When God Did Not Answer

A Gravedigger in the Time of the Black Death Florence 1348

When God Did Not Answer

You are the end point of an unbroken chain of survival.

Every person who came before you - through plague, war, famine, and flood - lived long enough to pass forward what was necessary for you to exist. You did not begin when you were born. You began when humanity began.

Everything between that beginning and this moment is the story of the making of you.

Florence. 1348.

A city of one hundred and twenty thousand souls. A Sicilian ship at Messina with twelve crews dying at the oar. Four months later, a third of Florence is in trenches behind the parish churches.

On the twelfth of June, the Priors silenced every bell in the city at once.

When God Did Not Answer asks what it meant to live inside that silence.

Not as a pope. Not as a prince. As the ordinary man - a gravedigger of the Oltrarno - who carried out of their houses the rich and the poor, the priest and the wool-comber, and laid them in the same trench under the same lime.

• What does a man believe, when the bells stop?
• What does he do, when the institutions die faster than the dying?
• What is the difference between a Christian and a man who keeps the Christian gestures because no one else is left to keep them?
• What is held up from below, when nothing is sent down from above?

The facts are extraordinary enough:

• The plague reached Europe through twelve Genoese galleys at Messina in October 1347.
• It traveled four kilometers a day overland, faster by sea.
• Florence lost between forty-five and seventy-five percent of its population in four months.
• Pope Clement VI consecrated the Rhône so that bodies could be dumped into it as into a grave.
• Two thousand Jews were burned alive at Strasbourg in February 1349 - before the plague had reached the city.
• Within five years of the silencing of the bells, Florence installed its first mechanical clock.

The arguments about what broke that summer have never stopped.

History is not a sequence of dates.

It is the record of billions of lives lived forward through a present as urgent as your own.

A widow shelling beans at a board. A grain of sugar on a child's finger. A hand straightening a linen sheet at a stranger's collarbone. A bell that did not ring.

They were curious about the same things we are curious about. They lived through something that is still asking us questions. This book is the attempt of one ordinary witness - a gravedigger who understood the world by carrying it - to answer.

For homeschooling families:

You are already doing the most important thing - putting the story of humanity directly into your children's hands. The Beyond His Story We Stand series was written for you. Each book takes one moment in human history and makes it lived rather than memorised, felt rather than filed away. Not a textbook. Not a syllabus. A story your child will not want to put down - and that will leave them asking the questions that no curriculum can generate for them.

The questions that only wonder produces.

When God Did Not Answer is part of Beyond His Story We Stand - a chronological journey through human history, told through the eyes of the people official history forgot to record.

The bells fell silent. The hands went on. That is how the world was kept.