Flowerpots

Relics: fragments of apparently deceased organisms, used for purposes beyond ordinary capacity by those capable of understanding the instrumentalities in question. A prescient individual whose words are still under copyright and who shall remain nameless wrote in a letter circa 1960 that solutions to the spiritual crisis of the West were no longer possible because the enemy was Western culture itself; all that could be done was to hide away, metaphorically speaking, a few relics in a flowerpot where they could be kept as reminders that something else once was possible. Here are two relics for the flowerpot. 1) A millennium or so ago in Japan, an old woman provided sustenance for a venerable hermit who lived on a mountaintop near her little cottage. The time came when enemies of the hermit, seeking to undo his supposed sanctity, sent a beautiful young woman to crawl into his bed one moonlit night. The hermit, seeing her enter his quarters, murmured a reproachful verse to the effect that the bare tree of winter cannot be tempted by the promise of spring flowers, and ushered her out. When the old woman heard of this, she exclaimed, "To think that I wasted my food for so many years on that old fraud! He need not have yielded to her blandishments, but he ought to have shown compassion for what seemed to be her human need." And saying this, she started up the mountain to drive the hermit away. 2) Also some time in the past, a man who was easily angered was given an assignment by his teacher, to seat himself at the main crossroads near his village and offer water to every traveler who passed by. The man did so, patiently and with growing pleasure at his task, until the day when a traveler rushed by, ignoring the man's invitation to stop and drink. Furious at being slighted, the man grabbed his rifle from the ground and shot the traveler dead. As it happened, the traveler was a murderer, on his way to commit the most heinous crime of his career. As is the case with the two tons of splinters of the True Cross and the three heads of Saint John the Baptist, these relics will arouse, one hopes, bemusement and ridicule. That is one of their functions. From the relic who prefers, for historical reasons, to sign himself Johannes the Silentiary