Credo Quia

Not because it is the concluding, confounding chapter to the Greatest Story Ever Told, but because the story itself is unsatisfying in detail. It tells like an anecdote hastily recounted; not the things you say at the funeral but the stuff you say at the wake, the stories you tell at the airport bar the next day on your way home.

This is something that happened. Here’s some context. Then my friend, he said this. Then this thing happened. Now it’s over and I don’t know what it was supposed to mean. I have to run.

Joseph of Amimathea. In a proper story, well-told, Joseph of Arimathea would be the Roman Centurian whose daughter was healed, or the Rich Man who turned in sadness, away from the Needle’s Eye. You have to introduce the wealthy benefactor in the first act if you want to shoot him in the third act. Even Fortinbras gets name-checked throughout.

But no. Joseph of Armiathea just shows up. Like you do in real life. He might as well be the kindness of strangers.

This is a thing that happened. I don’t know what it means. It might be important, so listen closely.

In a way, I think we have not moved much from that spot. What we celebrate every Sunday is the mysterium fidei — not the thing we know; not the thing we understand. The thing that confounds us and makes us silent. We do not gather to commemorate the gravitational constant, the laws of supply and demand, the principle of noncontradiction. We understand these things, or if we do not, they are at least within the possibility of our comprehension. We do not need to keep doing them, over and over again for thousands of years.

It went like this: God Himself broke bread with man, and He poured out wine; and a little later, God’s own flesh was broken, and out poured blood. And somehow, those two events are connected. Are you paying attention? It went like this.

I sometimes think that every priest is blind. Every priest is an old man in a darkened room with a single stub of candle. Every supper is the same supper. Every supper is the last supper, the last thing that we will do before the universe ends and our particles are consumed by fire. Every priest is the last priest on a worn-out world, carrying forward in time this thing-we-know-not-what, the wheat and the grape that are the remains of when God became man and died.

gauche
01 Apr 10