Innerstellar Arcadia

Returning year after year to the Lord’s feasts, I find this one refuses ending. The Octave of Easter is a wound that never seals: eight days, one opened side in time, and every Alleluia puts its finger back into the unfinished quarrel between Your claim and my refusal. First day: You come through the shut room. Not memory. Not emblem. The latch stays fast; still the air gives way. Peace, You say, and the word does not soothe — it opens. I am not ready for a mercy that keeps its scars. Second day, third: the bells go on striking the side of morning. White upon white. Linen. Candle. Breath on the altar. I keep wanting grief back in its grave-clothes, a manageable absence, a God who stays where I laid Him. But You stand where fear has bolted the inward doors. Fourth day: I call it doubt because doubt sounds cleaner than self-defense. But Thomas is not behind me in the Gospel. He is the locked bone of my own hand. If You are risen, then all I have arranged around delay, around prudent sor...

Praise curdles in my mouth, Risen Christ. I taste it turning — milk to gall, hymn to a blade — because you stand radiant above a world still wet with cruelty, and all your dawn, for all its white fire, still smells of burial spices. I do not know whether to bless you or strike your name against the stone again. My throat is a narrow room. My tongue drags myrrh and iron. Below your lifted hands the murdered keep happening. The earth does not close. The blood does not finish speaking. What am I praising when the flies still choose the wounds of children, when grief goes on kneeling in the road with its raw mouth open? Yet you do not step back. You stand there with death’s perfume clinging to the seams of light, with the tomb not washed from you, with the nails still burning like small suns through the wrists. You are not clean of it. That is what undoes me. You have not come back sweet. You have come back scented with the place they laid you, aloes, myrrh, the shut rock, the dark linen, ...

O Christ of the hidden fire, Lamb of God, pierced yet radiant — I enter the shadow of Your Passion, where love was stretched upon wood and Light was veiled in blood. Lord Jesus, You walked willingly into suffering, not as one overcome, but as one who gave Himself — a living offering, a conscious descent. You carried the weight of the world’s forgetting, the blindness of hearts, the fracture of souls exiled from their own Light. And still — you did not turn away. Teach me to behold this mystery rightly. Not only the pain — but the meaning within the pain. Not only the cross — but the fire hidden inside it. For Your Passion is not defeat, but revelation: that Love, when pressed to its limit, does not break — it becomes eternal. O Crucified One, when You were lifted between heaven and earth, You became the bridge between them — the meeting place of wound and glory, of death and awakening. Let me not look away. When I see Your wounds, let me remember my own — not as shame, but as places wh...