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A vision from long ago
Jul. 14th, 2023 08:06 amI may have written about this before, but when I was younger, I had a vision of the Christ upon the cross.
It was during the summertime, maybe after sixth grade. It was like a dream, but more than a dream. I saw him. Between us there was a gulf, almost infinite; you could not rescue him if you tried. But the key was that he was allowing this gulf. He hung suspended over this terrible abyss for all eternity. His face was one of infinite sorrow for the whole sorry human race, as he was bearing the sins of the many.
It seemed to me, then, that this was Hell: a void, a total absence of Love, infinite loneliness. The gulf was a black and purple hue, and alone the Savior in the midst of it, cut off from all lovingkindness—and yet he had taken it upon himself to put himself there, for who else but God could select infinite alienation? My thought was that he had chosen to experience the human condition, in its worst way...its estrangement from Love and the Divine. I wept, because we could not save him. And the paradox was that although he had caught himself off from redemption, he was in fact the source of lovingkindness himself, and the source of redemption himself.
This then was the paradox of the crucifixion—part of its mystery, perhaps, and how Love could transcend death and Hell itself. The sorrow struck my heart, and I could not forget it, even all these years later. It made me quite redoubled in my formal religiosity for a time, but then I drifted away, as a person cannot be good all on their own without divine aid. In some ways, perhaps, I may have been deliberately trying to forget—a search for the relief of Lethe. I drifted, like Dante lost in a dark wood, until the call again came to take up the Path of Return.
May the Divine keep you safe, dear reader, and may the Uncreated Light shine in your heart.
It was during the summertime, maybe after sixth grade. It was like a dream, but more than a dream. I saw him. Between us there was a gulf, almost infinite; you could not rescue him if you tried. But the key was that he was allowing this gulf. He hung suspended over this terrible abyss for all eternity. His face was one of infinite sorrow for the whole sorry human race, as he was bearing the sins of the many.
It seemed to me, then, that this was Hell: a void, a total absence of Love, infinite loneliness. The gulf was a black and purple hue, and alone the Savior in the midst of it, cut off from all lovingkindness—and yet he had taken it upon himself to put himself there, for who else but God could select infinite alienation? My thought was that he had chosen to experience the human condition, in its worst way...its estrangement from Love and the Divine. I wept, because we could not save him. And the paradox was that although he had caught himself off from redemption, he was in fact the source of lovingkindness himself, and the source of redemption himself.
This then was the paradox of the crucifixion—part of its mystery, perhaps, and how Love could transcend death and Hell itself. The sorrow struck my heart, and I could not forget it, even all these years later. It made me quite redoubled in my formal religiosity for a time, but then I drifted away, as a person cannot be good all on their own without divine aid. In some ways, perhaps, I may have been deliberately trying to forget—a search for the relief of Lethe. I drifted, like Dante lost in a dark wood, until the call again came to take up the Path of Return.
May the Divine keep you safe, dear reader, and may the Uncreated Light shine in your heart.
