Jesus goes to church

   ... I enter the Church of the Atonement and find myself awash in visual/auditory/sensory experiences of Word and Spirit. Yet there is also a light-heartedness that inhabits the boundaries, as if Christ had wandered in with some curious street people, wondering what all the fuss was about. “Is that me they’re talking about?” he wonders, and nods approvingly at the exertions of the bell-ringers. He looks around and sees the people ill-equipped to scale the smoke-shrouded slope of Mount Sinai, with the earth’s crust shaking and cracking under their feet, and the wild Law-Giver spitting out commandments like molten pebbles from an outraged volcano. Ready or not, everyone is Moses here.

And so Jesus volunteers to serve as tour-guide, as Sherpa, as expert on volcanoes who will take them to the fiery rim where they might safely view the face of God.

This Is My Body, cries the presiding priest, oblivious to the continuous clamor of the tower bells, and at once the streaming lava and the Precious Blood are one, the absent Father and the beaming tour-guide are one, the Spirit breaks loose and zooms around, and the Holy Trinity is/are all right there in one place, dancing a three-step around the crowded sanctuary.

Shreds of Spirit swoop away on tangents, spun off by force so centrifugal as to defy measurement. Strands of Spirit trail behind, whisps of Ruah,transparent in their orbit, a reverse tornado of sacred breath, encircling the round host, the round world, the curved universe, the curved and holy Trinity, still dancing, still circling, still Three.

The bells fall silent, and the spinning Spirit settles down, like a wide-winged bird settling upon its high nest. The shuffling communicants return from their pilgrimage to the volcano’s edge. Jesus wanders back out onto the street. The world rearranges itself into orderly sequences and rows. We arise, once again to the insistent throbbing of the bells. The Trinity recedes into the walls and floor, assuming its familiar, flat, doctrinal form. We walk unknowing on the Word, and, unthinking, breathe the incense-flavored Spirit while the Father/Yahweh retreats the furthest, where no words, however wise, can go.