It's Day Four of Holy Week and in Mark's gospel account things are heating up. In the midst of plotting and looming betrayal comes tenderness. I'm reading Brendan Kennelly's stunningly beautiful opus, The Book of Judas, as a sort of devotional:
I have never seen him and I have never seen
Anyone but him. He is older than the world and he
Is always young. What he says is in every ear
And has never been heard before.
I have tried to kill him in me,
He is in me more than ever.
I saw his hands smashed by dum-dum bullets,
His hands holding the earth are whole and tender.
If I knew what love is I would call him a lover.
Break him like glass, every splinter is wonder.
I had not understood that annihilation
Makes him live with an intensity I cannot understand.
That I cannot understand is the bit of wisdom I have found.
He splits my mind like an axe a tree.
He makes my heart deeper and fuller than my heart will dare to be.
He would make me at home beyond the sky and the black ground,
He would craze me with the light on the brilliant sand,
He is the joy of the first word, the music of undiscovered human.
Undiscovered! Yet I live as if my music were known.
He is what I cannot lose and cannot find
He is nothing, nothing but body and soul and heart and mind.
So gentle is he the gentlest air
Is rough by comparison
So kind is he I cannot dream
A kinder man
So distant is he the farthest star
Sleeps at my breast
So near is he the thought of him
Puts me outside myself
So one with love is he
I know love is
Time and eternity
And all their images.
No image fits, no rod, no crown.
I brought him down.
Where o where are you finding these amazing contemporary retellings of Jesus interactions with women in photography? Please give us a link.
Posted by: mattlumpkin | 28 April 2009 at 02:16 AM