JESUS NATION SEX REBEL, mini-chapter 19

19. THE ASHES OF LOVE

Adam looked back at the Transgressor’s face. He could see the beginning of the skull show through the forehead. The skin was peeling off, and the flesh underneath it was exposed. He looked at the female Beloved. Her breath came like the rattle of death. A shock ran through him: for some reason he could not fathom, his body grew sharply harder at what he saw, as if the hand that was hard around his hand, was also hard around his sex.

His heart beat faster.

The heart: the site of his dissatisfaction.

What did all his sexual adventures add up to – his chase of many women, his knowledge of their bodies, his making them feel guilty before God -- when the terrain of his heart was a blank void, a waterless desert, dead? He was like some reincarnation of Pat Robertson’s Missing Penis, without a home, without solace, the butt of schoolboy jokes.

With a shock it struck him, like lightning splitting an old tree: focused on the love that lay buried at the bottom of Freedom Tower, he’d been happy to live without love. He’d welcomed the numbness. It had become the badge of his constancy, his fidelity to the death of Sarah. When those towers came down, down came all living love and the continuing possibility of love.

Did the ashes of the love of his life want his love to remain ashes, like hers, forever joined with hers? If his were the ashes lying there now, would he not want her to find love again?

Love should be celebrated, not entombed. He felt something tear. A tiny cell broke open, something split inside his chest: something wanting to connect and be made whole.

He looked back at the Transgressor, and saw the hair go up in flames, the head swell, the blood fly. A burst of red, like an explosion in his retina. He looked back at the female Beloved, and marveled at what he saw.

The blood streaked down the Transgressor’s face while out of the female Beloved’s eyes ran tears, red in the rush of flames, freely falling, streaming down her face.