Chapter Three

A THOUSAND YEARS LATER
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD
by Hotetsu

[Case]

Book of Serenity #4: When the World-Honored One was walking with his assembly, he pointed to the ground with his hand and said, “This place is good for building a temple.” Indra took a stalk of grass and stuck it in the ground and said, “The temple has been built.” The World-Honored One smiled.

[History]

Of the four sons of Clovis who divided their father’s kingdom, Chlothar, age 14 when his father died, was the youngest. Over the next 47 years, he gradually reconsolidated Clovis’ realm, and added further conquests.

In 524, Chlodomer died in battle against the Burgundians, and his kingdom was split between brothers Chlothar and Childebert. To ensure against later claims from Chlodomer’s three sons, Chlothar and Childebert demanded that their nephews be shorn of their hair (symbol of Frankish royalty) and join a monastery. When this was refused, Chlothar murdered two of the boys. The third escaped and ended up, after all, cutting his hair and joining a monastery.

In 531 came the conquest of Thuringia. In 534, combined Frankish forces at last conquered Burgundy – a chunk of which went to Chlothar. Theuderic, King of Metz, died the same year, was succeeded by his son Theudebert, who died in 548 and was succeeded by his son Theudebald. Meanwhile, Chlothar was busying himself with largely inconclusive campaigns against the Visigoths to the south.

In 555, Chlothar took over the Kingdom of Metz when Theudebald died childless. Per Salic law, that realm was also to have been divided between the remaining brothers, Childebert and Chlothar. Chlothar, however, quickly married Theudebald’s widow, Waldrada, making her, temporarily, wife number six (of the other five, by that time, two had died, and Radegund had left to become a nun). Marriage to Waldrada, daughter of the Lombard King Wacho, also gave Chlothar an alliance with the Lombards to help back up his claim to sole reign over the lands that had been Theuderic’s.

In 558, Chlothar gained Childebert’s lands when Childebert died childless at age 62. All Francia was again united under a single king. Still, as ever, there were occasional rebellions to quash. The most significant of these was led by Chlotar’s own son, Chram. After defeating Chram’s forces in 560, Chlothar had Chram and his family killed.

The next year, just three years after uniting Francia, Chlothar died of pneumonia and Francia was back to being four separate kingdoms: one for each of Chlothar’s surviving sons. As Chlothar lay dying, wracked with fever, he wondered aloud – perhaps in outrage, perhaps admiration -- what manner of heavenly king would bring great rulers to their deaths in such a fashion? That greatness was measured by conquest, slaughter, and subjugation was a popular notion of the time.

In the course of his career of virtually continuous pursuit of violent domination, Chlothar took wives – generally also as a device of domination. The first was Chlodomer’s widow, Guntheca. Radegund was the second.

By 550, ten years in to the marriage to Radegund, Chlothar was weary of his recalcitrant wife. His marriages to Baderic’s daughters offered as much support as marriage could afford to his claim to Thuringia. So when Radegund at last fled the court to pursue her longing to dedicate her life to her faith, Chlothar’s efforts to get her back were half-hearted, intermittent, and finally abandoned.

She went first to a monastery at Noyon, 40 km northwest of Soissons, and there beseeched Medard, the bishop of Noyon, to allow her to take holy orders. Threats from Chlothar’s men made Medard hesitant, but Radegund’s arguments that allowing her soul to escape the church would surely bring divine retribution prevailed. Medard conferred diaconal orders upon Radegund, making her a deacon of the church, a long-standing office open to women who, like Radegund, were freed from married life though technically still married.

After Chlothar gave up on bringing Radegund back into the world, he sought to use his connection to Deacon Radegund to improve his relations with the church – in particular with Germain, Bishop of Paris who was threatening Chlothar with excommunication. Chlothar thus underwrote the first large-scale female monastery among the Franks. He designated Radegund to select the spot and found the institution – probably also expecting that she would be its abbess, thus giving Chlothar a toehold of influence within the church.

Radegund traveled to Poitiers, nearly 500 km south from Noyon, and there founded the Abbey of St. Mary, as it was at first called. Though Radegund would enter the convent as soon as it was built, and spend the rest of her life within its walls, she was never a nun. She was, rather, an ordained deacon of the church and the abbey’s founder and patron. As such, she appointed Agnes, her friend since childhood and her lady-in-waiting during Radegund’s brief stint as a queen, to be the abbess.

Radegund exerted herself to bring holy relics to the abbey, the most important of which was a bit of wood obtained from Emperor Justin II purported to be from the cross upon which Jesus had been crucified. In 567, the abbey was renamed for this relic: The Abbey of Sainte-Croix.

