The double cross
Filly awoke from a dream.
In the dream there were people crowded around the table but they did not belong because they were not people she knew. In her mind, the song crowded table played, but in her dream, the broken people who were trying to sit at the table were not good. How did they get in? She sat up and got out of bed.
Filly had a horse shoe near her door but it was not because she believed in luck. She had thought it was a Spanish religious symbol when she found it at an antique thrift shop. As her bare feet touched the carpeted floor she turned and walked barefoot to look at her horseshoe. She retrieved it from the window in the kitchen and went to the main room of her house.
Her feet were cold and she wrapped a blanket around her toes as she perched on the corner of the sofa and examined the horseshoe. It was lying flat on a piece of cardboard and was wrapped in plastic wrap. It looked old.It was heavy in her hand. The man on the horse was St. Martin de Tours.
He was a saint who shared his cloak and is a saint for veterans and the poor. His feast day is November 11, which was armistice day, celebrating the end of world war 1…which concluded the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. There was a tradition of holding a lantern and cooking a goose on this day as well.
As she looked the clock struck two am. She had to get up in two more hours she thought. She looked at the weight in her hand again. The horseshoe was wrapped in red and other colors of thread and there were religious stickers and jewels and pictures.
There was a tiny crucifix in the middle. She turned the square with the horseshoe over. The back said El Secreto de la Virtuosa Herradura…. secret of the virtuous horseshoe. She had examined it closely and realized that it was not as much religious as it was for good luck. But it did have a cross with Jesus on it. Only it was not just a cross it was a double cross.
Filly did not believe in luck. To people she did not like, she used to say “good luck to you and I do not believe in luck”. But she did believe in Jesus.
And a lot of what the bible says that Jesus did, was to “double cross” (for their own good) his enemies. He lived, when he was supposed to be dead. That was not luck.
Filly believed that if a person believed in good luck, then they had to also believe in bad luck. She did not want the luck of the draw. She wanted what was earned. For herself and for her family, she did not want to rely on “luck”.
But she liked the talisman because of the crucifix and Jesus. She wanted to rely on God. And then of course there was the fact that it was a horse shoe…and her nickname was indeed “filly”. She smiled. If she were a horse this was her shoe… if the shoe fits…. just like Cinderella for horses lol.
Growing up, Filly remembered how the Triad of the Father, son and Holy spirit, in Catholic school was depicted by a green shamrock. They were three separate entities that compromised the one God, she was instructed, and the shamrock with its three leaves while still being on one stem, was how this “mystery” of “three in one” was explained.
Mike Ross, Sarah Brown and Jason McKenzie were three in one as well Filly thought. But for the Irish, a FOUR leaf clover was lucky, that is, if a person believed in luck. They were definitely not God. lol
And when thinking of Ireland, Filly thought about Northern Ireland, and then the whole of Ireland. If her family was part Irish, would division be a “legacy” she would want to leave? I mean after all, money IS the root of all evil.
The randomly chosen quote for the day set the tone…
“and I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountain of Israel and one king shall be king to them all and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided unto two kingdoms any more at all.”
Apparently THAT is the legacy that would be left…not money, but that the two of them would not be separate. They would be one nation. And that nation would be under God. The same would be true of her country, the USA. It also would continue to be one nation under God. She hoped that one nation under God was what Ireland wanted. She did not know but she trusted the words that were relevant to her whenever she selected them randomly.
Filly always had a question in mind when she chose her random verse/quote for the day. This day her question had been about Ireland, Irish names and legacies… and about how this related to her country as well… and her family as in her dream. Her question had been answered. She turned off the light. She put the horseshoe back on the window. She put the rest of the stuff in her suitcase and she got back in bed. She went back to sleep. Only an hour and a half left to sleep.