by Rice, Anne
“ ‘This is not failure,’ he said. ‘Memnoch, I shall be a martyr to what I teach! Blood offerings of the innocent lamb to the good God have been made since Humans began! They instinctively render to God what is of great value to them to show their love. Who knows better than you who spied on their altars and listened to their prayers and insisted that I listen! Sacrifice and love are connected in them.’
“ ‘Lord, they sacrifice out of fear! It has nothing to do with love of God, does it? All the sacrifices? The children sacrificed to Baal, and a hundred other hideous rituals the world over. They do it out of fear! Why would love demand sacrifice?’
“I had clamped my hands over my mouth. I couldn’t reason further. I was horrified. I could not sort out the thread of my horror from the overall stifling weave. Then I spoke, thinking aloud:
“ ‘It’s all wrong, Lord. That God should be so degraded in human form, that in itself is unspeakable; but that men should be allowed to do this to God … But will they know what they’re doing, that you are God? I mean, they couldn’t … Lord, it will have to be done in confusion and misunderstanding. That spells chaos, Lord! Darkness!’
“ ‘Naturally,’ He said. ‘Who in his right mind would crucify the Son of God?’
“ ‘Then what does it mean?’
“ ‘Memnoch, it means I subjected myself to the human for the love of those whom I have made. I am in the flesh, Memnoch. I have been in it for thirty years. Would you explain yourself to me?’
“ ‘To die like that, it’s wrong, Lord. It’s a filthy killing, Lord, it’s a bloody horrible exemplum to lay before the human race! And you say yourself they will remember you for this? More than for your rising from the death, from the light of God exploding out of your human body and making this suffering fall away?’
“ ‘The Light won’t burst out of this body,’ He said. ‘This body shall die. I shall know death. I shall pass into Sheol and there for three days remain with those who are dead, and then I shall return to this body and raise it from the Dead. And yes, it will be my Death they will remember, for how can I Rise if I do not Die?’
“ ‘Just don’t do either one,’ I pleaded. ‘Really, I’m begging you. Don’t make yourself this sacrifice. Don’t dip down into their most misguided blood rituals. Lord, have you ever drawn near to the stench of their sacrificial altars? Yes, I used to say to you, listen to their prayers, but I never meant that you would dip down from your great height to smell the stink of the blood and the dead animal, or to see the dumb fear in its eyes as its throat is slit! Have you seen the babies heaved into the fiery God Baal?’
“ ‘Memnoch, this is the way to God which man himself has evolved. All over the world the myths sing the same song.’
“ ‘Yes, but that’s because you never interfered to stop it, you let it happen, you let this humankind evolve and they looked back in horror on their animal ancestors, they beheld their mortality, and they seek to propitiate a god who has abandoned them to all this. Lord, they look for meaning, but they find none in this. None.’
“He looked at me as if I were mad, truly. He stared at me in silence. ‘You disappoint me,’ He said softly and gently. ‘You wound me, Memnoch, you wound my human heart.’ He reached out and put His roughened hands against my face, hands of a man who had worked in this world, labored as I had never labored in my brief visit.
“I shut my eyes. I didn’t speak. But something had come to me! A revelation, an insight, a sudden grasping of everything here that was in error, but could I reason it out? Could I speak?
“I opened my eyes again, letting him hold me, feeling the callouses on his fingers, looking into his gaunt face. How he had starved himself; how he had suffered in this desert, and how he had labored these thirty years! Oh, no, this was wrong!
“ ‘What, my Archangel, what is wrong!’ He demanded of me with infinite patience and human consternation.
“ ‘Lord, they chose these rituals which involve suffering because they cannot avoid suffering in the Natural World. The natural world is what must be overcome! Why must anyone suffer what humans suffer? Lord, their souls come to Sheol distorted, twisted by pain, black as cinders from the heat of loss and misery and violence which they have witnessed. Suffering is evil in this world. Suffering is decay and death. It’s terrible. Lord, You can’t believe that to suffer like this would do any good to anyone. This suffering, this unspeakable capacity to bleed and to know pain and to know annihilation, is what has to be overcome in this world if anyone is to reach God!’
