Why do they schedule me for these blasted 8:00 a.m. classes!
Mornings were a sore subject for Silas. He much more preferred nocturnal exploits to sunrise ones. This one was made more painful by the browbeating from administrative bureaucrats and the decimation of his professional goal of tenure.
He was still seething with the outcome of the hearing. On top of it, he had a lecture to get to. That he was now late for. Already he was falling down, barely an hour into his new “development” plan.
After leaving the hearing, Silas had gone to his car to stew before class. He didn't know what else to do. He sat in his aging, sagging Jeep as the rain assaulted its windshield. He pounded his steering wheel with the palm of both hands in anger. Then he closed his eyes, sighed, and leaned his driver's seat back. He started counting backward to quell his anxiety, a trick he had learned back in Iraq during the post-9/11 conflicts. When he had returned home to the states, he used it to deal with his post-traumatic stress—along with the little pills sitting in his glove compartment.
Silas popped the latch and found the plastic container that would help him negotiate the rest of the day. He opened a thermos he brought along to celebrate and poured himself a cup of steaming black brew. He popped a pill and took a swig. He hesitated as he twisted the cap back on the bottle, before taking it off and popping one more.
Extra insurance.
He leaned back in his seat and sat still, the patter of rain a balm for his heart rate and anger and disappointment. A few minutes later, he had jolted upright and checked the gift from his father. It read 8:01 a.m. Class had already begun.
Silas swung open the door, stepped back into the rain, and headed for his lecture hall.
“Just great,” Silas mumbled as he hunched forward struggling with the collar of his raincoat. From across the sidewalk, he spotted Dean McIntyre, all dry and comfortable and not wet underneath a massive, black golf umbrella. He glanced at his watch, almost dropping the thermos of his precious brew. 8:04 a.m.
“The last thing I need is another snarky comment about running late again. Especially after that blasted witch trial.”
Lucky for Silas, another sidewalk opened up to his left. It would take him the opposite direction he needed to go. But the escape was welcomed. So he made it, avoiding He Who Shall Not Be Run Into.
The trees above his alternative route were thick, heavy blankets of reds and oranges and yellows, a welcomed relief as the rain began to pick up the pace. His mind flashed to a memory of camping one summer with his father and twin brother, Sebastian, along the Appalachian Trail in Northern Maine.
Dad had the fantastic idea to go camping with nothing more than pup tents mid-April. They don't say “April showers bring May flowers” for nothing. After a night of saggy, soppy, wet canopies, they called it and drove to a Holiday Inn. The indoor water park more than made up for Dad's folly. Now, he was dead, thanks to the plane that slammed into the Pentagon. And Silas and his brother were on less-than-speaking terms. Especially after what Sebastian pulled over the summer with the Gospel of Judas nonsense.
Silas pushed the memory and the painful fallout from his mind as he double-backed toward his lecture hall. 8:09 a.m. Move it, Grey.
He hustled faster and made it to the door as thunder rumbled in the distance. Heavy drops joined the morning chorus. Two coeds twenty-feet back squealed as the rain fell with fury. Apparently, they forgot their umbrellas, too.
“I half expect Noah’s Ark to go floating by,” Silas said as he stood holding the door open for the hapless victims, soaked through to the bone as much as he was.
“Thanks, Professor Grey,” the ladies said in unison.
“Don’t mention it. Now, let’s get to class before all three of us are marked tardy.”
After wiping down his face and close-cropped hair in the bathroom, Silas walked into his awaiting hall and down to his podium to get on with his lecture. The class was “History of Religious Relics,” one of the more popular courses at the home of the Tigers, and his personal favorite among his roster. He had made something of a name for himself in his young, blossoming career as one of the leading experts in relicology, the study of relics. Especially after the events earlier in the year allowed him to authenticate the veracity of the Shroud of Turin, the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, and scientifically prove he rose from the dead. Or at least prove something monumental happened in what is believed to be Christ’s tomb, preserved within the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
That seemed like another lifetime ago as he opened his laptop and arranged his notes on the podium. Another life I’d just as soon forget about.
Silas raked his hand over his damp hair and loosened his tie a bit to air out the sauna that had become the inside of his shirt. At least his tweed jacket was dry.
“Alright, class. Sorry I'm late.”
"You were lucky, prof," a guy in baggy sweatpants and a dark blue Princeton hoodie said. "We were one minute away from exercising our student right to leave after a fifteen-minute no-show."
“That's fine because I would have exercised my professorial right to mark you absent. Sorry to burst your bubble, but that so-called rule is an old wives’ tale. You better get more creative if you want to skip out on one of my classes.”
A few in the class laughed. Baggy Sweatpants did not.
“I do sincerely apologize because my tardiness is disrespectful to your time and hard-earned tuition dollars. And, no, that doesn't mean you're getting a refund for the last fifteen minutes.” A few more laughed, even from Baggy Sweatpants. “What it does mean is I'm going to bring my A-game today as we dive into the Passion relics of Christianity. Who knows what I'm talking about when I say Passion relics?”
The class averted their eyes in unison.
“Come on, nobody?”
“Does it, like, have something to do with Jesus?”
One of the ladies Silas opened the door for on the way in. Insightful. “You’re getting warmer. And glad to see your hair has dried since our last encounter.”
