Gospel & Universe 🎚 The Priest’s Dilemma
Priest & Pastor
Bread & Wine
From beyond the grave He brought hope: the Resurrection; the sacred mystery of the Transubstantiation. He brought not only some outward contract to change politics, to do unto others — golden, infinite, almost inhuman — but also the inward contract that made all the rest make sense, a divine contract to change the very nature of human nature, as if by magic, by the incantation of these words, by the hand that dips into water, dips into wine, transforming corpuscle and vein, the magic of these words, the bread and the body, cherished by Greeks & hallowed by Rome.
In Switzerland
But the northerners couldn't understand. It wasn't literal enough for Zwingli, or for Calvin with his litigious mind and billable hours, so they turned it into a symbol that couldn't be penetrated, not here, not now; a mere abstraction: the wine ... turned into a symbol; the body ... transubstantiation itself ...
I can’t help thinking, That's what happens when you put theology in the hands of a repentant lawyer. No wonder the walls of their churches are bare. No wonder the Holy Ghost refuses to hover amid the gold and light of Mary's hair.
Highland Dream
In a dream Jean-Luc wandered fields of wolfsbane, viking's pom, and long purples. He took a deep breath of cold air, which smelled like oatmeal, and then walked slowly back to his stony church in the waste land of northern Scotland.
John Luke looked at the bare grey walls and the tattered hymnal. A school of hard Knox, Geneva-bound. The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, 1558.
He no longer remembered the sound of Albinoni, deep in the cloistered chambers of the Vatican. Instead, all he could remember was the prose of Adam Smith (that other Adam) and the harrowing precision of James Hutton, who was the first to lay humanity in the bedrock of time. John Luke's bedtime reading was Hutton's Investigation of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe, read aloud to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785.
The pastor revolts at the very sight of the icon: Blessed Mary, Mother of God wrapped in golden foil. Golden Calf of sceptre and rote, blood and babylonian wine, as if it were anything but blood and wine. Symbols, at best, and the Word garbled in an old language no one understands.
For years John Luke castigated the Whore of Babylon with her ermine robes, and her bread that was more than flour and water, and with her water that was more than wine.
He became so drunk on his own crimson words, so embittered by the choler that coursed through his veins that he needed a transfusion. He returned in secret to the golden altar to drink once again the blood of his God, and feast on the flesh of his imagination, deep in his cave, deep in the troglodyte hills.
Champs-Élysées
Jean-Luc awoke to the sound of the bells that hovered above the gargoyles with their cold northern sneer.
He looked out of his cell window and could almost smell the jonquil and lavender on the other side of the glass.
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