Matrix

by Lauren Groff

Perhaps the song of a bird in a chamber is more precious than the wild bird’s because the chamber itself makes it so. Perhaps the free air that gives the wild bird its better song in fact limits the reach of its prayer. So small, this understanding. So remarkably tiny. Still, it might be enough to live for.

When they are long out of earshot, Marie asks the abbess where she learned to exorcise fields. No book she knows holds such a ceremony in it. The abbess is exhausted and pale. She smiles and says, Oh of course I made it up. Ritual creates its own catharsis, Marie. Mystical acts create mystical beliefs.

Thus they showed me that the war so often vaunted between them was a falsity created by the serpent to sow division and strife and unhappiness in the world. For, I saw, it was from Eve’s taste of the forbidden fruit that knowledge came, and with knowledge the ability to understand the perfection of the fruit of Mary’s womb and the gift given to the world. And without the flaw of Eve there could be no purity of Mary. And without the womb of Eve, which is the House of Death, there could be no womb of Mary, which is the House of Life. Without the first matrix, there could be no salvatrix, the greatest matrix of all.