SEX REBEL OF JESUSLAND, mini-chapter 150

150. THE SERMON.

They played the crucifixion video again and again, like they had played 9/11 over and over again, the plane entering the building like a sperm entering an egg, and exploding inside it, making it pregnant with fire and smoke and destruction.

At first the commentators had nothing to say, because their minds were spinning and overcome, just like the collective mind was overwhelmed by the unreality of 9/11, by the unreal disaster-movie quality. It was unbearable, and it was horrible, too, because it was so exciting, because it united all consciousness in the excitement of one single incomprehensible act, as though the greatest work of art suddenly blazed itself onto the mind of humanity in one instant, hitting the collective at a single point of vulnerability, and transporting all minds together into his mind-boggling embrace.

Jeremiah Luther crucified.

The two others were footnotes, completing the picture visually, but not part of the collective in which the suffering of Jeremiah, who within the first hour was being called The New Christ, was paramount. Adam could hear how the tone changed, how the Men of the Gospel were gathering their thoughts, how the event was being processed into a new clarity, the clarity of the consensus decided by the Men of the Gospel, being spun, being propagandized, being interpreted, more than that: being created. The crucifixion was a fact, the Brotherhood was a fact, but these facts had no meaning, except for their force, a force that united all minds in the country, and now the Men of the Gospel were writing their creed on these exploded minds, and giving the fact a meaning, and walling its total expansion of the mind into an understandable byte, into the narrowness of meaning, a slot, a meme, an understandable, graspable, confined identity. They were using their senses, their power, to make them gather around the fire of this event, like an ancient tribe gathered around a ritual in the dark, dancing around a camp fire in the middle of the village, and to view the fire, this primordial thing, this event beyond events, this event that recalled the Greatest Event of all, that mimicked it, that reinstated it, that made new television of the pre-television of the Crucifixion of the Lord Jesus. They made the words that made the event something that could be talked about. They created the language of the event, and thereby created the event itself, which was nothing but bare fact before, but now was an event with flavor and tone and sense and meaning.

For the first time in his life, Adam was truly outside the collective. The Men of the Gospel preached, turned the fact into their sermon, but it had no meaning for him. Jeremiah Luther, the new Christ, had no meaning for him. He had eyes only for Eve. She was not a footnote to him. She was the center of his video.

He saw only Eve, his beloved, hanging from a cross, a helpless victim, yet again, of a society he now saw as insane. They were making a new religion, and the new love of his life was dying in front of his eyes. The next day there was a new video. The same camera angle, but this was of the new day, early morning, and Eve’s suffering was worse. Blood was running out of her mouth.