Looking Inside the Tombs

The last entry is fraught with ambiguities. First, you have to know a little something about Holy Saturday. (I have been blessed to study with one who knows more than a little.) Then, there is the soupy language. What exactly is a dangerous love? How could one presume that all are Christian and have a Christian understanding of love, and even then, how could one presume all Christians would understand what a dangerous love is? I cannot pretend myself to comprehend the danger of love as the disciples of every age have done.

Further, I am not quite sure from whose perspective these lines are given, and I do not know to whom they are going for certain. Is it a man or woman speaking? A straight or gay person? Is it Peter? Mary Magdalene? Me? J. Alfred Prufrock? To whom do these lines go? Jesus of Nazareth? The God of Jesus? An absent lover? An unrequited love?

Perhaps the perspectives keep shifting. I have been listening to Dylan's story songs, especially "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Abandoned Love." Or there could be multiple perspectives being presented simultaneously.

Where are we? Jerusalem, or Boston? "Nine forty-seven on holy Saturday night." Is it 2,000 years ago, or was it just last night? Who knows whether it matters. And God knows what is really happening here. Confession coupled with imagination, or imagination coupled with confession, leads a writer to say curious things. The most cagey artists never really tell you what they're confessing, and there's no telling what they're imagining. Now I understand why.

So I decided to play with the ambiguities. Against my better judgment, I have conflated eros, philia, and agape. Further against my better judgment, I have also played with the thoroughly discounted legends shrouding Mary Magdalene. (Pope St. Gregory the Great got it wrong.)

And there it is. The piece works well because it resists a single meaning while bearing a wholly overwhelming feeling. But it also fails for me because I resist it. I don't want to engage it. I don't know if it's virtuous or blasphemous ... and I don't want to know, either. However it is, it hits too close to home. Hints of joyful love behind me, hints of glory before me. But in this moment, neither is there. What is here is not pain, because I have been too privileged and too clever to be caught by real pain. What is here is only a lonely, lonely longing.

I look through keyholes into tomb-rooms, hoping they are empty, but hoping secretly I will find someone. Why? So I can be courageous? What will I do if I find someone inside? What have I ever done but turn away?

Every day of my life is a Holy Saturday, and I am the cemetery custodian, keeping death and new life at arm's distance.