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| Bishop Gerald Beaumont |
At each motion of his feet, a cloud of pollen burst into the sun, rolling and streaming in lancets of crystal light.
He moved gently through the long golden grass. Insects leapt and winged away. And he stopped, and held himself still. A moment passed, and a new kind of life took up about him. Secret business was transacted at his feet. Minute creatures pressed on through the great jungle he hardly saw. But, in his body's ease, he now found interest and leisure to look down and small.
Lowering himself to the earth, he first knelt, then reclined. The grass gathered about him, snapping and crackling under his weight. With his head low, he focussed on the brilliant petals of a small yellow flower. Such was the day, its brilliance carried the sun into his eye. Blinking, he pressed closer and shared his delight with a solitary grasshopper. The creature seemed, for a moment to reflect, and then it leapt and embraced the flower. The man was all stillness; and the grasshopper began to feed. Piece be brilliant piece, it devoured all that golden beauty. And the man was all stillness, his heart grieving the death of this light. But, as he rose to his feet again, his vision expanded.
All of life was like this. What beauty at every turn! But beauty feeding on beauty. He remembered other ancient contradictions.
He could still remember the graze of rough bark against his city hands. He could still feel the fibres blotting the moisture out of his palms. But, as he stripped the bark, its smoothness met him and calmed him. That rough bark confronted him. That tender, moist heart soothed him.
And then he could see far back. A long, long way back to a beginning. From seed, tree after tree had been formed to meet him. Fashioned from the dust they met his fashioned dust. And, in this moment, they embraced, as he tore that tree apart. Unable to bear its dusty roughness, he tore to its tender heart and brought it death. He didn't mean to, but he did anyway. He had to tear it into something he felt easy with, and so he tore the life out of it.
This seemed to be the way of it. Life set against life. Beauty against beauty. Word pressed against word. Contra - diction.
It wasn't even that he did not change. He was not always clumsy with those "city" hands. He had put his hands to new work. He joined with the earth in new ways.
Out of its dust, again, ran another halting life. Red earth offered up glowing, terrible rivers that he feared, then formed as he willed. Crustlets of ash scorched his arms, and left a pungent reminder of their passing.
Old metal met its cousin. Beaten lifeless on its cold altar, and resurrected to a startling new body. Red dust. The detritus of Creation. Now transformed, and made to hold it together.
Sharp and strong the man made the nails. Each one he had laboured and sweated into being. Pounded and beaten, and now ready to use. Blue-black, they gathered in buckets. Others bore them away, and he was glad to see them go. They would draw broken separate pieces together. Out of many parts, a lovely unity would emerge. Shelter would be given. Trade would be done. Worship would be offered. The tree held by the nail. Powerful and precious unity.
Someone else; a quiet patient woman, remembered the careless games she played as a child. The rhythmical chant as she flew, weightless, over the chalked squares. And the dry, white, dust on her hands. Rubbed, now and then, down the blue dress that she would later offer to wash, but wouldn't.
Old now, the dust still clung to her. It had become her life. It had ground her body, as she ground it. She had been unable to resist its pristine power. Cities reflected the great light of the sun wherever it has been used. White-walled, white-washed, simple places expanded and glowed.
How glad she felt at this simple concoction with such old ingredients. First, life; then death; then the movement of new life as, thrust from ocean beds, the chalk slowly exposed its mime's face. She had gathered the pieces so profligately offered in the enormous abundance of Creation. Then she had bled the gums which would bind the dust. Patiently, they had been ground and joined. Another transformation. The substance of death offering the brilliance of new life and light.
The stuff of the earth made to dress the stuff of the earth. To reflect the glory of the sun; to make the soiled, clean; to whiten the sepulchre; to identify the "King of the Jews", words slashed on a board. The letters of contradiction.
And now we see that strange king. Hung out to dry and die in the afternoon sun. Pinioned by those wonderfully discovered and carefully beaten nails that share his dust. Suspended from that stripped and broken tree that share his dust. Dust strains against dust, and beauty is broken under the sun.
And then a quiet comes, as, for a time, in death, all objects and creatures are one. Just for a time. Just for a second. And then, bound together, they suddenly fly apart. But, whenever lifted up, the strange king holds all the parts together. Wood and iron, and a glow in the superscription that looks like gold.
What a figure that strange king is! Dragging the Cross down into the earth with him. Pulling all its biting, torturing parts back into the dust. Ready to be re-formed until, in God's mysterious good time, the wood and iron, and chalk and gum are brought to a harmony of life upon life, out of death upon death. Until a sound begins that is word upon word, out of word against word.
The man lifted up, that strange king, now feels himself joining fibre by fibre, particle by particle, with the frame of his death. All that was set and made to torture, he feels now passing into him.
Wood and iron and Jesus, in a passover into the joyful, dancing God, singing up his Creation.