A NEW YEAR, A NEW LIFE, A NEW AND OLD LOVE
By
John Van Laningham
NOTE: This is based on the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark
Please donate to Nifty. $6 a month. This is a resource.
Each day is a struggle. But on this day, mid winter, an arbitrary day that ends one year and starts another, I am determined. I stopped even the small amount of lecturing that I had been doing a year ago because the struggle was too much. I needed too long to recover from even the lightest of exertion. And in the year since, that has been even more true. The swelling, the trouble breathing, trying to sleep in my recliner, fitfully, waking up short of breath. And each I time I make my way back to the hospital, my cardiologist, suitably named Dr Cohen, a scion of the ancient mysteries of pre-Rabbinic Judaism but now a master of the mysteries of a new faith, informs me that my mortality risk doubles with each trip. But this last time, they kept me longer and I left dry and feeling good. I had taken a cab home where I live alone and now it is three days later. The heaviness in my chest, the discomfort I didn't tell them about, an old and familiar friend though, is nearly constant and with virtually any activity. And I do not have to be concerned that the activity today would weaken me for days. I doubt I see a new year.
I rise from twin bed I've slept in for years and greet the last day. Everywhere are books. My failing sight makes it harder to read but I can't easily throw over my old loves. Everywhere there can be a bookcase, there is. I have been a polygamous lover of books. There are books everywhere. Even in the pantry, displacing food, and in the oven, for want of space. I shower and the warm water flows over my thin frame and it feels good. I soap up and do the necessary ablutions of modern sensibilities. I view myself in the mirror and I wonder whatever became of the lean, wiry young man that I had been. Lean muscle and boundless energy. How he became old. I dressed comfortably in khaki's and a warm, thick shirt. Clear and cold, I don a hat to protect my bald head. At street level, in the canyon of urban Manhattan, I turn and walk slowly the blocks to the open air and the open field. Central Park. Frederick Law Olmstead's masterpiece of manufactured nature.
I sink onto a bench and conclude it will need to be my headquarters for now, at least. I would love to stroll but there is the trip back home, to my destiny, to be considered. I sit and look at the people passing by me, joggers and children and adults being dragged by a dog. It is strange that they are all sentient, self aware beings with lives of their own, perspectives of their own, stories of their own. Surely, some of them must be interesting. I've spent a life uninterested in the living but fascinated by the dead. In the sunlight of a clear mid winter day, I close my eyes and think back to a happier day. Tenure? It was an achievement but it didn't make me happy. The New York Times bestseller's list? It was satisfying but it didn't make me happy. The positive, even gushing reviews? The points scored against numb skull critics? My thoughts wandered back to a place. Mar Saba. The monastery of Saint Saba. Not the summer 33 years ago when I discovered the letter from Clement of Alexandria to Theodore. Source of controversy and fame. Not when I photographed it in the small cell of a room. No, 15 years before. A younger man, 26 then, on a donkey traveling from Jerusalem through the hot and dusty brown world of the Kidron Valley to the monastery, as much a part of the mountain as on it. There, from shortly after Christmas until the beginning of Lent, I lived the rhythms of the monks, of the worship, of the liturgy, the sights and sounds of the night vigil, of Terce and Vespers. How it had thrilled me and moved me in the worship of a God I loved only to later discover to be either fictional or unconcerned.
I woke with a start. I was not aware of having gone to sleep. Beside me there was a boy. Small, his feet not hitting the ground, he looked up at me, a mop of black hair on his head and big black eyes, olive skin.
"Are you sad?" he asks in a high pitched voice.
"Not particularly" I say back. "Are you?"
"I'm a kid. Kids don't feel sad"
"What's your name?"
"Joshua"
"Joshua, I'm Morton. I don't think it's true that kids don't feel sad. I think kids feel their emotions far more readily than old people do. It's much more raw"
"You know what the best part of being a kid is? Everything is new. It's always a surprise."
