The Child Who Jesus Took Into His Lap
I was playing with rocks in the shade when he called for me. I had come there with my father, who’d heard of the miracles and hoped he could heal his leg, but he was too shy to cry out like the others did. Child, they said. Come here. The Teacher has asked for you. How he even saw me through the crowd I don’t know. Without so much as asking my father if they could take me from him I was lifted up and passed over the crowd, all those strangers’ hands on my body, then lowered down into his lap. He was thin. I could feel his thighbone digging into my leg like an oar. His beard tickled my neck. He smelled of sweat and flowers and his breath stank. I didn’t hear him say what I would later hear he said, something about how his followers had to be like me if they wanted to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I was too focused on the faces of those in the inner circle, all men save for one woman. They looked insane. I was afraid that now that I was in his lap I would never again see my father, who was standing on his crutch in the shade of the olives, trying to see me through the crowd. But he must have sensed that I was afraid because even as he kept talking he began bouncing me on his knee like my father would in the evening, on his good leg.