Gypsy's Gethsemane

For those who don't know, Gypsy sent me a copy of the Al Stewart song and I have to admit at first I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Having made a jump from from Agnotic to Evangelical Christian several years ago, my first knee-jerk was to stiffen. Was it a ridicule? No, she wouldn't hurt me that way. A statement then? A tribute? A Lament? Let me tell you a story as I ponder what the song means not only to me, but to Stewart and to Gypsy as well.

Ponce a wanna time I flounced my way to school dressed in a pleated wool skirt, resplendent with crisp white oxford shirt and smart navy blue weskit. Yes, there were saddle shoez and bobbie sox to complete *the look*, not to mention the pale yellow golf jacket. The stitching on a small emblem (a Sacred Heart of Jesus patch) sewn just over my own heart was cut neatly open at the top, the perfect *Lace-made* pocket to store loose change for lunch. (Money shielding my heart from Christs.. hmm..). I was glad, no ecstatic, for the uniform. The oldest of five girls raised by devout, albeit poor, Roman Catholic parents, it provided me a hiding place from the fashion show of the public school from which I had transferred in 7th grade. I was the only one in the *new school* that knew without it, my social status would have ranked somewhere between last and nonexistent amidst the public school's Bobbie Brooks. The pain of 6th grade's repetitive two or three outfits and one pair of shoes, noticed by girls dressed in fashionista splendor, can still embarrass me. To this day.

Once captured by Catholic acacemia, I seemed bound to it from high school through graduate school. To top things off, I found myself joining the professional work force of Catholic Social Services and a Jesuit University following graduation, in that order. But for all those religious affiliations, nevermind instructions, here is the curious part. I didn't *believe in Jesus*. I'm not talking about not believing that He was the Son of God, or that He performed miracles; rose from dead. I mean I didn't believe He existed at all. I thought He, like Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses, Abraham, all of them, were fictitious characters cast in a novel of superstitious Neanderathal proportions. Nice moral *figures* the Church used as examples, or threats depending on your viewpoint, to keep control of its masses.

The effect of this was a deep internalization of existential emptiness. Fear. Fear beyond fear. Fear beyond loneliness. The kind of fearliness that leaves you laying awake at 3 am with nothing but the ache of oblivion and the ringing of an ocean in your ears. Like listening into a large conch shell, with no soothing waves to lull you rolling in and out from the shore. (I prolly have tinnitus from piping all that blasting music directly into my eardrums, hence the ringing- to me it always sounded like an ocean nevertheless).

Study the *lives of the saints* at the feet of priests and nuns who paint themselves as superior and you'll understand how insignificant, inconsequentional and inadequate a soul can feel. Before I left the Church I made my way through the motions of Mass and Catholic life feeling like a part of the waking dead. Not quite *bad enough* to warrant eternal fires, not quite *good enough* to merit the heavenly realms Mother Teresa surely would. My soul just suspended on a thread, hovering over hell, with God tossing about the idea of cutting the string just as I was performing one sin of conseqence or another. Empty, frightened, alone, with a seashell's ring wafting through my soul on long sleepless nights.

Then Gypsy posted awhile back and I thought I recognized a flicker of my own pain. Awake at 4 am. The ticking of a clock. The silence of the night. Afraid to give in to death, afraid to keep on living to postpone the inevitable. I realized how long it had been since I felt that fearliness. And then I contemplated the reason it's gone. Gethsemane. Gethsemane and the Man who'd knelt there sweating blood as He prepared to sacrifice Himself for me had healed it. Soothed it like warm tea sliding down a sore throat. A soft blanket wrapped about me in a snuggly bed. A mother's arm around sobbing shoulders. And my heart ached not for me, but for Gypsy. The thought of her padding about her house, looking out black windows into a blacker night, wrenched me. *Gutted* as Neil says, I wanted to save her from it. What difference did it make that I've never met her face to face? That our lives have never touched physically and that I don't really *know* her? She is a person on this planet, with an angst I can vaguely remember. And that is enough. It wasn't until then I realized that the same Man who'd begged forehead to the ground at Gethsemane for a different outcome before dawn that night, knew how I'd felt staring at the ceiling in the darkness wondering where God was. And when He bled out on a cross with arms stretched wide before the next sunset, He felt the same way about me. About the soldiers that had nailed Him to it. About Gypsy. He wanted to pull me into Him and take away my pain. Her pain. I looked at Stewart's song again and saw it. The message. Stewart hated *religion* as much as I when I fled the Church to join the church. But he didn't lump Jesus into the hypocrites equation. He saw Him as standing apart, watching the circus.

So who is this Jesus? Apparently unlike what I'd been taught as a child. He's not accessible only through His mother. He's not judgmental like the two Christians I visited with last week. He does not stand on ceremony, is not impressed by fame, not foiled by evil, not touched by the death that used to send that cold existential sweep down my bed-ridden spine. When He wept it was in the context of relationship; grieved over the pain etched on the face of a friend, over the downfall of a city overcome by religion. He ate with sinners and loved the worst of the lot. He forgave me for not believing He could... love even me... that He would.

Perhaps it was Stewart who, escaping *Church*, described Him best. I wonder what it is that Gypsy sees in the words?

Oh I dodged the collection box choirboy and out
To the streets where the wind shook my hair with a shout
And the dusty-faced daisies were blowing about So freely
And Christ in the ruins was wandering again
As he walked with the beggars and talked to the lame
And danced with the children and sailors who came