Holy Words

This piece was published in the now defunct Fiction at Work in 2011.

Holy Words

I have read these words before.  A mythology posing as liturgy.  Some things seemed restrictive, others simply inexplicable, and He... He seemed to be the greatest rule monger of them all.  But there was that one image that stood above all others.  It haunted me.  I could see it stand starkly against the circle of the sun, forming a window into some unfathomable mystery.  I would describe it as the scarecrow of calvary, terrifying men into sanctimonious sanctity, or alternately I would make deification into a sin worthy of forgiveness.  Who better, though, to forgive that sin than He Himself.  And I read these words, and they seemed a bleak house, a terrible damnation built in the clouded eyes of bald-robed hermits who drank deserts like salted cacophony, their cauterized cognition vaulted by hollow-toned stone cathedrals with devil vermin falling like waves off the bells.  And I hated these words.  And I hated His message.  And I hated His followers. And I hated Him.  And I wished to humiliate Him, to overpower Him, to destroy Him.  But I loved Him, too.  And now I find that these words have humiliated me, overpowered me, and destroyed me, because He did so.  For they were no words to read until they attuned to the living word that comes dwelling in me, just broken shells devoid of glory.