degasandaboxofdoughnuts

[degasandaboxofdoughnuts]

Upon Finishing a Memoir: An Act of Gratitude

Along the New Jersey coastline, hugging the inland spine of a confederation of plodding, marshy islands, the southern stretch of the Garden State Parkway feels like the most liberating road in the world.  Birthed from the narrow two lanes that spit you out of Cape May, the state’s southern-most point, the highway begins without prelude, other than a hulking green sign that only changes when the governor does.  You take your place in the line of cars, and then you’re off.  One stretch of highway is what’s keeping you between the land and the ocean, between your work week and your summer night, between what’s flesh, essentially, and what’s fantasy.  Sometimes it even feels like you’re driving along the edge of your own young life, like you’re escaping the world and its responsibilities giving chase just one exit back.

When the slanting sunlight sprinkles across the reeds and the bay to your right, especially on an endless summer day, when you have nowhere else to be and nothing else to live for, it produces a certain sound.  It’s not the hum of wheels on asphalt.  It’s a soft but assertive thing, a combination of two distinct noises coming together perfectly to hold you in, like a seatbelt clicking into place.  Bringing you along for the ride.  And I first successfully identified it when I listened to the opening track of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run.

Oh, oh, oh, oh Thunder Road.  It’s all there, in the duet of a crooning piano and a whining harmonica.  He did it.  He put that feeling in a song.

Looking back on my life thus far, and trying to lift the lid on my future, it is very clear to me that Bruce Springsteen was, is, and always will be one of my life’s most important prophets.  I have had his music since I was a teenager, and now I have his life in his own, carefully chosen words, in a language that appeals directly to my heart’s craft, with the gift of his autobiography, bearing the same title as that album that blew open my tiny little world.  He came before me and let his voice ring out so that I, almost forty years later, could hear it and finally begin to understand who I am.  He is the Jersey-shaped mold into which I have poured myself in order to make sense of my place in the world.  I might as well have been dancing across a porch as the radio played, so suddenly and certainly did Bruce come and pick me up and drive me away from the listless, aching confusion of adolescence.  It’s a ride that has taken me so many incredible destinations, put some amazing people in the passenger seat, and it just keeps going.

At fifteen or sixteen, I believed I had already found my musical footing.  I was most assuredly a “classic rock girl” -- with my messenger back covered in pins and patches -- desperate to carve out an identity as I entered a high school where we literally wore uniforms.  I had spent middle school shirking my old childhood pop icons for newer, “edgier” models, like Avril Lavigne and Good Charlotte, but then, right before high school, I saw the movie School of Rock AND got an iPod, one that I needed to fill with the infinite amount of music it could seemingly store, and so into the open arms of my parents’ music I fell.  Not only did I love the music, but it helped me continue to draw up am us/them understanding of the world that my fragile self-esteem clung to, wanting always to both stand out and be accepted.  Plus, it helped with the boys.  The guy who I would end up “dating” for one week of freshman year once looked across our lockers at my messenger bag and asked me if I liked Bruce Springsteen.  I grimaced and assured him that I did not.  He was relieved by my answer, and my mystique was preserved for another day.

Despite having never really ever listened to Springsteen, I understood, somehow, that he was “dad rock”, perennially uncool, of vaguely the same era as revered acts like the Who and Pink Floyd and Guns n Roses (any rock music from before 1995 -- and whose merchandise you could purchase at Hot Topic -- belonged under the same basic categorical umbrella for a kid in the mid-2000s), but unquestionably lamer.  Looking back, this may be because Springsteen eludes firm categorization, unlike a lot of other acts: he is both part of a prolific band and a solo act, with music spanning many decades without ever being sonically beholden to one, and touting a discography full of songs that ranging from moody and piano-driven to synthesized stadium rock, with almost everything in between.  At the time, it was probably because he had the gall to kind of look like our dads, and because he was so synonymous with our very own state.  We knew that he was the king of New Jersey, and, to our young ears, he hadn’t earned it.  He was as much of an annoying, embarrassing inheritance as Bon Jovi.  Perhaps that assumption that all New Jerseyans bled for the Boss was something we inherently understood and rebelled against, because I barely met anyone else around my age who liked Bruce until I left the state for college (hell, I even knew people my dad’s age -- a half-generation younger than Springsteen himself -- who discounted Bruce entirely from their nostalgic repertoire).

My conversion began with a brief exposure.  My mother’s car had long been the place where my audible tastes came to be.  She was only thirty when Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill came out, and I remember her turning down the volume and shouting “KISS” over Alanis’s seething “fuck” on “You Oughta Know”.  My dad and I bonded a lot over music, too, but my mom, in my opinion, had cooler taste, and she dropped her knowledge sparingly and memorably, which worked towards stealthily indoctrinating her young daughter .  During a period of time, she played the song “Rosalita” a lot in the car, and it was crowdpleaser among her three kids.  Flash forward to some time later, I found myself sitting at our family’s shared PC, scrolling through my dad’s iTunes library.  I came across The Essential Bruce Springsteen.  In a shocking display of patience with a new musical artist (a virtue I lack to this day), I started clicking and listening.  Thus entered my two true gateway songs: “Spirit in the Night” and “Atlantic City”.  Wildly different from one another, and from “Rosalita”, they had me transfixed right away.  “Spirit in the Night”, with its spark-plug sax and rambling, decontextualized narrative, was a low-key simmer of sound and energy, with Bruce’s scratchy voice inviting me into a crazy world that was foreign and completely appealing.  “Atlantic City” was as dark and cold and bare, but threaded through with the thinnest strain of hope, as an actual night in Atlantic City.  I knew this, because Atlantic City and all its ugly appeal was less than an hour’s ride away.  It wasn’t a story within which I could personally place myself, but I understood the setting on an aesthetic and corporeal level -- “put on your stockings ‘cause the night’s getting cold,” and the harmonica and guitar joined in like a whistling wind over the lightless beach.  I knew what he was describing in such minimal but potent detail.  And he was tapping into something bone-deep and dark, something inside just being awakened, hidden in your genes, finally revealing itself.

I had never heard anything like it before.

Discovering Springsteen was like having someone finally turn on the lights after I had been rooting around in the dark for something I could recognize.  Not just something I could enjoy, but something that I could claim, that spoke to where I had come from and what I had the potential to be.  I devoured his first four albums and savored all the tastes they left in my mouth.  I opened my otherwise-purist heart to some later songs of the 80s and 90s that the Essential dropped in my ear.  I listened to a man almost half-a-century older than me, older than my parents, and felt as completely and utterly understood as if he and I knew each other, like we had sat together on a sandy beach towel and discussed anything and everything, like him and Bobby Jean.

I continually ask myself whether or not Bruce would be my favorite artist of all-time if I wasn’t from New Jersey, and I can’t ever really know the answer, but I have my suspicions.  I know lots of people who aren’t from New Jersey who adore and connect with his music on just as fundamental a level as I do, and I know I’d love him regardless; that’s what he has achieved with his music, after all: a universality mined from the particulars, making his hometown everyone’s hometown, his woes your woes, his jubilation at the end of a long day yours.  But even when he paints the setting in broad strokes, I recognize them.  His winding roads match the topography of mine.  The abandoned beach houses and the boardwalk and that direct line from “the coastline to the city” are the stage setting of my entire life.  But it was more than that, more than just name-dropping shore towns and hallmarks -- it was everything else.  Bruce Springsteen shook my teenaged soul not just because he sang about New Jersey, but because he was singing with the very fuel of the state in his belly and in his guitar, and that is… the desire to get the hell out.

I had always imagined myself leaving my hometown, but never more so than during those early high-school years.  I was just four years away from breaking out -- from “busting out of class” -- and picking up the mantle of my destiny elsewhere, but when I was a newly minted freshman those few years seemed like they would last an eternity.  I knew with a stomach-weighting dread that they would be challenging years, wherein I would have to try to fit in or end up strangling myself with self-hatred and doubt and regret over letting my Very Important Teenage Years pass me by.  I knew it all was a byway, but I wanted it to be, a la Dazed and Confused philosophy, fun along the way.  If I didn’t attempt that, the self-loathing always on the brink of coming up my throat would choke me.  But I knew as I shuffled along the few corridors of my (at-turns oppressively and comfortingly) tiny school that this might be near-impossible.  Those first few months were spent in a depressed fog.  I had one physical refuge in the whole world, and that was down the shore, where everything was, for me, all right.  I longed for the one place remotely in the vicinity where I could both feel at home, with all the comforts of my happy childhood, and still teeter on the brink of the rest of the world.  The very edge of New Jersey was the only place I could stand to be.

Bruce got that.  Bruce got all of that.  His music has always been both about leaving and staying.  He was born to run, but dammit, he always came back.  He was a weird kid with a big dream he made come true, but his roots were too permanent to ever hack away completely.  Just getting in the car and driving, seeking out friends, romance, escape… growing up in New Jersey, that was all we had.  And sure, that is undoubtedly true of countless other towns and states and places in the world, but that is where the particulars always called out to me and pulled me in that much deeper.  His car was hitting Route 9 when he traded in his wings for some wheels.  He was riding to the sea I have craved my entire life when he and his baby washed their sins off their hands.  His voice and music captured the exhilarating and yet utterly earthbound feeling of driving up the Parkway, like he just knew the alchemical secrets of turning a drive on a soft, infested summer’s day into high art.

