Flesh of the Babe

We slept in what was once a Catholic church. I lay on my back, my eyes fixated on the above. The ceilings soared, dust particles flew between the rays of dawn sun that escaped through the cracks in the curtains. The dust, seemingly borne on the wings of some unbroken, gently tumultuous breeze, a baby breath of freedom, the beat of a moths wing…

The church was quiet apart from the occasional stir of a Sister saying her prayers. Weddings once happened here, christenings, funerals, Sunday services, sermon after sermon after sermon…‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’ must have broken the priests tongue a million times…

Most of it was familiar, almost like home. If you focused on the ceiling, you couldn’t see the tapestry, or the wooden doors or the Sisters dressed in lavender, nor the whips on their belts, they walked around the room, lighting candles, preparing to commence the mornings ceremony.

The tapestry was hung like a continuous curtain, clinging to the four stone walls.

To be honest, it scared the shit out of me.

At the beginning, it was hand sewn by the blind, the disabled, the sick, the pregnant, the young, the old, as long as you had fingers, you were made to sew. That’s how they began the new world, the new genesis; after the books were burned and the government turned to stone, they made us sew. There were tapestries like it in every colony, made by people just like us. It was our new Bible, but Luke and John were long gone, and this Bible had no words to be twisted, no proverbs to be change, no verses to be rewritten for man’s own motive; it was all there, in pictures on the wall.

From the North wall to the South, the tapestry stretched her omnipotent arms, and held us in her dogmatic belly. It began at birth, the legs of a mother spread wide and the body of a baby pushing its way out of her cruel cervix. They told us that the only time that we are without sin is the moments from our first breath, to when we wean from our mothers breast. The babe in the tapestry starts walking, into childhood, teen-hood, adulthood, with every stage they become deformed, crippled, until they are joined by other misshapen folk, and together they make their way towards their future, at one with their greed, sex, lies, money, jealousy, murder, their skin turns to scales, they grow wings, they mutilate themselves, they give birth to snakes and drown in black oceans; until, the light of the heart-shaped locket threads it way into their cluster of darkness and;

redemption.

It’s a familiar tale…but this time they promised, with their new understanding and prophecies, and a little obedience from us, it would be different.

Standing inside the locket was the Virgin Mary, donned in red and blue, and her naked babe in her arms. She was surrounded by men and women, they were pure, and without sin. Not at all an unfamiliar sight to anyone who remembered life before they came.

I could hear stirring, and in the distance the crying of a baby, I didn’t let my thoughts linger.

They believed redemption could only be found in the physical. That was their problem with the world and religion before, there was too much faith in what could not be seen, or held, or touched. They wanted redemption to be real, so real that one could taste it.

The church bells shattered the morning quiet, shaking the heavy sleepers awake, before long the whole room was filled with the sound of tossing and turning, stretching, yawning and the rustle of cotton clothes. The Sisters seemed to float around the room, unwanted spectres, hurrying us along for, ‘the ceremony, the ceremony, the ceremony.’

We made our beds with neat corners, folded out bed-clothes and placed them on our pillows, and washed our faces in water that smelled like sour drain pipes and stale sweat. I could still hear the baby crying, the piercing sound had gotten closer and was now paired with a low hum of voices and deep rumble of some distorted prayer. I tried not to listen and pulled my white tunic over my head.

‘You are but the purest form of humankind, untouched by the tendrils of sin…’

Just like last month, we stood on at the end of our beds, in two parallel lines, and waited. This was the part where you could always pick out the ones who were new. There was one girl, not much older than 15, she was looking around the room with jittering blue eyes and pale shaking hands. I had been here long enough to know exactly where to look, to the wooden doors underneath the Virgin Mary section of the tapestry. The baby’s distant cries were now coming from behind those doors, the humming and the distorted chants too had grown louder.

‘We are just clogs in the worlds womb, God has us in his hands, we are but foetus’ on a leash…obey, obey, obey…’

The Sisters began their rounds. There was two of them, middle-aged, clad from neck to ankle in lavender coloured garments, their hair cut to the scalp. They looked like no one, they were calm, do-ers of the will of the priest, they were just vessels, carriers of the lockets and owners of us. They walked down the aisles, from person to person, their whips almost gracefully hanging from their belts and swinging with their step. They handed each of us a metal bowl, in the same shape as the locket on the tapestry. Each time they handed out a bowl, they whispered, ‘In God’s name, the vessel of innocent flesh, praise the babe.’

The crying of the baby from the behind the doors was almost drowned out by the deep chanting of the priest. The young girl across from me winced every time the baby took a breath to let out another ear piercing cry. I found my heart was beating faster. I looked to the tapestry, my eyes lingered on the ceremony scene; the high priest, surrounded by fire and smoke, held a babe in one arm and the grim reapers scythe in the other. Even in the face of death, the babe looked so serene. It wasn’t like that in real life.

I watched the wooden door.

The priest was coming to the end of his chant, I now knew it by heart, ‘The body of you, be it the closest being to Christ in innocence, we must consume, in his name…’

The young girl was looking at me, to the door, to the tapestry, to the sisters, yearning for an explantation.

The babe’s cries abruptly ceased, harshly interrupted, as though the child had been distracted, or the breath snatched from its lungs.

We waited in the quiet. I looked up to the ceiling, the dust had now cleared, or had just been made invisible by the absence of the sun. It felt like dust was the only thing that had survived, I knew I, and everything that I had believed in, loved in, had faith in, was just about deceased.

The doors swung open, and the priest emerged, walking slow, crippled, waltz of reverence. His sunken face was lifted, and his eyes stared straight ahead, his outstretched hands held a deep bowl full to the brim of neatly chopped raw meat. He made his way down the aisle, and with a pair of gold plated tongs placed one piece of meat into our empty heart-shaped bowls.

The young girl in front of me dropped to her knees and started to scream. The Sisters ran to her and dragged her to the back of the church, whispering, ‘Don’t interrupt the ceremony dear, its sacred, sacred, sacred’. They whipped her until she stopped screaming, and left her to lay in a puddle of her own piss and blood, curled up on the ground like a sleeping child. All the while, the priest continued making his way down the rows.

It was my turn, the priest stopped in front of me, and with a ‘To you, the flesh of the babe’, he dropped a square of flesh into my heart-shaped bowl.

When everyone’s bowls were full, he stood at the front of the church, lifted his arms to the heavens and ordered,

‘Enter, the flesh of Christ, into the body of sin.’

Some chewed slowly, some with hunger, some let blood drip down their chin, some shut their eyes and tried to hold back a gag, the believers seemed to transcended the earth, entering some fucked up plane of nirvana.

I swallowed mine whole.

This was the new age; and there was no divinity in evil.

Just evil in what once was divine.