“He didn’t answer. He lowered his hands.
“ ‘My angel,’ He said, ‘you draw from me even more affection now that I have a human heart. How simple you are! How alien you are to the vast Material Creation.’
“ ‘But it was I who urged you to come down! How am I alien? I am the Watcher! I see what other angels don’t dare to look at for fear they’ll weep, and it will make you angry with them.’
“ ‘Memnoch, you simply don’t know the flesh. The concept is too complex for you. What do you think taught your souls in Sheol their perfection? Was it not suffering? Yes, they enter perhaps twisted and burnt if they have failed to see beyond suffering on Earth, and some may despair and disappear. But in Sheol, over the centuries of suffering and longing, others are purged and purified.
“ ‘Memnoch, Life and Death are part of the cycle, and suffering is its by-product. And the human capacity to know it exempts no one! Memnoch, that the illuminated souls you brought from Sheol knew it, that they had learnt to accept its beauty, is what made them worthy to come through the heavenly gates!’
“ ‘No, Lord, that’s not true!’ I said. ‘You’ve gotten it wrong. Utterly. Oh, I see what’s happened.’
“ ‘You do? What are you trying to say to me? That I the Lord God, having spent thirty years in this human body, have not struck the truth?’
“ ‘But that’s just it! You’ve known all along you were God. You mentioned times when you thought you were mad or almost forgot, but those were brief! Too brief! And now as you plot your death, you know Who you are and You won’t forget it, will you?’
“ ‘No, I won’t. I must be the Son of God Incarnate to fulfill my ministry, to work my miracles, of course. That’s the whole point.’
“ ‘Then, Lord, you don’t know what it means to be flesh!’
“ ‘How dare you assume that you do, Memnoch.’
“ ‘When you left me in that fleshly body, when you cast me down for the Daughters of Men to heal and care for, in the early centuries of this very land, I had no promise you would take me back to Heaven. Lord, you’re not playing fair in this experiment. You’ve known all along you’re going back, you’re going back to be God!’
“ ‘And who better than I can understand what this flesh feels!’ He demanded.
“ ‘Somebody who doesn’t fully rest assured that He is the immortal Creator of the Universe,’ I said. ‘Any mortal man hanging on a cross now on Golgotha outside Jerusalem would know better than you!’
“His eyes grew wide as He stared at me. But He didn’t challenge me. His silence unnerved me. And once again, the power of His expression, the radiance of God in man dazzled me, and drew upon the angel in me to simply shut up and fall at His feet. But I wouldn’t do it!
“ ‘Lord, even when I went to Sheol,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know whether or not I’d ever come back to Heaven. Don’t you see? I don’t claim to have your understanding of anything. We wouldn’t be talking here if I did. But I didn’t have any promise I would be allowed back into Heaven, don’t you see? So the suffering and the darkness spoke to me and taught me, because I took the risk that I might never overcome it. Don’t you see?’
“He considered this a long time and then He shook His head sadly. ‘Memnoch, you are the one who has failed to understand. When is Humankind closest to God than when they suffer for the love of another, when they die so that another might live, when they plunge towards certain death for the protection of those the
y leave behind or those truths about Life which Creation has taught them?’
“ ‘But the world doesn’t need all that, Lord! No, no, no. It doesn’t need the blood, the suffering, the war. That wasn’t what taught Humans to love! Animals already did all that bloody, horrible catastrophe to one another. What taught Humans was the warmth and affection of another, the love for a child, the love in a mate’s arms, the capacity to understand another’s suffering and want to protect that other, to rise above savagery into the formation of family and clan and tribe that would mean peace and security for all!’
“There came a long silence. And then very tenderly He laughed. ‘Memnoch, my angel. What you learnt of life you learnt in bed.’
“I didn’t answer for a moment. The comment was charged with contempt and humour, of course. Then I spoke:
“ ‘That’s true, Lord. And suffering is so terrible for humans, injustice is so terrible for the balance of their minds that it can destroy those lessons learnt in bed, magnificent as they are!’
