Holy Saturday unfolds in a dark, dank space, where Jesus lays with blood congealed on his hands and feet, in a half-world state. Perhaps plunged into an abyss of spiritual and psychic depth — a lore without much scriptural standing but suggesting that Jesus made a wild descent, with mythical overtures, into The Void Of The Underworld. Basically one Jesus gets mauled then another moves.
Messiah fantasy jokes aside it's been two years, since every single time I sit in the bath, I imagine I'm falling into a sinkhole.
It all began with the flooding of the bathwater. Twice it rained in the kitchen, with the two cats looking-in, wanting to cross to get dry-biscuits but not being able to walk on water.
In this same bath, in a lulling state I pictured being plunged into the kitchen, soft, naked with pieces of enamel tearing through my skin; a vein piercing through my forearm, breathless and half still.
This image colours my mind like blood through water.
Bathing like my imaginings are frequent, and further and fervently I plunged, eventually falling like Alice, head-banging-foot, through the dark earth into darker navy. Twisting and turning, my being stiff; flexed and focussed on my eventual splattering descent and demise onto a strange, cold floor.
But after many a minute when the picture doesn’t materialise. When the fears fly away from all the free-falling one flowers up to something entirely new. Letting some breath out, veins merging back towards the skull, eyes sighing comfortably back into their sockets into midnight blue/or is it brown? The only knowing is that it’s seemingly impossible to see where all this is going. What is certain is that with all this loss of control there’s a surrender out of strategy and a relinquishing of self into the infinite potential of the void.
It’s really not a choice, since I’m moving too fast to latch onto any random passer by. Plus there's not many people who seem as comfortable with all this chaos and of all this non-knowing. A general kind of person wants a picture. I could tell them I am hurtling head-first into the floor but I’ve began to wade in a mesmerising meditative plunge pool of empty. I am naked, helpless and I’m closer than ever to my unconscious soul, and to be honest I do not know if the bottom even exists, it’s just what a smidgen of myself thinks it knows. All this wading has made me realise that at first the emptiness befalls a horrifying loss of life; on the one hand, yet remains a gradual state and realising awareness of the emergent life to come. This difficult, timeless time is one of the symbolic gifts of furiously not accepting the size of the bath and the temperature of the water.
At this juncture many o’ man will just reach for their passport. When one reality becomes suffocating, too many people decide to venture off into new terrain. We all know the man who submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation. No the trick is not to divert attention sideways, like a 19th century anthropologist who runs off into the jungle to alter his social economic branch and have his ego talk niceties to the locals and go smoke plants. NO! One must stay with the void and plunge further into the inner sinkhole, not just change the geographical picture, for the real voyage is into the psychic spiritual underpass. It’s there that the pictures will eventually morph, it’s in my bathroom I delete the ‘needed’ programs, change channel and joyously merge into a whirling infinite lagoon.
On Sunday nobody recognised Jesus when he left the cave.
This is significant, as it underscores the difficult and mysterious nature of The Resurrection, which defies all norms and defeats rationalisation. The embodied spirit of Jesus returning from the dead was not exactly the same person who died but some altered version of Jesus; metamorphosed more than restored to his former state. In reality, the manifestation of Jesus after his death beggars the imagination: he acquired a new spiritual body.
Rising from the murky waters out to the new temperature takes time, like an awareness that grows deeper and more complex, more thrilling, as it breathes, moves and magnifies. With the old skin shed, purified, the totality of being is brighter, and really there seems no point looking backwards, back down into the black hole.