The Older Reading · II
The Squandering
What he gave did not vanish when he rose. It passed onward, by the laying on of hands. The gesture survives in every ordination on earth. The meaning was forgotten.
Each generation carried less. The age of miracles did not end. It thinned. Below a certain measure the wonders stop, and the words go on being said over the same bowed heads.
For two thousand years the world kept blood, and bone, and cloth. It sealed them in gold. It kept them in cool stone. It forbade the touching of them. Nobody knew what they were keeping. They kept it anyway, more carefully than anyone could have asked.
At the shrines, some pilgrims mended. At the reliquaries, some fevers broke. What remained was small, and it still worked, faintly, for whoever came near it.
Most of the relics were false, and the world learned it. The false ones guarded the true. Whoever tested found fraud, and concluded fraud, and stopped looking. The counterfeits kept watch over the treasure.
And the world spent the rest. The record is public: cities sacked, images broken, reliquaries emptied into rivers and fires. We recite no list of the guilty. We keep one sentence.
Grace was distributed as matter, and we spent it.