THE AMEN CORNER

 

Sunday, September 19, 2004

OPEN LETTER TO A CLOSED MIND

It's all about the LCD. You've run out of thought forms to do your bidding. You're at your wits' end, and your wit was somewhat limited to begin. In a desperate grasp for those very straws which build the Straw Man Of The Cross, you've nothing left to approach but the single largest tulpas in the Western World. Truly, does it matter if They existed before your impoverished need for Their healing balm? Your need materialized before your gods; perhaps if Need be your final Lord, you might meet--Master and Servant--in due, inevitable time. You're like a 12-year old who makes a deal with Santa--promising to be "good" in a letter to the North Pole. All of this in return for what may already lay beneath your tree. When you make a deal with That which cannot be seen, you'll never see it coming when It comes for you to repay the debts you've made. For your sake, I'd pray to God their isn't One.
Show me the man who comes to Calvary out of sheer love for the Father! You cannot. They come sniveling to Golgotha's planks for fear of His mighty wrath--the eternal Hell you have designed Him to provide. The Body Of Christ is a bloody golem of deepest need...a pale patchwork god-man archetype, crudely sewn and stitched together with the gangly dangling limbs of the martyr and the masochist. His leering zombie grin reflects only the face of It's tres-desperate creators--man in search of superman, to fix all that is wrong with waking life. He is a Hero with a thousand faces, and each of them a dead skin mask--cut from the still-breathing, bleeding victims of a holocaust of hope's design. These are the innocent, the children and the child-like--left for dead for the sake of eternal life, while in their Auschwitz body-pits, their lipless teeth still chatter childhood prayers. In the cloth and collar of clergy hides an SS uniform. Faith is fascism. Faith is Frankenstein...a blood-soaked scapegoat martyr-monster, alive with only rigor mortis, and the lone mortal rigors in a life of holy wish-fulfillment.
And what of this "love" that you must carry--forced upon you to reside within, like so much bacteria, or a virus of some kind? It seeks another host, and as it grows inside you, you long to share it with as many you can find. Your Love is Larvae; it squirms within the folds of tissue in your mind, a tumor-shaped coccoon, lying in wait while it lies and you wait, to transform into something that escapes you, learning like your "superman" to fly.
It is ironic that you serve a Carpenter. "Fix me...Fix this..Repair my situation...Repair my inner being!" These are the first prayers ever uttered to "the Lord." If Christ was but mere saviour, you'd be done with Him the day after salvation. You never needed or desired a messiah; rather, you wanted, prayed and longed for a Repairman...a Celestial Groundskeeper to patch your roof before it rains, or perhaps unclog your toilet, or let you in when you have lost your key.
I suppose it does not matter that your Hebrew Lord does not exist, or that the historicity of even Christ the Man, much less some hybrid God-Boy, is assumed only by those who never ask for evidence. (Your type is handy to have around during elections.) His sole lasting biography is largely just pulp-fiction, filled with ancient urban legends and pious games of Telephone. Tell me, do you truly hear the Voices? When you speak into the silence, does the silence answer back? Has It instructed you to do things? Worse yet, have you obeyed It? And will It testify during the trial? ("Greater is he that is in thee, as it is your turn to be the girl.")
Are you prepared to crucify the flesh when you can't even hang a drape? Are you ready to turn? Have you seen the light? Shouldn't you first make sure it's green? If you die daily, and daily are renewed and born again...does that mean you were born yesterday for the rest of your life? Rather than be born again, have you considered simply growing up?
Tell me if this bothers you: that good men, better than you or I, might pray either to Allah or Hindu gods, and swear they've had their faith confirmed in ways you would not ever question, had these things happened to you in the name of Jesus Christ? Does it disturb you that "God" answers prayers, or seems to, in ways less and less discriminating the further you go out?
And what of that Magic Jew, who suffered on the cross--that "X" that marked the spot, only to crawl out from the rocks to declare Itself the Rock Of Ages and the very Cornerstone to all those crossed, rocked, cornered and stoned as Stephen? Who is He, and what good is He--or better yet, How good is He? What does He truly offer, apart from Great Savings, a Great Vacation Package, and the Greatest Story Ever Sold? What does He give but oratory to oracles, an oral history spotty, sick, and spread like oral herpes sores--new orifices to stick our slicked-up fingers into? It is orthodoxy's paradox--ordained by by the mundane--extraordinary origins for original sin, the orchestration of orientations...a loving oppressor of the lesser blessed. What does our Desert Rat Magnificat provide but Life Support? He is the Living Vicar of those living vicariously. Oh, but that He could provide His darling children some sort of life!
What new thing-of-things does our King of Kings bring to the table, but a chalice of His curdled blood to drink, His veins blissfully emptied like old wineskins? He is a Menstrual Messiah, and a poor sport. He once turned water to wine for the celebrating common man; but to us, He offers bitter clots and puddles in a grail that will elude us for all time. He brings to the table, also, a pound of flesh, ground and pounded into pulpy mess likely taken from His side--a feast of haemorrhage, served up like a casserole, or John The Baptist's head. The covering atonement is deliverance delivered via covered dish--for the Covering of Blood is the covering of tracks, coven to convent, crotch to sternum, a covenant conveniently missed by all who might convene.
Verily I say...He offers a good deal of good deals, dealt only to the very good, for the greater good of us all. He has allowed for an awful lot of awful lots in life. Truly, what does He deal except ordeals? Dung, dry bones, and dry rot from the cross...Wishing wells and living hells, angels bewinged at the sound of church bells...Stainless robes, sackcloth and ashes, unanswered prayers and unfulfilled wishes...gold, myrrh, and frankincense for blood sweat and tears...loaves and fishes, stale Bread of Life to all fishers of men...Locusts and wild honey, strange flesh for a jealous god, seasoned words for the salt of the earth, a living sacrifice of praise and daily death? We are bewildered in the wilderness...alone.
He calms a raging sea merely to cross it; yet He cannot calm the rage in you and I. He walks across our paths, leaving footprints in the sand, and sandprints on our backs. Feet washed in our tears fill out the sandals that have kicked sand in our face. He makes water to whine, and rocks that cry...failing, still, to drown out the whimper of those crying in the night.
"You shall always have the poor."
"Suffer unto Me."
Are these His calling cards? Heavens rolling back, and trumps sounding forth...like a trump card and a money-shot heard 'round the world, in the twinkling of an eye...lashes gummed together in godly goo, like morning dew, glistening like manna...yes, joy comes in the morning. In fact, it came across our face.
Rain falls on the good and bad, because His arbitrary declarations, and our random, uninspired choices make one into the other before the rain even decides to fall.
All in all, and all around, everything It has to give is nothing in comparison to all that It has coming to It in the end. For the Horsemen of It's latter days gallop not toward us, but away; they shall flee like bandits and bankrobbers escaping to some hideout in the heavenlies after robbing our Last Train.
We the Hopeful, we the Faithful, we the Joyless...the Beloved, the Betrayed...We who were not mindful of our thoughtless ways...We did this to ourselves. In the beginning, we made for ourselves a Hero...who then made us into villians in the end.