Crucifixion with St. Mary Magdalen
Art by Suca Signorelli
c. 1495 - 1500
Before the sea of time you have to do the salt of tears.
The memory of Yeshua is like a diamond... dripping with blood. Diamonds are so hard; he was so soft. Still a diamond of memory in all its many facets & preciousness & pure clarity.
But bleeding...
The bleeding... it screamed across my memories for all time; it haunted my dreams... that memory...
My heart has so many pictures...
They're just memories, I tell myself.
But *you* say they are far more than just memories -- that they speak forever to the hearts of wo*men...
He is here in my mind, now, as I speak to you -- as He is here in yours, as I am here in yours.
There was an urgency about his teaching... that a time of necessary but tumultuous transition was very near. There was a sense of emergency, at times... but deep peace & compassion at others.
He had such soft eyes...
And there were the times when our very souls were merging... and the emergence therefrom was beautiful & profound beyond words.
It was in & out with him... joy & pain, bliss & frustration, serious & playful.
His haunted eyes would peer into my soul -- forseeing what was coming, with a look of forever searing upon my memory... knowing that his death was near, how He was savoring each drop of living.
This Love that we were, together, was only becoming Something More... in ways I could not, then, understand.
Looking into his future, he *knew*. That was why there was such a recurrent sense of urgency as to what he was trying to accomplish, in waking people up to what he had experienced, to what he *was* -- that they might be this, too.
"You're my angel, already," he once said to me.
It is painful to be removed from the finest passion that ever was.
It was a passion for *him,* certainly... but also a passion to *know* -- *from* him. We took each other into experiences in intimate knowing & divine mysteries in our own Oneness in the Holiness like no one else had ever experienced.
But... good ol' passion leads to loneliness.
Alone in the grottoes... wanting to die... Wondering how long this life was going to go on... not wanting to continue... realizing we were born to suffer... but, too, grateful to be bound to him in love's eternal gratitude.
All the lost moments in a life too quickly ended.
He was *murdered*!
All the things we didn't do...
All that was here to be unsung in this heart of desolation, myself upon an alternate cross... for did I not experience his own suffering, over & over & over again... seared forever into my memory...
All that never-was, which should-have-been... offered upon another cross of all that could-have-been...
How I missed His touch... how my heart yearned in the bittersweet pain of a longing passion to be swept up unto him, far away from the fields we know...
I broke my heartbeat for Him... & scattered across the years, all the shards of my heart, the songs my brokeness would sing for him, ever- changing.
Totally unable to forget... each breath of his bleeding death... utterly horrified... "He is being murdered! He is being murdered! -- before my eyes... and there's nothing I can do about it." He looked upon the thorns in his fingers, broken from the crown they mocked him with... and nodded... & then his eyes looked into mine...
I was a rich woman... I didn't know what was coming... I watched him *die*. See me there: I was there all the time... It was so intense. I asked his mother a stupid question: "What are we supposed to do now?" But we stayed there doing nothing. What *could* I do? The soldiers would only scourge me, as they had scourged him. So uncertain. Until finally it was done... my Love & my Lord... dead...
They cut him down. "Get going," a soldier said... and I left, bereft... thinking, "Damned Jewish murderers & damned vacationers. It was like a circus to them...
"It's too late... too late now to do anything to save him. He's dead..."
Where to go?
All my aspirations with him... draining out with his bleeding... He who had been my living inspiration -- his body to go to earth, now... all my realizations... like the dusts of dead dreams to me, now.
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