

As evening came, Galileans arrived. Some brought fish or small jugs of wine, but most brought nothing. These were Jesus’ friends and they were my friends too. We passed around the fish and the bread; we sipped from the wine jugs. Jesus spoke on his usual subjects. He spoke on love and kindness and mercy and of death untriumphant. We all laughed and cheered him on as we often did. After a few sips of wine we even started to take some of these visions seriously. 

When the fire was nothing but embers and our friends had all gone back into town, Jesus and I found ourselves alone together once again, a little drunk and verging upon sleep. There were a few loaves and fish leftover, passed up by everyone who didn’t want to take the last of the food.

Jesus and I descended the hill together. Walking along the shore, the stars above us were bright, brighter than I had ever seen them against a cloudless, moonless night sky. I felt so overwhelmed by the crystalline immensity that I laid down on the sand. Transfixed by the night sky, I barely noticed Jesus stopping to lie down next to me. I turned to him when I felt him take my hand and saw only his profile against the brilliant sky. We fell asleep like this, his hand in mine. I woke the next morning to the sound of the waves upon the shore. I was alone. 

Sometimes I wake from this dream and I feel swelling within me a feeling so familiar yet inarticulable. Sometimes, I gently coax Alice awake by kissing her neck until she finds my lips with hers and we make love together, entwined in the dark. Sometimes, I wake to a feeling of dread so deep, so weighed down with grief, I can barely move. Eventually I might lean over to kiss the space where Alice’s neck connects to her back, counting the bones of her vertebrae before turning face down in the bed and willing myself back to sleep.

It's not the violence of death that is to be feared; death himself is not violent. Nor is there death’s wrath to fear; death is not malicious. He is indifferent, a passing traveler, on the road only to take with him another in his company. It is this leaving, the setting off upon the road at night, that is to be truly feared.

Tonight, when I wake from this dream, I sit straight up. A small lamp casts stars upon the wall. My son is asleep in his crib. I watch the rise and fall of his small body as he breathes through the night and wonder what lives he might be dreaming.

If I find Death standing in the mist beneath the maple tree in the morning, fiddling with something unseen in his pale hands, I will go to him. I will find the words for the question I want to ask. 

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