The coed blushed and slunk down in her seat slightly. The class murmured, turning into a wave of giggles.
Oh gosh! Now Silas blushed. “I didn’t mean it like that! I opened the door for Ms. Simmons and her two friends as we walked in here. Late, might I add. And the rain and all, and then the wind...”
More murmuring, more giggles, more blushing. “Forget it,” he said waving his hands before advancing to the next slide in his PowerPoint presentation. “Passion refers to the Passion Week or Holy Week, the events leading up to Jesus’ death. And there are a number of objects that many have venerated over the past centuries to preserve the memory of those crucial events, given their meaning and weight for Christians.”
Silas advanced the slide again, coming to the first relic: the scourging post.
“Here we have a portion of the post at which Jesus was scourged. It's said to have been taken to Rome in 1223 by John Cardinal Colonna and is now kept in a small chapel in the Church of Saint Praxedes. Of course, by ‘scourging’ I mean the post that Jesus was tied to when he was beaten and whipped before his death.”
The next slide held a passage from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 27. He read it:
Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole cohort around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on his head. They put a reed in his right hand and knelt before him and mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” They spat on him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. After mocking him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.
“As you can see, this is the account of Jesus’ scourging from Matthew’s Gospel. And I’m sure you can understand why this relic is so important to Christians. This passage also has another relic, the crown of thorns.”
Silas changed slides, showing a picture of the wreath of thorn bushes wrapped in the shape of a crown. A few students whispered to one another in surprise.
“It is a bit frightening, isn't it? Three evangelists in their Gospels speak of this crown of thorns, but give no description of it. Now, when most Westerners think of ‘crown of thorns,’ they think of this picture. Except in the East, around the time and place of Jesus, crowns took the shape of a cap or helmet. Meaning, they covered the whole head. This theory is supported by this intriguing picture.”
He changed the slide again, this time showing a yellowed piece of linen, commanded by severe burn marks on either side with the faint outline of a man’s face. The Shroud of Turin.
The image brought back memories from earlier in the year when he was nearly killed in a mission to save it after teaming up with a little-known religious organization. He thought about the Order of Thaddeus, the ancient Church order dedicated to preserving the memory of the Christian faith. About Rowan Radcliffe, Master of the Order. Matt Gapinski and Zoe Corbino. And Celeste Bourne, director of operations for Project SEPIO, the special-ops team that executes the Order's protecting mission. He had reluctantly been dragged into another one of their missions over the summer preserving the apostle relics and true story of Christ while proving the Gospel of Judas a hoax—which his brother had almost conned him into authenticating.
I wonder how she’s doing?
Silas realized he had been staring in silence. He glanced up from his notes and noticed several of his students slouching and beginning to doze off. He cleared his throat and changed slides. This should wake them up.
And it did. Several gasped at the sight: the Shroud had been enlarged and enhanced by a computer algorithm to accentuate the features of the imprinted image. One side showed the soft face of a dead, Middle Eastern man, with long hair and protruding nose lying in repose. The other side showed the back of his head with obvious, dark cut marks embedded in the man’s matted head.
“What you’re looking at,” Silas continued, “is the image of Jesus Christ, seared into the burial cloth which held his body. Got your attention now?”
As if to say “Yes,” many of the students sat straighter. A few nodded in response.
“We will cover the Shroud of Turin in a separate lecture later, but for now know that those marks on his head are from a crown of thorns in the shape of a cap, supporting this theory. This relic has been kept at various sites, after having been found in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Along with this.”
He changed to yet another slide, showing the image of an ornate container holding a piece of wood.
“This is known as the Holy Cross or True Cross. In the year 326, Saint Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, was sent to Jerusalem to recover the cross and other relics of the Passion. There are a few stories about how she came to be in possession of this Christian artifact, from rumors of clandestine missions to divine revelation. Whichever is correct, it is known Helena found the True Cross and that she and her son Constantine erected a magnificent basilica over the Holy Sepulcher with the exact place of discovery situated beneath the atrium.”
Silas forwarded to the next slide of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, with its boxy shrine within the larger basilica housing the burial tomb of Christ. The one that was nearly destroyed in his mission with SEPIO while trying to protect the memory of Christ's resurrection.
“It is said that a portion of the cross was enclosed in a silver reliquary in this church, another piece was given to Constantine and enclosed in a statue of himself, and a sizable portion was brought to Rome and installed in yet another basilica named after the Holy Cross in Jerusalem. While it may seem farfetched to have been in possession of the actual cross of Christ, several early Church fathers assured members that the Church was in possession of it, from Cyril of Jerusalem to Saint Augustine. Relics of the cross of notable size are claimed by several churches, including the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.”
Silas looked out at his audience. Sensing early morning restlessness, he checked his watch, then nodded. “Why don’t we take fifteen?”
During the break, the sarcastic sophomore in baggy sweatpants approached him to have a chat. While addressing an issue with one of his recently graded papers, Silas noticed a woman had walked into the lecture hall from a door off to the side. She was carrying a large, black umbrella. Her long, dark hair was hanging loose and full down on her shoulders. She leaned against the wall and undid her raincoat, then smiled and waved.
Silas meant to smile back. Instead, his mouth fell open.
Celeste Bourne. What are you doing here?