The white stone-washed walls are light-stained –
seafoam and periwinkle at this hour.
My mind goes back and forth
My eyes move from every soft and shadowed and curved surface
to the stark brown wooden crucifix.
In this place of peace
this chapel of luminosity
this hushed contemplation
I am impaled by the icon most unfamiliar to me.
My Semitic sensibilities veer to the human side of the image, blasphemous, I know,
to hold a human narrative,
a human story I can’t seem to understand.
My childhood unanswered question returns, unbidden,
blasphemous, I know,
yet even in middle age I still wonder:
Why didn’t his arms fall off? Tear right through?
If bodies can be torn limb from torso, why didn’t it happen here?
I don’t understand
how it could have happened
the inhumanness of this particular kind of torture
the men – all the men, not just Yeshua the man –
destined to this fate
staked through bones to wood
nailed in place.
A show, a message, supposedly a deterrent – yet even televised executions didn’t seem to do the trick – nothing seems to keep humans from doing despicable things – attempting to overthrow the oppressive regime – that make them so feared and despised they receive their generation’s version of a slow, excruciating public death.
I wonder, too, about the others:
the soldiers, four per cross, under the centurion’s order, whose job was to drive iron stakes through bones of those still living
about when iron was scarce, and another soldier needed to pull the stakes out to reuse them for the next offender
about the one whose job was to take down the sun-dried, desiccated, bird-ravaged carcasses, remove corpses from scaffolds like meat from the backyard smoke house, return the crucifixes to the starting line for the next week or month’s public imposition of justice (executed)?
How?
In this quiet place of peace and reflection
intentionally constructed to feel expansive and soft
light and shadow
consolation and desolation
prevail.
I keep asking,
How?
The chapel glows with colored light – so much light – light filtered through stained glass lenses, light bouncing off color fields, halos of light on the high arched white ceiling, light reflected on white textured walls, light streaming to the floor.
The walls are soft with arcs and rounded alcoves
even the right angles are forgiving.
The ceiling billows like a white cotton sheet
wafting up before settling gracefully on a freshly-made bed.
I sit on plush green velvet cushions against the back wall.
Dotted among the pews are two on bent knees, in prayer pose, leaning on the polished blond wood in front of them, earnest in prayer;
two with prayer books in hands, heads bowed, reading.
To my right a seeker stands and faces the back wall, runs youthful fingers across the white grain.
To my left, my love is sketching, light and form and shadow, black ink on white crisp pages.
I am pinned in place by the crucifix, jarred and captive, pencil flying across my lined composition book, gazing up and away, up and away, up and away.
I explore my hands, feel along the length and sides of my fingers, my palms, wonder where a stake would go, feel the small areas of soft tissue, feel the flesh and bones and tendons, see the bluish veins under pale pink skin, a beginner’s sewing book pattern where I’ve been stitched together from some unknown human cloth, stuffed to the fingertips with muscle and fat and soul and yearning, draped tightly around sinew and bones, so many bones.
I can wrap my thumb and middle finger around my wrists
which seem particularly small today
too small to accommodate a 5-inch iron nail
there’d be nothing left
everything would shatter.
With the eye of an executioner
I examine my hands
with a bit of objective distance
as if for the first time
as if they were a surgical model
wishing I’d paid more interest in high school anatomy lessons
or maybe that I could have forced myself to attend that horrifying exhibit of skinless Chinese corpses that came through town a few years back
so that I would know if there is some place
some secret spot, perhaps
where an iron post wouldn’t destroy the essence
of my hand
shatter my bone
the place you could have aimed for
when you held the hammer
picked up a stake
pounded through my treasonous small, bony hands
to the receptive give of the wooden beam
you constructed for me
to teach me a lesson
make sure I knew my place
make sure I’d be pinned here
long after you left
good only for carrion and dogs and those even more wicked than you
to pelt me with stones
run me through with spears
gawk and jeer as the last drop of blood and fluids dribbled and evaporated
turning my pale skin a translucent white
curves and shadows
the perfect backdrop to reflect the light as it changes
hour by hour
as it does here
in the chapel
in the place of peace and love and remembrance
for all that is holy
and all that we do
to all that is holy.