Posted As Missing

Chapter Twenty-Five

As they watched the fire slowly heat from yellows and reds to greens and gradually to blues, Maria began quietly, "Mama said God delivered the meat. She said He likes us. Then you said, She likes us. I've always heard God was a He. I'm confused."

"God is all of us, all of life. Everything," David replied. "We're all part of reality. Not only He, not only She, but Us — all of us working in harmony. This is being demonstrated right here in this situation. Here we are, three people who have known each other for three days, maybe four. It doesn't matter. We've known each other for only a short time, but working together, working in harmony, each adding to the equation, we are so much stronger than the three of us acting individually." He looked into Maria's and Rachel's eyes.

"It's the greedy ones who create gods and add the confusion, add the complications. It's the greedy ones who try to get others to support them. The greedy ones distort the reality by setting up and maintaining religions so they can sit back. Sit back and be supported by the weaker ones they've scared and enslaved."

"So, the rabbis, the priests, the ministers, the preachers — they're all on the take, all gathering feathers for their nests?" Maria asked.

"Not all." He shook his head. "Not all. Some are genuinely offering their finest, offering from their reality. There was a padre I spent a lot of time talking with outside Ypres as I waited to go to the trenches again. He understood reality, dismissed the hocus-pocus, the flimflam manipulation of religion, and he agreed that many religions enslave people by preying on the weak, on the vulnerable by using emotions and guilt. Many religions seem to be little more than a way to suck the last few remnants of wealth from the weak."

"I sense you're not listed among the supporters of religion," Rachel said, "but I saw that from the beginning. You're much too free, much too open-minded, much too creative to be ensnared in those webs."

"You see clearly," he smiled, then pointing above the racks, he asked, "Do the ribs need turning? They're just starting to smoke."

Maria got up with David and they flipped the ribs, adjusted the supports and sat again.

"I love the harmony, the coordination, the acting together. No words needed. Just simply doing it together. Together. That's the power. Together. Focused and cooperating." Rachel said as she swirled the wine in her glass and looked deeply into it.

"This wine, this best barrel from the 1911 harvest, this was a great exercise in cooperation, in working together. It was a difficult harvest, ducking between the thunderstorms. Appraising the right moment for each plot, each row. Gambling together to hold out another day for the western slope, picking into the night on the Terrassen. Together."

"I've never had a taste so splendid," he said, rolling his glass under his nose. "I don't at all understand the complexity of what I'm tasting. It overpowers me, leaves me without vocabulary to describe it. The aroma takes me into realms I've never before been. I must learn more about wine. I must learn more about what it takes to produce it."

They sat almost mesmerised by the flames of the fire as they sipped their Gewürztraminer and quietly spoke, all of them offering.

David quietly added, "Here we are, calmly waiting for venison to sear by a fire on the southern slopes of the Schwarzwald. This would have been such an idyllic setting a year ago. Now we're doing it surreptitiously, close under the nose of the enemy, casually watching a large pan of pleurottes and morels cook in butter. We could be cowering in fear. I prefer not to."

"It's still an idyllic setting," Rachel said as she got up to give the pan of mushrooms a shake and a toss. "How far away is Fritz?"

"At least a quarter mile. The soldiers who shot the doe and fawn were about that far when I last saw them, carrying their meat away from the fire scar, away from us. They angled slightly upward, almost in line with the fire, so now the smoke and lingering flames up there are almost directly between them and us, and the smell of that fire will hide the aromas of our dinner... So, explain the pieces of meat you cut from the carcass."