I did not know what it was the first time I came upon it.
I had been walking through the valley that morning when I noticed the people — more of them than I expected, moving along the road from several directions with the purposeful air of those who know where they are going. Something drew me in among them, and I went along, not knowing quite why. The building was large and well kept, and the people filing through its doors seemed glad to be there.
At the entrance a man was handing out papers. I took one and found my way to a seat. The hall was filling quickly. I looked down at what I held — a careful document, densely written, organizing what seemed to be a vast catalogue of information about Jesus of Nazareth. His genealogy. His miracles. The precise circumstances of his birth and the sequence of events surrounding his death. Dates, locations, names. I had barely made my way through the first section before a man at the front called the gathering to order.
He spoke with evident authority and with what I took to be genuine care for the people before him. His subject was the document we each held. He moved through it section by section, pausing to invite responses — calling on one person and then another to supply the correct answer to the question he posed. And they did, with accuracy and with confidence, that clearly pleased him. There was warmth in the room when someone answered well. There was light in their eyes and a sense of shared accomplishment, as though something important was being secured.
I left when the others left, moving out through the wide doors into the afternoon light. And I carried with me, though I could not yet account for it, a feeling that something I had been hoping to find had not been in the room.
It was then that I noticed him.
He was standing at the edge of the clearing where the wood begins, apart from the crowd that was dispersing around him. Something in his stillness made me look twice, and then I was walking toward him without having decided to.
His face stopped me. Not because it was frightening — it was not frightening. It was the sadness in it. The quiet, unperforming sadness of someone watching something they love fall short of what it was made to be.
I looked down, and I saw his hands.
And then I looked up into his eyes, and I encountered something I have no adequate word for — a depth of love so complete and so personal that it seemed to reach past everything I had constructed around myself and find something I had not known was there to be found.
I do not know how long I stood there. When I became aware of myself again I was sitting on the hill above the valley in the long afternoon light, looking down at the Great Hall.
I sat there into the evening. Thinking about the paper in my hands. Thinking about the hall full of correct answers. Thinking about the stranger at the edge of the clearing, and the sadness in his face, and the scars in his hands, and what I had seen in his eyes when he looked at me.
Who was he. Why was he standing outside. And why, when I had looked into his face, did it feel like the beginning of something the hall had never offered me.

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