The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 2: The Testimonial Read Free Page B

was a great nation—armies with twelve hundredchariots, threescore thousand horsemen, with a host of a thousand thousand—and at her name other nations quaked.
    He was born of a nation of great warriors; the world’s first warriors—men who possessed the bravery of lions. Birthed from a nation of warriors who were also holy men, leaders at the world’s great councils of holy men. She told him of the warrior priests and saints, like St. Moses of Ethiopia.
    From the beginning, she told him, Ethiopia had God’s favor. They were not rich in currency, but they were wealthy in greater things. There were great cities like Lalibela, Gondar, and Aksum. The spirit of God hovered over Ethiopia, and God had given Ethiopia’s people to Maryam, the Mother of God, as a precious gift. The proof was in the emerald hills and the ruby valleys; the golden lions and leopards dotted with onyx; exotic birds of topaz, amethyst, and sapphire. The proof was in God’s choice of Ethiopia as birthplace of the majestic Nile. God had crowned her with rainbows like jewels.
    She told him the Nile’s names—Blue and White—and as a child he had tried to imagine how the water divided into two colors, separated one from another. When he told her, she laughed and told him that in the old language the word for blue was the same as black . The color was not important. What was important was generosity: It was Ethiopia’s gift to Egypt, birthed from Ethiopia’s Lake Tana. It was the gift that gave Egypt her beautiful flowers.
    From the beginning Ethiopia had been part of God’s Great Church. She told him of the paintings, Bibles, and crosses that dated from the earliest centuries. She told him of Masqal-Kebra, the beautiful and merciful Ethiopian saint and wife—a great queen who advised her husband, good King Lalibela, on issues of state, with gentleness and mercy.
    She told him the story of Moses and his Ethiopian wife and of the Ethiopian who rescued the prophet Jeremiah. Yes, there were Jews in Ethiopia, she told him. Families, thousands and thousands of them, who had been followers since the time of Solomon, Candace,and Menelik—and there were also others who followed the new religion, Islam. But all were brothers, Abraham’s children, she reminded him as her mother had reminded her.
    She shared the story of the Ethiopian Jew who, while reading Isaiah, had met the apostle Phillip and carried the good news of Iyyesus Krestos back to Ethiopia. His mother told him of the ancient bond between Egypt and Ethiopia—holy men had traveled the Nile, the Red Sea, and the Sahara for aeons between the great nations.
    She shared stories of the great churches of Antioch, Alexandria, Rome, Armenia, and India—all sisters to Ethiopia and part of God’s Great Church. She told him about the Ethiopian priests and their families. She told him about the wise men, shimaghellis , who lived their lives to serve the people—about people whose prayers awoke thunder and storms thousands of miles away.
    She told him how St. Frumentius, a fourth-century Greek from Tyre—the Kesate Birhan, the “Revealer of Light,” and Abba Salama, “Father of Peace”—brought Ethiopia the sacraments and helped spread the glory. She taught him of castles, palaces, and of Ethiopian cathedrals carved from stone. His mother whispered to him of the Holy Ark of the Covenant. “It rests in the Cathedral of Saint Maryam of Zion in the great city of Aksum,” she told him.
    The Ethiopian people believed in God and in miracles, in His mercy and in His love. What kind of person could look at the sun, the moon, the stars, the water, and not believe? she asked him. Only a fool of the worst kind would think himself greater than all the wonder and not believe, she said. God was a spirit and all mankind—all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues—were made in His image. God dwelled among His