Ecce Homo
Holy Land: Edition XII
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I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.
— Revelations 19:11-13
They rode across the desert beneath a vast and indifferent sky, the woman heavy with child upon an ass and the man leading the animal by a halter. The days were hot as the oven of the sun and the nights cold as the crypt. They'd departed Nazareth many nights prior, called to Bethlehem for the census of the mighty Caesar who sat far away in his enmarbled city. The woman gripped the burro with one hand and her belly with the other. The child there a seed soon to issue forth and bloom into this parched earth, good news for a bad world.
When they reached the town the woman’s time was nigh. They sought shelter at the inn but the keeper turned them away for there was no room. In crude stable they laid her, the beasts looking on placid and incurious. When the child was delivered the night had drawn its black shroud across the land. Yet some light seemed to emanate from the newborn who lay squalling in the feedbox as if he were no mortal babe but some otherworldly herald swaddled there helpless and pale.
Out on the hills the shepherds watched their flocks by firelight when suddenly the sky tore asunder and out poured a host of seraphim who sung choruses of gloria over that lowly manger. The shepherds rose in holy dread and went to bear silent witness. Soon after there came travellers from the east, men who studied the heavens and knew the stars and their movements through that vast and implacable ink. They too bent the knee though kings themselves and laid costly gifts before the child foretold by prophecy and heralded by heaven itself. The animals gazed on mild and mute, perhaps knowing that amidst their kind the saviour of the world now lay, come to redeem a realm as fallen and barren as those desert wastes through which his parents wandered to birth him here at the hinge of history in a land of dust and stone.
Or so it was written.