“ ‘Oh, but when love is reached through suffering, Memnoch, it has a power it can never gain through innocence.’
“ ‘Why do you say that? I don’t believe it! I don’t think you grasp it. Lord, listen to me. There’s one chance for this to be proven my way. One chance.’
“ ‘If you think for one moment you will interfere with my ministry and my sacrifice, if you think you can turn the tide of the vast forces already moving towards this event, then you are no more an angel, but a demon!’ He said.
“ ‘I don’t ask that,’ I said. ‘Go through with it. Minister, outrage them; be arrested, tried, and executed on the cross, yes, do all of it. But do it as a man!’
“ ‘I intend to.’
“ ‘No, you’ll know the whole time you’re God. I’m saying Forget that you are God! Bury your divinity in the flesh the way it’s been buried intermittently. Bury it, Lord, leaving yourself only your faith and your belief in Heaven, as if it had come to you through Revelation immense and undeniable.
“ ‘But bury in this desert the true certainty that you are God. Then, you’ll suffer it all as a man suffers it. Then you’ll know what this suffering is at its heart. Then will all the glory be stripped from agony! And you will see what men see when flesh is ripped, and torn, and blood flows, and it is your own. It’s filth!’
“ ‘Memnoch, men die on Golgotha every day. What is important is that the Son of God knowingly dies on Golgotha in the body of a man.’
“ ‘Oh, no, no!’ I cried out. ‘This is disaster.’
“He seemed so sad suddenly that I thought he might weep for me. His lips were parched and cracked from the desert. His hands were so thin I could see the veins. He was not even a great specimen of a man, only an ordinary one, worn down by years of toil.
“ ‘Look at you,’ I said, ‘starving, thirsting, suffering, tired, lost in all the darknesses of life, the true spontaneous evils of nature, and dreaming of glory when you exit this body! What kind of lesson can such suffering be? And who will you leave with the guilt for your murder? What will become of all those mere mortals who denied you? No, please, Lord, listen to me. If you won’t leave your Divinity, then don’t do it. Change this plan.
“ ‘Don’t die. Above all, don’t be murdered! Don’t hang from a tree like the God of the Wood in the Greek stories. Come with me into Jerusalem; and know women and wine and singing and dancing and the birth of little ones, and all the joy the human heart can contain and express!
“ ‘Lord, there are times when the hardest men hold infants in their arms, their own children, and the happiness and satisfaction of those moments is so sublime that there is no horror on earth that can destroy the peace they feel! That is the human capacity for love and understanding! When one can achieve harmony in spite of everything, and men and women do this, Lord. They do. Come, dance with your people. Sing with them. Feast with them. Throw your arms around the women and the men and know them in the flesh!’
“ ‘I feel pity for you, Memnoch,’ He said. ‘I pity you as I pity the mortals who will kill me, and those who will inevitably misunderstand my laws. But I dream of those who will be touched to the core by my suffering, and who will never forget it, and will know what love I felt for mortals that I would let myself die among them before opening the gates of Sheol. I pity you. Feeling as you do, your guilt will become too terrible to bear.’
“ ‘My guilt? What guilt?’
“ ‘You’re the cause of all this, Memnoch. You’re the one who said I should come down in the flesh. You’re the one who urged me on to do it, who challenged me, and now you fail to see the miracle of my sacrifice.
“ ‘And when you do see it, when you do see souls perfected by suffering ascending to Heaven, what will you think then of your paltry little discoveries made in the arms of the Daughters of Men? What will you think? Don’t you see? I will redeem suffering, Memnoch! I will give it its greatest and fullest potential within the cycle! I will bring it to fruition. I will allow it to sing its own magnificent song!’
“ ‘No, no, no!’ I stood up and railed at Him. ‘Lord, just do as I ask. Go through with it, yes, if you must, found this miracle upon a murder, do it that way, if that is your will, but bury your certainty of Divinity, so that you really, really do die, Lord, so that when they drive the nails through your hands and feet you know what a man feels and no more, and when you enter the gloom of Sheol yours is a human soul! Please, Lord, please, I’m begging you. For all humanity, I’m begging you. I can’t see the future but I have never been more frightened of it than I am now.’ ”
Memnoch broke off.
