I started this essay awhile ago but never posted it. I needed something for you to read this week, that I didn’t have to pull out of whole cloth for this week. It’s funny how days that are open are easy to fritter. It might not be all bad to write a rough plan for the next day. At any rate this is the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman found in Matthew 15: 21 – 28.  This was written without the help of AI except for looking up names. The pictures are from around the farm.
I saw him walking past the temple to Melqart, our cities’ protector and name for Hercules. How many times I’d prayed that the strong god would heal my daughter, but he had no strength against the hate bubbling out of her spirit. I could bear it no longer.
The man had the same look that swept past my daughter’s face when she came at me with the knife I used to cut vegetables, Maryam’s face otherworldly, fierce. We’d just been talking about how onions grow, buried in the ground, how we peel the paper off. I explained it’s how people are when they get closer. They peel off the paper and the glistening insides are shown. Sometimes we cry, I said. I was about to throw them, bulbs and stems along with celery into the bone broth. Hiram was roasting the hog we just slaughtered. I breathed in the smell of a feast.
My ears hurt with her scream, but I was past cowering. “Go ahead. I’m done.” She came right up to my face, her eyes wide with fury, her mouth twisted, the knife at my throat. It felt cold. Her breath smelled like a dead mouse.
As she collapsed, she looked like a cobra under the flute’s spell. Her wailing, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I hate myself” was as loud as the paid mourners. She curled into a ball and froze. My husband and his slave had to carry her to her bed. Where did my beautiful daughter go? We were best friends until her curves rounded over and she went the way of women. Whenever we tried to feed her, she hissed, “Don’t feed this ugly body.”
When our doctor sang his spells, she sounded like she was speaking from paradise. She sang how she’d walked in Eden and had run her hands through piles of emeralds and sapphires and diamonds. She’d seen the trees, not cedars, but the death tree and the life tree. All the cedars, even the ones that built Solomon’s temple, are nothing compared. The angel with the white-hot sword swinging back and forth did not scare her. She whispered, “My father was an angel. My mother was like you. I escaped the pit. Let me show you paradise.” She reached out her hand. Almost I took it, took the demon, but her eyes terrified me. No vision of paradise was worth the hate.
Our doctor tried whirling until he was in a trance. He tried special incantations, roots and herbs. At least she started eating, though she was dainty, only wanting honey and yogurt and hummus.
The man’s face was otherworldly fierce too but filled with kindness that scared me more than my daughter. But alive, so very alive, unlike the stone of our cities’ protector god. Nikkal, my best friend, said her husband came back from Israel, saying the man healed anyone—deaf, demon possessed, crippled. They said he was the Son of David, come to set Isreal free. A clean wind full of hope blew through me. It was like I sucked in a breeze that blew in from cedars up north. I was drawn to him in the same way I looked in on my daughter sleeping to make sure she was alive. I ran after him, my feet, stepping out of my sandals, the stones piercing them. I did not notice.
“Have mercy on me, Oh Lord son of David, my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” I cried out. His robes flowed like the sea when the swells were rising. His men ignored me and kept walking. “Have mercy on me Oh Lord son of David, my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” I screamed over and over, tears pouring down my face, my daughter’s sleeping and peaceful form in my mind’s eye. And still they walked away.
Do you know how painful it is to ask for help and be ignored?
Still I called out. ‘Have mercy on me. Son of David.” (After all my city supplied Solomon with timbers for his God’s temple all those years ago. Isn’t there some debt he owes?)
Finally they stopped. I heard his disciples say, “Tell her to go away. We’re tired of her voice. What a loudmouth.”
He looked beyond them to me. “I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” He sounded tired, impatient, his body taut with purpose.
All the history of my ancestors being at war with the house of Israel roared forward. They took our land, killed our flocks, decapitated our babies. We married them to make it stop. They said it was because Canaan took the land for himself when it was supposed to be Seth’s when Noah divvied it up. They said we had no right to it, that Canaan’s father should never have looked on Noah drunk and naked. They said God gave Abraham the land.
I stepped up. There was a twinkle in his eye and an unfathomable sadness. And that same ferocity like my daughter’s that was beyond our world. Only his teemed with authority and love. I did not kneel. I am a proud woman, a dyer of purple. People from the east, and north and south buy my cloth.
“Lord help me.” I dropped my eyes.
“It’s not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the puppy dogs.” His voice sounded like newly sawn wood, but full of laughter. I saw our Pomeranians sitting, eyes bright at our table. Even my husband sneaks scraps and I scold.Â
Before I could think I said, “Yes, even the little dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the masters table.”
“Oh woman, how great is your faith! Be it done to you as your desire.”
Right then, my daughter came running to my arms. Her eyes as bright and alive as his. He opened his arms as she ran past them to mine. I could barely see for the tears. I felt his hand on my shoulder.
His disciples were open mouthed. But I saw the sadness, the set in in the teacher’s jaw, as though some dread destiny was coming too fast. Not long after, we heard how he healed any sick person in the Decapolis. He told us to sit while he broke bread and fish and fed all of us on the hillside. The sun shone on our faces. My daughter took the bread, breaking it, eating it piece by piece.
