Gospel & Universe 🪐 The Priest’s Dilemma
Que Sais-je?
What We Knew
Jean-Luc resigned himself to the fact that there was more than one creation and more than one resurrection. He was tired of pretending that he was some sort of starship captain in a TV show, who evangelized among the aliens, telling them that his little planet had drafted a Prime Directive, a Great Code that everyone in the universe should believe.
In the beginning of time and space there was a spark, an explosion of light.
In the beginning of life there was water and cells
and movement and bodies that eventually swam in the water and crawled up onto earth
and flew into the skies like finches documented in the holy book about the origin of species;
an Alpha without an Omega. But it was also a work of devotion and truth.
In the beginning of civilization there was a hammer that fell onto a stylus
that pressed itself into the clay of another holy book,
read by George Smith in 1872: the cuneiform account of The Flood,
read to a convocation of educated birds who witnessed, but may not have understood the implications, of this resurrection of clay tablets that were extant,
like the stele of Hammurabi’s code in the Louvre that were proof, albeit truth of an infuriating Modern sort, read aloud in London in 1872, anno horribilus, that told us
vi. for the last two thousand years we only knew half of what happened, that is, since humans have written down what they knew
What I Know
i.
I know that beginnings are slippery things, ever since that fateful day in the Garden of Eden or Dilmun (what does it matter?), that symbolic Garden (the Hebrew story no more and no less convincing than the Sumerian) where Enkidu was created by the gods and lived as one with nature.
Like Adam, Enkidu was tempted — but in this version he was tempted by the harlot Shamhat to enter the bronze city of Uruk, where he learned to drink and copulate, and where he lost forever his contact with the wild beasts of forest and hill.
The Fall
ii.
And I know that the ideas of Moses aren’t as original as they once seemed, and that the Bible is adrift in seems.
I know that the Bible comes from the strangest of places, from the Queen of the Deep, Ereshkigal, and from the temple of Ishtar, and that this God who commanded total allegiance wasn’t the only one to do so. Aten, Marduk, Ahura Mazda, all commanded total allegiance, and in their day were more powerful than Yahweh.
Across the hills of the Holy Land, beyond Jericho and Jerusalem, was another Holy Land, populated by stranger gods: the holy trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva,
and beyond that the Holy Ghost spread its wings and became Brahman, transcending even the gods, who themselves pointed to that great beyond, to the peak of Kailasa where Shiva created universes and destroyed them,
and to Buddha's distant shore, beyond which the Absolute, iconoclastic beyond any recognizable belief,
and astride that the Dao, intangible to words, and
iii.
I know there were twelve tribes, and there were twelve thousand tribes. I know that their particular version of God was a reaction, like Al-lah, to the evils of Ba’al and Al-lat or whoever the God was of the enemy of the time, and
iv.
I can’t help noticing that this jealous God of mine had the temper of Enlil, who smote the world with thunder and alluvial flood-plains of rain,
until some kinder God took pity, Ea, the god of sweet waters, friend to humankind,
and in went the animals, two by two, and
v.
I know that many of the great Jewish ideas came down to us through the idolatries of the Babylonians. Strewn in sacrificial blood and taint, they stretched way back; even the laws — an eye for an eye; so many shekels — were old as that sacrificial goat Hammurabi, and before him, Ur- Nammu.
I know that Moses wasn’t the first to imagine an ark or a tyrant like Gilgamesh.
Eucharistia
These things don’t destroy my faith because I never believed in the literal meanings. I see the things that aren't there in the things that are: bread is the blood of Christ, and also the baguette I slather with pâté and eat with wine, dark as Enkidu's blood, for lunch.
I know that the secret of eternal life was stolen by the snake long before Eden, but that even now the serpent slithers up the apple tree or snakes its way to the bottom of a river.
Now and 5000 years ago; it snatches life from the grasp of Gilgamesh, just as it snatched eternity from beneath our very noses.
Rhein gold and Gollum, just as then in the land of Sumer that brought the Fall, and
vi.
Eventually, inevitably, perhaps by pure chance, three thousand years later
love broke out from the hardened clay into a real life
(or a metaphoric life, I don't have a clue: 40 or 40 million years in the desert, what does it matter?)
until through the thorns and the blood and the overturned tablets and the shattered commandments & the laws
forgiveness broke through
forgiveness tangible, not some far-off story of a legendary god,
but a human birth in the womb of a lady of immaculate worth
Yet the human god was misunderstood: everyone thought He was bringing vengeance, political revolt, or a new set of laws, equally complicated contradictions to the existing laws, when in fact (or in fiction, what does it matter?) He brought light.
He brought freedom from the logic of hatred. He brought the rapture of the self exploding in a million stars. He brought only light in the face of all that darkness, in the place of all that death. He brought light into the darkest chambers of Ereshkigal’s gloom. He brought life to the dead corpse, to the dry dust, to what we all become: bodies floating down the Euphrates.
He brought hope to the despair of Gilgamesh, and to the existentialist pain that ends only and always in the boat of Magilum, no grimmer than, for this boat has no Charon, no Urshanabi to guide us back to Eden or Dilmun (what does it matter?) because for Gilgamesh there was no other side
There was only six fathoms deep, after the exploits, after the defeat of Humbaba with Shamash and Enkidu by his side, there was no more by his side, only the swirling depth of the Euphrates, six fathoms deep. The Boat of Magilum.
All that was left was Gilgamesh’s great pain at the loss of his friend Enkidu; Gilgamesh's great despair, his matted hair, as he roamed the forest, his third millennium selva oscura, like a wild beast of the forest and hill, the great king of kings, this Ozymandias with his sneer of cold command trapped in his own powerful ego.
Even to him Jesus brought release.
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