Apocalypse of Jude

Jude sits quietly for a moment, considering the act.

“It was just a moment of surrender to something that my life of chastity can never take back.”

Jude sits back satisfactorily, denying the desolation that he feels from the event.

“I am free of my ridiculous infatuation with marrying Christ at last. Me being a priest was meant to be a beautiful vocation of God in man, man in woman and the mystery of sanctification. The true romance of which all our romances are mere shadows.”

He laughs another cynical laugh.

“Now then Caul, it’s just us left burdening the earth with our toil and screams of childbirth. What of marriage? From now on it’s just sexual relationships tied by whatever social convention it finds itself in. But hasn’t this been how we’ve always existed? They don’t tell you that in the obituaries, do they?”

Jude looks now again at Caul, the sound of his soul’s thunder still reverberating through him.

“So my friend, I ask you, what then did I give Mae? Love? If it had been possible for me to have given her that, then there would not have been this whole farce. But I didn’t, because there was no Love in me to give. Therefore no God in me. No Spirit. No life. But flesh I have, and flesh I gave and she took it, because that’s what she wanted, because that is all she can want. I am finally free to be cynical and hopeless in my sloth.”

He shouts these last words out in a glee to the burning world. Sparrows gathered in late evening chatter in an overgrown bougainvillaea tumbling over the veranda’s far left corner, scatter.

“So I am free to say, Caul, that you failed in your mission to heal me. Dionysus got to me first through his maenad. I am dying, and my land will die.”

“As for you Caul, go ahead. Drift in whatever wind this is you’ve found. But you don’t even know what you are seeking. How do you ever hope to find it, if you can’t even call out for it?”

Caul doesn’t answer, but the mention of the god’s name and his tie to Mae pierce Caul with a bright light, and it is as if scales of blindness have fallen from his eyes. In the new light, Caul recalls the dionysian voice in the dance, and realises the way of Mae is not love, but just yet another flattering falseness of Orion’s deceiver. In Caul’s mind too comes the remembrance of Janice’s words that the consorting of Mae and Jude would open a door to a spirit to destroy the life in Jude that he, himself, had been trying to save, but has realised he can no longer save, being wounded himself. Finally, he remembers the voice when the storm passed over the mountains bringing summer so suddenly upon this beautiful place in a rainbow that echoed to him the ancient covenant that never again would freed waters cut off all life. Deciding that he knows that this is the voice he seeks, the path of love he seeks, he calls it God.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 104