Let him offer me a better place...

This is how I came to learn, then, dandled on a former adept's knee, how blessed Elua came to be; how when Yeshua ben Yosef hung dying upon the cross, a soldier of Tiberium pierced his side with the cruel steel of a spearhead. How when Yeshua was lowered, the women grieved, and the Magdalene most of all, letting down the ruddy gold torrent of her hair to clothe his still, naked figure. How the bitter salt tears of the Magdalene fell upon soil ensanguined and moist with the shed blood of the Messiah.

And from this union, the grieving Earth engendered her most precious son; blessed Elua, most cherished of the angels.

I listened with a child's rapt fascination as Brother Louvel told us of the wandering of Elua. Abhorred by the Yeshuites as an abomination, reviled by the empire of Tiberium as the scion of its enemy, Elua wandered the earth across vast deserts and wastelands. Scorned by the one God of whose Son he was begotten, Elua trod with bare feet on the bosom of his mother Earth and wandered singing, and where he went, flowers bloomed in his footprints.

He was captured in Persis, and shook his head smiling when the king put him in chains, and vines grew to wreath his cell. The tale of his wandering had come to reach the ear of Heaven, and when he was imprisoned, there were those who answered. Choosing to flout the will of the One God, they came to Earth...

...It came then to the One God that his persuasion held no sway over Elua, in whose veins ran the red wine of his mother Earth, through the womb she gave him and the tears of the Magdalene...The One God pondered long, and sent not the angel of death, but his arch-herald to Elua and those who followed him. "Do you stay here and love as thou wilt, thy offspring shall overrun the Earth," said the herald of the One God. "And this is a thing which may not be. Come now in peace to the right hand of your God and Lord, and all is forgiven."

Blessed Elua smiled at the arch-herald, and turned to his boon companion Cassiel, holding out his hand for his knife. Taking it, he drew the point across the palm of his hand, scoring it. Bright blood welled from his palm and fell in fat drops to the Earth, and anemones bloomed. 'My Grandfather's heaven is bloodless," Elua told the arch-herald, "and I am not. Let him offer me a better place, where we may love and sing and grow as we are wont, where our children and our children's children may join us, and we will go."

The arch-herald paused, awaiting the One God's response. "There is no such place," he answered.

...Our mother Earth spoke to her once-husband, the One God, and said, "We may create it, you and I."

--Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Dart, pp. 12-13, 15-16

Let him offer me a better place - let his religion offer me a better place - one of passion, laughter and sensuality, where we may love and sing and grow as we are wont...and I too, will go. Until then, neither the One God nor any of his self-styled owners of the 'one truth' will persuade me to an eternally bloodless and passionless land.

Love as thou wilt, and the blessed Elua will ever guide thy steps.

And so I shall.