Check out Simon's blog on Easter's Cross from Saturday, April 15, 2006 @ Adullams Cave .
Here's some of it. Very moving...
The truth is that the more I see the cross the more I want to stay with it and have it and have the guy who was on it to stay by me. There on that little hill we have called calvary, outside the walls of the city and in the place were thieves and murderers and losers died, I have found an end to my life sorrows and the struggles that crippled me for so many years.I have a recurring and ever growing vision that swims around my heart and mind becoming clearer and clearer whenever I close my eyes to soak in his presence and think of him. I am in a garden as a boy just looking around under rocks and playing make believe and I am alone, like I mostly felt I was as a kid, and I'm trying to make my own fun and to forget some stuff that went on regularly in the home of my boyhood. I look up and I see at the edge of the garden, where it is barren and lifeless, an old dry and dead tree sticking out of the ground with red rivulets of blood running down its base. It is the red that attracts me to it because it is the only thing giving it some colour. As I lift my head I see the vague form of a man with his feet immovably fixed parallel to the tree, one on each side, with thick nails going sideways through the heels. As I move a bit closer and my sight becomes clearer I follow the line of the man's body upwards and notice through the red map of fresh bright blood that his skin is almost as dark as the tree and the dying sun at his back is turning him into a silhouette. Again I move closer, having to squint my eyes a little because of the angle of the sun. But as I get nearer, I realise the dark skinned man is breathing still. Though still a few feet away from him, I hear each loud breath is incredibly strained and desperate. I notice that with every new attempt at breathing he has to lift his whole body upwards from his feet, using the nails that pierce his heels to push up from. Every breath he manages also pumps a new stream of blood from the nail holes in his heels. I sense the man's terrible pain as well as his desire to let go and die, and yet I can tell also that his human instinct to live is contstantly willing his body towards yet another and then another agonizing breath. I am frightened. I look around but no-one is there to help. I hesitate before moving closer to the man as I realise that tears are forming in my eyes, not so much in empathy for the man but more because of the fear and powerlessness I feel. Fear and powerlessness being two emotions I was acutely aquainted with as a young child and here, with this man who hangs before me so helplessly, the sense of them is incredibly heightened.
I stop within arms distance of the dying man. He is still laboring with all his strength for every breath. Breaths that are becoming so loud and disturbing for me that I wish in my heart he would hurry and die. The man is not aware ...
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