{CROSSWAYSNET}

GOD was spent. Expended. Wasted. Left thoroughly empty. All Three could barely keep eyes open. And with a blink, Creation could no longer see God. Anywhere. As if the Birth had killed off the Mother. What had been a hot writhing mass of Life upon life; Change upon change; Day upon night upon day was suddenly a frozen expanse. Embers barely ignited suddenly shivering in an icy void, clutching to them their newborn chicks in constellations of Now; Not Yet; Now What?!

God was dead.

God slept.

Eons passed.

All in a Sabbath. The First.

Men deported themselves from Paradise, a figment of condemnation shaming them into despair, flaming shards of departed Divinity barring the path of return. They built mighty temples to themselves. Man and his empires rose to greatness, fell to others and died together. Along the way, a handful of outcasts claimed to hear from the God Now Dead. And dead gods are angry gods.

A bottleneck of Heritage floated their delusional dreams on a sea of chaos and death. They chose to believe in signs in the after-sky that God was, and was not drowned in His own creative destruction. They birthed more seers of the God who had no name and was not to be found in the world.

A murderer finds the God-Who-Is-Not in a desert flame. The Fire consumes him but does not consume Itself. The finger of God poking up from His grave; a hallowed voice calling up from the hollows of the Earth.

A Tempest erupts from the grave of the Earth, full-formed and formless. It topples Man’s empires and elevates them; establishing a template of Covenant and seals it under the blood-soaked feet of the Chosen. They choose to elevate and shun the Covenant, lifting it from the Earth with a million strings attached until the wordy mass now rests on the heads of the Chosen’s children. They groan from the weight of it. Every Sabbath a reminder of the labors to come; the burden of all the unfinished left undone. A fresh tomb chiseled every seven days from the cold bedrock of God’s dead heart.

Man suffers the ongoing death of God.

*****

The Death may end the living but the Sorrow is new every morning.

Mary sat on the lid of the trunk full of spices like a stone cherub, splatters of the blood of Jesus still on her skirts. There was no mercy from this seat. At least not for the living. Only love for the Departed. Despairing adoration that sees in the grave the only thing ever worth loving, and nothing left to love - to live - for.

The other Mary approached, gently extending her hand to console the other. The first Mary didn’t move. Not even a breath. She lowered her hand and looked down at the lid as well.

The perfume of last week had cost a fortune but a mere pittance compared to the richness and glory of their new King. Seven days and the Kingdom was overthrown, the King trampled on a bloody field of battle. Only one side came prepared to kill, Peter aside.

Both women had cleared out their treasuries the day before for these hundred pounds of spices. Why bother to hold back for anything else? They were all sure to die soon anyway. If not from swords then from sorrow. No one could drink yesterday’s wine or water much less chew a morsel of food. They were all just so… spent; expended; wasted. They could barely hold open their eyes but could not find solace in sleep.

Both women were thinking of the waste of it all. On every level. As for the mound of wealth sitting under the despondent gaze of the two Marys, neither had imagined the mass of the stone or the size of the Roman seal. There was no way around either. Their King would rot as a pauper with no way to stop it. 

How long they stayed put in this eddy of nothingness they could not say. Nobody was counting the hours any longer. It was the death of her feeling that finally roused the first Mary. She could no longer tell where she ended and the balm of death below her began. She didn’t think she would ever bother to find out. Yet another Mary was approaching slowly. She held a box - much smaller than the heavy crate of spices.

*****

This ornate chest had been broken open two days earlier and most of its contents rubbed on the greying skin of her son as the sun was setting in a thin red line between the black of the earth and the carbon of the sky. Moments before John and Peter and the tomb owner’s slaves lifted the body over the threshold. Before the soldiers heaved and the priests hissed “Faster! Fasssster! It’s almost Sabbath!”

A single set of hands rubbed the still temples of the Son, aged aloes and frankincense streaked down the face to the chest ending in his mother’s fingerprints. Myrrhs pressed to the punctures on his scalp, His lips and His side. Then his wrists. She hesitated at the knees, remembering all the scrapes she had kissed away. She tried to kiss them again.

John lifted her by the shoulders. “Mother, there is no time. They will not allow us anymore. We must go. Now.”

Mary the Mother grasped for her son’s legs as they hauled him back from her into the void. Her hands still greased with the ancient fragrance of holiness slid down to his pierced ankles and he was gone.

*****

Mary the Mother placed her treasured chest on top of the crate and let it rest there. The three Mary’s held vigil into the night with only token approaches from the others. Once the Sabbath broke they would find a way into their Lord’s prison or die trying. They did not have hope but they had determination. One by one the others in the room fell into the pit of troubled sleep, some with dreams that called out in terrors others could hear. Intensity grew in the three as they waited the Sabbath of Sorrow to die. Or at least to yield. Then they could finish their mission to the dead and prepare for their journey to join him wherever he was. There was nothing more…