among the tombs

Our retreat guests just left, and we're flushed with excitement and gratitude. For the guys who came and for how good it was. I'll write about it when I have time to gather my thoughts, and when I've rested a bit, but I wanted to remember what Heather wrote for the retreat. To help us all get into the story we were studying, about the man possessed with a legion of demons (from Mark 5, right after Jesus calms the storm). Her version begins with the storm still raging, the demoniac speaking...

Bad storm today. The sky is as black as my mind, and the wind is whipping the lake till it heaves and groans with the pain, humps itself up into waves that are taller than me. Lightning rips down the sky onto the water, close—very close—the thunder cracks as soon as the light is gone, a sound of huge stone smashing against stone, almost drowning out the voices in my head.

I look up to the cliff where the pigs are pastured; I can hear them when the thunder fades, grunting and screaming in fear. The pig-herders are having a bad day of it. Everyone is; except me.

Anyone out there on that lake is a goner. I've seen bodies washed to shore with fish-bites taken out of them; this is where the currents bring them, here to the tombs where I live. Handy. Anyone out on that lake is a goner, but here on my hillside of rocks and caves and graves I listen to the thunder and it wraps me in sound, and the voices are stilled to a low angry mutter and I can hear myself think.

I like storms.

I squat here in the rain, not moving, looking up into the angry sky. The rain comes down in fury, battering my face. Any sane man would be crouching under a rock ledge, even inside one of the caves where they bury the rich dead, to be out of this.

I am not a sane man.

I am Legion.

(for the rest of her story, click here: "Among the Tombs")