I sat down to further pull apart resurfacing memories and feelings. I looked down at my hands in my lap then looked up to see I wasn’t in my room anymore. [My Bow-Wielder aspect] sat across from me, holding my rosary in one hand and my surviving bible in the other. The Angel of the Lost Crucifix stood guard over her.
“I need another name for that bugger lurking over you.”
“Aye.”
“I wasn’t supposed to give it away, was I.”
“Count how many rosaries passed through your hands after remaking that first one and remaking the one I hold now and then tell me that this angel is bound to any particular collection of molecules.”
I watched her defiant comfort under the silent watch of the angel for a moment.
“Why a rosary?”
“Cuz it, like you, is demonic. That Mary actually took an interest in you is a pleasant happenstance.”
I knew what she meant. The viciously evangelical fundamentalism that infected American Baptist churches led the descendants of Protestantism to declare the Roman Catholic Church to be demonic from common laity to the Pope himself. Marianism was the same as demonolatry and the rosary was portrayed as a leash leading the gullible into Hell.
To have one in my possession was a symbol of my escape from the cults that broke me.
I know now that there is nothing demonic, infernal, and/or malicious about the rosary or what it represents. That I winced at her comparison was a marker that I still have a lot of unlearning to do about myself.
“I have Horatio and Pescado. I have Philippus to advise me, and others to assist me if necessary. Why do I need another entity that I don’t understand and can’t relate to?”
She stared at me for a moment. “Because you were promised, and the promises will be kept.”
“I’m not Christian.”
“You don’t need to be.”
“Years ago, you said I made a terrible Christian and that I had to choose to following the party line or making a clean break. I made the break. Why am I getting entangled with that shit again?”
Her face softened. For a moment she looked as old as I feel. “Because it’s not about you. It’s about those you will be helping.”
She pulled her hat over her face and my sight quickly obscured as my face was pulled down. When I lifted my head, I was back in my room.