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

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. The Fall of Man is inevitable. The Incarnation of Christ is inevitable. I cannot savor compassion, or transcendence, without bearing the pain of creation. Selah.

In the core of my heart is a black hole where fierce immaculate silence drowns the opposites before they escape into creation. This is the primordial womb of chaos that was here before God said "Let there be light." The portal to this sacred space is an infinitesimal bindhu between exhalation and inhalation. I rest here unbreathed, annihilated for an instant, and worlds bubble out of my loss.

Immersed in the bee-drowning cup of this wound, deeper than sadness, deeper than sin, the darkness I have fallen in... Neither repentance nor forgiveness have any meaning here. The vulva-laceration in Christ's side leads to the kingdom of the unborn, pain and beauty commingled in one placenta. Love's vineyard ferments before the harvest. Here the poem keeps starting over. In the core of my heart is a black hole, fierce, immaculate, a cauldron of swirling stillness.

The agony of Spring, the passion of tormented petals in a bud. The bud is a slave ship that carries its flower across the sea of time. They burst, they fall, and they bear fruit. No one can imagine the sorrows of pollen.Wine pours from a gash in the ribs of the dead poet, Jesus. I thought I might rise and soar, but I only sink deeper in the secret well of prayer, my tiny feet, my wings dragging me down through the sweetness. I struggle to make a humming sound, but cannot even say, "Thank You..."