Jesus spent some time in the desert. It must have been hot and I'm sure he longed for cool water, needed to purge himself of the temptation his flesh sang out for.
Maybe he wanted companionship, the touch of a woman late at night when the world was silent in that dark way of the still and very holy.
He told himself, drink of the Spirit to turn away those temptations of the flesh.
I'm sure he thought often of water, of a woman's slender hands in moonlight, of the way a body's deeper thirst might be quenched.
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In the early '80s when I was drinking my way through France with my ex-wife, we stopped for a couple days at Lourdes and laughed at the desperate believers filling their plastic water jugs with the holy fluid; and unlike Jesus who longed for a simple drink, these pilgrims prayed for metaphor, wished for healing in the cool grotto where a young girl, years ago, had seen the Virgin Mother's face look down benevolently, before touching her with a quick, electric grace.
My ex and I snickered our way through the show, wandered out into the barren town where shops sold miraculous souvenirs, including my favorite—chocolate Marys, which made a great after-lunch dessert.
Later, I ate the Virgin and entered a sugar haze, thinking about how Jesus once walked the desert in a heat-induced daze,
and I suppose all of these pilgrimages are just ways of entering the barren, beautiful world of faith. Ways of figuring out if Logos was Jesus before his conception, before the Annunciation, before Gabriel briefed Mary on the coming world of tears, and long before I ate the Virgin after a ham sandwich in a French café.
I have long struggled to understand virgin births, resurrections, salvation, how that mighty stone was pushed away, how the cave shown empty like a burial, how the night stars rose over the mountains and blinked those special messages from outer space. I have long struggled to understand the Trinity, how saltines and grape juice are Jesus' body, how communion makes us one with spirit, but which spirit, which holy ghost?
I'm all for Logos, all for the quenching of our long thirst with a fountain of sacred words. I'm all for ghosts, for the Holy Spirit that enflames the world, sets forests on fire and screams like a banshee on a rollercoaster sitting next to a bat out of Hell. I'm all for Holy Relics,
for fingers and toes and bits of skull, for arm bones and neck bones and thigh bones which are all connected to the notion that the remnants of our bodies are somehow imbued with meaning.
I should say that it's only certain bodies: Peter, Paul, John the Baptist, Pope Clement and the like, or even Descartes' skull, which was missing when they dug up his grave in Paris just after the Revolution.
But the world is on fire man, just as John the Divine promised, just as Revelation predicted, and I've heard that next week, exactly at 1 p.m. on an otherwise normal Wednesday, Jesus will descend from heaven and bring us 1000 years of the Kingdom of God. Extra, Extra, read all about it,
poet predicts the return of the Savior! Is there any limit, then, to what poetry can do?