[Fiction]

Radegund, Agnes, and a small retinue arrived in Poitiers looking for a place to build the women’s monastery that Chlothar had promised to fund. It seemed an auspicious place. Forty years before, Chlothar’s father Clovis had conquered the area, defeating the Visigoth Alaric II at a battle just outside town. Before the Visigoths, Poitiers had been the principal city of the Roman region, Gallia Aquitania. Ruins of Roman aqueducts and a large amphitheater remained in the city. When Radegund learned of the Hypogee Martyrium in Poitiers, where many early Christian martyrs were interred, her conviction that this was the right area was sealed.

One afternoon Radegund and Agnes went out alone to investigate a plot they had heard about on the southern outskirts of Poitiers. Reaching the spot to which they had been directed, Radegund pointed to the ground and said, “This place is good for building a convent.” No sooner had she spoken these words than a vision of Saint Peter appeared to both women.

Perhaps it was a shared hallucination – a folie à deux – or might one say, "folie à Dieu"? Maybe some external entity called Saint Peter caused himself to appear before the women – or maybe “Saint Peter” is simply as good a name as any for a certain set of the complex neurological processes occurring while the women were having what they called “a vision of Sant Peter.” Or perhaps an actual physical man, unusually dressed in middle-eastern garb stepped out from hiding, and a trick of the late afternoon light made him seem ethereal.

In any case, the women thought they saw Peter standing before them, holding a stone the size of a loaf of bread. They thought they heard him say, “On this rock” – a phrase they recognized from Matthew 16, where Jesus says to Peter:

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.

As the women stared, Peter seemed to be gesturing toward them. Was he indicating that they were to be the rock-solid foundation of the new monastic community? Or did he, more literally, mean the rock he was holding? Or both? The women stood frozen.

Peter placed the rock on the ground in front of his feet. “The abbey has been built,” he said.

Agnes deferentially lowered her gaze. Radegund smiled, briefly closing her eyes. When the two women looked again where Peter had stood, he was gone.

In the months that followed, construction began. Radegund reflected often on the vision of Peter, what he had said, what he might have meant. Sometimes she talked with Agnes about it, usually not. “The abbey has been built,” Peter had said. Before any building had begun, it was already built. She remembered Luke 17:20-22.

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within/among you.”

The Greek preposition entos was ambiguous. It could mean “within,” as in, “the kingdom of God is inside you, in your soul.” It could also mean “in the midst of,” which, since Jesus was addressing a group, would suggest “the kingdom of God is among you.” Either way, Radegund reflected, the kingdom of God is a thing already built – already present -- and yet, at the same time, Jesus was calling us to build it, day by day and stone by stone. She remembered vividly her experience of the morning star years before. Since that morning, the awareness was never far from her mind that we are all beings of ineradicable glory who mistakenly imagine ourselves separate. To build the kingdom that is already present, Radegund understood, is to recognize the oneness that is already ours.

Radegund knew she could not explain this. If she tried to tell others that we are all consubstantial, coequal, and coeternal with God, or that there were truths that words, including the words of the Bible, could not express, or that rocks were shouting the Word, she would be branded a heretic, or a lunatic, or both. And rightfully so, she felt, for explanation comes out as words, and words inherently miss the mark – falsify the reality. Only in silence can we make our home in abiding truth. In speaking to Agnes she was cautious about hinting at her unorthodox way of thinking, and to others she spoke not of it at all.

The abbey is already built, she whispered in her prayers, therefore, we must build the abbey. The whole world is the abbey – complete and whole yet requiring our continual construction.

One day, as she and Agnes were walking around the site, inspecting the progress of construction, Radegund disclosed, “Oh, Agnes, lovely as this is, and much as I do long to be enclosed within these protective walls, shut off from the world of violence and perfidy, at the same time, I also apprehend that we can never be apart from anything. The whole world is the abbey.”

“Repairs won’t be easy,” said Agnes.

Radegund stared at her friend. “Agnes, I believe you understand.”

“Milady?”

“So perfect in every way is God’s creation. So whole and wonderful. And at the same time, so broken. So in need of repair. Repair it we must, and yet we can’t – and yet we can’t not. It’s so hard to say, for it comes out in contradictions.”

“I know, milady,” said Agnes, “The brokenness is the wholeness.” Then she leaned over, kissed Radegund’s cheek, and whispered in her ear, “I saw the morning star.”

The friends walked on. Radegund sniffled. Her cheeks were damp with tears.