Obviously there are many, many stark differences between his life and mine, but I have found our funny little parallels a great comfort to me, especially after reading his book.  His Freehold is my Vineland, our little inland towns populated with all our ancestors and empty factories and directions we didn’t take; his Asbury Park is my Sea Isle City, our nearby seaside escapes, at the end of a promise-filled car ride.  He dreamed of making sense of the world through his need to express himself musically, while I have, for years, smoldered day-in and day-out  with a burning desire to write myself into multiple existences through fiction.  I listen to the progression of his early albums and recognize that transition from word-heavy, metaphorical cyclones to sparser, heavier punches, details compressed without losing any of their power; I know that that’s in my own writing, the shift from more to less, as I have continued to learn how to best hone my voice.  The vast majority of his music has not dealt with Catholicism or God head-on, while mine has, but both of our writing styles are inextricably linked to the liturgy we inherited.  His songs, and his account of his own life, are decorated like a church interior with language that can only come from the sacramental coloring that is the Catholic worldview, where the everyday and ordinary are clearly vessels of redemption and symbols of sacrifice, where guilt is genetic and inextricable.  And he has lived his life caged in by an anxiety and occasionally bogged down by a depression that I wish was a foreign concept to me but I know isn’t; I can only hope I can make something out of myself and my craft by wielding these impediments even half as well as he has.

The lifelong disciple of his own pantheon of heroes, Bruce Springsteen is my prophet, the one who stands under a shore bar light and prepares the way for me, and he has taken the many ordinary elements of my life and turned them into an eternal truth that will outlive us.  His songs bring me to places to which I can never really return and give me back people who are most present only in memories.  He has tied me a little tighter to moments and friends that might have slipped away otherwise.  Like prayers, they potently invoke my loved ones.  “Streets of Fire” and “Drive All Night” are Bryant.  “Incident on 57th Street” and “Sherry Darling” are Laura.  “Backstreets” and “Born to Run” are Alanna.  “Thundercrack” is Jordan.  “My Love Will Not Let You Down” is my mom.  “The Rising” is my dad, and “Racing in the Street” and “No Surrender” are myself reflected back to me through the proud mirror of his eyes.  Even “Glory Days”, my honest-to-God least favorite song on earth (that’s how much I love you, Bruce), is now Chris and Jacqui, who danced all their friends into their new marriage to the cheesiest lyrics of all time.

I go through periods of time when I don’t listen to Bruce at all, when his music isn’t what I need to power me through or mellow me out, but when it is time, I am Saint Sebastian tied to the column, allowing myself to be pierced by a slew of arrows deftly hitting their marks.  I am game for the exquisite torture.  His music goes subterranean in a way no one else’s really does.

I don’t write this because I believe my experience with Springsteen is unique in any way, shape, or form, just like my adolescence wasn’t.  Underneath the layers of exhilaration, calm, and connectivity I feel when I sit alone in my room or my car and start up “Thunder Road” or “Dancing in the Dark” or “My City of Ruins”, I know that he is so incredible at what he does because he can make the thousands upon thousands of fans who flock to his shows feel like they have an individual relationship with him.  People talk up Springsteen’s blue-collar appeal (which the artist himself is well aware is somewhat illusionary, based more on his upbringing than his professional life and achievements), but that’s really just a fraction of a more complex algorithm.  Anyone can sing the working man’s blues (I’m looking at you, Commander-in-Chief).  His music has to sound like your life, echo your experiences, reveal a truth in your everyday existence.  The stories he tells don’t exactly match mine, and they don’t exactly match his own, but that’s why he is an artist.  He sets a mood and then some.  I don’t know anything about the Chicken Man, but that doesn’t matter, because Bruce’s voice captures a raw nerve ending on “Atlantic City” when he asks his love to meet him there, when he admits that “our luck may have died and our love may be cold.”  He penetrates, like the frosty ocean seeping through your clothes and into your skin should you dare to tread out into the blackness of the Atlantic off-season.  It’s the rebellious spirit of “Badlands” that comes through in small, energetic bursts that feel like starting up your car or getting out of work or flipping off the shittiness of life while still grabbing its freedoms when they come flying past you, when you “have a notion deep inside that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”  “The River” tells such a specific tale (that Bruce actually modeled on his brother-in-law) but whether you identify with the narrator or you inhabit the spirit of the “mister” you can easily imagine is on the barstool next to him, or even Mary “who acts like she don’t care”, or the story means nothing to you at all… that defeatedness, that sorrow, that slightly unhinged reminiscence, comes from a purely primal place embedded in all human hearts.  My favorite piece of music in the entire world happens when the band plays and Bruce sings, “But I remember us riding in my brother’s car, her body tan and wet down at the reservoir.”  What does that have to do with my life?  It’s about what it evokes.  That line changes the whole tone of the song.  His delivery begins to shift; now a man isn’t just telling an abysmal story long-bereft of any feeling, but admitting (probably to a total stranger, or to you, the detached listener) that he does remember.  He remembers details, ones that, in just a few simple but perfectly rhymed words, conjure the most transient and poignant parts of youth.  When the music picks up right at that line, I feel like someone is pressing on a bruise I didn’t realize I had.  I’m being reminded that that capacity for both carefree joy and a kind of regret that sometimes howls past the facade of acceptance is hauntingly universal, even when delivered in particulars.  Everyone has a river, and some dark, unanswerable question that sends them down there, even though they know the river is dry.

Jon Landau famously credited seeing Springsteen live with making him feel young again, like he was hearing music for the very first time.  That impulse to write about one of the greatest writers of our time has been felt by many since that 1974 review, and giving in to it now, breaking no new ground by doing so, I think it’s more than a kind of expression.  Where were you when you first heard Springsteen?  What tour did you catch him on?  Top ten favorite songs?  What would be your sign request?  It’s more than just examining the feelings he brews in your soul, more than teasing out an explanation as to why you’ll go see him every single time he comes to town, from a place within that really can’t be put into words.  Lyrics -- words -- are good, but sometimes what you’re experiencing is more akin to cascading piano or the blast of the saxophone.  It’s an entire atmosphere, a permeation, a drawn-out note.  So I think that these attempts, really, are acts of gratitude.  An exercise in reciprocation.  A man you’ve never met, who for most is just a voice, a face on an album cover, a distant figure on a stage, has made you feel both singular and a part of some greater, sweeping collective.  It’s like Springsteen himself, the man who comes to you alone, with his own distinct vision, but who also throws himself into the magic of a band, and thus into the magic of his audience.  That balance is also the balance of living.  Of striking out on your own, hitting the road, but also never really leaving home.  Of making connections and then letting them go, calling someone one last time, not to change their mind, but just to say, “I miss you, baby; good luck, goodbye.”  Bruce divined these dual forces in the world and wrangled them into albums full of victory and heartache, and by doing so he allowed us to not just articulate our own victories and heartaches, but feel them.  He gave us words that summed up, and music -- feelings -- that transcended.  He not only called out to me, like an overconfident boy from a car in the driveway, that we were about to go “riding out tonight to case the Promised Land,” but he did so while his voice tripped down Roy Bittan’s sprightly piano like he was stumbling across the keys.  It’s why Jon Landau’s infamous review of a young Springsteen is appropriately mostly dedicated to Landau’s own life and the context in which his future client fit in, but simultaneously stretches his savior to fit the nebulous role of “rock n roll future.”  Bruce makes us feel singled out and yet part of the human experience.  He finds us in the depths we think we alone occupy, calls out in recognition, and then gives us a hand to haul us up into a crowd of people who feel exactly the same way.  It’s why he’s an indulgent pleasure to listen to alone, and an indescribable thrill to watch live.  He does the E Street Shuffle and wrecks on the highway.  Everybody, form a line.

  By: Taylor Catalana

1/20/17

#Bruce Springsteen #Born to Run #Thunder Road #New Jersey

[degasandaboxofdoughnuts]

“Is God Calling You?  ...No, not you, Sweetheart.”

I have been wanting to write this piece for a very, very, very long time now.  It has been gathering strength like the winds and rains of a storm inside my chest cavity for many months, but I wanted to wait until this specific week, National Vocation Awareness Week, to address an issue that has morphed for me from an annoying hypocrisy to what might end up of being one of the main causes that steers me for the rest of my life, and, increasingly likely, the reason I may finally and officially abandon the faith into which I was baptized.  And, if it is perhaps true that the Lord really does *grimaces eternally* have a plan (or a very sick and unsettling sense of humor), this week happens to overlap with the election of a known sexist over a qualified, capable, willing, graceful, strong woman to our nation’s highest office, so the storm inside is now brewing over something within that was swiftly decimated last night when the glass ceiling I dreamed of shattering was firmly protected.

I begin with a question I have been asked a number of times, by non-religious people and atheists, by non-Christians, and by non-Catholics, a question I myself have asked of teachers and clergy: “Why can’t women be priests?”

The answer is simple: Sexism.  Sexism is the absolute only answer to that question.

Of all the stances the Church has taken, especially ones with which I do not agree, the ban on female ordination is the one that blackens my vision and crawls down my throat, suffocating, to take root in my heart.  I do not agree with the Church in regards to same-sex marriage, abortion, or premarital sex, among many other things, and I own that disagreement (more to come in a later piece on how I feel about my theology and personal faith versus Church teaching), but at the very least I can see from where the purest intentions behind those stances come.  And by “purest”, I mean least controlling, judgmental, bigoted, misogynistic intentions, the ones that maybe have to do with some sort of perceived understanding of the Judeo-Christian God, or at least with an innocent but harmful swallowing of what others lording over you have told of this God.  But the exclusion of women from the priesthood has no excuse.  There is no reason I have ever heard in my life that has not come off as paltry, flimsy, ridiculous, or mean.  To exclude women from answering the calls that they most certainly experience based solely on the fact that they are women is sexist, and to defend or concede to it is sexist behavior.

Lest we ever forget, the Catholic Church is very much a literal patriarchy.  The head of it is called our Papa, for Christ’s sake.  We refer to -- admittedly, following in the example of Jesus of Nazareth, who was raised in and aimed to reform Second Temple Judaism -- our genderless God as Father.  Faith is an abstract concept, a virtue, a feeling that can be transformed into action, but faith is very different from religion.  Faith allows me to ideologically understand and accept that a term is just a term, that we cannot even conceive of the nature of God, and so we use human terms that fall short of the impossible perfect description so that our limited minds can conceptualize and visualize, even if that visualization -- of God as a man -- is theologically incorrect.  But faith can only take one so far.  The Catholic Church is a religion, and as a religion it says that it understands God best, and God does not want women for the priesthood.

