Celestial Music

A Reflection on Golgotha and the Child 

 . . . when you love the world, you hear celestial music.  Louise Gluck

There is a question you want to ask that comes around again
like a leitmotif in a musical composition – paused
as if leaving space for a response from within your living –
a ball of yarn unwinding nearer the end.
Were there any children at Golgotha?
Surely, mind insists, there was a ragamuffin child or two
running about in the place of skulls, weaving in and out
among the crosses, feet dusted with earth, hair hanging in
strands of uncaring, eyes fixed in a stare beyond hope
of being lifted, carried to a safe place.

Scripture doesn’t tell us all – so much is left out
including most of Jesus’ childhood
but we know he loved the world created by God in all its wonder,
and he learned to pray – first at home and then at synagogue
by praying the Psalms, ancient Israel’s Hymnbook.

There is an image that compels you:  a child
who greets and welcomes you morning after morning,
but there is another image that interrupts –
Should your bright little soul not have learned by now
that the world you love brims with terror and tears?

Tears! yes, which water the question of what is happening
on a hill just outside Jerusalem city walls
a place open to all including children passing by.
Surely it is just a nightmare before dawn and you will waken
fresh as a flower, petals lifting in the wind passing through.

But wait . . . there is more to tell –
There has been a trial under cover of night, a skirmish, an arrest –
scourging . . .
an anxious man in an important chair has asked a question
of the Man-Chlld no longer depending on language –
trusting – letting be unto silence unfolding to truth
and your heart is opened to the reality before you –
the forsakenness cried out in words he remembers from a Psalm
that tells the suffering and the Covenant promise continuing
beyond desolation –
the great throbbing heart of love – creation’s celestial thrumming
beyond death’s passing –  flowing beyond the ending of the Psalm
his mother taught him when he was a child.

Margie Dimoplon

Note:  With gratitude to Bibliographic sources:  Entering the Passion of Jesus, Amy-Jill Levine, Jewish Scholar/Historian; The Mystery of the Child, Martin Marty; The Book of Psalms, Psalm 22.