Via Dolorosa

This is the Via Dolorosa I saw.

I. In the courtyard of a Muslim school, a judgment is handed out. Release this depraved killer, or this crazed mystic? Pontius Pilate performs ablutions and thinks this story won't last much longer; he doesn't understand why the mob's so bloodthirsty as to free a murderer, but he knows it'd be dangerous to deny them. Besides, he didn't hear anyone speaking up for the mystic. Just a small group of people crying. They also know it'd be dangerous, and they know he... He... doesn't want them hurt. So Jesus is condemned -- doesn't even try and defend himself -- in a school, blatantly guilty of being a deviation in the paradigm. Miracles on the Shabbath? Blessed are the meek? The whole kingdom of the Most High God in the seed of a mustard plant, a weed? If we teach our children that, logic will eat them alive.

II. So the Mossad agents lead him across the street. There's evidence he's connected to some escaped Nazis -- dared to offer them redemption -- so it's time for a good old-fashioned scourging, but just 39 lashes, since 40 is considered lethal and they want him alive... they want names. But all he screams are the Names of G-D, and that never holds up in court because it's impossible to extridite divinities. So they put a bag over his head, a flak jacket on his chest (to keep some jackass from a mercy killing before he can be made an example), and put the cross on his shoulder. He takes it like he's been waiting for it, and the agents curse themselves because it's hard to break a masochist.

III. But it's a real cry of pain when his knees buckle and he drops to the street. The guards have come to hate that sound. Pathetic. Usually they get the inmate within sight of the table before he begins blubbering like a baby. Life isn't fair, boy. Touch luck. Got caught with a dangerous opiate/hallucinogen/upper and had so much the cops didn't even bother asking if he had intent to distribute. Deal with it. Suck it up and carry yourself with pride at least. But he doesn't. He manages to stagger to his feet and carry himself... but not with pride.

IV. Burned in from overuse, she can remember exactly the last time she saw him before they snatched him and he disappeared. His friends told her what happened. She remembers how scared he was, yet how determined. And as gut-wrenching as that time was, she wants to remember him that way, the way he was before he vanished into Guantanamo. Because she looks at him now and her words and his words seem so far away and she can't remember them exactly because inside she's screaming over and over again, "What have they done to my son?!" She wants to remember him right but his face is so bruised he doesn't look human, and her tears make it hard to see; so she blinks her eyes but the guards have already taken him away. She wants to scream out "Just give them what they want!" But she knows what he'd say, a little afraid but determined: "But Mom... I am."

V. They took him to the right, back onto Via Dolorosa from al-Wad Road. Not sure if Simon Cyrene ran into it all on his own accord or if the Klansmen grabbed him. Records are scarce and Simon was probably illiterate, so we have only secondary sources: a handful of writings and an eerie postcard of the end result. Either way, Simon carried the cross about 50 meters at most. Not sure if Jesus tried to help him or if he was "occupied" by the Klansmen, but I wouldn't call this much of a break for him. Besides, if he looked like he was regaining his strength, they would have put the cross on him again. The only record that later mentions Simon still doesn't explain if his help was voluntary, but his grandson records him as saying "We're all carryin' crosses anyhow."

VI. She'd been standing by the column, bracing against it so the crowd wouldn't push her away. This was crazy. She didn't go to medical school for this. She didn't sell her soul for school loans so she could watch helplessly as the Hutus drove this Tutsi man like he were cattle. And for what? Racial purity? She'd been here God knows how long and she still couldn't tell the difference except one group was killing the other. Killing and humiliating: rapes, mutilations, and now this. Every time he stumbled into the crowd they beat him mercilessly. He couldn't see for the blood in his eyes. And here she stood, feeling like an idiot and hating herself and thinking of what her mother would say. She wrings the handkerchief, her stomach twisting up more. She's with Doctors Without Borders. They can't touch her, right? She's politically neutral. But is anyone going to ask for her badge before she gets a machete in the face, or worse? If she had a syringe of morphine, she'd dope this guy up so much he'd think he's in Heaven. If she had a pistol, she'd put him out of his misery. But no. Little Miss Veronica has a handkerchief. She busts through the crowd and wipes his face before anyone has any idea what she's doing. They hurl her into the dirt and kick at her. She covers her head, screaming, and instinctively locks her legs tight because she's had nightmares about the stories she's heard. But the crowd passes on. She looks at the handkerchief and sees a face of blood and she thinks about medical school and the only thing that got her through opening up corpses: this is all of us; we're the same blood, breath, and bone; this is all of us.

