We thought we were dead those days – we certainly were not living. Death and demon days when pestilent winds and punishment were piled aheap on our prayers. Putrid sores filled with pus and poison – the purple buboes of the plague -marked the bodies of the dying. And there was no prophet proper to declare the word of God, no impartial priest to bless the people. Only the imposition of demands of our demented king by his proxies – lawyers and creditors as the appointed determiners of our destiny. “Pay up!” they demanded. “Your debts have come due!”
“We deserve to burn upon the pyre,” proclaimed the apostate in dark black robes. “To perish in flames!” The impatient crowd pelted him with stones.
“No peace, no peace,” sang the psalmist and the people dumped dung upon his head. The dizzied mob, disturbed by his presence in the square destroyed his instrument and drowned his voice.
I could not sleep and I would not dream. Not then. Not in the dark. Perhaps it was despair. Perhaps it was a premonition of the danger yet to come. I do not pretend to know. We longed to return to the anodyne past. We looked to the future with dread.
No palliative care. No apothecary. No painkiller prescription to break the fever of those days. No penitential prayer for pardon. Only endless days of destruction. Only the deluge of despair when God did not, or would not, hear our pleas.
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