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Jonas was not a lily white.
Nor dark as Indian Ocean water at night.
More Mediterranean.
He came from Jersey, so he said.
Nazareth, New Jersey.
What? Maybe three years ago.
Said he’d been a stonemason there.
And a carpenter, too.
Always seemed pretty secretive to me, about his past.
I figured there was something to hide.
But no crime in that.
He talked about a communal society that didn’t use money.
Never worried about where their next meal was coming from.
“Let tomorrow take care of itself; and let the dead bury the dead,” he would say.
Libertarian, perhaps. Or anarchist.
Ah, ah. Ah, ah.
Words were the coin of his realm. Armageddon was one of his favorites.
Always promising the end of the old world and the coming of the new.
Nothing tangible, like a home, that showed he’d put labor in to own the place.
His mother came here, once, to talk to him.
He refused.
Nothing really concrete to show whether or not he dealt in arms,
except for a patch of paper he carried on him,
and copied when he needed to, that said:
“I am not here to bring peace on earth.
I’m here, not to send peace, but weapons.
I’m here to set a man against his father, and a woman against her mother.
Brothers will kill brothers.
Parents will kill their children.
And children will kill their parents.
Anyone who loves a parent or a children more than me is not worthy of me.
Sell what you need to, and buy the weapons you will need.”
When I once asked him about it, he told me,
“It says what it says.” And would not be further drawn on it.
He had a pet phrase he frequently used. “Something, something Gentile.”
Which meant, I gathered, anyone who was enough unlike him to be called “Gentile.”
Gentiles were human breathing beings he called dogs, or swine, or the like.
But I’m afraid it loses something in translation.
Possibly Jonas loses something of himself in translation.
There was a place in Jersey he occasionally talked about.
He called it “Gehenna.” “Demons’ Land.”
Tales he told what went on there could make a man’s blood run cold.
It did mine….
Prayed a lot. I do remember that.
He had a best friend, who lost his head in a marital dispute.
No, literally, his head got cut off.
Jonas told me that his friend was the greatest man ever born.
And that his friend had predicted that the day would come when Jonas would burn the evil people in this world to ashes who did things like that.
He talked a lot about forgiving people.
Your family, friends, and neighbors, of course.
But also your enemies.
A person who smacks you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek to him as well.
Then, when he got angry, he swore that whole cities would burn in Hell.
Worse than Sodom and Gomorrah did.
Places like Brookhaven, Bethesda, and Camden Town.
I told him it didn’t make sense.
It was hypocritical.
Calling people who don’t agree with you a “generation of vipers.”
Where’s the forgiveness in that?
And he told me that he’d just as soon curse an innocent fig tree to its destruction
than to rescind his curse on places that wouldn’t listen to his message.
A lot of people believed him, apparently.
And, I guess, started buying weapons for the revolution.
Enough so that it frightened the government.
And
long story short
they executed him.
Without a just trial, I would say.
He never told them a thing, about his past. Which was par for the course.
I often find myself reflecting on life.
And the life of Jonas in particular.
My deeper, more talkative friends pretty much agree on one thing:
If we could find it, embracing fellow man within a common belt of love, respect, acceptance, and appreciation would be just about the best world we could hope for.
If we only could understand each other.
Provided we win the love of our life along the way.
Which, I guess, Jonas never got the chance to.
And earning what we get. That’s important, as well. Not just taking.
Ain’t nothing in this world just for the taking.
And giving. There will always be a needy hand.
Jonas promised that.