Silent Night

I looked at the Pieta again. A small replica in white stone, chiselled almost to perfection. When I had seen the original, alien emotions had overtaken me and I unashamedly wept. Spires, stained glass windows and frescoes just lost all relevance for me then.

One is accustomed to seeing the Virgin Mother with a baby Jesus, but this one is with a dead Christ, an adult in the lap of a woman, who seems ageless. We know of the woman as nurturer, but here what could she nurture?

Is it possible to nurture another's death? Or to project one's life onto the dying? Isn't dying for the living a kind of life?

I still do not know why I cried. Today as I watch the statue I just experience a little pain...a pain I do not wish to explain even to myself.
- - -
They say this is the time for giving (forgiving?). It is easy. But accepting?

Accepting anything is always left to us. I accept gifts (material, emotional, intellectual) with grace and if I can I do try to return the gesture, but the returning is not a hisaab-kitaab thing. It is like being embraced...one's arms naturally encircle the one hugging you.

For me getting even disappointments and grief from those I care about are 'gifts', for they show me what I would have failed to see otherwise...

I accept...it is my acceptance of anything that enriches me.

By that same token, there are things I do not accept: gaalis, curses, innuendo. The people giving them to me remain burdened, for since I have not taken their 'gifts' to me, they stay with them. They will have to live with their own conclusions.

I do not become what they call me, I am not what they think me to be and I have not done what they assume I have done.
- - -
I looked at the Pieta again...