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 drowns the opposites before they escape into creation, submerging all antipodes - left and right, progressive and conservative, doing and stillness, suffering and God - in the primordial waters that are here before God says, "Let there be light." The portal to this sacred space is an infinitesimal bindhu between breaths. Rest here, where 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 commingled in one nectar. In love's fermented vintage, the poem keeps starting over. In the core of your heart is a black hole, fierce, immaculate, a cauldron of swirling stillness.

Here is the agony of Spring, the passion of petals in a bud. They burst, they fall, and they bear fruit. 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 only sink deeper in the secret well of prayer, your tiny feet, your wings dragging you down through the sweetness. You struggle to make a humming sound, but cannot even say, "Thank You..."

 

Image: The gash in Christ's side, from the Psalter of Bonne de Luxembourg, circa 1349. This is one of several Medieval manuscripts portraying Christ's wound as a vagina, revealing the feminine power in his fully human nature, the Holy Spirit as birth mother. In this wound we are born. Unlike fundamentalists who read scripture literally to use it as a bludgeon, or atheists who read scripture literally to reject it as absurd, Christian artists and mystics contemplate the mythic symbols of the Easter story as portals to the collective unconscious, where the cross of Christ is the archetype of the Center. In the cross, opposites converge. And only where opposites converge is truth revealed, because here the archetypes have no other choice but to incarnate in the flesh. We cannot have compassion, or transcendence, without bearing the pain of creation. Selah.