Member-only story
Going the Jerusalem Mile
A story for All Soul’s Day…
[This is a few days late — All Souls’ Day is November 2nd — but fiction rarely aligns with the calendar, so…]
Ten days in every year — Easter week, the solstices, All Souls’ — the canons of the cathedral have a great many chairs removed and a vast square of canvas taken up from beneath them, to reveal a maze laid out in lines of bronze and time on the stone flags of the floor there, a channel worn by centuries of barefoot and chilly faith.
I think they’re mad, entirely insane, and I have told them so. That cursed measure should be dug up and melted down, it should be ripped out and filled in, ploughed under and cemented over. That tainted bronze that marks the path should be cast into ingots and then into the sea, into the deepest trench of the deepest sea, where no man might ever see or touch it. Let it do harm to demon-fish in the darkness, I don’t care. The maze should be deleted, expunged, destroyed; beyond that, I dare not go.
No blame to the good canons, I guess, that it is not. Small lives are small concern to them, who overlook a thousand years of history in stone and height and symbol. Easter congregations flock to walk the maze, jostling each other from its concentricity; its fame draws in tourists and townsfolk with forbidden cameras and outré shoes, both tolerated for that short season for the sake of money in the offertory boxes. In winter, pilgrims walk from the north, from distant Scottish churches, timing their long marches to reach us on the shortest day. Our maze is the end, the point and purpose of all that walking; by candlelight and prayer they shuffle, round and round and back and forth like dancers to a spoken beat resounding down the generations. The summer solstice looks southerly, to churches from the chalky lands, the lands of flint and furrow. Their pilgrims burn candles too when they come to us, and carry crosses as a sign of fealty .
They hardly need to do that. It gives them pleasure, I suppose, to give themselves a little pain. Their coming is token enough that this is a crusade, Crusading-Lite, in search of a diet deliverance. They’ll find no pain else, beyond what they bring on their own behalf.
It’s called the Jerusalem Mile, our precious maze, this way they walk, white-worn stone with brass…