Jacob's Wound by Trevor Herriot

Jacob's Wound by Trevor Herriot

Author:Trevor Herriot [Herriot, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-437-6
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2006-09-04T16:00:00+00:00


With the sun a few degrees lower in the sky now, I notice a glint of water on the eastern horizon. It’s the Wolverine, or at least I believe it is, running past St. Peter’s and on down from the northern limits of the Qu’Appelle watershed. At mass this morning I was daydreaming as I stared at the river motif that runs through the stained-glass clerestory of the chapel at St. Peter’s. Though the church is quite new and follows a modern, almost cubist design, the interior has an airy, skyward symmetry that alludes to Gothic cathedrals. Brushed-chrome struts are splashed by blue light from the “River of Life” that meanders overhead in the vaulted ceiling. The stained glass, like the pipe organ behind the altar, was built and installed by one of the brothers with the help of local volunteers.

As I looked at the small shards of coloured light that glow in abstract forms on the river of glass, as though they were adrift on its current, the stories I’d been reading about Hattie McKay, the Crusades, the scapular, and the origins of the Carmelites drifted through my thoughts. Then one of the brothers rose to give the first reading. The words of the text came in waves, and I felt within me an alignment, like metal filings before a magnetic field, as the brightest, sharpest remnants from all those stories flowed in a kind of patterned chaos until, off into the distance of our history, I began to imagine I could see one of the rivers of narrative that bind human spirituality to the wildness of creation.

In the weeks that followed, as Christian leaders prepared to wreak vengeance upon the unholy ones who brought terror into the very temples of international trade, I headed upstream, following the meandering history of the Carmelite scapular back to its indeterminate origins in medieval, post-Crusades Christendom. I set off with hopes that I would find a spring at its source offering clear draughts of wisdom. Instead there was the murkiest of bogs, but I waded in anyway.

At my shoulder as I read was the same question that now seems to loom over every church, mosque, and synagogue. It will be asked a thousand times in the privileged and shocked nations as we try to fathom what would make a small band of Islamic men launch a counter-crusade against the powers of modern Christendom. You can phrase it many ways, but it comes down to this: Why does religion divide when it should unite?

There may be no definitive answer, but I wonder if this question, too, is part of the divorce between monotheism and wildness. It is a primary division that has us now blaming religion for everything that is wrong with the world, from racial intolerance to mental illness, from war in the Middle East to environmental destruction on every continent. The evidence is damning enough and requires no litany here. The three faiths that arose in the Holy Land have at



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