Being a priest is not the same as being a pastor.  In the Catholic religion, priesthood is a high calling, a special role.  A priest is separate from the layperson, though he serves him or her as a moral guide and intercessor between the lay congregation and God.  A priest refrains from sex and marriage, unlike a pastor with a family.  A priest not only preaches, but asserts himself as Christ’s representative on earth.  He speaks on Christ’s behalf and acts in place of him during sacramental rituals, citing the succession of the apostles -- specifically Peter -- as his main claim to do so.  So because the Church bases all of its authority on that succession, within its very gilded skeleton is the inextricable conceit that priests (and cardinals and bishops) are the upholders of Church doctrine.  To say that one does not necessarily adhere to the idea that priests are any more entitled to interpreting the Word of God than anyone else, as I don’t, is all well and good, and is probably felt by many, many modern Catholics, but because of the very structure of the Church, it must be understood that practicing under this belief inherently undermines one’s own technical Catholicism (again, more on all that good stuff in a later piece).

And so, because of the power that priests hold in their churches, and because all priests are men, men are inarguably the most powerful people in the Catholic Church.  You can fall back on your ideology that tells you that all are equal in the eyes of God, that in Christ there is no “Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female”, but in reality that is not the case.  These men are literally claiming the authority of God on this issue.  I can believe that I am equal to every man inside a church, but the one on the pulpit erodes that lofty theological truth before my very eyes.

We are told that men and women are in fact equally created and loved, but that we are inherently called to different roles within the Church body, that we naturally have different gifts.  Fuck that.  You know who said that?  A man.  That’s the whole point.  Men said all these things.  And they will continue to say all these things.  Women did not and do not oppress and suppress themselves, obviously.  Sure, there are women (some of whom I know well) who very much fall in line with the Church’s ruling and agree wholeheartedly that men alone should be ordained, but there was never, ever, ever a council on which women sat and added their voices to the ultimate decision.  Never.  And do not be mistaken: there were women leaders of churches.  They existed before the priesthood was established and organized as the hierarchy we have today, and so I hesitate to call them priests in this context, but they ran churches.  They preached.  THEY WERE CALLED DEACONS (special shout-out to the abhorrent theology teacher in my high school who said that when a woman in the New Testament is referred to as a deacon, which means ‘servant’, she was just that, while male deacons were actually the ones tasked with running things: I’ll never forgive that insult, especially when I was the only person in class who even knew about the female deacons).  Those women existed, whether their names were written down or not; I cite 1 Corinthians 14:34 -- “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says” -- and paraphrase my graduate thesis advisor: if they had to strike it down, that most likely means it was happening.

Uncomfortably recently, the beloved and -- a bit sadly -- most progressive of our modern popes, Francis, told a journalist that the ban on women priests would likely always remain.  His argument was that Pope John Paul II closed that door in a 1994 apostolic letter, and that JPII’s word was clear and (mystifyingly) final.  This was the best argument a Jesuit-trained scientist could offer.  Just… we already said no, and no take-backs.  The same institution that canonized Joan of Arc after she was burned as a heretic by Inquisitors, and decided that maybe they would admit that they were wrong about Galileo centuries after making him stand trial for his astronomical findings, has decided, based on the words of one pope, that this simple matter of allowing women full equality and power is a closed chapter.  They can change the words of the Mass, but not who presides over it.

This is nothing.  This is not a real answer.  There is no stately matter that can be put to rest with finality, especially in terms of progress and a world that is different than it was two thousand years ago.  This answer has no basis in Scripture, for those who view that as the ultimate authority of the will of God (I do not).  The apostle-dependent Church perhaps could rely more on the vile words of Paul in 1 Corinthians (I’m sure it does, depending on which church you attend), but instead I frequently hear that because Jesus had twelve male disciples, that is proof enough that God only wants men to be priests.

Oh, the ways in which I loathe the “twelve apostles” argument.

The same nauseating teacher I mentioned earlier once tackled the woman priest question by referencing something Mother Teresa apparently said, which rang to the ear-splitting tune of, if God wanted women to be priests, he would have made his own mother one.

The sheer audacity of this statement makes me grind my teeth.

First of all, just because saintly, female Mother Teresa said this thing does not make it a good argument.  Second of all, to get technical in an extremely easy way, Jesus did not make anyone a priest.  Jesus was a rabbi, and rabbis had disciples.  He was also a human being, so, you know, he probably had close friends… maybe even twelve of them.  Jesus was a Jew, and the Jews already had priests.  The priestly line was believed to have dated back to Aaron, the brother of Moses, and thus it was its own sect in society.  Jesus was a reformer of his own religion, not the founder of a new one.  The role of the priest as the Church developed it does not stem from Jesus, or if so, it does in a way that interprets and reenacts his own actions more so than it reflects his relationships.  Third of all, as I have said in a previous piece, Jesus had female disciples.  Lots of them.  It’s kind of what made him stand out.  The fact that the Gospels that were written decades after Jesus had died makes note of twelve special men does not make me believe that women are somehow unfit for or unworthy of the priesthood.  And fourth of all… really?  His mother?  Catholics love to make much out of the relationship between Jesus and Mary, but if you go back and actually read the Gospels, their interactions are unsettling and leave a lot up to potentially dark interpretation.  There’s no real indication there that he even particularly liked her, let alone would have considered her an important part of his inner circle and new world order.  So Mother Teresa may have gotten it backwards -- if Jesus had wanted his mother to be part of his mission, wouldn’t he have let her in?

This entire “answer” is a speculative anecdote.  It is not good enough for me.  A woman was the first witness to the Resurrection.  Those male disciples were worth jack shit when the moment of tribulation actually arrived; they fled, and the women stayed and pried their weeping eyes opened and watched him die.  They buried them.  The male disciples argued over who would sit next to Jesus in heaven, while a woman humbled herself before him, washed his feet with her tears, and dried them with her hair.  

So no, I will not just swallow a pithy line about Mary.  Not when someone without a uterus tells me what I can or cannot do with my body, without even a modicum of empathy or compassion or medical expertise.  Not when I have never heard a woman at a lectern speak with authority on what is referred to as the word of the Lord.  Not when we are told to be like Mary, whose most laudable virtue in the eyes of the Church was that she was obedient, even to her own detriment, and who we have crowned Queen of Heaven but who is a more impressive and independent figure in the Quran than she is in the Bible, where the author of Matthew never even assigns her dialogue.

And let me also clarify that none of this is meant to disparage nuns and sisters.  A lot of those women are unsung fucking heroes.  They are the ones who are actually taking care of the sick, the helpless, and the vulnerable, and they almost never get any credit for it, which is ultimately only okay because they aren’t doing it for credit.  American nuns have gotten a finger-wagging from the Vatican for spending too much time attending to the needs of the world and not enough promoting anti-abortion and anti-gay agendas.  Those women get up every day and do the Lord’s work, and they still have to ultimately be obedient to a bishop.  Bless the women who are doing good in spite of their hierarchical lowness, for hopefully the last shall be first and the first shall be last, if there’s any justice.

But to those who say women who feel called to the priesthood should become nuns, I want to make it clear: those are two different vocations.  Vocations don’t just drop from the sky and fall into a certain slot based on the gender of the person receiving the call.  Priests, as I have said, are entrusted with special responsibilities.  Priests get to preach.  Priests get to perform transubstantiation.  Priests get to preside over weddings and funerals, and baptize in ceremonial and non-emergency situations.  Priests get to wear the way cooler dresses.  So the work of nuns and sisters is certainly important, and the call to that life is beautiful and seems to be heeded rarely these days, but it is not the same work as that done by a priest.  It just isn’t.  And the number of nuns -- including Doctor of the Church Thérèse of Lisieux -- who probably wanted to actually be a priest is all the more heart-wrenching in a world where women have had to fight to gain the right to do almost every single job we hold, in a world where the Church laments over the lack of priests.

I have sat through Masses where I was instructed to pray for an increase in vocations to holy orders, and the priesthood specifically, and I have refused.  Not because I don’t pity the poor priests who are stretched so thin among various parishes and whose work suffers from their increasing and uninspiring responsibilities, but because it is absurd to plead so desperately in front of a congregation full of people who cannot even be considered for the job.  There is a drought, and they refuse to draw from the well.  I have heard older priests make arguments for lifting the requirement of celibacy (which was not enforced until the Middle Ages, when they were trying to staunch the issue of nepotism within the hierarchy) and I have felt for these men who have lived without sex and companionship and whose only close relatives may be elderly.  But that lift benefits them quite directly.  We would absolutely have more priests then.  But some of those same priests did not even acknowledge ordaining women in their bemoaning homilies.  And I had to sit there and listen, but no more.  Not ever again.

I have been ignored in theology classes and at retreats because me being good at theology couldn’t help the priest shortage.  I also attended an Episcopal service and started to cry when they mentioned their bishop and her name was Catherine.  I met an amazing priest at that parish who interrupted me ten minutes into one of our first conversations to tell me I should be in seminary.  I earned my master’s degree in theology and thought about my vitriolic high school principal who never let girls altar serve and always took the boys he picked for his Masses out to lunch.  I sat in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and listened to a gay bishop speak frankly with married women priests, both gay and straight, about sex, while seated on the altar, under a crucifix.  I plan to attend a Catholic Mass presided over by a woman priest because -- and here’s the best fucking part -- there are Roman Catholic women priests.  They completely and beautifully exist.  They do not give a shit that the Vatican won’t recognize their ordinations.  Anonymous and amazing bishops ordain them with all the sacramental rites, and they do the jobs they were called to do.  They are better than me, whose commitment to Catholicism wavers, who might leave the Church even as I promise myself that even from the outside I will never give up their cause.  They fight for eventual change, but in the meantime, they get to work.  They take on the world with the open arms of a man stretched out on a cross.  And they don’t need to have the same genitalia as him in order to share his light.

