Another Thomas, Another Wound
Two rivers I have crossed—
once as a child, and again tonight.
My lines of life on your dark hands;
the child is still an anchorite
in the desert behind your lachrymal glands.
Your shadow raised a cumulus claw;
the eye you raised has lingered since—
one reason why your body stays,
why man or babe, between
your thighs, became an apostle’s fingers.
Your desires divide and conquer you.
Rising—Christ shines
through the cobwebs you wear.
Clairvoyant, voyaging
under his thighs,
your finger-bones blossom under his hair.
From the myths of the Middle East I construct my own myth. What Marduk did, and what Jesus endured, are epiphanies of what I am in relation to woman—epiphanies of what drives me, inhibits me, afflicts me, when it comes to spending a night, or a lifetime, with a woman.
Like all peoples, the Babylonians told a story of origins. It is a long story, its crisis and climax arriving when the gods felt threatened—whether truly or in imagination—by Tiamat, the chaos monster. Alarmed by her primal, frightful will to dominion, they gathered in council and chose Marduk, their city god, to go against her.
And so, across the Abyss, the battle raged—overwhelming against overwhelming:
male against female,
conscious against unconscious,
cosmic against chaotic.
Tiamat—the many-headed, many-fanged, vast She-shape of the Abyss—was slain. In triumph, Marduk split her in two: from her belly, the earth; from her back, the sky.
But there is a law of return. The wounds inflicted on Tiamat did not vanish. Suppressed, they remained alive in the world’s unconscious. And so the world was troubled. Temples and empires shook with bad dreams, and there was no Daniel or Joseph to interpret them.
As the Psalmist cries:
O God, thou hast cast us off,
thou hast scattered us,
thou hast been displeased—
O turn thyself to us again.
Thou hast made the earth to tremble,
thou hast broken it;
heal the breaches thereof,
for it shaketh.
Thou hast shewed thy people hard things;
thou hast made us to drink
the wine of astonishment.
On Good Friday, a frightful thing happened.
The wounds we inflicted on Tiamat in the beginning—long buried in the depths of the human story—rose to the surface in Jesus. All that day, they gaped at us.
For two thousand years, they have gaped at us still.
We call them spike wounds and a lance wound, and so we deny them.
And as long as we deny them, they will continue to gape.
Stigmatized by them, Christ endured them—
in his depths,
in his body.
He died of them.
Yet he was the first to hear her:
Tiamat, singing in the Abyss.
Singing, she rolls.
Singing, she sounds.
Singing, she gives suck
to six marvellous mornings.
Yes—
we have a new past to emerge from.
Tiamat sings the whale-song,
and at last we may open
our old Esagila doors to it.
With Jesus begins the sanctity
of inclusion and integration.
We have a healed past
to emerge with.
- John Moriarty
Image: Winfield Bevins (Stations of the Cross)
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