We stood alone in the sands, Memnoch looking into the distance and me beside him, shaken.
“He didn’t do it, did he?” I asked. “Memnoch, God died knowing He was God. He died and rose knowing the whole time. The world argues over it and debates and wonders, but He knew. When they drove the nails, He knew He was God.”
“Yes,” said Memnoch. “He was man, but that man was never without the power of God.”
Suddenly I was distracted.
Memnoch seemed too shaken to say any more just yet.
Something changed in the landscape. I looked towards the circle of stones, and realized a figure was sitting there, the figure of a dark-skinned, dark-eyed man, emaciated and covered with the sand of the desert, and he was looking at us. And without one fiber of his flesh being other than human, He was obviously God.
I was petrified.
I had lost the map. I didn’t know the way back or the way forward, or what lay to left or to right.
I was petrified, yet I wasn’t frightened, and this man, this dark-eyed one, was merely looking at us with the softest sympathy in his face, and the same unbounded acceptance of us that I had seen in Him in Heaven when He’d turned and taken me by the arms.
The Son of God.
“Come here, Lestat,” he called now softly, over the desert wind, in a human voice. “Come closer.”
I looked at Memnoch. Memnoch was looking at him, too, now and he gave a bitter smile. “Lestat, it is always a good idea, no matter how He is behaving, to do exactly what He says.”
Blasphemy. I turned, shivering.
I went directly towards the figure, conscious of each shuffling step through the boiling sand, the dark thin form corning ever more clear to me, a tired and suffering man. I sank down on my knees in front of Him, looking up into His face.
“The Living Lord,” I whispered.
“I want you to come into Jerusalem,” He said. He reached out and brushed back my hair, and the hand was as Memnoch described it, dry, calloused, darkened from the sun as his brow was darkened. But the voice hovered somewhere between natural and sublime, it struck a timbre beyond the angelic. It was the voice that had spoken to me in Heaven, only confined to human sounds.
I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t do anything. I knew that I would do nothing until I was told. Memnoch stood off, arms folded, watching. And I knelt, lookin
g into the eyes of God Incarnate and I knelt before Him completely alone.
“Come into Jerusalem,” He said. “It won’t take you long, no more perhaps than a few moments, but come into Jerusalem with Memnoch, on the day of my death, and glimpse my Passion—see me crowned with thorns and carrying my cross. Do this for Me before you make your decision whether or not to serve Memnoch or the Lord God.”
Every part of me knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand it! I couldn’t watch it. I couldn’t. I was paralyzed. Disobedience, blasphemy, those weren’t the issues. I couldn’t endure the thought of it! I stared at Him, at His sunburnt face, at His soft and loving eyes, at the sand clinging to the edge of His cheek. His dark hair was neglected, wind-torn, swept back from His face.
No! I can’t do it! I can’t bear it!
“Oh, yes, you can,” He said reassuringly. “Lestat, my brave bringer of death to so many. Would you really return to Earth without this glimpse of what I offer? Would you really give up this chance to glimpse me crowned with thorns? When have you ever passed up a challenge, and think what I am offering to you now. No, you wouldn’t back off from it, even if Memnoch urged you to do it.”
I knew He was right. Yet, I knew I couldn’t stand it. I could not go into Jerusalem and see the actual Christ carrying His Cross. I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength, I would—I was silent. A riot of thought within me condemned me to utter confusion and continued paralysis. “Can I look at this?” I said. I closed my eyes! Then I opened them and looked at Him again and at Memnoch, who had come near and looked down with a near, cold expression at me, cold as his face could be, which wasn’t cold at all so much as serene.
“Memnoch,” said God Incarnate. “Bring him, show him the way, let him but glimpse it. You be his guide, and then go on with your examination and your appeal.”
He looked at me. He smiled. How frail a vessel He seemed for His own magnificence. A man with lines around his eyes from the hot sun, with worn teeth, a man.