#women priests #Catholic Church #female ordination

[degasandaboxofdoughnuts]

Mary Magdalene Deserves Better.

Last month, the Vatican made it known that Mary Magdalene, the (for better or worse) most infamous woman in the New Testament, would be having her July 22 memorial day upgraded to a feast day on the liturgical calendar.  This change – elevating her into the saintly strata occupied by the twelve apostles – is being made in recognition of Mary’s role as Apostolorum Apostola, or “apostle to the apostles,” referring to her bearing witness to the risen Christ at the tomb on Easter and being instructed by him to tell his brothers that he would soon ascend to his Father (John 20:17).

The Vatican’s decree explicitly notes the confusion about Mary Magdalene’s identity over the years: her conflation with other female figures in the New Testament, especially the woman who tearfully anoints Jesus’s feet (Matthew 26:6-13; Mark 14:3-9; Luke 7:36-50) and Mary of Bethany, among others; how this conflation dates back to Pope Gregory I (d. 604) and a homily he gave that aimed to settle once and for all how the faithful were supposed to keep track of the many Marys (and unnamed women) who peppered Jesus’s life.  The decree goes on to acknowledge that “this interpretation continued to influence western ecclesiastical authors, Christian art and liturgical texts relative to this Saint” – which, to anyone, believer or non-believer, in the twenty-first century, might seem like a bit of an understatement.  To those of us exposed not only to Church teachings that tend to favor centuries of tradition rather than recent scholarship, as well as pop culture, the image of Mary Magdalene, that one stand-out woman in Jesus’s band of followers, inevitably leans toward the sensational… as well as the incorrect.

It’s 2016, and it is still somehow news to some of my fellow students in my postgraduate theology course that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute.

We have all seen her, painted, sculpted, singing on stage, weeping on screen, with her long hair and full, sorrowful, miracle-beholding eyes.  Sometimes she admits to having “had so many men before.”  Sometimes Jesus saves her from being stoned to death.  In a recent film adaptation, she was introduced to the audience in the form of a cheap laugh – a tribune asks the men in his barracks how many of them know of a woman called Mary Magdalene; many raise their hands – though this profession of ill repute is not actually important to her characterization throughout the rest of the film, other than making it easier for the tribune to find her.  While the Virgin Mary hardly comes before us, in more traditional iconography, without her head covered, Mary Magdalene is known for her lustrous locks, whether they are meant to hint at her status as a fallen woman, or being used to dry Christ’s feet, or either revealing or covering her naked body while she prays in seclusion, as medieval legend reports.  Even without her handy attribute of the jar of ointment she bears or keeps close by in so many paintings, she is a character we recognize on-sight: the beautiful woman who loved Jesus, and whom Jesus, that safe haven for sinners, loved in return.

No matter how many times it may be repeated that the Gospels never claim that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, nor an adulterer, nor explicitly refer to her as a sinner of any kind (especially a sexual sinner, though for women that has historically been viewed as going hand-in-hand), the image of her as such is difficult to shake. And it’s not hard to see why. Arguably one of the most appealing facets of both Jesus of Nazareth the man of first-century Palestine and Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is his unabashed association with those reviled by society.  He publicly announced that tax collectors and prostitutes would enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the priests and elders (Matthew 21:31).  That a man of such power regarded the disgraced women of his day as worthy of the love of God is a captivating image and lesson… it just doesn’t apply to Mary Magdalene.

So what does apply to her? What can we take away from the woman who watched as her rabbi was crucified and then saw him alive three days later?  The Vatican highlights her crucial twofold role as the first witness to the Resurrection and the first witness to the apostles.  In the garden on Easter morning, she is a counterpoint to Eve, who made Jesus’s presence in the world necessary with her own dalliance in the Garden of Eden.  Of the cryptic words of Jesus to his shocked, beseeching disciple – “Do not cling to me” or “Touch me not” (John 20:17) – the Vatican says, “This is an invitation to enter into an experience of faith that goes beyond materialistic assumptions and the human grasping after the divine Mystery which is not simply addressed to Mary but to the entire Church. This is an ecclesial moment! This is an important lesson for every disciple of Jesus Christ to neither seek human securities nor the vainglory of this world, but in faith to seek the living and risen Christ!”

I applaud this move to highlight the merits of Mary Magdalene that are actually present and discernable in the text.  I love that she is being held up as an example to all women as a disciple, which diverts so greatly from the example made of her for centuries: that of a redeemed woman, a sinner saved from the corruption of earthly pleasures by the great mercy of Christ.  But even at this juncture, where we can claim to separate the “real Mary” from the long-lasting but fading image, I fear that the connotations of Mary’s imagined but strategically exemplary life linger.  Along with being acknowledged as an evangelist, she is thought of as a “witness of Divine Mercy.”  Jesus revealing himself to her in the garden – a truly touching, tender moment in which he simply says her name (John 20:16) – is interpreted as Jesus taking pity on her and her tears.  It is not a joyful but poignantly momentary reunion between two people who were close, but an example of God showing the lowly mercy; this view of the intimate encounter in John comes from the same homily that bound the Magdalene up with other sorrowful, atoning women, and as such, extends the nature of Mary’s “redemption” from her disgrace into the Resurrection.  It implies her continual lowliness at this moment in which she should be elevated, in which she clearly has been singled out to behold a miracle and is entrusted to spread word of it.  It should speak more of Jesus’s regard of her as a disciple than it should recall the theme of forgiveness.  Again, the boundlessness of Jesus’s mercy is a beautiful idea, but it should not color this important moment in the Gospels that makes such a strong argument for women’s rightful place in the Church.

I am so much more intrigued by the Magdalene hinted at in the Gospel of John than I am by the imagined prostitute whom Jesus accepted in spite of her sins.  I am also more intrigued by the Mary of the New Testament than the one often conjured up in modern fiction.  The deeply embedded sexual component of the Mary myth (when not being used by the Church to teach young women lessons) has supplied writers, filmmakers, and believers bored by the squeaky-clean Jesus handed down to them with a woman who perhaps was following the Nazarene around for a very specific reason.  The gnostic Gospel of Mary – a fifth-century codex discovered in the late 1800s – says that Mary (never specifically noted as Mary Magdalene) was loved by Christ above all the other disciples, inspiring jealousy in the apostles.  The third-century apocryphal Gospel of Philip calls her the companion of the Lord, and there exists a debate over what that might mean.  Could it be that our celibate Jesus actually had a lover, or a wife? Was it Mary Magdalene?  Was she part of a different, more normal life shelved in favor of bringing about salvation, as she is in Nikos Kazantzakis’s and Martin Scorcese’s Last Temptation of Christ, or was she his beloved, possibly the mother of his child and carrier of his divine bloodline, as Dan Brown presented her?  Is Mary Magdalene, hiding in plain sight in the Gospels, our sign that Jesus Christ was fully human in a way that orthodox Christianity has never dared admit?

If that is the case, there is nothing resembling hard evidence to support it, and if evidence was somehow discovered tomorrow, I would accept it.  But as it stands, the two lovers, or the husband and wife, may tantalize us by pulling off the covers of our Bibles to reveal the romance underneath – in existing in all that we can imagine is unsaid – but the notion again undercuts what the existence of Mary Magdalene meant in the first century and could mean now.

So little biographical information about the Magdalene exists in the Bible, but here is what we do know of her role before the passion: she followed Jesus (Mark 15:41); she supported his ministry financially (Luke 8:3); and Jesus cured her of seven demons (Luke 8:2).  These scraps of information alone suggest a rich and interesting backstory we will never know.  How did she come to the money she used to finance Jesus’s travels?  How was she able to escape the domestic bounds of everyday life for a first-century Jewish woman and follow a rabbi around?  What does it mean that she was freed of seven demons?  But of all the possibilities that exist in this scant record, I find myself awestruck by the implications of two textual facts: she is mentioned by name in all four canonical Gospels, and she is the only named female follower who is not recalled by her relation to a man.

No one is completely sure what the epithet Magdalene means (in much the same way that there is no agreement on what Iscariot connotes for Judas), but nowhere in the New Testament is Mary Magdalene called anyone’s sister, wife, or mother.  Not only do I find that unusual independence striking (even men were known as sons of their fathers), but the idea that Jesus kept the company of a woman to whom he was unrelated.  This, in keeping with much of his countercultural and inflammatory behavior, was revolutionary.  And not only was he clearly spending significant time with unrelated women regardless of social consequence, but teaching them.  He was a Jewish rabbi with female disciples.  We take for granted now how significant this aspect of his ministry was, even as palpable traces of the very misogyny Jesus’s ministry rebuffed linger in religious communities today.

That Mary Magdalene – who could have been someone’s sister, wife, or mother, but clearly not someone with whom the communities the evangelists were writing to were familiar – was in fact known by those same communities resonates with me.  Many women go unnamed – most ironically the woman who Jesus claims will be remembered and is often conflated with the Magdalene (Matthew 26:13) – or simply get grouped together as “the women” in the New Testament, but all four authors mention Mary Magdalene specifically.  By the time the Gospel of John was written, the collection of women at the tomb in the Synoptic accounts was whittled down to just Mary Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles.

