Six
hours outstretched in the sun, yes,
hot
wood, the nails, blood trickling
into
the eyes, yes –
but
the thieves on their neighbor crosses
survived
till after the soldiers
had
come to fracture their legs, or longer.
Why
single out this agony? What’s
a
mere six hours?
Torture
then, torture now,
the
same, the pain’s the same,
immemorial
branding iron,
electric
prod.
Hasn’t
a child
dazed
in the hospital ward they reserve
for
the most abused, known worse?
This
air we’re breathing,
these
very clouds, ephemeral billows
languid
upon the sky’s
moody
ocean, we share
with
women and men who’ve held out
days
and weeks on the rack –
and
in the ancient dust of the world
what
particles
of
the long tormented,
what
ashes.[1]
But
Julian’s lucid spirit leapt
to
the difference:
perceived
why no awe could measure
that
brief day’s endless length,
why
among all the tortured
One
only is ‘King of Grief’.
The onening, she saw, the onening
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to
the pain of all minds, all bodies
-
sands
of the sea, of the desert –
from
first beginning
to
last day. The great wonder is
that
the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t
explode
when
utmost Imagination rose
in
that flood of knowledge. Unique
in
agony, infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered
Him to endure
inside
of history,
through
those hours when He took Himself
the
sum total of anguish and drank
even
the lees of that cup:
within
the mesh of the web, Himself
woven
within it, yet seeing it,
seeing
it whole, Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.
[1]
‘On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX.’ This is from the longer text of Julian
of Norwich’s Showings ( or Revelations ). The quoted lines follow
the Grace Warrack transcription ( 1901). Warrack uses the work ‘kinship’ in her
title-heading for the chapter, though in the text itself she says ‘kindness,’
thus – as in her Glossary – reminding one of the roots common to both words.
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