Bone Saints
I wonder what the first men of the church to find prehistoric bones thought. What went through their heads as they gazed upon bones that defied all reasonable expectations? Femurs the size of a man. Knuckles the size of a woman’s fist. Teeth the length of an arming sword. What else could such things be but
Holy?
Divine, biblical?
Some bones were attributed to monsters. To the Antediluvian Giants, or to the fearsome gauls that crashed against Rome, or to the serpents that God had to lay low. That last interpretation isn’t far from the truth: What else is a meteor if not an act of judgement, whether cosmic or ordained?
But some bones were closer to human than monster. Large, yes, and old, and heavy, and all these other descriptors, yes- but the knuckle of some great raptor looks remarkably similar to the knuckles of that peasant boy taken by a stray arrow. Put the two side by side after the crows have had their fill and you can almost imagine the knuckles belonged to the boy. Maybe, given enough time, and food, and space, and fervor, and, and, and- maybe he could become that which those men of the cloth believed they had found.
Saints.
It sounds comical, knowing what we know about the suspected shape of the creatures whose bones the soil turned skyward. Scales and feathers, razor teeth and wicked claws and vibrant colors garbed in church white. A halo suspended atop a gore stained head. Gold capped teeth set in the jaws of an apex predator. But what else could they think?
What else could these bones, these relics stained and fossilized and carbon dated by millennials of age be, if not.
Well.
I wonder if human is the appropriate word. After all, is not the goal of every saint a separation of humanity? To shed one’s flesh, to slough off sin stained and forgiveness scented skin in favor of wings? In favor of fire?
Did those first men ever ask themselves,
“Where are the wings? Where is the fire?”
“Why is it here?”
The church reburied the bones of these Newly Found and Hastily Named Saints in the graveyards and catacombs and holy sepulchers of worship and prayer. Right across from the peasant boy who no one remembered, killed by the pox that had ravaged his town, found gutted and naked by the side of the road. Was he a saint, in the end? Did he feel the presence of the Bone Saints, lying next to him? Or was it all dark?
I wonder- if it all ends like they say, fire and brimstone and all that, will the Saints get one last chance to see the world?
There, look honey! It’s Saint Peter, right next to Saint Nicholas!
And Saint Stegosaurus!
And Saint Mammathus!
Would their halos fit their heads?
Or is Saint-hood a “one-size-fits-most” situation?
In the religion I grew up under, there was this assumption that, when Christ returned and the dead were resurrected, it would be on a familial basis: You would raise your grandfather and his wife, and then they would raise their parents and siblings, on and on and on.
There was a great deal of fixation on the specifics of this. For example, the church discouraged cremation as it was assumed that the end was very near, and that lacking a body would task your descendants with building you a new one. This was considered a doable task (after all, there were plenty of other people with bodies that would simply be unrecoverable) but also a significant inconvenience that you should spare them, if possible. A politeness. I like the idea of this mixing in with that. Of an old man going back into these tombs to retrieve the young boy’s bones, the young boy going back to retrieve his fathers, on and on and on. The Pharaohs would be resurrected first, with their ancient lines of well preserved bodies. More common folks would learn fleshsculpting to a high degree. Imagine whole Babylonian villages working together to try and recreate the one generation before them, each helping the previous before moving on to Kolob. And then, as even those passed, we’d hit the blurry pieces. In the same way that you have to teach your grandpa how to use a computer, you might have to pass some higher thinking skills to hominid ancestors. It would be a grey line, not nearly as clean as this, but there is something charming about imagining a modern man having to teach an australopithecus how to work clay well enough to rebuild his father. And then that same australopithecus having to teach a rat the same. And then one day, finally, a rat would sit upon the shoulders of St. Oviraptor, and struggle with all of its might to teach him how to carve the bones of his father. All while the hordes of heaven cheered, while God himself smiled, while the world itself was bathed in paradisiacal glory, we would watch a rat teach a lizard how to make a dinosaur. And it would be beautiful.
