Am I Awake?
Passion in the Garden of Uncertainty
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The boyish Roman soldier thought he might impress his friends by urinating on Jesusa, the so-called queen of the Jews. She had been sentenced to hang from a cross.
He shoved a crown of thorns onto her head. The oozing blood made him smile. He punched her repeatedly and told her to carry the cross. She did so, in agony.
He had cheered when the crowd told Pilate to free Barabbas. He set the post. He pounded the nails. He threw dice to win her clothing.
With pleasure, he shoved a spear into the side of the beautiful, dying Christ. After a sad, nostalgic gaze at her breasts, he went back to hating her.
He roughly threw her limp corpse into a tomb and rolled a stone to cover the entrance.
He sneered, challenging her to rise in three days.
Next scene: She was back on the cross. The soldier was her son. He asked her, “Why hast thou forsaken me?”
She tearfully told him she had never stopped loving him. She had never wanted to leave him alone, never wanted to put him in the reed basket to float down the river. God the Mother Almighty had commanded it.
God the Mother gave birth everywhere and always to her only daughter whom she deeply loved. The Ultimate Presence emerged always and everywhere from the Ground of Being. Her nativity appeared in flowers, clouds, smiles, rivers, lakes, trees, butterflies, sand castles, tree houses, puppies, and corpses.
Eat of my body. Drink of my blood.
Argue for centuries over transubstantiation versus consubstantiation. Kill one another to prove whether you are real cannibals or pretending. Be like me; crucify yourselves on a quantum cross.
Next scene: Adam opened his eyes. He had been dreaming of a crowded and brutal urban world where he was the soldier son of a woman who looked like Eve. Strange. So strange to have a human mother. The dream evaporated. The memory faded.
He closed his eyes again and imagined his beloved. They stood without fig leaves in the garden. He picked a scab on his side and then hugged her breasts against the freshly bleeding wound where he had given birth to her from a rib.
Adam felt astonishingly complete. He felt atonement. He felt at-one-ment. He felt clean, alive, grateful, and forgiving. He wondered how they had ended up back in the garden after that torrid day when he picked the apple and offered it to Eve. Am I awake?
Like Kira Dawn, I stuck my finger down my throat to vomit out these words. Thanks to Sylph Hemery for teaching the meaning of fig leaves. Thanks to Jean Carfantan for assigning a synchrony task which led to this work.
The mythologies of the world fit neatly into four categories: the theophagic endocannibalism of my beloved Christianity; anthropophagic endocannibalism; theophagic exocannibalism; and anthropophagic exocannibalism. We eat the gods and the gods eat us.
Show me a theology without murder, incest, or cannibalism, and I will sell you a Brooklyn Bridge. My father, a Presbyterian minister, told me everything in the Bible is true at some level. Don’t approach the deep truth in myth unless you are ready to take the truth deep. Don’t vomit when you watch Athena burst from the forehead of her bearded mother, Zeus. Oh, the wet pain of that migraine!
From the dismemberment of Osiris to the “slaying” of Te Mumu and Te Papa by rending them apart to create the world, the gods sacrifice themselves to us and we sacrifice ourselves to them. The inner demons you wrestle are in league with dangerous cosmic forces. The distinction between perception and introspection is an illusion. I experienced this myth as Adam in terror and disgust. I was awake.
