Their Eyes Were Watching Death

Their Eyes Were Watching Death

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways. – 1 Corinthians 13:11

When I became a Catholic, I reasoned like a Catholic, and noticed the Catholic world.

I noticed that every Catholic corner my eyes looked were places “richly fixated on the body of Mary, the body of Christ, the bodies of the martyrs” and with a history of sensually violent and death-riddled art.

From the artfully splayed dried fingers of saints decked with gold rings to some disembodied head of chaste holy women, whose half rotten heads still yawned with...a religious ecstasy beaming from their black teeth. I was told of their celebrated stories and I...found the goodness of religion when my lips touched their holy gore, because we eventually found where to look to make that narrative true. Yes, a smile indeed lingered on her skull because she's smiling in heaven, yes, we were indeed excited when they were exhumed and still were in a pose of tortured piety. Any traces of humanity that lingered on their twisted forms made us glad, even excited because these little favored corpses were our bridge to a better life that they themselves lead. All was depending on those holy fragments of Story; fragments of a bigger story of the Holiest God.

It’s a long tradition that doesn’t exist in North America, where the camera usually turns away from such subjects, where the austere ministers would shy away at the mentions of saints and the exalted places, and their bodies. I was sorely disappointed with the revolutionary, abstract, and mostly boring Protestantism. Because they have exorcised the STORY, in turn, they have exorcised the stories of martyrdom and suffering and perhaps final grace. Instead of an exciting story full of drama and lessons, the experiences of the divine became lifeless recitations of dates and commandments. It is an infrastructure full of warnings and punishments without US, the human actors, the clay God breaths into, it looks away from everything we left; everything that made us, and somehow drove us to undo ourselves and would make ourselves over in salvation-

I miss those Catholic days, those vibrant narrative full of ups and lows, full of color, feeling and flesh that we can participate in through Heaven and Hell.

The church never left my mind. I am still blessed by the its beautiful, morbid haunt.