Sunday Thoughts: Dead Christ

Andrea Mantegna's Lamentation over the Dead Christ

Dead Christ 

Andrew Hudgins

There seems no reason he should’ve died. His hands
are pierced by holes too tidy to have held,
untorn, hard muscles as they writhed on spikes.
And on the pink, scrubbed bottom of each foot
a bee-stung lip pouts daintily.
No reason he should die–and yet, and yet
Christ’s eyes are swollen with it, his mouth
hangs slack with it, his belly taut with it,
his long hair lank with it, and damp;
and underneath the clinging funeral cloth
his manhood’s huge and useless with it: Death.


One blood-drop trickles toward his wrist. Somehow
the grieving women missed it when they bathed,
today, the empty corpse. Most Christs return.
But this one’s flesh. He isn’t coming back.






I love ekphrastic poetry, work that attempts to distill the essence of a piece in one medium into another piece of art in a different medium. I've mentioned W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" and there does seem to be a way in which these Old Masters of the Renaissance have so many stories to tell. There's a deep vein of story running through a lot of their work that really lends itself to being mined in a poem. I've tried it myself, to horrendous results, but that doesn't mean the project itself isn't worthy.


I found this poem in an interview with a poet describing how vital it is that anyone writing about religion come at it with fresh language, new perspective. Nothing is more off-putting than recycling or appropriating religious language and not bringing something different to the party. It can get so bad that several literary journals I was researching have in their submissions guidelines things like, "NO Holy Land pilgrimage poems will be considered for publication!"


If all you're doing is rehashing stories from Genesis or paraphrasing the Psalms, you're not really making art. It might be edifying, it might be perfectly appropriate for Sunday school or a Bible study, but you're not making art. 


More and more I'm trying to see creating things — anything — as a spiritual act, a work of religious feeling. I'm not particularly good at exegeting Bible passages, keeping a faith journal, being part of a prayer chain. Most of my spiritual practice is done alone, in secret, out of the light. Maybe it's the pastor's kid part of me that often sees church less as community than as community theater: rituals played out on a minimal stage, everyone knows their line and blocking, and the only interesting thing that can happen is a failure of the process.


Writing words on a page or pressing strings to a fret is becoming part of how I talk to God, how I listen for him to talk back. I don't quite know how it's going yet, but it's a step in the right direction. But more on this soon. 


For now, I've got to get ready for church tonight.