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O brother Abel! What pain of long ago and now; to be cursed and scorned by your sheep, to hear them bleat their hatred against you while you protect them and tend them, helping them in their labours as your father helped your mother in the getting of your brother and of you, and tending their young as you were tended. To love, never knowing lover's embrace. What miracle, to bear that pain, to sacrifice for them – cold nights in mountain pastures away from father, mother, brother, with but fire and staff and love to stand guardian over so many; singing your story of Him to the dark hills and the distant stars. Were you heard above their curses? – to love them and to die for that love – did they ever take off their enmity? Who guides them and guards them now that the earth has opened herself to your bloods?
She was cursed for your sake, and with her mother's mouth, a mouth that knows the secrets of all story, the swaddling of life and the winding of death, cried out your story. O brother, we all die with you, long ago and now.
O brother Cain! What pain of long ago and now; your brother's blood, sunk in the earth, cried out and you were rejected by her. She whose thirst was fed by your sweat, who tripped your feet as you stumbled home in the darkness, tired for your care of her. Home: to live, burdened by her resentment – for she was cursed for your sake – and to scratch your survival amongst the scraps she throws you, rewards for your toil. You laboured with her to bring forth her children from the soil, as your father laboured with your mother to bring you forth, and your brother too. And she for whose sake you were rejected by God – her scraps, her gifts, inadequate – has closed her mother's arms to you. She has rejected you, my brother, though you may never leave her; your feet always strike her and are burning always from her hate. Knowing lover's embrace but never love; cursed Cain and his cursed sister-wife: you cannot go on, you cannot stop. The tiller become hunter and the hunter hunted.
Where is Mother and Father now? They cannot console your griefs; Brothers, this story is your story, while Mother and Father are lost in their own. They are gone from the fields – the fields were your inheritance. When their story left these fields it was unstained; broken, yes, but unstained.
They cannot help you now but their story is passed to you in these fields: a broken inheritance, doubly broken.
Nowhere to go, nowhere to stand and always, long ago and now, we are running with you. You are deaf and blind and dumb with pain and exhaustion and fear; but listen to the blood of Christ, for from the earth and from love it cries out your story to the Father, and with a mother's mouth: a mouth that knows the secrets of all story, the swaddling of life and the winding of death. Find the ears to hear, hear His Story, and the tongue to sing in return.
O brothers! Now and long ago your story is our story.
Graeme Castleman