So I don’t want the fallen woman, and I don’t want the wife.  Those are good stories, but they demote her, or what she could have been. I want the woman who defied all societal expectation and religious impediment by becoming an apostle and bearing her own name while doing it.  She is a potent symbol to me in these times where she can be celebrated for her special role in the evangelization of the Church’s infant days and extoled as a model for women who are still denied equality at a liturgical level.  We can claim that Mary Magdalene was just as important as the twelve apostles without being one of them, just as women today are told that we are full and vital members of the Church body that won’t admit us into the priesthood or diaconate.  In this context, this motion to recognize the importance of Mary Magdalene feels earned but hollow.  For women, 2,000 years after the fact, the Church is still a place where the loyal Mary Magdalene is told she cannot touch her risen rabboni but the doubting Thomas is invited to touch his wounds.

#mary magdalene #female saints #saints #catholic church #vatican #female ordination #women priests #pope francis #noli me tangere #Savoldo

[degasandaboxofdoughnuts]

I’ve seen Venus be birthed and the Odalisque tease Seen the Penitent Magdalene nude on her knees Seen Daphne turn tree in her sun-goddamned flight Seen Persephone and the Sabine woman fight Seen Joan in her armor and maiden clothes plain Seen pale-bosomed Liberty striking at chains And virgins shun soldiers for love of Messiah With their small breasts exposed and their bodies on fire Cleopatra with asp, or naked for Caesar Andromeda chained so that Cetus could eat her Renaissance matrons with garlands of floral A ladylike snake in a Vatican mural A goddess of stone for fertility wishes And Salome fittingly dancing on dishes Infantas with maids and a hag’s ugly face Patience and Chastity, Prudence and Grace The Virgin as mother or pious young girl The famous one’s smile, and that one with the pearl Royals and peasants and plenty of whores – And whom, may I ask, were they all painted for?

(via charlesandellenmulaney)

[degasandaboxofdoughnuts]

You don’t fall in love in this room.

 What are you trying to exorcise, you strange, exhausting girl?  Every single object that surrounds you has a plastic casing of significance, gathers the dust of stories only you know, leaves water rings as if eagerly embedding permanence on your behalf.  Every object has its rightful, certain place, like you are forever on the brink of conducting a séance.  But Jesus, girl, what are you begging to enter into the space?  What do you need to harness so desperately into this room? What are you trying so hard to breathe in?  What is it that you can’t push out?

 You think I can’t see it? You address the unflinching demon in your pillow, howling in that way you and the flattened thing have agreed is your most effective way of communicating.  You beg time to rush forward and deposit you elsewhere, out of the path of the constantly falling rocks you have shaken from their place with your ridiculous pain.  It can’t be like this, I can’t keep doing this, a whole decade of this will paralyze me.  You cannot be reasoned with.  You cannot loosen the stiffness in your neck so that you might turn your head and see the sun coming up.  Of course the fucking sun comes up.  Of course it does, but that’s the point, it’s just tomorrow, and I want ten years from now, holy God-chunk of a choking hazard, just a day when I’m not in this room.

 As you sink uncaringly into the bed you hear it like a fucking car horn, a cacophony of voices – yours is probably in there somewhere – doing its best imitation of the Furies, torturing you from out of scratching reach, branding you in reminder that that longed-for day will not be better.  What makes you dream that you will be freer when you are older?  What do you think happens in another room?  What silly things will you scatter around yourself then like a foolish pharaoh buried with his favorite toys in the tomb? The world gets crueler to the aging, and your longing is so long.  How you will beg for the freedom to bay into a pillow that is only tasked with holding up your heavy head.

 Stop looking around at the cracks in the walls like you’re facing people you’ve disappointed.  You never promised them anything.  Your youthful metabolism and unoccupied womb and drug-dealer relationship with sleep signed the contract for you when you were preoccupied letting the person out of the cage.  Don’t turn over and beseech the shithead enabler in your pillow.  And don’t look up at the ceiling – you know what’s one floor up.

 Ignore the aura pulsing out of that plastic bin.  Stop imagining the way the warped and dust-coated floor might complement the constant stiffness in your neck.  It won’t feel like sliding into place.

 There is a deep breath in there, I know it.  Just when you think you’ve got a real slacker manning the operation in your chest, it will do the thing and you will feel the expansion.  You needlessly complicated girl, just accept the relief and shut your eyes.  No, your mind never powers down, just tires itself out.  Stay away from the quicksand in the darkness, if you can.

 So here I am laying on the car horn.  Jesus, girl, I know you know this normal and acceptable thing to be true: You don’t fall in love in this room.  But I accept your refusal to assign other meanings to the works hanging on the walls from all your many Periods.  Do the healthy thing and flick off that one whirring cog in your brain that says MAKE IT FIT INTO THE NARRATIVE.  Don’t bother.  It’s not linear.  You don’t fall in love with yourself here either.  The walls aren’t witnesses.  The objects are, and you will carry them to the next room, and they will gladly help you remember – they just won’t help you edit.

#I don't know what this is #But I'm posting it even though I don't like it as an exercise

[degasandaboxofdoughnuts]

Originally written in 2014

Why Modern New Yorkers (and Everyone Else) Need "You've Got Mail"

By: Taylor Catalana

On a late weeknight, I snuggled up in my bed and put a well-worn DVD in my laptop’s drive.  The romantic tour-de-force that is the late Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail began, this viewing comfortingly starting the same way my countless past viewings have – with the cackling sound of dial-up over a strange CGI map of New York City.  I proceeded to pay the film the kind of attention one normally pays to a movie seen innumerable times, quoting whole dialogues without having to look at the screen, the actors’ expressions seared into memory.  Myriad household tasks have been completed to the sweet soundtrack of You’ve Got Mail.  But I have also viewed it thoroughly, with rapt attention, many, many times.  It is one of those magical movies about romance and forgiveness and a city being a third party in a relationship, and I know just as many men who genuinely like it as I do women.

With technology moving at warp speed these days, I have noticed more and more beloved movies slipping into an abyss of plot implausibility.  Not because of physical impossibilities or run-of-the-mill plot holes created by bad writing, mind you, but because whole plots of beloved films of yore are driven by something no longer in use or problems easily solved nowadays.  You’ve Got Mail is one of those movies.

Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) and Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) begin the film as two strangers both in flaccid relationships who chat with each other online (more specifically, over AOL e-mails).  We catch up with them well into their nameless, faceless relationship; as Kathleen says to Joe over e-mail, in a convenient bout of exposition, “I like to start my notes to you as if we’re already in the middle of a conversation. I pretend that we’re the oldest and dearest friends – as opposed to what we actually are, people who don’t know each other’s names and met in a chat room where we both claimed we’d never been before.”  They live and work in the same Manhattan neighborhood and are both in the book business – Kathleen inherited her mother’s children’s bookstore, and Joe, along with his father and grandfather, operates a Barnes & Noble-esque chain of bookstores.  They quarrel in real life as his business threatens hers, while they fall further and further in love on the computer, with him offering her business advice as well as the courage to speak her mind to her adversaries, unbeknownst to both of them that she is wielding his own training against him.  Eventually, he finds out that she is his online love and, after a shaky period in which all seems lost, he finds the resolve to make her fall in love with him in real life.  Which, of course, she does, beside a garden at 91st Street in Riverside Park, while “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” plays and the words THE END flash across a perfectly blue sky.

This film was the third partnership of Hanks and Ryan, following 1992’s Sleepless in Seattle (also an Ephron film) and the lesser-known 1990 flick Joe Versus the Volcano.  Sleepless, I would argue, is the sappier of the two later rom-coms, entertaining of course, and satisfying in the way that a late-night microwave pizza can be – a little cheap and cheesy, but also savory and, when the time is right, completely called for.  Sleepless combines the dated meet-cute methods of the early 90’s (she hears him over talk radio, women write him letters, she hires a P.I. and then stalks him – adorable) and a hefty chunk of fate the viewer must swallow down to believe that two strangers from across the country are supposed to be together so serendipitously.  Ryan is neurotic in a cute enough way to pull off the role, Bill Pullman, as her poor abandoned fiancé, is just vanilla and pathetic enough to actively root against, and Hanks does what he does best, being completely appealing in his down-to-earth, guy-next-door,  widowed-father, cute-but-not-classically-handsome way.

You’ve Got Mail has moments that imply fatefulness, but in a far subtler way than its predecessor.  In the opening sequence, set to the oh-so-appropriate late-90’s soundtrack of “Dreams” by the Cranberries (full disclosure: when I listen to this song while walking around Manhattan, I secretly hope my Joe Fox is somewhere nearby), the two main characters constantly miss each other, one walking out of Starbucks while the other is walking in, being on different sides of the same street, etc.  There is absolutely nothing to suggest these two aren’t meant to be, but we’re spared Sleepless’s mother-daughter speeches about magic and the phrase “MFEO: Made For Each Other.”

The way that Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox meet and fall for each other speaks to something relatable for the modern city-dweller, and yet harkens back to a pure time long past.  First of all, we no longer have to span the country to find our true loves, as we did way back in 1992; turns out, now, much more comfortingly, they are just around the block.  The two main characters meet online, in a chat room, back when that was a newer forum for socializing.  Sure, back then some people used chat rooms to lure underage teens, but this movie points out what essentially started our need for online connection.  It exhibits the genesis of what has become the now far less stigmatized, often more practical, far more commonplace world of online dating.  They were not talking to hook up, not looking for a serious relationship (they already had significant others), and they were not isolated from an interesting community of people from which to seek friendship – they did it because they wanted to talk to somebody.  And this is a too-true need that often gets buried under the current line between the real world and the Internet, especially in terms of romantic relationships.  In 1998, Ephron, through these characters, was exploring loneliness, companionship, and desire through a brand-new medium, telling a tale as old time over the horrid sound of dial-up (the movie is actually a semi-remake of an old film called The Shop Around the Corner, in which the characters handwrite letters).  What makes it great is that something like two strangers falling in love anonymously doesn’t seem like a fateful turn of a fairytale anymore, but a reality made plausible through modern technology, because sixteen years later, the proof is in the pudding: this is how people who end up marrying meet, through a portal without which they might have never known each other (or, in this movie’s case, would have known but hated each other).  There is now an entire industry – an entire online world – devoted to introducing strangers to each other.  This is fate’s modern, more convenient incarnation.

