Holidays - Seasons Greetings!

Mary rose up and swiftly, with eager, trembling fingers and noiseless, hurrying feet went about her meager little preparations for her journey.

It was a journey of a hundred miles and more. It was a way filled with perils and terrors for a girl alone, and Mary must go alone. She must face the odium of going secretly and furtively, for she could not tell anyone why she must go. But these things, the road and its perils and the thoughts of those she was leaving, had no power to deter her. The need of her soul for that other woman was imperative, peremptory. There was nothing, nothing large enough or strong enough to turn her heart back from that which it craved!

In the whispering dawn Mary left the house and made her way down the straggling hillside to the great road that ran past Nazareth from the sea to the hill country and Jerusalem.

There would be no need to ask the directions of the road. This great highway ran straight from Ptolemais, the Acre of a later day, through the heart of the land to Jerusalem. Romans, Greeks and Jews all knew it. It was the great artery of trade by which the West came to Israel.

Mary had almost no money for the journey, but that was little matter. The kindly hospitality of the road would not let her suffer. Kindness and charity to the stranger were not only traits of her people but they were enjoined most strictly by the Law. David himself had seen to the building of rest places along the unpeopled parts of the roads and the tradition of the sacredness of the wayfarer held strong among all the folk.

The real dangers of the road were from Herod’s hired soldiers and the bands of outlawed men living in the hills, half bandits, half patriots, whom Herod’s suspicions and jealous cruelties had driven into this way of life. The long, bloody reign of this Idumean king was drawing to dose in gloom and distrust. Fear, hate, rebellion were rife in the land.

The iron hand of power and repression was strong on every road. Soldiers were quartered over all the land. But always, just out of reach of the soldiers, in the difficult passes of the hills, lurked men watching for a chance to cut off some detached troop of soldiers or to plunder some band of infidel merchants who brought the abominated things and customs of the heathen into the land.

Mary knew all these things, but she had no real fear of them. She was following the need of her soul and the voice of the Angel. No harm could come to her. These things belonged all to the lesser, the ordinary parts of life. Her way was set above them. She could not escape the natural trepidations of a girl alone on a dangerous road. But over these and past them she must walk with steady, hurrying feet.

Before the sun came up behind the rounded height of Tabor she was well on her way across the rolling plain of Esdrelon, with the villages of Nain and Endor in the hills to her right. A beautiful land, a goodly land, this rich, dark plain; the heavy greens of the early Spring showing vividly against the soft black earth. The sheep dotting the round of the encircling hills, the oxen grunting on their way to the day’s toil, the onion beds in the flat black earth, the budding vines on the distant hillsides, the new wheat glistening with the dew on the wavy plain, all told of a country blessed in unbounded plenty.

But the plenty of the land was not for the moiling men and women who even at this hour of the morning were bending to their work in the fields. The tribute to Caesar, the wild extravagances of Herod, and more than all the rapacities of the tax-gatherers themselves took the products of the toil; took the fodder from the treading ox, took from the laborer his wage, took the heart from the willing people. Their patient, stooping backs were to Mary, as her eyes swept over the plain, a picture of Israel itself, the good land, and the land chosen of God, but bowed and harrowed under the drag of the oppressor. How long? Oh God of the fathers!

Nearly seventy years had passed since the terrible Pompey came storming the gates of the holy temple. And never a day of peace, never a night of rest and happiness had come in all that time either to Israel or to the people. Turmoil, slaughter, unrest, misery; these things were in the fingers of the hand of the great oppressor of the West. Seventy years of captivity worse than ever were the years in Babylon had been the portion of the land and the people. How long? Oh God on high! Mary breathed the supplicating question that was in the heart and on the lips of all the people. Then her soul trembled in sudden fear and adoration as she thought of the answering secret that was hidden in her own heart.

Mid-day found Mary resting alone under the shade of a giant terebinth that stood near the junction of the road from Main with the great Roman road which she traveled. There was a rest place at the meeting of the two roads, a khan such as have been the roadside inns of the East from all memory, with a walled corral and food and water for the beasts and some slight shelter for men. But Mary had continued on past the rest place and across the little stream that drained the plain toward the west. The whole wealth of the plain lay spread before her eyes, for at one side of the road the country stretched away in a gentle fall toward the chasm of the Jordan while at the other a broader and a longer slope reached down even to the distant sea.

The quiet, mid-day beauty of the country under the haze of the hot Spring sun, the peaceful lull that had fallen over the scene as men rested for a little, even the hum of the wayfarers at the rest place, threw a gentle curtain over the tired senses of the young girl so that she came to peace, a grateful peace with all outer things, and her soul was able to enter undisturbed into its holy of holies. Since the Angel had left her, she had not known such peace, such holy content and confidence. Now she was sure that the Angel had indeed meant her to take this journey in this way.

She was not, however, left long to enjoy the peace of her solitude and calm.