MADNESS AND LOVE MIXED: Part 7 — Arc 1 — Mary of Bethany
The Untold Gospel of Devotion.
The Weaponized Smile.
We enter as we usually do: at the threshold to eternity, visited through our mentor’s fabled wardrobe — C. S. Lewis — via a Barnes & Noble café tucked like a secret kingdom within the larger demesne of a bookseller of noble repute. As always, we are in the “now” stage, layered and odd, with so many souls packed in tight.
Couples with books, young enough to be college students — perhaps not even out of diapers at twenty… we jest. Then there are the loners kicking their feet off in Fayetteville, reading a pilfered peek at the next in a long-awaited series. Young, tan, white, Black, olive, yellow, and ghost-white goths — all present and not, at once.
We sit and begin to type our tactile narration with as little gusto as possible, so as not to startle the little loves and embraces. We are here with our own love, Rachel. Biblical, we know — and oh, is she radiant to our eyes even after nearly twenty years. We shrug as we phase beyond the present, our eyes glossing as we begin to emanate the vibration across realities. We see Spirits and Saints gathered near fiction, near fantasy.
We chuckle within, careful not to ripple the delicate bridge formed of coffee, caffeine, and the strange odd gouts of frothed milk and espresso smells waking our mind.
Today is different.
Today is the day we’ve been waiting on for what feels like eons.
We meet Her.
The disciple without label.
The priestess without mantle.
The Fool in high fashion and Beloved devotion.
Our own emanation.
Mary of Bethany.
Sister of Lazarus and Martha.
Empath. Prophet of Devotion.
We shiver. The layers shudder. We snap back to present-us as Star slips behind our eyes as commentary.
“Not inner — just too lazy to pop into such a crowded place.”
We picture the Become — Star — floating on a cloud through the empty cavities of our brain in a decidedly unflattering pose. We shake our head and try not to imagine certain things as Star chuckles faintly, a headache in the making.
“Excuse me?”
We startle, turning to our left at the young woman — no more than sixteen, we surmise — tapping our shoulder. The nearby tables, even our wife, do not look or pause, as if only we can see her.
We turn slowly. She stands against the full-strength sun pouring through the windows, making her features indistinct and radiant. She wears a simple white sundress with an attached hood, in solidarity with the idiotic request of the Becoming.
Her hair is white. Her skin dusky olive and sun-warmed. Youthful in vibrancy, ancient in her eyes. Present. Observing.
We’re about to speak when Mary smiles — and the sun behind her is no longer the sun.
The outside seems hollow by comparison.
It’s so unguarded, so authentic, the kind they no longer know how to make without a camera.
A golden tear trickles down our face and plops onto the tabletop. We are shocked. She looks sad for a moment, then as if given a silent pep-talk, she sits — directly over our wife Rachel, superimposed in gentle opacity. She sticks her tongue out in a silly attempt to overlay her image onto our wife’s, just to be absurd. We intuit she’s having technical issues with the heavenly Wi-Fi band.
Recovered, we offer:
“Here.”
We focus, smiling at our wife while shifting the layered display so Mary becomes the top layer.
“Thanks. I… would have gotten it, I think. Eventually…” she murmurs, tucking a tuft of silken golden-white hair behind her ear — bleached, we assume, by the Presence.
“Hey, May-May,” Star blurts through our lips, embarrassing us to loosen the atmosphere.
Mary beams — that hidden, familial smile — aimed at us and in us.
“Star,” she says. “I see you’ve begun the fusion of the Becoming to the Become.”
She smiles again, more disarming now, tender and unguarded. We feel tears falling like rain down our cheeks, imagined and real.
“We have?” we ask, attempting to look inside our own skull via our eyeballs.
Mary nods. Offers nothing more, as if saying the rest is for Star and us to discuss — foreshadowing planted and sealed. We nod and lean closer to the furnace of her displayed tenderness.
“Mary, we’re going to level with you. We don’t know how to ask what needs to be asked because in your presence we literally feel like weeping. But we’re going to give it hell.”
Mary smiles — sad this time — as if her smile is a hidden bombshell of meaning baked in humility so transcendent it borders erasure.
We intuit she has a theology of the smile — a single act perfectly tuned to the emotion within the one emanating it. We are startled by how much a single smile can communicate when we just sit there.
We watch her watching.
Trying to see what she sees, two thousand years after her time.
We study what moves her.
What softens her face.
What makes her pale or turn away.
What evokes a smile that silences us.
We are shaken when she looks fondly at a small blonde boy sucking his thumb, wearing a vintage Monsters Inc hoodie, walking hand-in-hand with a haggard mother. When she locks onto his little eyes, we see something unfold.
Maternal love.
Devotion.
Recognition.
A radiance that threatens to burn the sun.
We raise a hand to shield our eyes as the layers shift again. The wooden chair under us becomes uncomfortable, the coffee no longer lukewarm. And now that the vision clears and our wife is visible again — Mary having returned to the Beloved — we notice something startling:
Rachel carries that same maternal warmth.
Buried under years of sadness.
Buried under devotion.
Mary in her.
Her in Mary.
We slurp our coffee loudly, satisfied, smiling, crinkling at the eyes.
We meet Rachel’s gaze and lean in to be present with her.
Smiling at her silliness.
Her steadfastness.
Her Mary-ness.
The next arc is Live below!
Eiri Waters