The Dovekeepers

by Alice Hoffman

They say the truest beauty is in the harshest land and that God can be found there by those with open eyes.

All that will ever be has already been written long before it happens.

The heat was mysterious and unrelenting, as if the wickedness of earth reflected back to us, a mirror of our sins.

He insisted that God’s judgment depended on motive,

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

If we lost our faith, we would become like the clouds that swell across the western sky when the wind pushes them into the desert, promising rain but empty inside.

I forgot that even the worst of lives is a treasure.

“Being human means losing everything we love best in the world,” she murmured as she released me. “But would you ask to be anything else?”

It was said that angels came to human beings for comfort. How lonely they must be, locked in

the silence of their world. But a human burned in the embrace of the angels, his body set aflame, and the kindness of such creatures could become a curse.

But now I understood that, although words were God’s first creation, silence was closer to His divine spirit, and that prayers given in silence were infinitely greater than the thousands of words men might offer up to heaven.

When you change your name, you change your fate as well. The person you had been vanishes, and not even the angels can find you.

“Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away.”

Love made you give yourself away, it bound you to this world, and to another’s fate.