I memorized the breastplate of St. Patrick while on my way to the International Christian Youth Group in San José. I carried the ancient prayer in the side pocket of my camo pants along with traditional Gaelic songs, ballads of middle earth and Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot.
I worked hard to unite what my unschooled mind knew about science and what I knew about Christian ontology. I knew Jesus was true because I understood how the space time continuum functioned on earth.
I knew that I moved in the intersection between the 3rd and 4th dimensions and that all life was only a shadow of the real. In a spectacular union of theology, medievalism, romanticism, and Eurocentric idealism, I came up with a formula for how to know if something was true. If it felt good, it it was beautiful or held a hint of what the German romantics called Sehnsucht, it was core to reality. In other words, it was a “shadow of truth” suspended in space and time for eternity.
Aslan is Jesus is King Arthur is Aragorn.
If you couldn’t see it, you weren’t looking hard enough.
“Today I put on a terrible strength
invoking the Trinity
confessing the Three
with faith in the one
As I face my Maker”
I mumbled the words as the bus headed south to the city. Protection against the supernatural forces that tore at my soul trying to disrupt my task as a spiritual warrior.
I left the compound in Costa Rica when I was 18 to discover what kind of warrior bard God had called me to be.
I surfaced as an ordinary human somewhere between cups of tea and chopping onions for supper at L’Abri.
Alexandra Ross 