"I suppose so" I say
"Do you like magic?"
"Yes, I do"
He nods. "I do too. I'm a magician. But I gotta go. See ya later, Morton"
"Goodbye, Joshua"
The trip is a struggle. The discomfort in my chest is nearly constant, worsening gradually with each step and I may not have the wind to make it. Silently, I have to encourage myself onward, lest I die in the street like a dog. I make it to the building and take the elevator to my fourth floor apartment. Once there, I make myself one last Scotch and soda and slowly sip it, despite the mild nausea I feel and the cold, clammy sweat. Finishing it, I carefully wash the glass and put it upside down to dry. I undress and put on my pajamas and get into bed. I close my eyes, steeled to the ultimate event in life. That I die alone is nothing. We all die alone, even if in company.
In my last conscious thought, I feel my heart stop beating and I need to take a breath but can't. There is a mild bit of panic and then nothing.
Then ...
I am aware the bed is hard as a rock and cool. I suddenly inhale a panicked lungful of air in a gasp, through a linen shroud over my head. I don't know where I am but it's dark and cool. My heart is pounding out of my chest. I am breathing hard and heavy. I hurriedly pull off the shroud and fling it aside. I can't see anything in the darkness but I fear I am no longer in my comfortable book filled cocoon. Outside, I hear a voice, vaguely familiar.
"Son of David, have mercy on me"
I cry out, loudly, in a sudden realization of where my dying hallucination has placed me. The stone rolls away and a bright shaft of light stabs through directly at me, momentarily blinding me. I stand there transfixed as the stone rolls further and further away, allowing more and more light in. As if drawn by a magnet, I move toward the opening. A hand - large, rough, calloused, the hand of a workman, a carpenter - comes through the opening and I grab it like a drowning man reaching for the rope to save him.
He is nothing but pure beauty.
Whether the bright sun, shimmering in the green and brown scrub or his inner light, he is surrounded by a faint golden light. Of medium height and broad shouldered, his black hair short and a full black beard trimmed short, he is physical perfection. His olive skin flawless, his eyes the color of iron gall ink but kind, gentle and loving, I could not help but love him. Not for bringing me back to life. I had awakened all ready when he arrived. No, it is because he will make me whole. He will make life worth living.
"You are El Azar, the one God has helped" he says, with formality
"Yeshua ben Yosef, Son of David" I say. "Son of Man"
"Come" he says in a deep booming voice "We will dine with you for the time to come"
Straightaway, we left the garden of loss, the garden of the dead and walk to my home. I know the way even if I don't recognize the landmarks. The woman, my sister I know trails behind. His companions, rough and ragtag, follow behind too, unworthy of the beauty and light of the Son of Man. My home is large by the standards of the day for I am rich. Then, I remember and am ashamed. I had come to him before and he had looked on me with pure love. I had asked him what I must do to be saved and he had answered that I should keep the commandments. I had since I was a beardless youth and I said so. Then he had told me that I should sell all that I had and follow him. That's when I made a grievous mistake. I turned and left, choosing wealth and security over love.
For 6 days, days that pass in a minute, I sit at his feet, absorbing every word he speaks, every sonorous syllable, and marvel at the things he says. The stories he tells. The wisdom of every phrase. Then he says that I should come to him in the night on the sixth night. With only the linen cloth I was buried in to cover my naked body, I enter his chamber where he stands naked. The hair of his torso, his powerfully built, thick, muscular torso, is like a tree leading up from the roots in the crotch, a trunk of hair between his formed abs, with a canopy of hair across his powerful chest. His manhood, thick and tumescent, above a pair of weighty stones catch my eye. I feel an involuntary stirring in my own loins. He comes up to me and put his strong hands under my linen shirt, pulling it up and over my head. I stand there too, now naked, my excitement beginning to show. He rubs his hands on my young, tight muscles.
