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  • El Greco’s Jesus
  • Richard Schiffman (bio)

El Greco’s Jesus, lit theatrically from behind by a single shaft of sunlight pouring like water through a chink in the gathering storm, his thin, artistic fingers cradling the cross which rests as easy as balsa upon his willing shoulder, gazing here beyond the picture frame, beyond life itself, almost tender with transcendence.

And in the dark pupils of those eyes two stars of light— all that we shall ever see of God—two small stars, the dim reflection in the flesh of the world he has already fled to. Two stars, but that’s enough,

and more than enough, because it shows how God enters upon the slimmest thread of feeling—not much in the vastness of the night— but enough to refute the darkness, that’s the point. Enough to prove that the night is not all. [End Page 242]

The tip of a diamond drill, invisible to the eye, bores through steel plate. The love that made the world, invisible to the world. But focus those slender rays within the soul and they will burn through everything even death. That is what El Greco’s Jesus knows.

Once on a beach in San Francisco an urban shaman rocked a boulder back and forth—whispering to it as tenderly as Jesus stroked his cross— until the great stone hung like a ballerina striking an impossible pose, defying the law of gravity. How can so much rest upon so small a fulcrum?

Like the weight of God poised tremulous upon the mind, and faith—that thinnest strand, absurd on the face of it, bearing that which is greater than the world. How is it possible for so much to rest upon so little? [End Page 243]

But faith doesn’t need much. A sparrow perches upon a twig, a grassy stem. Faith too—poised upon the thinnest stalk of evidence— flies to the Shoreless Sky

without denying the pain— that’s the point— without denying the weight of the world pressing like a boulder, without rejecting the bloody lumber of human cruelty, which Jesus bore throughout his short and stormy life.

The very same Jesus who said: “My burden is light.” [End Page 244]

Richard Schiffman

Richard Schiffman is the author of two spiritual Biographies: “Mother of All,” and “Sri Ramakrishna, A Prophet For the New Age.” His poetry has appeared or is upcoming in Sojourners, Poetry East, The Southern Poetry Review, the Potomac Review and many other print and internet journals.

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