I’m in a rented morning suit, minus the hat.

Looking down the slender nave of a church finished eight hundred years ago, with a man in a full suit of armor lying carved in stone one room over, I’m trying to get used to the idea that I’m supposed to read in here. Out loud, in public. We’re early, on purpose.

Tom, a friendly vestryman my age, takes me up the aisle to the place I’m to read from. It’s a carved dark oak lectern with two steps, halfway up on the right.

People on both sides will be facing each other across the center aisle, he explains, except where the lectern looks directly across at the wedding party. A bit further up is where the priest will give her message and officiate the ceremony. When the time comes to do the witnessing, the priest will escort the couple and their parents all the way forward to sign the documents at the high altar, above the handwriting of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

She asked me to read at her wedding, my niece, her godfather. We worked it all out by email. Of course! I would love to, I responded. It would be an honor! Where would the wedding be? At Christ Church Cathedral, in Oxford, where she and her fiance teach and study.

My wife and I were very excited. What a perfect opportunity to see Oxford, celebrate with family, tour the University, walk the Cotswolds.

It’s Henry VIII’s cathedral, actually. He took the place from the Catholic Church about 500 years ago when there was a lot of fighting over property and ideas between monks and kings. Like now, except these days it’s between political parties, gangs and governments. Besides, there aren’t as many monks around, and hardly any kings.

After Tom’s briefing, I got a short course about the stone knight and the cathedral from Sally, an interested congregation member. The knight was important, but the place wasn’t about him. It was all about Frideswide.

Frideswide was the daughter of Oxford’s ruler in the 600’s. She took vows, started a convent and seemed to be doing fine until a nearby king decided to take her in marriage by force. When Frideswide prayed for her safety, the king (and/or his soldiers, depending on who’s telling the story) was struck blind at the Oxford gate. Once it all died down, Frideswide agreed to restore everyone’s vision on the condition they fully repent, which of course they did.

She went back to running her priory. By the time she died, it had monks, nuns, a school and a convent church, the predecessor of this cathedral, in which they buried her. 

In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey dissolved Frideswide’s priory in order to build himself a College in its place. It would be called, not surprisingly, Cardinal College. Unfortunately for Wolsey, he had a job-limiting problem, which was that, try as he might, he couldn’t get the Pope to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

But Henry really wanted that annulment. He sidelined Wolsey, proclaimed himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England, had his own Archbishop Cranmer make the annulment, married Anne Boleyn and got himself excommunicated by the Pope. Personally. After that, he dissolved the English monasteries and took their property, including Cardinal College, which he renamed Christ Church. Which is where we are standing.

Back to Frideswide, continued Sally. In 1553, a former nun named Catherine Dammartin died. She was the wife of a Protestant divinity professor working in the College at Christ Church. They buried her in the cathedral close to Frideswide, who had by this time been a saint for centuries.

Bloody Mary (Henry’s daughter with Catherine of Aragon) took the throne that year. High on her list was restoring England to Catholicism. On that agenda, Cardinal Pole ejected Catherine (the deceased now-Protestant former nun) from Saint Frideswide’s church, dumping her remains into a manure pile out behind the stables.

Elizabeth I (Henry’s daughter with Anne Boleyn) was next in line for the throne when Bloody Mary died. Elizabeth was Protestant. Catherine was headed back inside. Her remains were retrieved from behind the stables and mixed with the bones of Frideswide, in what must have been quite a service, right here in this very church. They were re-buried together beneath the floor, the Catholic saint and the Protestant married nun, not far from the stone knight.

It would be a passage from the Song of Solomon, she said. She gave me the verses to rehearse. “Set me as a seal upon your heart,” the middle part goes, “as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave.”

Wow.

I wonder if Henry ever read that. I hope so.

Love, death, passion, graves. They’re all here.

I need to get calm now. I’d like to read the words the way Solomon would have recited them, surely how the wedding party wants to hear them. Tom the vestryman is smiling. He sees I have the words typed out, slipped into a leather-like folder I can carry up to the lectern. I think he knows the folder will mask my shaking hands.

OK. It’s time.

Henry, are you there? I’m going to read now…

In: Travel Thru History >travel memoirs 2012

Before ten years ago, we never knew we had pin cherries. It was only after the pines began to fade from age and drought, that the little stand of trees took root. After we saw them we noticed the tall sinuous parent tree to the east, one we had remarked for its trunk shape but never knew by name.