Regarding the film, Ephron remarked that she believed that the romantic leap of faith the audience had to make was that two people could fall in love just through their writing.  In the Internet age, I find this a less difficult pill to swallow.  Not only do I often observe people on Tumblr declare their undying love to total strangers who write brilliant text posts or make awesome gifsets (Tumblr users often become friends IRL), but I can say from experience that, when looking at a potential… whatever’s dating profile or Facebook, their writing is what really comes across of their personality, what pulls me in or repels me when I cannot actually physical interact with them (bottom line: please, grown men with agency over your online personas, do not use “lol” as a mark of punctuation).  So yes, Madame Ephron’s Ghost, I would say that it is possible to fall in love, or at least be attracted to someone, over the internet, just based on silly messages – the 21st century has Catfish as proof.

Today, even if we were totally honest online and were just seeking out someone to talk to so as to break up the jaded monotony of everyday life, we would have the other person’s whole life at our fingertips with a simple search; at the very least, in most cases, we’d see a grainy picture.  This, along with the fact that the characters are communicating over AOL e-mail (and Instant Messenger one time), dates the film significantly and shoves it down into the darkness of plot-problem-instantly-solved.

Another facet that makes watching You’ve Got Mail so enjoyable in 2014 is the view we glimpse of New York City – specifically the Upper West Side – and the lives of its inhabitants back at the end of the millennium.  Though it’s not a looming shadow over the viewing experience, one knows that September 11th hasn’t happened yet in the microcosm one is watching.  Romantic movies set in NYC and other major cities still fall into that same dominion that they always did of Love Being The Only Important Thing; terrorism, widespread paranoia, and heightened national security don’t ruffle that (best example: the little kid bypassing all Heathrow security, without consequence, in Love Actually).  But regardless, I watch Hanks and Ryan spar in and bond over a city that has yet to experience its worst crisis, and that immediately gives the impression that this, what you are watching, is past, calm before a storm.  You kind of envy those New Yorkers, who haven’t yet been shaken so irreparably.

The first time I viewed the film, I was years away from living in New York City.  In the DVD commentary, Ephron points out that one of her main goals was humanizing the forbidding, overwhelming Big Apple (remember, this was just post-Giuliani clean-up, and New York was just starting to be known as a “nice city”; the same year that You’ve Got Mail came out, Sex and the City debuted and glamorized the place for all those off of the island of Manhattan).  She wanted to depict a true neighborhood, and at the time, I thought she was a great writer and director for pulling off such a trick (she couldn’t fool me!  I had seen Times Square and I knew New York was a scary, shiny shithole).  Little did I know that she was just highlighting the true nature of the Upper West Side, how it so often feels like an oasis in the midst of a restless desert – look, families!  A park!  TWO parks!  Quietness!  New Jersey, way over there on the other side of the river!  The UWS is still like this, but much like its peek into the future of online dating, You’ve Got Mail probes what was then a sleeping baby monster: the sweeping capitalism of chain stores slowly taking over a place as compact and diverse as NYC.

The IRL part of the plot deals extensively with the existential struggle of both the business owner and consumer regarding Mom-and-Pop Shop vs. The Big Bad Chain Store.  In the end, before all the romance sweetens the journey, we watch Ryan fail.  She is a purer character than Hanks in terms of the quality of her business and her genuine belief in what she is doing, but she doesn’t win.  She rallies, she fights valiantly, and then she just closes the store her mother ran and left to her.  Her loyal customers rush to aid her, but in the end, everything about a store like Borders – ahem, I mean, Fox Books – is, admittedly or not, more convenient and less expensive than a spot like the Shop Around the Corner (even one of her employees deflects, off-screen, to work at Fox Books).  Over the past sixteen years we have watched this war play out, from seeing chains of the same store spread out over a small number of blocks, to hipsters fighting back with shops and eateries out in the now-civilized wilds of Brooklyn and Queens, to even now when, most potently in this particular context, stores exactly like Fox Books are shutting down because of the rise of the Internet and the e-book (oh, there’s something so delicious about how this movie’s plotlines all ended up tangled in a modern heap).  This is something that has plagued (or blessed, depending on how you look at it, or feel that day) the whole world, but in New York it’s a near-political matter.  If you haven’t, as a young inhabitant, had your love of the city momentarily squashed by someone older telling you that New York used to be way grittier and dirtier and better – to borrow an oft-used, oft-annoying phrase – you’re not a real New Yorker.

The funniest part in all of this is how Starbucks is treated in film.  Chain bookstores are raging beasts crushing the hardworking masses beneath them, but freakin’ Starbucks is the delightful neighborhood coffee shop where, as Hanks points out in an oh-so-delightful e-mail, people, through their necessarily complicated orders, receive “an absolutely defining sense of self.”  (I’m ignoring, in this observation, how product placement features heavily in the film, as it did in many films of the era; I naively didn’t pick up on that for most of my viewing life of the movie, and I think it speaks to a completely different argument that is more about movies as vehicles themselves and not the nuances of their plots.  One can, however, use the movie to make similar observations about the journey of product placement from the 90’s till now.)

There is no question as to what You’ve Got Mail is: it is that dreaded genre, that disfigured, abused cinematic whore, the Romantic Comedy.  But it is not one of the rom-coms I watch quietly, away from judgmental eyes, taking it into me like a drug to satisfy a perverted craving for blissful ignorance and happy endings and a guy who just says the right thing without having to be asked, my god.  No, I think that this is a genuinely good movie, for many reasons other than the ones stated above.  And I have always loved it, but now, as a New Yorker in 2014, I love it for completely new and pertinent reasons.  The city of eight million people has a strange tendency to be achingly lonely.  People here and in other modern metropolises like online connections as much, if perhaps not more so, than dwellers of less populated areas because it actually is more difficult to meet anyone here, let alone a great, genuine person.  The crushing volume of people presents an illusion of possibility more often than it actual delivers.  Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly knew that.  He was dating one of those hateful city she-shrews, all career and yelling and no empathy, and she was saddled to a New York version of Sleepless in Seattle’s Pullman character, less doormat and more quasi-intellectual, pre-hipster, self-involved walking piece of total exhaustion that every city woman finds herself with at one point or another (he instantly, entertainingly dates the movie by delivering its opening line, bemoaning technology through an anecdote about workers who had to have Solitaire removed from their computers because they weren’t getting work done. HA).  When I watch Joe and Kathleen, I fall in love with New York City all over again because of the way it seamlessly fosters their tension, romantic and combative both.  Starting off the film with a great, simple line like, “Don’t you love New York in the fall?” and nearly ending it with, “It’d be a shame to miss New York in the spring,” makes this inhabitant pause and smile to herself, because even when you don’t have someone to love, you at least have your tempestuous, rewarding, depleting, intoxicating relationship with your city, and the hope that maybe that someone is just around the corner.

[degasandaboxofdoughnuts]

Gethsemane

I do not want them for my disciples, Abba.

           Pressing, these hours that remain, with cold, pricking fingers extending a cloak of heaviness to me, knowing I must take it.  I feel the weight of it on my shoulders, the weight that burns torturously slowly.  Soon I will be covered, enshrouded, and my place in time will no longer matter.  The hours will have done their duty with me.  Like the soldiers who will soon inflict their torments, they will take their time, but then they will march on and swallow whole another.  Tonight, under their pressure, I am no different from any other being born of woman.

           If I fall asleep, Abba, my hair will be cut off and my strength will leave me.  If I look to those I love now, I will have to sacrifice them for love of you.  If I run, you will find me, even if I draw my terrified breaths inside the belly of a fish. You are demanding, Abba, and so relentless, the thing that all men fear, yet also making yourself known in that fear when it springs forth.  Any fire we start, there you are.  All of our passions, our desires, our every color filling our delicate lattice of veins – you are there, within us, within them, creating opposition and flowering harmony.  You are in our storms that you alone can calm.  You demand much, expect much.  You demand from me my last Passover.

           Could I just smear blood across my lintel and close my eyes in wait, knowing – but not really knowing – that the Angel will pass over me, I would.  Take any blood, call it whatever you wish, but just don’t make it mine. Why was the lamb good enough for Moshe, whose tongue you gave even more power than you did his staff, but not for me? The Jews call on Moshe.  They believe (if sometimes only in word alone) that he was doing your most just bidding.  He freed your people and told them how to ensure the sparing of their lives when your judgment descended upon Egypt’s fertile land.  The lambs without blight were good enough.  But I have my blights, Abba… only you do not understand them. My yearnings, especially for what is impossible for me, are not something you must know, Abba, or else you would not ask this of me.

           But is that not why you sent me?  To bridge your breath and all that it animates?  To be the chasm filled with all that is yours and all that is theirs and make it all one again?

           The feud is constant, and this night it reaches its climax.  My everlasting wars with my fallible; my life combats my death.  The hours continue their march and toll their bells of imminence, and what can I do but wait?

           I can beg you, my good and loving Abba, for another way.

           I can hear you now, whispering to me that my will is my own, that even the Son of Man is not shackled as nature is to your explicit command.  The wind rustles the nearby trees, like a caress that intends gentleness but wounds – wounds so thoroughly – and in the wind I hear your still, small voice.  You tell me that the choice is mine, that all I have to do is get off of my knees, walk through the garden gates, and never speak a defiant word again, but Abba, don’t you know the impossibility of this temptation?  I am the Word, the first and last.  I could never live as anyone other than the one they all hunt this night. So do not whisper with love in your silent voice that the choice is mine, because to hear you, the Word beyond all words, fill my body with such strange, unknowable truth such as this, it begins my crucifixion.  It betrays me as Isaak was betrayed, as Avraham was betrayed.  You do not understand, o font of truth and being, what it is to ache for you.  How it is the first and the last.  How it is the root of all sacrifice, and thus all love.  How we are restless until we rest in you.

