Sunstroke in the garden

*

The warrior only met God via sunstroke.

If given water and shade, the warrior recovered, became an ordinary human, lost contact with God.

Sometimes the warrior refused food and water and shade.

Foolish person, they said. Foolish person, they said.

Yes but sustenance had a cost. Food masked his own true nature as a creature dying and almost dead, almost alive again.

I would like to be alive, not just fed. Foolish person, they said and shook their heads, blurry in his no longer functioning vision. Foolish -- the word swishing like a weak whip.

Why would anyone wear a mask? Why would anyone want to be anything other than what he was?

If you craved salvation, and that he did, if you craved, how could you expect your craving to be, no, how could you ever expect a creature with your name to gain it, to gain salvation, any creature other than the one single creature that you actually were? The creature that your one name called? How would you expect a mask or fantasy to win what only a naked creature could have?

Why then mask that same nakedness and pain?

At least that was one argument.

So the warrior turned down water and hallucinated, or that was what the onlookers said. The word foolish lay coiled and waiting upon their tongues.

No, this vision is real, he said, but the onlookers laughed. That is just exactly what he *would* say.

*

But isn't this your true self? Calm and washed, sober, able to speak about what you see? You aren't saying that this is a mask?

*

The warrior said that he walked with God but the world saw his thrashing on the park bench, acting up. So they took him to the hospital and medicated him and he complained about the flatness.

The drug is like a door that has closed between me and God.

No, Elf said. It's more like the door to a room with other people.

Solitude won't do. God is meant to be worshipped with other people. He is God of the living, not of the dead.

The man named Dave became a human again, most reluctantly. He talked earnestly to the priest and to Elf in the eating room while the others -- "addicts" people called them -- huddled in a line to get their own cross. When they got their own cross they found a corner and huddled, holding it close to them, risking of course ridicule, no no, braving ridicule, enjoying it -- such were the ones we called "addicts". The one they called the knight of the Red Cross babbled to himself by the altar and, I don't know, made sense in a way, but people looked at his furry-shouldered girth and took care not to come too close. Foolish person, foolish person. But Elf, Dave said, won't you at least let me tell you what I saw?

To ease this rapture from my craw -- like a little dachsund spitting up the Snickers wrapper, slowly.

Let me tell you what I saw when I wandered alone. I saw the witch, I saw the devil. Her body lay disorganized like a decayed landfill, cans strewn everywhere, a piece of junk in the garden. Rejected recycling. When I gave her water she wouldn't swallow. Foolish body, lacking reason.

Whose body was it? Elf asked. Whose body?

It's so hard to remember -- you've medicated me and now I don't see so well -- you've made me human again. Now I don't see that other place as I did. I no longer quite know when I am reporting as opposed to making up what I say.

I think that body was your mother's -- it was the devil or at least like the devil -- but what is the devil's shape without a body to feed on? Isn't the devil qua diabolus nothing but a virus without a host? What is evil when it has to live on itself? What if not short term? Nothing to speak of, right? I wouldn't think destruction has much of an independent essence to describe.

But it seemed to me that she was giving up and dying, the man said.

She was shriveling and ceasing to take much notice.

If only that were true, it would mean that the new time that has been coming and coming might finally just come.

*

The broken ones -- the ones who could not call themselves Christians but only would-be Christians -- they could not stop pondering the meaning of orthodoxy, this structure that contained them and that they themselves could not contain. What for you is orthodoxy? A set of decreed beliefs? Dead beliefs? Are you sure that's what it is?

People object to being ordered what to think. Yet the spell is very strong. It needs to be defined a different way.

For the warrior, orthodoxy was not a code but a place. To this place he brought his considerable doubts, which is just to say that he brought himself. He did not bring a mask of someone else, behind which one might hide from whatever was to come. It couldn't just be the tongue that walked this aisle. The whole body had to follow.

Name this place. I cannot, will not. Not yet.

In the safety that was this place -- both garden and hallowed building and still but the precinct of a building -- hanging like the shadow of a raised shield -- doubt itself became protected and so faith flourished, beyond all expectation. The warrior rested. People walked here together, awkwardly, like cripples approaching their Sunday cup.

Name this place. Name this place. Say the name.

After the meal with his friends, Dave walked unsteadily to the stable behind the garden. His armor clanked against his thigh. There was a bruise that led to a wound that led to a pool of blood beneath his belly where the soul lay, face up, mouth open, desperately hungry. The metal clanked, it was foolish to wear.

There was a compost heap by the garden and, some feet further away, a dried-up place filled with things that were unable even to be treated as compost. There she lay, breathing but only barely.

Dave turned to cry out to his companions but his head -- only half sticking out from the cotton wadding of the drugs -- felt too dizzy even to judge its position and his throat was too dry to speak.

He felt alone. But alone with God. Orthodoxy extended even here. That is, if you wished it to. If you acknowledged its scope and its power.

Salute the sun in the name of the one you are afraid to name.

*

Lord, save us from even the wickedness we have triumphed over. Save us from feeling triumph.

*