VII. The intersection with Khan al-Zeit used to be a gate to the countryside, but now it's a flexing, thrashing arm of the market. The legionnaires shout for people to move out of the way, but no one here speaks ancient Latin anymore, and it's hard to scare people by waving a gladius around when everyone has seen 18-year-old soldiers with assault rifles. So no one was real surprised when a kid with a cart skidded past, jolting the cross, which drove the crown of thorns in deeper. He fell. Shopkeepers first started yelling that the Romans were clogging up the street, then they quickly began to implore the mob to look at their goods while they had such a captive audience. Two icons and a rug were soon sold. A Roman traded his gladius for a knockoff Japanese sword (the gladius was sold minutes later), while the rest of his platoon were trying to figure out where the gate was. Finally the captain got the attention of a young Arab boy and made a "V" with one hand and held up three fingers with the other. The boy pointed down Aqabat al-Khanqa and offered to guide them for just one dollar. The Romans shoved him aside and got their prisoner to his feet, leading him along.

VIII. There was a fortune to be had in Jerusalem. And, yes, the Holy Land needed cleansing. But when a man is driven mad by the sun, malnutrition, and disease -- and priests, equally mad -- he has difficulty seeing the difference. Fortune and purification. But this had to be done right the first time because not a one of them wanted to come back to this God-forsaken place (though they might send and errant son or two to make a man out of him). And that's exactly how it was done: in order to really secure the fortune, heirs had to be dealt with. They caught up to one they'd wounded, and he was shouting to two women: "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, weep rather for yourselves and your children." They overtook him and charged the women. One man, a toothless squire who used to be something of a mason, actually stopped on the spot and chiseled a Crusader cross into the wall, shouted "For Jesu!," and hurried to catch up with his lord who'd got ahold of one of the women. A precision strike in a densely populated neighborhood had become a massacre.

IX. Back to Khan al-Zeit, up some stairs above the market, and down the street to the three Coptic churches. In Queen Helen's Church (named for Constantine's mother, who made it a point to go around finding Christian relics), there is a cistern in the basement: narrow stairs with a low overhang which open up to a cavernous room, the stairs going down into the murky water. I sat down on the stairs, listening to the dripping. The sign outside said to try singing a hymn because of the long echo, so I hummed "Amazing Grace." I don't think I had the verses in the right order, and I don't really care, because I prefer to end with my favorite: "Through many dangers, toils, and snares I have already come. / T'was grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home." Halfway through the verse I heard a man call down the tunnel. I thought he'd hear my humming, but he turned out the lights. Pitch black and the sound of water. I smiled and sang the end of the verse -- "And grace will lead me home" -- because I'd walked the Buda Labyrinth and I was alone with the dark, Echo singing back to me. I could have happily sat there for hours. Nearby, Jesus fell a third time, and if there's a sliver of mercy in the world, he passed out and dreamt he was beside me, in the echoing dark that is at once intimate and transcendent. But the Via Dolorosa isn't over yet. I turned on my flashlight, smiled, turned it off, and felt my way out, back into the light of day.

X. Down through the Ethiopian church, and take a right through massive doors into a place of lanterns, paintings, and tourists. They strip him bare to humiliate him in front of the crowd; he probably doesn't notice. Then they gamble over the soiled cloth as a memento because most of us are floating somewhere between numbness and horror. If he has any comfort left, it comes solely from within.

XI. They nail him to the cross at the back of the Franciscan chapel while tour guides debate the mechanics of a nail through the palm of the hand or through the wrist.

XII. He is hauled up in place, the "Place of the Skulls" ("Golgotha"). Pictures are taken to make this moment last forever, like so many paintings and crosses showing him so often crucified and not enough resurrected. The various denominations argue who gets to nail the sign on the cross. Someone has stabbed him in the side, but the Romans are gone by now... except for those of the Catholic variety. No one sticks around the full, pregnant three hours, so we all just mentally fastforward to the end: the Word Made Flesh dies. An earthquake tears the ground so Jesus' blood can reach the buried Adam far below in the center of the world. The ghost of Queen Helen finds three crosses in the basement and the third one heals a passing invalid. Somewhere is an echo of words that may or may not have been shouted in agony, but which nonetheless ring true: "Daddy! Daddy, where are you?!"

XIII. He is taken down. He's gone. Mary holds him, and this torment reaches into the deepest parts of her, beyond even her womb. Her icon shows her red heart bared, pierced by a silver dagger. Like her son on the cross, the agony is what fixes the moment in reality, the sorrow pins it to the cosmos, sews it onto the moving skin of memory and legend. This scar has not healed. She has since died and gone to Heaven, become the spiritual child of her child. Perhaps she has transcended all this, her heart so wide that the pain and joys of the world are as the sigh of the wind. But we still remember her suffering.

XIV. He is buried in a stranger's tomb. Mary buries a part of herself. They think the story's over.

But a messiah comes to Israel every year, sometimes two or three at a time. The archangel Michael, still blowing the Trump of the End Times, hasn't taken a breath in centuries. And one day we will not only allow Jesus to fully ascend, but we will join at his side, all of us Anointed, all of us Christs. We will be a species of saints. We have much work to do.

So the question is: after the last station of the cross, where do you go?