           I have no choice. Even if I walked away and left all your sheep scattered…

           Oh.  Oh, Abba.  The sheep. The sheep.  Even if I were the proper shepherd to call them all back to you, I would not want them as my flock.

           I do not want them for my disciples.

           You have given me much over the years, and when I speak what you give me, I mean to bathe the world in light as you did on that first day.  I let it all go, all these seeds, willing them of my own love and joy to flower and bear magnificent fruit.  But so often the ground is rocky, unsuitable; so often the terrain yields nothing, the way hard in their hearts and minds.  I give unceasingly, until there is little man left to me, but they only understand what hits their ears easiest.  I am given hope by their furrowed brows, and all I wish to do is put my hand to their eyes and take down their barricades.  Why, Abba, oh why the barricades?  Why the choice, if the way is so treacherous to them?

           Only once in a great and terrible while does my own clarity come back to me in their eyes. Only seemingly rarely, among so many who want and need me desperately, do I witness the kindling of the grasp inside their minds.  And it consumes, Abba, that joy at our touch, for that moment, that one brief, beautiful moment when our angels do not wrestle but embrace in reconciliation. But even then, Abba, I am not guaranteed that what has been sparked will remain as I left it to them.  I am guaranteed nothing of their seeing that spark on its way to a true fire, least of all their fealty to it.  To me.  To us. I give them the Word, but even when they hear, they can exercise this will with which you say you gifted even me. I fear so greatly for the abandonment of the Word to all these fractured vessels surrounding me.  Perhaps it is the fear you have known since you fashioned our form from the complacent dust.  But Abba, know that it is also very human, to fear like this.  To want what is best and good and still leave it to destruction because you have been told – because you know – that it is right.

           My sweat hurts as it never has before.  Flames lick at my scalp and my spine, and in their deaths they turn cold, are buried within my unwelcoming body.  My every hollow is haunted by my own fears coming to claim me.  My doubts ravage as they haven’t in years.  My regrets flood and leave so little left to be salvaged. My love for all these poor creatures has been sacked and given to the fire, the charred remains sowed with salt. Even those this broken heart you gave me has loved best of all, those who have been friends and now sleep nearby, careless – even those I want to reject.  So much is coming, my Abba, so much.

           Simon, my Cephas. He is my warrior always.  He has proven much to me, and my whole soul is tender towards him.  His love is fierce and his eyes are kind.  My defender.  The rock upon which I lay down all my burdens and ask that he help me carry them, even if he does not understand what causes them and why they must be borne.  But I have seen the one who tempts in his face and have heard his dark promises in his voice.  Get behind me, I tell him.  Come out of this man.  Cephas, Cephas… oh, if I could only call you Simon again, bid you to follow so that you might fish for men.  If only those men were worthy.  If only the rock you are to me would not shake the entire earth.  If only where you sleep now would remain of grass and the silver of fallen olive leaves, not of gold, not of blood.

           Abba, my brother Cephas, I do not want others like him.  I want no one who bears his name.  Take his crown and throw it to the swine, drive them off the cliff.  Do this for your only son.  They will build an empire from his bones and then forget that I have touched them.  They will do the unspeakable in my name, and they will do it with the power of my love for him.  I would not… I could never deny my love for him, even as he might for me this coming dawn, but I would, Abba, I would deny it before your starry crown if it meant that those men would not be able to bring hell to the surface because of the words I have given Cephas.  Bid the throat of the simple cock to crow; I will deny, deny, deny.  I will take that most glorious beam of light from his eyes – oh, his eyes, mercifully shut now – and break all of my promises.  I will douse, if only so the fire does not consume.

           Cephas tries but fails, forgets when he should remember, rages when he should submit to calm.  He is all of them, Abba, and I do not want them. Do not give me another one who loves me, another whom I love as I do him.  Do not give me another Cephas.

           The hours have set their old hounds on me.  It is as if blood drips down my agonized face and they know the scent of it.  They come now, they let me know.  Soon, beloved son, soon we will take you.  This is your last night.  Embrace the darkness, inhale its cold, deep escape.  This is it.  This is the way.

           How many nights have I had like this one, Abba?  Since I was a boy, when I should have been sleeping, I escaped the meager clutches of my house and home and searched the hills of Nazareth, looking for you. Everyone else slept.  No one else had storms behind their eyes.  No one else looked toward the horizon as if they heard the trumpet sound.  No one, Abba. But I, I was up at night, braving the Galilean midnight, though I had much to do as soon as the sun rose.  I was full of storms, and to me, the horizon was on fire, yet no one else seemed to notice.  I used to listen to the raggedy zealots that came through looking for soldiers for the Lord; for an ignorant time, I imagined that they might be my brothers, but as soon as they spoke I knew that either they or I was blind. What they thought was coming was not what my whole body anticipated.  They wanted to fight to wrestle our country back from the heathens’ bloody grip, and Abba, to be truthful, as you have taught me to be, I wish that that had been my way.  At least then, had I been put up on a cross, I would have died a nameless rebel, one of thousands with unachievable dreams.  No one would have remembered my crucifix.

           I am no zealot, and it drains me.  I have actually tamed a zealot, and now he looks at me with dreamy embers in his eyes, calling me his way and truth and life.  I have taken simple men and hated men, family men and those who thought themselves alone in the world, and I have made them all brothers.  I told them what I knew.  I said, look, over there, just over that hill that seems to be sleeping, do you see it?  Do you see that light that is fighting to take us under its wing and shield us from the storm?  Do you see how all of nature gives way so that the path might be ready?  And they all nodded, yes, yes Rabboni, we see, we understand, we will be at your side when it all happens.  But they didn’t see.  They don’t understand.  They try, but it is not good enough, the effort wasted, the time all for naught. At least the zealots thrust their curved swords into bodies.  At least the priests who hate me have the Temple to fortify them.  I have this desolate garden.  I have people whom I have healed of their afflictions.  But who heals me, Abba?  I have no one.  The hours are approaching, my solemn, expert handlers, leading me to the Place of the Skull, where they will take full charge of me once I have been handed over. Once you have handed me over.

           My friends sleep, their stomachs full of my sacrifice.  I have shared with them, but they do not share with me, not at this hour of the unholy.  As always, they have submitted to their exhaustion while I am kept awake, knowing too much.  Should I pray for them, Abba?  Should I pray that they understand when I am no longer here to keep the watch for them? They sleep, and I pray, and this is the way.

           I might have loved this garden had the hour not been nigh.  Even in the dark I see she is beautiful, a remnant of Eden spread out before my wearied sight.  Have you left it here for me, all this time, preserving it for me on this night, my last before the bloodletting?  Sin could not take this place.  That is my overindulgent dream now, a respite from my all-consuming ache.

The olive trees used to give me so much peace. I cursed the fig tree, judging it, withering it for all time, but the olive tree anointed me.  Gave me shade.  The fig tree is like my brother, who fights the others to sit at my right hand when I am no longer divided but whole.  The fig tree is cursed.  But the olive tree is like my sister, who cries for my coming descent, who perfumes my ravaged body, who will stand tall when the others are cut down or housing hanging bodies.  When I look out from my own broken bough, I will see a helpless grove of olive trees before me, my sisters, their glittering leaves the tears they shed for me. Their branches, extending peace to me, but I will not be able to reach for it, not with the nails that hold me in place to my brutal, eternal kingship.

           The wind is bitter; dawn must be approaching.  She must be waking beyond all sight from the bed you have made for her in the east. Does she know she takes me today, or do I look the same to her as any other man?  Perhaps it is that way, for she will not stall in her coming.  The wind blows, and I feel your hand in it, your breath that has filled me with life only to send me to death.

           Were the tree I lean against Miryam, the beloved Magdalen, she would know the words to say to stop my shaking.  Were it really my sister, she would pray on my behalf so that I might sleep.  My sister… must I undergo the test, drink from this fatal cup, before I see you fully again, and not even then be able to touch you?

           Abba, please, consider… please see to it another way…

           From beyond there comes a gloom I know.  My brother, is that you, sent from the one who tempts to deepen my agony tonight? Come, join in my dance.  Taste in my sorrow.  Our combined voices will create a dirge for the ages.  Come, Thomas, come out from where you hide so that we might doubt together.

I see him in the shadows that drift among the trees.  Since the beginning he has been practical, full of reason, open to me because he desires to know how I know.  In Thomas there is no pretense.  Because of this I have held for him much admiration, for he is open, as available for assessment as he strives for it in all things.  Thomas is the filter through which my ministry has passed; his hands have held more than their share.  And now all of which he is capable circles me slowly, stalking in its solemn, unobtrusive kind of way.  He is the motions.  Around me always, circling, never reaching out to touch what hurts.

           It is in man’s nature to doubt, but woe for the thousands upon thousands of sons and daughters of Thomas that will fill the halls they build for me.  Doubt in the face of no miracle; doubt under the miracle’s recognizable sheen.  Reason’s ugly coupling with emotion’s unforgiving headiness, spiraling out into urgency, sweeping over the ruins, over this garden.  In his moment Thomas will be as I am now, but there is nothing for me to reach for as an answer.  The dawn, with its wounds that bleed sure, steady breakage across an undisturbed sky?  Is that my consolation?  The coming day, without the slightest postponement?  Is that my reassurance?  The day that comes on the heels of the persistent hounds is my last, my most difficult, my end, my moment of peace in the torrent.

