Salvation

By Jennings Roth Cornet

Jerusalem.
Saturated with the blood of the faithful.
Imbued with visions of God.
This is the land of the Holy. Promised by God to us all.
A land of pilgrimage and war. It crackles – electric and pulsating with humanities extremes. Oh we succumbed so deeply, so profoundly to worship. How we can hold spaces sacred. How easily we can discard ourselves, how easily we hold valueless the life of another.

I stand quietly and alone in a darkened corner of an earthen room below the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I can feel the presence of the Christ here. Upstairs is teaming with symbols and tourists and gold plated relics. Upstairs it feels like Disneyland – the Vegas of the divine. But here in this cave with the dusty floor beneath me I vibrate with the power of the sacred.

“ Judge not” the Christ whispers. I feel the gentle hand on my cheek. “Judge not” it cautions with love.
But I do – I do judge and I find this place an abomination.

I am not Christian or Muslim or Jew.
I am a Pagan, a Priestess from Centuries past.
I believe in all your Gods.
I believe in all your gods.
I believe in your power to create them, and they you.
I believe in your power to destroy each other.
Your God is almost gone now.

Two millennia of bloodshed have left him weakened and wounded nearly beyond repair. It is in small places that he hides. Places where your greed, your avarice, your lust for salvation can not find him. You have struggled to posses him, you have gripped him and smothered him and fought over him like children pulling at a toy till it rips. Yet the toy was a puppy, an alive thing that wanted only to love and be loved by all.

His wisdom was an Ocean without end – but you have poisoned it with your stupidity and now you drink of that poison daily. Oblivious to all it has undone.

His sword was that of the initiator. It could have cut straight to your truth. It could have sliced through the chains of your despair and lead you to freedom and bliss. But you misunderstood. You spill blood upon and blood and each wound you inflict is another he must suffer.

Even a God can take only so much.

I turn to the Mother – it is only your ignorance of her – your denial of her - that has saved her from your clutches. She grows stronger daily – and you can bet she won’t be happy with the destruction of the Father and the son.

My anger is the furnace and the wood; it feeds itself hungrily, daily.

A mother wheels her child down the street – her carriage glistens in the dusk. The child smiles happily and licks hungrily at the candy the mother has provided. Short miles away another child plays obliviously in a pile of garbage. The nauseating stench is his daily perfume – he faces bullets and dirt and poverty and one day he will face that other mother’s son with gun in hand and hate in heart. Any mother that does not know that all children are hers has allowed her heart to be covered in shadows and she deserves what she gets. Her ignorance, her righteousness have put her child on a path to meet a bullet and ever will she lament this place - thick and coated with illusion.

Pilgrims in prada walk the path of their savior. They bow their heads solemnly, seeking to satisfy themselves spiritually, indulging in their soul’s masturbation. This land becomes their sacred whore. They pay for the ecstasy of the solemnly divine. Turning their faces from the tanks that bear their flags.

Boys and girls stand with guns corralling old women and grown men like cattle. That grandmother is yours. You call her by the name enemy; you call yourself ruler and captor. Two lifetimes ago she suckled you; she feed you and led you to grow.

Peace fighters joined by churches and mosques lure in western teenagers with the seductive power of Gandhi. Then these pacifists quietly uplift killers hidden from view by masks. They set their youth on the conveyer belt of slaughter – denied a vision of tomorrow – they are condemned to live and die always in the sacred name of the past.
There is nowhere to turn that my eyes are not seared by hypocrisy.

I am on fire. My disdain, my detest, it seeps from my very pores. It flows like a river of sewage into the spirit of everything my eyes land upon. My stomach is bloated with its bile; my face raw, red and filled with rages pestilence - hatred now threatens to consume me.

The fire of my rage reaches hungrily for another log. The Goddess stays my hand.

“ This fire has lit your way, it has awakened you but now it threatens to destroy all that it touches.”

“ When you look into the face of those you revile you can see only yourself.”

I am condemned to accept that which I cannot abide, cannot make sense of, cannot control. The will of my fellow who is me, but does not choose as I would have her choose. In a place this non-sensical, so far beyond the comforts of logic, perhaps faith is the only recourse. I came here for answers – to understand and dismiss and move on. I return bound by confusion and unknowing.

The fire out, I am left in the void with nothing but ashes and despair to surround me. I am suspended, unwilling to let go, trapped in the stagnation of denial. I cannot love that which I know to be wrong. To do so would mean….

No. My teeth are hungry for the meat of vindication. The knowing that it is I and not them who see. My hatred is justified – it is holy – it is a worship in itself. I long to see the look on their faces when they realize all they have done wrong – all they have misunderstood. They worshiped false idols, they misread the signs, and they killed their God daily in flesh and in Spirit when they refused to recognize that he was living in the face and the flesh of the other.

Each turn my mind takes leads it further into an infinite labyrinth. I am alone in the wilderness – set here to wander by the hands of the gods. The dark night of the soul will lead you to divine Union with God.

You are my gods - soldier, mother, baby in your spoiled shining carriage, hypocrites - all of you call me to let go and love you - to melt in the presence of your radiant perfection. My feet crunch unseen branches. There is nothing left but surrender – but I am not ready yet – no not yet.