The Baptizer

1.

You come from the margins, that hazy place where the known world fades into the unknown, where just to live is to exclude the comfortable, to accept without dismay the de-exalted self. Even your food is hard to come by. You fully expect to decrease, to fall behind, to become nothing. You go about shouting, "Turn! Turn!" You have nothing to lose.

2.

You come from the margins. The center seems strange to you, so full of itself, as if everything else needed its example to aspire to. It is crowded with people pretending to be necessary, pretending to do essential things. You, of all people, cannot be fooled. You shout, "Turn! Turn!" It is what the margin says to the center, always, and it is always dangerous.

3.

You come from the margins, from the fringes of the familiar, where absolutely nothing has been shaped for the task of creating the illusion of ease, and where all things crumble to dust except that which cannot crumble. So, you have developed the capacity to recognize unshakable things. Therefore, you will always be the frightening stranger, the fascinating fool, wrapped in animal skins and smelling of sand and sweat and shouting, "Turn! Turn!"

4.

You come from the margins. Like those wanderers from the east who knew when they saw the newborn in the cattle stall in the dusty nondescript village under its peculiar star that this was the King they sought, like them you will know, you will recognize your kin, the One who cannot be shaken. Everything changes now. Everything. "Turn!"