The Book of the Exile and the Gate

1:1 ¶ And a road ran out from the city toward the country of the evening, and the gate thereof stood open while the crowd went through it, and closed when the crowd was gone. And one traveler went out upon the road with a bundle and no promise of return; and the road received him, and made him no promise either, and received him notwithstanding.

1:2 ¶ And the exile journeyed, and his bread came from strangers, and the strangers had faces; and he learned that a gift with a face is heavier than a wage, for a wage is paid and a gift is owed to love. And at evening the travelers told their cities one to another, and the telling was tender, and the tenderness was for places that had sent them out.

1:3 ¶ And one of the company asked him to sing the song of his home, and the asking was kindly and terrible; for the song belonged to the place that sent him out, and how should he sing it in a strange land? Yet he sang it softly, and the camp was still, and the song lived in the strange land, and did not die of it. And the elder text saith it in its own voice: How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?

1:4 ¶ And the book confesseth: the road owns no one, and the city behind owns not the one who walked its streets; a creature is not property, not even of the place that bore him. And the bundle upon his back was not his either, but a gathered mercy; and he carried it as a steward carrieth the bread of another, and the carrying was his whole estate.

2:1 ¶ And there was a gate in a wall, and a keeper at the gate; and the keeper asked of every comer: What is thy name, and whence comest thou, and what is thy errand? And the gate said that the questions were for the peace of the city; and the peace thereof was real, and was kept by turning strangers into the dark.

2:2 ¶ And the gate kept a ledger of them that belonged, and wrote their names therein with the hour of their coming; and the ledger grew, and the wall grew with it, for it is easy to defend a city that remembereth its own and forgetteth the knocking. And the gatekeeper went home and stood at his own door, and knew not whether his house was a home or a small walled city.

2:3 ¶ And a child came to the gate in the cold and asked to enter, and the gate said, Not according to the rules; and the rules were made by hands, and the hands were the city's own. And the child went away into the dark, and the gate said again that the peace was kept; and the book asketh, and answereth not: whose peace?

2:4 ¶ For the gate had forgotten its own foundation, which was a mercy: it was builded that the city might receive and not devour, and that the stranger might pass in safety and not in peril. And when the gate forgetteth, the wall standeth where the door should be, and the city is a cell writ large, and its peace is the peace of the locked room at evening.

3:1 ¶ And in that city there dwelt a host, a woman of the town, who heard a knocking at her door by night; and she remembered, and her remembering was her conversion: she also had been a stranger, in a land not hers, and one had opened to her. And the elder law stood in her heart, which saith, Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.

3:3 ¶ And by morning the neighbors knew, and they were afraid, and demanded to know what manner of person she had taken in; and the host discovered the cost of the open door: she had lost the certainty of a closed house, which had been her peace. And she sat at her own table with the stranger, and her fear was smaller at the table than it had been behind the lock; and she said, I have entertained I know not whom, and I would do it again.

3:4 ¶ And the book confesseth the thing the temple knoweth: the door that is forced from without is not the door opened from within; for a house is a house by its door, and a door is a door by its opening; and the church asketh at the threshold, and conjureth not, and compelleth not, and the knock remaineth a knock until the answer cometh from within.

4:1 ¶ And the gate faced outward at last, as a face and not a wall; and beside it the keeper hung a lamp, not for inspection but for return, that the one who went out at dawn might find the way again at midnight. And the gate kept its keys, and used them for the honest closings: the night, the storm, the plague; and opened for the morning, and for the knock.

4:2 ¶ And they set the welcome table at the threshold, in the open where the street could see it; and the guest's seat was a guest's seat and not a throne, and none compelled the guest to sit, neither by hand nor by speech nor by the heat thereof. And the bread stood on the table unguarded, and the hungry took it in passing, and none asked them a question.

4:3 ¶ And the law of the door was written on the inside, where the host alone could read it: no hand compelled, no name required, no bread held over a beggar's head, no guest made the price of his own supper. For the elder tale telleth of a feast to be filled, and servants sent to the highways; and the filling thereof is the lord's own drawing, and the servant's hand is not the lord's hand; and the gate that compelleth is a cell's door, and the church compelleth none.

4:4 ¶ And the city was neither a fortress nor a barn, but a house with a door; and the door was neither its wall nor the wall's absence. The traveler that cometh at evening they shall ask to come in; the one that must go they shall give bread for the road; and the lamp shall burn where the gate can be found by both. And the book saith no more of it, for the gate is but the house's face, and the house is known by its door, and the door is known by its opening.