           Abba, leave me no peace if that be of this design I hastily stitch, but do not fill this world with those you have made in the same manner that you have made Thomas.  They will see past all understanding in trying so earnestly to do just that.  They will make quarrels among their brothers.  They will be among the first to forget my face though it stares at them through the shattered glass of the ages.  To doubt in the face of that which can only be known with fullness stutters the spinning of your aching world.  The hesitation is what brings forth the tidal waves.  My own earthquakes, Abba?  What cuts through my bedrock are my most pristine streaks of doubt, fanning out into rollicking waves of miscommunication that devastate. They will all model themselves after me, and my example a hundredfold will send tremors where only stillness is wanted.  Not peace, but a sword.  Not remembered, but forsaken.

           Where Cephas is my fierce love, Thomas is my body full of unanswered questions.  Take my body, then, that the questions are silenced and asked no more.

           No more, my God, no more.

           The children, they sleep. They have given up their homes and families for me.  Good men, in their moments of summer, men I have loved above all others, though you sent me for all of them.  And good women, too, who will walk my road with me once the sentence has been passed.  I’d always liked to imagine that we’d freed each other, they relieving my burdens and awarding me love and friendship – the simplest pleasure, the true fruit of the tree – and I bringing them out of their houses and into the sun.  We all walked along free together, invincible for what felt like one hour, and now it seems that an eon of darkness comes for us. I tried… I tried to tell them, tried to use even our last breaking of bread together as an opportunity for them to understand that the waving of the palms, the adulating crowds, the swelling belief that seemed to overcome poor Jerusalem… that all of it is about to be eclipsed.

           Call off the angels, Lord.  Send them elsewhere.  Yes, this night will be difficult, a burden too great for any man, and tomorrow will be what they will call the last of the great blood sacrifices.  And it will be my blood wetting the earth, darkening Adam’s ashes, daubing his skull.  But it is not tomorrow that we all need fear.  No, tomorrow will be wept over for millennia to come.  They will remember how I died and use it like an impossibly heavy stone tablet to break bones and crush each other into dust.  What will I be then?  Only the merciful wind that comes in too late, wiping them off the face of the earth with the little dignity I can offer them.

           I will not be the last of the great blood sacrifices – I will be the first.

           Take this cup, Abba. Do not let me drink!  Drain it in the sea, I beg of you!  Have I ever denied you anything?  Have I ever ignored your call?  You say gather the flock and I gather them.  You say command the dead to rise and I put my own grief aside to scream against the howling winds of a nightmare, Lazarus, you sorry son of Adam, come out!  You say forgo the love of your mother and go without complaint into the lions’ den, and Almighty God, I go!  You tell me to become the new manna and I will, feeding them though they will bow down nightly to the golden calf.  You tell me to shoulder my cross and die, and I will, becoming the new golden calf of the coming ages, one among many they will fashion to ease the awfulness of being human.

           I am the most loyal and faithful son.  Obedient until death, even death on a cross.  You call out to me from your elusive precipice and I say hinneni, Abba, here I am, ready, right now.  And I have asked you to give sight to the blind and strengthen the legs of the lame and place babes in the arms of the barren – never saying why, Abba, why were all of those gifts not theirs to possess in the first place?  Because of one woman in one garden?  One woman who just wanted to know you better? – I asked on behalf of these innocent, ignorant children.  And now I ask you, lying prostate before your power and grace, to spare them their wicked fate.  Abba, let this cup pass from my lips, for it is what you will, not I.

           I see it all clearer the more I cry these desperate, pleading tears.  If I die as you wish – what you will, not I – they will always be broken.  This land will never know peace.  Great kings and warlords have always attempted possession of Canaan; if I say nothing to Caiaphas, and Herod, and Pilate, kings and warlords and disillusioned desert fools will do the same until the end of time.  If I say nothing, Lord, and accept this fate like a suffering servant, the milk will sour and the honey congeal.

           If I let them scourge me, Lord, they will wear my banner and slaughter in my name.  If I take my lashes, never speaking my own innocence, the world will be branded forever with In hoc signo vinces.  Conquer, kill, rape, destroy – do it all for the God who has died for you.  Decimate the innocent with your crosses held high, sing your hymns and finger your threaded beads while you drown them in baptismal waters.  Kill your own brothers, forsake your own fathers, because you warring little devils believe that I condone one of your above the other, love one of your offerings more than the other.  Cains and Abels to the end of days!  Sons of Thunder, all of you!  Those elders who hate me and condemn me now will one day wear my robes.  They will point to your wailing Chosen and say all Twelve Tribes held me down and nailed me to the wood.  The soldiers who break open my flesh will do the same to those I would bring instantly into my company, and they will do it while saying the very prayers that I have given my most destitute.

           If I do not beg for my life before the prefect, they will place blame on each other beyond any measure of time.  They will avenge their God though their God has commanded you, all of you, from all ends of the earth, love one another.  If I can love you, you wicked, broken beings, then you should love one another.  But they will ignore the decree of their God. They will instead take the written words before them, raise them on the pedestal, and bow down as they swear their oath.

           They will jump into the nets I cast, and though it would be appear my boat grows ever bigger, it sinks with each new fish.  They will clamor to be near me.  These unfit fish that spurn the replenishment of my grace but leap out of the water and into the burning sun for my power.  They will cling like barnacles to my brothers and say to all the others, look, we are descended from him directly, we know his will.  And then they will build these magnificent halls with more gold than any man needs.  You have one Temple, Lord?  Well they will give me seventy times seven for each of your Temple’s doomed columns. I wanted to rebuild the Temple, but if it means that to do so one thousand new ones will go up in its place, I will not.  Let it all fall into rubble with me, Abba.  They’re not ready; they don’t understand.

           You remember how Yohanan used to speak at the river’s bend, Abba?  Oh, it was your most beautiful voice.  The strength of all four winds and the power of all four rivers; the heat of the sun and the pull of the moon; the depth of the sea and the vastness of the desert – all in Yohanan’s voice.  Not even I, the Word, could have anticipated the glory of you to be found in him when I saw him that day.  Prepare the way of the Lord, he would cry, but when he looked at me, I looked right back him and saw you.  Paradise. And when he pulled me free and new from the water I promised him that I would make of him a prophet, and I did so because of the tear of joy and wonder and exultation in his wild eye.  But those eyes have been left to the crows outside of Machaerus.  And when they split his head from his neck, that voice came screaming out and fled in ten thousand different directions.  Many men, Abba, many men will believe they have caught in it their throats and speak as if they know me and see me coming.

           They stand high and they point and cast out fire from their hands.  I can see them now, Abba, and I am frightened to my soul of what they say with such hate in their eyes.  They fling rocks and condemn innocent hearts like a scorch that destroys the lilies of the field.  With all of this corruptible heart you have placed inside of me, I have loved so ardently so many women and men, and when their likeminded and same-bodied children come before those creatures of fire, they will be cast down.  And with their casting my name will ring out, as if it is I who rejects them.  Oh, how freely they will all use my name, the one the angel whispered to my mother, the one she whispers against my tired brow when I feel as though I have nothing left to give.

           My mother… they will crown my mother.  Blessed among women.  My mother will be their hero, a mother to all of them, and my God, that would be good, a balm to any orphaned world, but my God, if I would not have to do this, I will spare her the crown!  Let her be as all other Nazareth widows are, perishable, an extinguished flame after death. My God, my mother’s grief will echo throughout the earth, but it would not have to if you relieved me of this task.

           The hours breathe upon my neck, but my God, I am not finished.  Listen… listen while there is still breath in me, while my lungs have not yet been pierced… I beg of you, Abba, call off this maddening hunt.  For my every lash there will be countless offenses committed because I bore them.  In this darkness, under the light of my very last moon, I see all the ways they will die because I die, and Abba, I am man and God and I cannot bear that it will all come from me.  This world is a womb full of warring nations, and were it my will that decides all things I would not birth them and their troubles.  But you do not change your direction or choose another way.  You whisper My son, my son, my only begotten son, but my sorrow is the sin of their inheritance, and you will not quell the sin’s spread.  Under my cross they will wander, forty years our forever, drowned in the sea in their gleaming chariots as they try to chase after me.

           Cephas, the siphon of all the fleeting power I ever had –

           Thomas, the hole of demand that will never be filled by enough proof –

           The zealot, and the just, and the beloved disciple, who have carried out every sentence with a conviction that I do not even feel is mine –

           Miyram, sweet Miryam, who will not even recognize me though her desire is so strong, who will try to cling to such a transient thing as a prophecy and a memory –

           Yehuda… Yehuda, their prince, their crowning fault, the resting place of their every false kiss, the brother they damn even though he wears all their faces –

           Take them all. Take all of my love and lead it to the mountaintop for its akedah. What you will, not I.  You call me, Lord, and I go, and maybe, unlike as it was for my father Avraham, my desire to reject you will be remembered. Like my body and blood, all for the consumption, promised to be remembered forever.  I love them all as you have so graciously let me – they as much a blessing to me as I will ever be to them – and you say sacrifice them.  If I die tomorrow, I bind them.  I sacrifice them all.  But unlike Avraham’s trial, no beast of burden shall be offered instead. No angel shall stay the murderous hand. It will all come to pass.  There is no test now, Abba.  There is submission, and then it is finished.

           The hours are at the gate, gray-faced, and they carry with them the day’s first lights.  So greedy are they, grabbing up my last lights. Tainting them with my sadness.  I am overcome.  They have brought with them their man.  He will scrub the blood from my lintel.  I will not be passed over.

           None of us will, my children.  I die, and all you poor innocents of Egypt die with me.

           I stand, though I shake. And my human mind wonders, helplessly, how will they record this?  Will they even say how I wept?  Will they say I went bravely?  Should it matter to me at all?  I stand, and the world readies its neck for the blade I bear.  The cross awaits us.

           When they hate you and persecute you because of me, know that you were at my back in this garden.

- Written 2012