Pasche

"Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood." ~ C.S. Lewis

In the core of your heart is a black hole, where fierce immaculate silence submerges the antipodes before they can escape into creation. The portal you've been searching for is the infinitesimal bindhu between breaths, drowning all the words you used, like "left" and "right," "doing" and "not-doing," "suffering" and "God,” in the primordial flood. Worlds bubble out of your loss. Immerse in the bee-drowning cup of this wound. Deeper than sadness, deeper than sin, the darkness you have fallen in. Neither retribution nor injustice have any meaning here. The vulva laceration in Christ's side, leads to the kingdom of the unborn. Pain and beauty comingle in one nectar. Love's vintage ferments. The poem keeps starting over. In the core of your heart is a black hole, a cauldron of swirling stillness. It is the agony of Spring, the passion of petals in a bud. No one can imagine their sorrow. Wine pours from the gash in the ribs of the dead poet, Jesus. You thought you might rise and soar, but you sink into a secret well of prayer, your tiny feet, your wings dragging you deeper through the sweetness, as you struggle to make a humming sound, but cannot even say, "Thank You."

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Image: The wound in Christ's side from the Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg, circa 1349. This is not the only Medieval manuscript portraying Christ's wound as a vagina, showing the feminine aspect of his fully human nature, the Holy Spirit as divine mother. Unlike contemporary fundamentalists - and atheists - who insist on reading the scripture literally, either to reject it as absurd, or turn it into a bludgeon, Medieval Christian artist/mystics contemplated the mythic symbols of the Easter story as portals to the collective unconscious, the realm of the archetypes. The cross of Christ was the central archetype of all, the convergence of opposites. For where opposites converge is the only locus of truth. No compassion, and no transcendence, without bearing the pain of creation. Selah.