The way they told us was their blossoms in the spring, shed in white flurries like a second snow when the wind came in over the lake from the south. Their deep copper bark contrasts beautifully with their early chartreuse foliage and that of the maples and juneberries nearby.

We should have known they were there, downhill from our vegetable garden, waiting in soil created from forest duff on top of sand left by glaciers, but we never saw them until the blossoms came.

Pin cherries like cold climates, grow like weeds and die early. They take no chances on reproduction, spreading both by birds who devour their berries and by sending roots beneath the soil to the next open spot of sun and rain they can pop up to meet.

Besides being more pit than pulp, they are related to roses, I found out. Also to juneberries, chokecherries, black cherries and raspberries, all of which grow wild in our untended woods.

Good travels, pin cherries. Find a niche, stick with it, make yourselves useful. Enjoy the company of others, all of us here for a little while.

It was darkness in springtime, with orange blossoms. The Spanish understood it, especially the Greek, the one who painted as if with his brush he were feeling the bones.

Seville turned silent as the procession passed, folds of Christ’s cloak carved in wood, black with age, moving through the smell of rosemary above the costalares straining beneath their floats, weightlifters shuffling in cells of night with the bugle dirge behind them, until a tap on the pavement told them to take one more step, to set down the load bearing on their necks through soaked towels, to rest.

It was raining bombs that spring on Belgrade, and fear on Kosovo. Albanian Kosovars lined up at the Albanian border and at Macedonia, all the borders they could get to, miles of them, to get away, to get anywhere away from the slaughter. They went toward hope, for without hope the darkness is too powerful, the darkness wins. They straggled into borders, miles of people, some of them partial, some whole, some angry, some gone already.

South of Seville in Ronda also there was rosemary, bitter and resinous in the evening, people holding a sprig next to their heart as the float passed, the float of Hermandad del Santisimo Cristo de la Sangre y Nuestra Senora del Mayor Dolor, the Brotherhood of the Most Holy Christ of the Blood and Our Lady of the Greatest Pain.

They were not thinking of Albanian blood when they carved into the signal bell of their float in Ronda the name of their brotherhood. They were not thinking of Kosovars when they wrote their names on the chart of lifting positions for the raising of their float at the signal of its bell. They were thinking of the blood of Christ, of the blue veil of the Virgin floating above them in the scented night, of the sound of shuffling feet in every Spanish town this Semana Santa, this Holy Week in the Year of our Lord 1999.

The Christ died doing what he loved, convincing people of possibility. Others who saw perfection differently took his life, as did the bull which gored Manolete of Cordoba. The people loved Manolete too, for his artistry in the ring, but he worked in a way different from the Christ of Nazareth’s way, until the end when they each drew the bull close.

His spirit, Manolete’s, is still inside the replica of his tomb in his home town, on the second floor of the bullfight museum in Cordoba. You can go there and see for yourself, white marble.

In the procession of Semana Santa the brotherhoods march as penitentes, robed and hooded, barefoot and chained, dragging behind them links of iron scraped bright on the pavement. Satin cloaks and hoods bear emblems of their order, sewn-on mandalas, designs hundreds of years old.

It is a matter of fasting the next day if you are a penitente. If you are a young one, your mother will feed you a sandwich just before midnight. It is important that the procession be done late in the evening, arriving at your neighborhood church about three in the morning, because in daylight the reflections are wrong. The floats and hoods and capes and chains are made to reflect the light of candles, not of the sun. People lining the procession route expect this. They are silent and serious through the week until on Easter morning everything changes and the processions take place against the whiteness of the orange blossoms, in the light of a new spring.

Perhaps this is how Manolete will arise one day. We will be in the procession straining under our load, shuffling toward the thump of the marshal’s staff on the pavement, setting down at last the wooden crossbeam from our shoulders to crouch, to rest. And then Manolete will appear at the end of the next block, his mother standing beside us wiping away her tears in the joy of his arising from the marble box on the second floor of the house in Cordoba, the beautiful marble box lifted above the street as we lift the Christ on our shoulders.

Then he, Manolete, will lead us to the border. It is there that we will care for the woman from Kosovo, for her child and for her neighbor, the one with vacant eyes, the one who has not spoken a word.