Cross Roads Read online

  “So, how long have you lived here?”

  “Forty-some years, give ’r take. A lifetime, some would say. Barely a drop, really.”

  “No kidding,” retorted Tony, shaking his head, the tone of his voice disingenuous and tinged with superiority. What crazy person would choose to live in this wilderness for forty years? He’d go stir-crazy in forty hours, let alone forty years.

  Trying not to be obvious, Tony glanced sideways at the stranger, who either didn’t notice or simply didn’t care. Tony already liked him. He seemed to be one of those rare people who felt completely comfortable inside their own skin, and at peace with everything around him. There was no detectable agenda, no sense of someone looking for an advantage or angle like most everyone else he knew. Maybe content was the word, not that anyone in his or her right mind could ever be content out here in this loneliness. To Tony, contentment and boredom were synonyms. Maybe the guy was just ignorant, didn’t know better, untraveled and uneducated. But here he was, an unexpected element inside some projection of Tony’s subconscious. He must mean something.

  “So tell me, if you would, who are you?” It was the obvious question.

  The man deliberately turned to face him, and Tony found himself looking into those incredibly penetrating eyes. “Tony, I am the one your mother told you would never stop holding on to you.”

  It took a moment for the answer to register, and Tony took a step back. “Jesus? You? Are you the Jesus?”

  The man said nothing, only returning his gaze until Tony looked down at the dirt in order to focus, and then suddenly it made sense. Of course it was Jesus! He had written his name on the list. Who better to conjure up in a drug-induced comatose state than Jesus, the archetype of all archetypes, an imagination buried in the deepest recesses of his neural network? And here he stood, a neurological projection that had no actual existence and no real substance.

  He looked up just as the stranger cracked him across the face with an open hand, hard enough to sting but not hard enough to leave a mark. Tony was stunned and instantly felt anger surface.

  “Just helping you perceive how active your imagination really is.” The man laughed, his eyes still kind and gentle. “It is amazing how a projection with no actual existence or real substance can pack a wallop, eh?”

  If anyone else had been present, Tony would have been embarrassed and furious. But he was more startled and surprised than anything. “Perfect!” he announced after collecting his thoughts. “See, that’s proof right there! The real Jesus would never slap anyone,” he claimed.

  “And you know this how, exactly? From personal experience?” The Jesus person was grinning, enjoying himself. “Keep in mind, Tony, you have convinced yourself that I am a Jesus generated by a drug-addled subconscious. You yourself introduced this dilemma. Either I am who I say I am, or you believe deep down inside in a Jesus who would slap a person across the face. Which is it?”

  He stood there, this Jesus guy, arms folded, watching Tony struggle with the logic. Finally, Tony looked up again, and answered, “Then I guess I must actually believe that Jesus is a person who would slap me across the face.”

  “Ha! Good for you! Dead people do bleed!” Jesus laughed and put his arm around Tony’s shoulder. “At least you try and remain consistent with your assumptions, even when they aren’t true and regardless of the difficulty they add to your life. Hard way to live, but understandable.”

  Tony shrugged and laughed along, thoroughly mystified by the reference to bleeding dead people. As if they both knew their destination, they together descended the steps and began walking up a hill toward a distant grove of trees. From below, these appeared to be congregated at the highest point of the property, nestled into the gray stone wall somewhere near but above where he had first encountered Jack. From that vantage point it was likely that one could see the entire enclosure and perhaps even over the far walls and into the valley beyond. As they walked Tony continued to ask questions, the businessman in him puzzled.

  “Forty-some years and this place looks pretty tired and broken. No offense, but is this all you’ve managed in all that time?” If he had intended to mask his insinuation, he was unsuccessful. Instead of reacting, the Jesus-man absorbed the implication.

  “You might be right. Guess I’m not too good at this. This place is only a shadow now of what it once was in its beginning. At one time it was all a wild and magnificent garden, open, lovely, and free.”

  “I didn’t mean to sound…,” Tony began apologetically, but Jesus waved it off with a grin. “It just doesn’t look much like a garden,” Tony offered.

  “Yeah, work in progress,” Jesus sighed, a sound both resigned and determined.

  “Looks to me like an uphill battle,” Tony added, trying not to be too negative. He couldn’t help himself; it was an old habit, finding a way to gain the superior position in conversations.

  “It might take some time, but I don’t lose,” came the unruffled reply.

  “I certainly don’t mean to be rude, but don’t you think this project is taking way too long? There’s a lot you could do to clear the land, plant it, fertilize it, see it grow. I think it has potential. A few professionals with the right tools could come in here and make rather short work of it. Couple bulldozers? I noticed a few places where the walls are starting to crumble and deteriorate. You could get an engineer and an architect in here and stonemasons could get this place shipshape in about six months, and that would include a crew to tear down and rebuild your house, too.”

  “This, Tony, is a living land, not a construction site. This is real and breathing, not a fabrication that can be bullied into being. When you choose technique over relationship and process, when you try and shortcut the speed of growing awareness and force understanding and maturity before its time, this”—he pointed down and over the length and width of the property—“this is what you become.”

