Loves

Magdalen’s Epistle Of Love’s discrete occasions, we observe sufficient catalogue, a likely-sounding lexicon pronounced so as to implicate a wealth of difference, where reclines instead a common element, itself quite like those elements partaken at the table served by Jesus on the night he was betrayed—like those in that the bread was breakable, the wine was red and wet, and met the tongue with bright, intoxicating sweetness, quite like ... wine. None of what I write arrives to compromise that sacrament, the mystery of spirit graved in what is commonplace and plain— the broken, brittle crust, the cup. Quite otherwise, I choose instead to bear again the news that each, each was still itself, substantial in the simplest sense. By now, you will have learned of Magdalen, a name recalled for having won a touch of favor from the one we call the son of man, and what you’ve heard is true enough. I met him first as, mute, he scribbled in the dust to shame some village hypocrites toward leaving me unbloodied, if ill-disposed to taking up again a prior circumstance. I met him in the house of one who was a Pharisee and not prepared to suffer quietly my handling of the master’s feet. Much later, in the garden when, having died and risen, he spoke as to a maid and asked me why I wept. When, at any meeting with the Christ, was I not weeping? For what? I only speculate —brief inability to speak, a weak and giddy troubling near the throat, a wash of gratitude. And early on, I think, some slight abiding sense of shame, a sop I have inferred more recently to do without. Lush poverty! I think that this is what I’m called to say, this mild exhortation that one should still abide all love’s embarrassments, and so resist the new temptation—dangerous, inexpedient mask—of shame. And, well, perhaps one other thing: I have received some little bit about the glib divisions which so lately have occurred to you as right, as necessary, fit That the body is something less than honorable, say, in its ... appetites? That the spirit is something pure, and—if all goes well— potentially unencumbered by the body’s bawdy tastes. This disposition, then, has led to a banal and pious lack of charity, and, worse, has led more than a few to attempt some soul-preserving severance—harsh mortifications, manglings, all manner of ritual excision lately undertaken to prevent the body’s claim upon the heart, or mind, or (blasphemy!)spirit— whatever name you fix upon the supposéd bodiless. I fear that you presume—dissecting the person unto something less complex. I think that you forget you are not Greek. I think that you forget the very issue which induced the Christ to take on flesh. All loves are bodily, require that the lips part, and press their trace of secrecy upon the one beloved—the one, or many, endless array whose aspects turn to face the one who calls, the one whose choice it was one day to lift my own bruised body from the dust, where, it seems to me, I must have met my death, thereafter, this subsequent life and late disinclination toward simple reductions in the name of Jesus, whose image I work daily to retain. I have kissed his feet. I have looked long into the trouble of his face, and met, in that intersection, the sacred place—where body and spirit both abide, both yield, in mutual obsession. Yes, if you’ll recall your Hebrew word. just long enough to glimpse in its dense figure power to produce you’ll see as well the damage Greek has wrought upon your tongue, stolen from your sense of what is holy, wholly good, fully animal— the body which he now prepares.