"Stay with me tonight and I will show you the mysteries of the Kingdom of God" he says
He put his hands on my unshaved face and our mouths meet and we kiss. When I could breath between the urgency of the kissing, I was breathing hard, my heart racing, every sense alive with wonder. I touch his tight hard body, feeling his masculinity. I could kiss him forever. This would be heaven, forever in his presence, forever in his arms.
"Why did you not act on your attractions and desires?" he asks
"Rabbi, I couldn't. It seemed a shameful thing, unnatural. It seemed a sin worse than fornication. I knew of what the Apostle Paul taught in Romans 1"
"Hmmph" he grunts. "In the long history of God reaching out to man to redeem the race, there are in every generation charlatans and lunatics with hallucinations to distort and to lie, leading good people astray. The synagogues and the high places are filled with men convinced God agrees with them when they know nothing of the mind or will of God. Why should God give you the desire and the need with the means to fulfill it and be happy in his greatest creation of all, which is love, but then deprive you of the fulfillment? Why would not God speak to you directly in your receptive mind, rather than some human spokesman?"
He put my manhood, rigid and throbbing, above his own, swollen, full and hard, and he stroked them with his hand. I gasp and moan slightly.
"Like me, you are unpolluted by women. We are not subject to the common desires. Such are necessary for the generative act, to pass life from one generation to another. And it can be beautiful in it's own way. But the sublime desire is the intimacy of two men. The pure and perfect love. Men together have power. Men don't complete each other. They strengthen each other."
In the night, his powerful arms wrapped around me, his muscular body next to me, he enters my flesh and I become one with him. He moved within me. He touches me in an intimate way. The sensual pleasures are ecstatic in my mind. I am lost in the pleasure of it. I feel at one with him, with humanity, surrounded by love. He fills me with his seed and his motion alone sends me to rapturous heights.
The following day, he and his companions take leave and cross to the other side of the Jordan, unto Jericho. Although my sister and mother, along with Salome were there in that city, Yeshua received them not. He left the city with a great multitude. And then in the last tumultuous week on Earth, I am with him to comfort him in his cruel but required act of sacrifice. When he scourged and cleansed the Temple from the grifters, the con men, the thieves and cheaters, all proclaiming their own innocence and honesty and devotion to God. At the last meal, where he commands that as often as we bite bread and drink wine, we should remember his sacrifice in body and blood. I follow him into the garden where he leaves behind a guard of his most loyal followers. They fail him. I kneel prostate on the ground praying as he speaks with the Father, as he argues with the Father that the cup should pass from him. I pray the same thing because his torture and death is an agony I cannot wish upon my love. Prostrate before him, I provide him with what physical comfort I can. But it is one of his followers, a narcissist who carries the common purse for fear someone else might sell their goods for profit, a narrow minded and cruel man who drones on endlessly at the imagined wrongs done him, that betrays my beloved and beautiful Yeshua as the others slept. And he betrays him knowing the truth, all for a bit of money. I am seized by the Roman troops, tearing my linen cloth as I flee naked.
I weep at his suffering.
It is I that greet the women at the tomb, dressed in a white robe with the good news that Yeshua has been resurrected and redeemed for the hope of all.
Once more in darkness. Then a shaft of light enters, a single keystroke of light. It grows and grows. I head for it.
"Welcome Morton" the voice says
"Hello, Joshua"
"You have all eternity to lay next to me, to be held in my arms, to be loved by me in the way you should have loved all along."
"And what of ..."
"I said, don't you remember, that there will be many who say 'Lord, Lord' that I will turn away for I never knew them. Those that allotted love for some and denied it for others, that took life from some and freedom from many to enrich themselves, that dealt unjustly. Prejudice and shame need never bother you again"
What comes after is love and beauty, fidelity, intimacy and companionship. We are made perfect in love, love in all it's varieties. Love without need for orthodoxy or heresy or unearned moral superiority. Love is love. God is love. You cannot gainsay it.