  Tony couldn’t tell if Jesus was using the editorial inclusive “you” or the “you” that meant him. In case he was talking about him, he didn’t ask.

  “We are only able,” Jesus continued, “to move at the speed and in the direction the land itself allows. One must relate to it with honor and reverence and let the land speak its own heart. Then, out of respect we must choose to submit to its idea of ‘real’ and still remain ones who love it toward the true, without faltering, regardless of the cost. To not live for the land in this way is to join its aggressors, ravagers, users, and benefactors, and then all hope for its healing would be lost.”

  “Sir.” Tony was growing a little perturbed as he tried again to grasp what he was hearing. “You’re talking in metaphor, and I’m losing you somewhere in the translation. You are referring to this land as if it were personal, like someone that you know and love. How can that be, when it’s just dirt and rocks and hills, wildflowers, weeds, and water and stuff.”

  “And that,” Jesus said as he touched Tony on the shoulder and squeezed gently, “is exactly why you cannot understand what I am saying. I have not used a metaphor once, while you have done so many times. Because you continue to inhabit and believe your metaphors, you cannot see what is true.”

  Tony stopped on the trail, raised his hands up as if taking in the expanse of the place, and dramatically announced to make his point, “But it’s just dirt! It’s not a living person. It’s dirt!”

  “Ah, Tony, you already said it yourself… from dust to dust. Dirt!”

  This was the connection he had been missing! The very idea was a shock, staggering in its implications. He looked up into those eyes again and found the words, afraid of what he was about to suggest. “Are you telling me that all of this, and not just what I saw inside the walls but everything outside as well, all of this is a living being?”

  The Jesus-man did not waver in his gaze. “I am telling you much more than that, Tony. I am telling you that this living being… is you!”

  “Me? No, that can’t be true. That’s impossible. It can’t be!” He
felt crushed beneath an invisible fist that hammered him in the stomach. He turned, staggering a few steps away, looking back and out. In an instant, his vision had changed, his eyes had opened, but now he desperately did not want to see through them. He had already judged this place from a superior position of aloof noninvolvement, and declared it a no-man’s-land of loss, a scrap heap not worth saving. That was his assessment. He was being polite and trying to be encouraging, but it hadn’t reflected at all what he really felt about this place. He would level everything that lived, bury it under asphalt, and then replace it with concrete and steel. It was ugly and without value, worthy only of destruction.

  Tony dropped to his knees and covered his eyes with his hands as if to conjure new lies to conceal the gaping emptiness left by the absence of the old ones, or secure a new delusion that might offer refuge, protection, and comfort. But once you “see,” you can’t “un-see.” Honesty compelled him to rip his hands from his face; clarity demanded a hearing. He looked again and this time looked deep. He found nothing he admired or felt affection toward. This place was a shattered waste, a complete and utter loss, a sad blemish in an otherwise potentially appealing world. Were this truly him, his own heart, he was a staggering disappointment, at best. At worst, he hated everything about himself.

  Crying was a weakness that Tony detested, an activity he had vowed as a boy never again to indulge in. But now he couldn’t help himself. The weeping became a sob. A dam, years in the making, broke, and he felt utterly helpless in the onslaught. He couldn’t tell if his emotions were causing him to shake and tremble or whether the earth was literally quaking beneath him.

  “It can’t be true, it just can’t be,” he bawled, trying not to look at this Jesus-man. Then came the unexpected cry from somewhere deep within him, “I don’t want this to be true!” He begged, “Please, tell me it isn’t true. Is this all I am, a sick and pitiful waste of a human being? Is this all my life is? Am I ugly and disgusting? Please, tell me it isn’t true.”

  Waves of self-pity and self-loathing pounded him until he felt the fabric of his soul was going to tear apart at its seams. A shock wave knocked him off his knees and slammed him to the ground. The Jesus-man knelt down and held him, letting him wail in his arms, strong enough to keep unbearable pain and loss inside a grasp of tender kindness. It felt as if the only thing holding him in one piece was the presence of this man.

  Caught in an emotional hurricane, Tony felt his mind tearing from its moorings; everything he had considered real and right was now turning to dust and ashes. But then, like a bolt of light, the opposite presented itself: What if he were actually finding his mind, his heart, his soul? He shut his eyes tight and sobbed, wanting to never open them again, to never again see the shame of what he was, what he had become.

  The Jesus-man understood and pressed Tony’s weeping and snot-smeared face into his shoulder. As one wave of emotion would ease, a new upswelling would pummel him and he was washed away again, the pressure at times so intense he thought he was turning inside out. Surge after surge, years of buried emotions, waiting for jubilee, expressed, finally voiced.

  Slowly the onslaught hesitated, then subsided and finally receded. A quiet descended, occasionally interspersed with short spasms that rocked him. All the while he was held by this Jesus person who wouldn’t let go. Finally, when calm fully settled, the man spoke.

  5

  AND THEN THERE WAS ONE

  Pain may well remind us that we are alive, but love reminds us why we are alive.

