The Garden & the Serpent
My Dear People,
On that day I saw flights of goldfinches winging and bobbing their canary way over a field of sunflowers gone to seed. I saw wild turkeys skitter through tall grass and into the cover of thick woods. I picked up shark's teeth along a lazy beach. I stood at the edge of a high bluff and looked out over the serene, wide blue of the Potomac, stretching out for miles. And I made some new friends.
All this was Monday, on a Sabbath day I took up on the banks of the Potomac, on the Northern Neck. It was thoroughly life-giving. I came back with my shirt soaked through and with blood caked on my ankle. It is one of the best days I've had in months.
And yet there was something that happened that morning that stood apart from the rest of the day: as I made my way down Route 301, passing through Caroline County, I noticed an historical marker, "John Wilkes Booth." I pulled over. It turned out to be the spot where Booth was cornered, at the Garrett place, and gunned down. Having read Manhunt a couple of years ago, a riveting account of Booth's flight following his assassination of Lincoln, my imagination lit up. I walked down a path, presumably to the actual house site; and that's where I found it. A granite marker embedded in the earth, that read simply, "Let your peace fall upon the soul of John Wilkes Booth. The Twenty First Century Confederate Legion."
An image flashed through my mind: I could hurl the marker down the ravine. I reached down and felt to see if I could pry it loose. The ground was wet. I could do it.
I didn't.
I didn't want to participate in something like that. And I didn't want to give them, when they returned, which surely they will, any excuse to do anything in the same spirit.
During the course of the otherwise luminous day, occasionally my mind would find its way back to Route 301, and to that dark spot.
I thought of the serpent in the garden. And I knew afresh that that snake didn't live thousands of years ago.
That snake lives today.
And we can't kill it. And we can't throw it down a ravine.
What we can do is refuse its venom.
Your brother in Christ,
Wallace+
