Christ Physician: Paschal Triduum 2018

Christ Physician

“Está la majestad de Dios tendida

en una dura cruz, y yo de suerte

que soy de sus dolores el más fuerte, 

y de su cuerpo la mayor herida.”

-Lope de Vega

How can you make an appointment with me by means of an illness? Are you a doctor handing out pains so that, dragged in, we will come to you? You will tap my window, you say, and with your desperate whispers, I will open for you. How brutal you are, I say, attracting me that way. Crazy things move us without us knowing why; you abandon me to that, at least that's how it seems to me. Knocked over, sweating, anxious fervor, I would rather be healthy than to wander endlessly this way. But the healthy do not move, isn’t that what you are wanting to say?

Well good, but no: it is risky for me, to look for remedies while drops come out of God knows what pores or passageways inside of me. And what if I find an ointment that calms me down but can nothing healthy really give to me? Will I notice it, or not? What if the ointment kills me, even as it covers what it is I suffer? Ah, a risk of making a mistake, you tell me, is better than dying. You tell me that the dead do not move towards you either, and that therefore you do not suffer that I should die. 

You push me to move even more, looking for you, although there are many windows that lead to nothing but to me. Is it really a life, to live like this? Whisper to me, then, if you are as graceful as they say, that I find the window, and with a doctor's hand guide me to see where it is finally you would me lay. Don’t you know, Lord, that we all lie to doctors ("all is fine, doctor, nothing really hurts") because we fear the remedy that leads to the last day?

But you knock on my door, and it hurts, and you ask me to ask you, and bid you come in. I see the stone that I had not noticed before; marked with blood, or with an oily hand, I could not really tell which, knocked down by a strength that did not come from me. Inside, I see the tomb empty, the one you prepared to show me to me, and the entrance that leads me to find you. And what Lord, here is where I stay?  No? There is another destiny for the one who knows how to die this day? Ah, I did not realize; you don’t live here anymore. I see your tracks that lead away, and I continue, behind you.

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