  —Trystan Owain Hughes

  Listen to my voice, Tony.” Jesus was again stroking his hair, as he would a child, a son. “Every human being is a universe within themselves. Your mother and father participated with God to create a soul who would never cease to exist. Your parents, as cocreators, supplied the stuff, genetics and more, uniquely combined to form a masterpiece, not flawless but still astounding; and we took from their hands what they brought to us, submitting to their timing and history and added what only we could bring to them—life. You were conceived, a living wonder who exploded into being, a universe within a multiverse, not isolated and disconnected, but entangled and designed for community, even as God is community.”

  “Ha! Living wonder?” Tony sniffled, limp from the exertion of fighting the flood. He thought the tears had drained, his reservoir empty, but a few more presented themselves at the thought, running down and trickling off his chin. “I’m not.”

  “For there to be an ‘I am not,’ there must first be an ‘I am,’ ” Jesus encouraged. “Image and appearance tell you little. The inside is bigger than the outside when you have the eyes to see.”

  “I’m not sure I want to see, or know,” mumbled Tony. “It hurts too much. Anyway, I don’t believe any of this, including you, is real. And yet I still feel so ashamed. I would rather go back to my blindness, to not seeing.”

  “The hurt is real, and true. Trust me, Tony. Transformation without work and pain, without suffering, without a sense of loss is just an illusion of true change.”

  “I hate it,” declared Tony, another but brief spasm racking his body. “I can’t do this. And trust? That’s not a word I’ve had in my vocabulary. Trust is not my thing.”

  “That’s for sure,” Jesus said and chuckled. “But it is my thing!”

  Tony still had not moved or opened his eyes, his head down and resting on the chest of this man. He felt stupid and vulnerable, but he didn’t want to move.

  “I don’t know what to do,” confessed Tony. “Can I tell you who I miss most right now?” Tony opened his eyes and took a deep breath. “I really miss my mom.” From somewhere Jesus produced a folded red handkerchief, which Tony gratefully accepted and blew his nose.

  “Tony, your mother was the last person you trusted. You can’t do any of this on your own or even on your own terms. You were created by a community to exist in community, made in the image of a God who has never known anything except community.”

  “God, a community?”

  “Always. I told you I have never been alone. I’ve never done anything by myself. Relationship is at the very heart of who I am.”

  “I never understood any of that.”

  “No worries. It was not meant to be understood. It was meant to be experienced.”

  Tony took another deep breath. “So, what happened to me? If this place is really me, how did I end up a lifeless and devastated wasteland?”

  “From your point of view, you would say that ‘life’ happened to you: big and little losses inside the everyday; the accumulation and embracing of lies and betrayals; the absence of parents when you needed them; the failure of systems; the choices to protect yourself, which, while keeping you alive, also inhibited your ability to be open to the very things that would heal your heart.”

  “And from your perspective?”

  “From my perspective, it was death not life, an unreality you were never designed for. It was un-love, un-light, un-truth, un-freedom… It was death.”

  “So, am I dying? Is that why all this is happening?”

  “Son, you have been dying since the day you were conceived. And even though death is a monstrous evil, human beings have imagined it into something much more powerful than it deserves, than it actually is, as if light were casting death’s shadows in horrific proportions onto the backdrop of your existence and now you are terrified by even the shadow of death.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a conversation with many layers, much of it not for today. For now, understand that a significant reason why you fear death is because of your atrophied and minuscule perception of life. The immensity and grandeur of life continually absorb and eradicate death’s power and presence. You believe death is the end, an event causing a cessation of things that truly matter, and therefore it becomes the great wall, the inevitable inhibitor of joy, love, and relationship. You see death as the last word, the final separation.

  “The truth is,” he continue
d, “death has only been a shadow of those things. What you call death is indeed a separation of sorts, but not anything like you imagine it. You have focused yourself and defined your existence with reference to the fear of that singular last-breath event rather than recognizing death’s ubiquitous presence all around you—in your words, your touch, your choices, your sorrows, your unbelief, your lies, your judgment, your unforgiveness, your prejudices, your power-seeking, your betrayals, your hiding. The ‘event’ of death is only one small expression of that presence, but you have made that expression everything, not realizing that you swim in death’s ocean every single day.

  “Tony, you were not designed for death, but neither was death intended for this universe. Inherent in the event of death is a promise, a baptism in this ocean that rescues, not drowns. Human beings uncreated life and brought that un-life into your experience, so out of respect for you, we wove it from the beginning into the larger tapestry. You now experience this underlying tension between life and death every day until you are released through the event of death, but you were designed to deal with its encroachment in community, inside relationship, not in self-centered isolation like your little place here.”

  “And all those paths, the many trails leaving here?”

  “Tony, they originated here, inside all this damage. No one is coming. They all left.”

  For a moment grief rose like a stalking predator but as quickly vanished. He decided to acknowledge what he was thinking. “I sent them away, didn’t I? They didn’t just leave.”

  “When you don’t deal with death, Tony, everyone in your world becomes either a catalyst for pain or dead to you. Sometimes it’s easier to bury them somewhere on your property than to simply send them away.”