Vachon Imagined

What Christ did to himself is what humans do to themselves.

Before he was the Christ, he was a man who knew he did not belong here entirely. He fed the hungry. He clothed the weary. He sat with the broken and the forgotten. But the one thing he could not do was remove weariness itself.

That was not his right.

That is not a human’s calling.

Instead, he entered weariness.

He entered suffering.

He allowed suffering to become flesh so that others might see it clearly.

Not as an idea.

Not as a philosophy.

But as a lived reality.

He walked willingly into the doorway of suffering and showed people what they themselves were capable of creating within their own minds, within their own bodies, and within their own lives.

Those who shared the same consciousness, the same fears, the same stories, and the same beliefs participated in it because they could not see beyond it.

They were living in the same house, entering through the same doorway.

And so they did what suffering does.

They condemned.

They judged.

They attacked.

They feared.

Christ did not reveal something foreign to humanity.

He revealed humanity to itself.

He showed people what hell looks like when it is brought into the body, when thought becomes suffering and suffering becomes reality.

He showed the terrible weight a human being can carry when separated from love.

And he showed the consequence of carrying it.

The pain became so complete, so excruciating, that eventually even he had to let go.

And in letting go, he revealed another way.

Those who loved him were asked to do the same.

To release.

To surrender.

To lay down what they believed life had to be.

And in that surrender, something was freed.

Not only in him.

In everyone who followed.

For perhaps the cross was never merely an instrument of death.

Perhaps it was a doorway.

A doorway through suffering.

A doorway through fear.

A doorway through the mind itself.

And on the other side waited the thing that suffering could never touch.

Love.