A gasp and then... it was only a dream. My hands curled into each other, up over my heart, almost tucked beneath my chin. I'm five years old again in the darkness of a strange room. I am the only person I know here. I sit up.
From the balcony, the bay is a depth of night pooled and peppered with pins of white light. I wonder in this moment why I dreamt of crying. The banister is so cold it stings my palms. I lift my hands. Blood.
When I think about salvation, I don't think about His blood. I don't envision or contemplate or weep over His sacrifice, His terror, His pain. No, not because it's easier to turn away from any story that starts in betrayal and includes torture and (temporary or not) death. I don't dwell on those physical things because they don't touch me. They don't grab my heart in tight fingers. I guess I've bled on too many roads for anyone's blood to impress me.
Callus? Blasphemous? Or just truth?
Truth.
When I think of Christ on the cross, I think of tears. I think He cried, yes. I think He was devastated by the betrayal of His discipline. I think He was horrified that mankind could do this to any criminal let alone a political one. But I don't think it is humanly possible (and, in my eyes at least, He was human in those moments) for a person to cry for themselves as much as a mother cries for her child.
We have all heard the cliche. No parent is meant to outlive their children. It is a biological error. And I don't believe any time or timing can lesson that unnatural blow. We are never peers with our parents. We may come to speak with them in that comfortable way that adults have but we cannot change this fact: They made us. We may have shaped and influenced them, but they made us.
I wonder if Mary thought about that. About the unique twist of fact that she alone was experiencing. That she grew this baby, raised this little boy, loved this young man... and yet, He made her. If the Father and Son are one, than the son made the mother. Did she think about that as He hung bleeding on the cross? As the sky tore open and He screamed?
I think He was crying. I think He may even have thought once or twice, How can man do this to one another? And why must she endure this moment with me?
But Mary and Christ is far from the first or last Freudian dichotomy. The question of who is the father and who is the son, who is parent and who is child, plays out over and over again in many of life's arenas. Power dynamics are just the beginning. Behavioral mimicry, over-protective/over-possessive attitudes, passive aggressive cycles... our partners, our bosses, the manager at the QuikyMart.
Especially here in America, we seem to have very limited choices in appropriate relationships. Without a spoken class system we have, nonetheless, created a caste system as strict as India or China. In some ways, more strict because our tiers are unspoken and unclaimed. They change by region. They differ with state of the union, with the mentality of the masses, with the grand perspective of the mob mentality.
Whether or not we like it, our country, so fond of saying we do not persecute each other for religious differences, does exactly that every single day. We have created classes, hordes of second-rate citizens -- and if you think I'm *only* talking about immigration, you're not paying attention. Right now, all Americans are *not* treated equally nor do they have equal rights. You toe the Christian line or monied America is not going to stand behind you.
When was the last time, in America, that a Black man was beaten bloody and left dead just because he was Black?
When was the last time, in America, that a gay man was beaten bloody and left dead just because he was gay?
When was the last time, in American, that a Christian boy was beaten bloody and left dead just because he was a Christian?
What? You don't have a date for that third one?
Sadly, the cycle is broken. The ruling class tries to parent the rest of us, but they have forgotten who their Father is. And I don't mean the gentleman in the White House, his advisers, or our senate when I talk about ruling. I'm not that stupid. That would be like saying that the media is never sensationalist. Or that reality shows are candid. (Nowadays, I'm shocked when I'm *not* on camera, aren't you?)
The ruling, monied class -- the class that can campaign and spend millions, and organize with military precision their well-funded causes with the sweat, cash and heavily-mascaraed tears of the tithing, mandatory-Sunday-meeting seething masses who have nothing else to do to blow off steam except bludgeon us with their morals as if the Melting Pot of our ancestors exists only to boil us down and reshape us all into the puritanical separatists that (so few of them actually) came from -- is a class far from without public corruption, and as pure-intentioned as a gas-price hike when they turn off Internet in Egypt.
Why can't everyone see that we're all just crazy little heathens in the eyes of God? Even those of us actively trying to read His lips. Mary is crying for her son and Christ is crying for her. She gets pain and horror and injustice... but He gets something so much bigger, so much sadder. He has to leave her here while he returns to paradise. His own mother has to stay in a world that has no problem nailing its pundits to timbers... or telling its little boys they'll burn in hell if they think Finn Hudson is cute.
No wonder I dreamt of crying.
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