"Don't cry," said Love.

Throngs of curious townsfolk shuffled, clamoring to join the swelling procession passing through the street. As Mara gently wrestled her way to the front, the crowd slowed to a lumbering pace, carrying with it the weight of grief. The hot afternoon sun made her skin feel sticky with the sick stench of loss. A loud wail burst through the muffled weeping of the crowd, uncontainable by the mother's heart - already shrunken when her husband had died. Now her son was gone too. Her tears rushed to preserve her soul that would have shriveled in the heat.

The mother's unbridled cries broke any sense of composure the crowd held on to. There was nothing left to hide; sorrow was no stranger to the town. Mara turned and saw the mother of Hevel, the neighbour boy who had played with swords imagined from olive shoots. His mother's eyes trailed the grieving widow as she gripped the bosom that had been pierced when Hevel left one night in a stupor and never returned. Mara knew that in their loud weeping, they were all remembering their own lost ones. If only her father heard the crying in her and her mother's hearts.

The procession had slowed to a halt at the town gate. The passageway was narrow, and the other side of the gate held another crowd larger than any she had ever seen in her life. It stretched so far out of the town that no one could see where its end was. Peering between the heads of two women in front of her, Mara saw a man coming through to the front of the other crowd. The brownness of his face and his sandals betrayed the miles he must have traveled. He paused as he gazed at the coffin, and then at the woman who had collapsed at the feet of the coffin bearer. She bore no other strength to cradle her own shriveling soul. The traveler gathered it and carried it in his eyes.

"Don't cry," she heard him say to the widow as the crowd's wailing thinned to spread a bewildered murmur. Mara felt a fragrance of fringed lavender passing over the crowd and closed her eyes. 'Strange,' she thought, 'that is the wind from the safflower season.' When she opened them and looked at the traveler again, she recognized the familiar grief she and her mother had known for years. It was carried too in his eyes!

Astounded, she reached in her heart and rummaged for it. It was gone. There, she found a dove, preening its feathers so intently it was startled by her presence. She smiled an apology and tiptoed out of its cove. 'I'd come back later,' she thought to the dove.

The mother of Hevel stood behind her watching the man with the brown and weary sandals. Mara was certain that her hands that still gripped her bosom must too have found a dove in her heart building its nest - an olive branch held in its beak. For she had seen the mother's grief for Hevel carried in the man's eyes just next to her own.

The traveler came towards the coffin and touched it. "Young man, I say to you, get up!" he commanded. "Who is he talking to?" the men beside Mara whispered to one another. But those who were carrying the dead and wooden casket stood terrified, for it had begun to shift.

"Open it! Quick, open it!" the crowd outside the town gate surged, taking the coffin from its bearers and prying out nails that had once sealed a destiny. The young man, who had been dead for days, sat up in his coffin and began to move his lips. The crowd roused and shook with astonishment, gushing forward in disbelief to touch the impossible. With her knees in the sand and arms over her head, the widow inched through the swell of sandals and found the pair of dusty feet. There, she placed her forehead on it, and kissed it. "Your son is returned to you," the traveler spoke softly, and gave her a dove for the new seam in her heart.

The crowd parted for the traveler, and a breeze followed through the gate. Mara's tunic waved lightly, carrying in it a scent of lavender.

  

Luke 7:11-17