The silent servant had founded the temple of the Goddess many years ago. Before then, he had longed to serve Her but did not know how, until one day She came to him in a vision. The Goddess showed him what She wanted, and where She wanted it. She made it so funds appeared to purchase the plot of land and build Her temple upon it. She told Her servant how to worship Her and what to do when Her other followers appeared. It was all he had ever wanted.
The silent servant obeyed his Goddess, and followed Her instructions. The temple was built, he consecrated it to Her and created the rituals She had commanded.
Visitors did indeed begin to arrive at Her temple, and found Her servant there to greet them without a word. For he had given the Goddess his silence as an offering, and subsequently had pierced his lips top and bottom so that they could easily be stitched shut. Most of the time, that was how people saw him; there was a gap in the middle where he could drink through a straw, but most days he did not eat solid food – his hunger, too, was an offering.
On days where he ate, he would remove the stitches for his meal, brush his teeth, and replace them. He was quite thin due to his limited diet, but he had more energy now, doing what he had always longed for, than he had ever had when he had tried living the life society told him he should want.
The only other time the silent servant removed his stitches was when the Goddess overtook him, spoke through him, possessed his body. This did not happen often, but when it did, he would sleep afterword for three days. The power of his Goddess was great, and Her sudden reappearance in the world was felt as an urgent thing.
Humans had poisoned Her planetary body and destroyed and harmed many of Her children, and now after many years of slumber the Goddess was awake and repairing the damage that humans had done.
The rich and powerful who at first tried to claim Her awakening and healing as proof that they were not the monsters everyone knew that they were, were quickly disabused of that notion when She began to systematically destroy all of the worst offenders. Those who had not yet been killed tried in vain to appease Her, but the sacrifice She demanded was more than they would willingly give, and so She ate them whole, feeding their bodies to Her children that had long been neglected. The inheritors of the consumed pollutors began to come to the temple, asing how they might avoid inheriting their forebears’ blame as well as their wealth. The silent servant asked his Goddess, and one by one, fortunes were given away to restore Earth, to restore ecosystems, to lift up the poor and neglected, human or otherwise. Some of the rich children thought they might commission a statue of Her and be done with it, but the silent servant warned them that She would not be pleased with this. Her body was everywhere to see, and they and their forebears had descecrated it.
Some of the inheritors were fed to Her children, too.
Eventually though, the air began to clear and the temperatures began to slow their brutal climb. Waters were cleaned, landfills were mined for resources instead of mountains, and forests that had been clearcut or burned were replanted. The people who had suffered poverty and deprivation were given their share, because there was already enough to satisfy everyone’s needs as long as a small minority were not hoarding the share of thousands, even millions of people.
Obstructionist policies in the name of profits were ceased, and progress was made to make the world safer and healthier for all. Their propaganda machine destroyed, many believers in the previous ethos of domination over All began to realize the harm they had done. Those who were truly contrite were told to show with their actions how they felt, and power chasers began to plant forests and give their mansions to those with no homes. Lawns were reverted into native prairies or wetlands, and farms that had previously grown subsidised monocultures became regenerative permacultures.
Through all this, the silent servant did the rituals to honor Her, and happy humans often brought flowers from their gardens for Her temple. These days, the silent servant was often in a state of ecstacy, as Her movement in the world and Her healing of harm was felt in his body, too. Visitors to the temple would sometimes find him on the floor, sometimes lifted up into the air, sometimes dancing with pure joy as She moved within and without. Her servant would wave off those people who tried to address him with titles that sounded too grand; his desire was to serve, not to gain power for himself. Some humans would probably never understand anything but their own gain in this lifetime, and saw worshipping Her or gaining favor with Her servant only in terms of what it might do for them. They were young souls, who would gobble up everything that they could, as the pollutors had been. The necessary change had been to not allow such children to have power, and to teach them restraint and to share. Some humans never passed kindergarten.
Eventually other servants of the Goddess came to work at the temple, but none of them were ever called to offer up silence as their sacrifice. They did the rituals, and offered council, but still the silent servant was often called upon to speak to his Goddess and in his gestures-and-occasional-written-word way, impart Her instructions. He was sometimes asked when or if the Goddess might allow him to speak again in his own voice, but he would just smile, and otherwise ignore the question.
The day the silent servant died, the world felt the shift. The Goddess had gone back to sleep, now that things were right again in Her bodyworld. She was still there, but as She had been before, allowing Her children to play as they will, not so directly interfering. Like a mother watching from the window, she had come out to correct Her childrens’ errant behavior, and then gone back to her internal work. The silent servant’s silence had been an offering so that the world might hear Her voice; his hunger had been so that All might be nourished. In an age where the greedy wanted all abundance for themselves, and all enraptured by their decrees, one person’s offering was enough for Her to channel through and discipline Her naughty children and admonish them to be nice to their siblings. And so it was, and so Her children could play in contentment without the bullies destroying the garden.
The temple endured, but no servant of the Goddess was ever needed to offer up their voice to Her again. A small statue of Her servant was placed under his favorite oak tree, and the people sometimes left beside it his favorite foods.
A recording of his true voice was unearthed from the days before he had built Her temple, when in misery he had stumbled through the world that had been anathema to Her ways. In it, he sang a poem, which became a hymn Her followers often sang in the temple:
Lost children of the Mother;
Where have you gone?
She calls to you now from beyond
Do you not hear your own Mother?
She weeps in sadness
For you have trampled Her beautiful garden,
And killed the sacred butterfly.
Wandering children off the path
You have strayed far, come back
Into Her welcoming arms, where She
Shares love and nourishes equally
The trees are calling you now
Into the sacred grove
Does your collection of treasures please you
More than the joy of giving?
Death is but a part of life
Not its aim; not its end
Rotting bodies feed living bodies,
So it has been, so it shall ever be.
Misguided children, you cannot
Purchase your way out of the circle
Or fortify against it
Behind high defensive walls.
Blessed children, come back to play
The flowers are blooming
The caterpillar has made its cocoon.