good friday

today marks good friday

and it is dreary outside

cold and gray

which seems fitting for the day

followers of jesus

remember

pause

anticipate

believe

this photograph

has,

to me,

always seemed the most fitting single image of christ on a cross

deity submerged in waste

the beauty and filth of the world intermingled

a glimpse of glory

not yet realized...

a poem for good friday:

Andres Serrano, 1987, by Andrew Hudgins

If we did not know it was cow’s blood and urine,

if we did not know that Serrano had for weeks

hoarded his urine in a plastic vat,

if we did not know the cross was gimcrack plastic,

we would assume it was too beautiful.

We would assume it was the resurrection,

glory, Christ transformed to light by light

because the blood and urine burn like a halo,

and light, as always, light makes it beautiful.

We are born between the urine and the feces,

Augustine says, and so was Christ, if there was a Christ,

skidding into this world as we do

on a tide of blood and urine. Blood, feces, urine—

what the fallen world is made of, and what we make.

He peed, ejaculated, shat, wept, bled—

bled under Pontius Pilate, and I assume

the mutilated god, the criminal,

humiliated god, voided himself

on the cross and the blood and urine smeared his legs

and he ascended bodily unto heaven,

and on the third day he rose into glory, which

is what we see here, the Piss Christ in glowing blood:

the whole irreducible point of the faith,

God thrown in human waste, submerged and shining.

We have grown used to beauty without horror.

We have grown used to useless beauty.