The Eucharist of Suffering

I Do you pray for love or merely to be seen by something vast, a void? Love, in its tenderness, demands belief in something greater than decay, and I once believed in its warmth. I pleaded for it, carved myself into its shape like a sculptor that had a proclivity for perfection. However, with time, love ebbed away at stone, its edges crumbling, leaving only a vulnerable longing—the yearning to be good enough for something.

II Now, I ask only for the dark acknowledgment, for the Creator's gaze not in affection, but in pity. Even condemnation would suffice if it meant I was worth receiving it. I've been begging for the silence that follows exhaustion, the hush that swallows a body whole even when despair has worn itself thin and departed, unreachable, indistinct, like the aftertaste of a forgotten dream.

However, my prayers are not pure. I do not offer them with folded hands and a softened voice. They come torn from my mouth as I choke and gag through the thorny noose; they are whispered with clenched teeth against bruised knees. My lips, damp with invocation, press against the worn, familiar name. The name I utter, His name, catches like wool on  thorn, and mercy, I imagine, drips somewhere above me—colourless, indifferent, a futile blood hail, falling beyond reach.

III Smoke curls from my mouth like a lie dressed in silk, delicate but insidious. Sweet, ghostlike, it weaves itself over my skin, dissolving into the air laced with the sweet rot of longing. I inhale the scent of my own corruption, the bittersweet tang of things broken and exhale something quieter, purer, more refined. The divine-whatever it is no longer resides above but within, its essence corrupted and consumed, folded into the soft decay of flesh. It has become a part of me, flickering faintly beneath my ribs, indistinguishable from my own suffering.

IV I no longer consider myself a worshipper.

I am the offering.

The altar.

The dagger.

My body lies open—innocent and obedient as a silent witness to its own destruction. I give it freely: take my blood, breath, monotheistic hunger and spill them onto the cold stone of my devotion. Not as a sacrifice for forgiveness, but as a gesture of recognition. As a plea to be seen in the act of unravelling; and if He is still watching, I want Him to see all of it. Every wound, every cut, every unspoken "please."

Let Him witness the undoing of a soul.

V The blade is a teacher, slicing through the illusion of purity, drawing truth from the rawness beneath. The wound itself, a kind of scripture, inscribed deep in the flesh, an offering written in the language of pain.

Pain, which I've learned, is the most articulate form of surrender.

Faith is not a light but a blade. You trace it slowly across yourself until you believe. Until the pain becomes a part of you.

And devotion? Devotion, as it turns out, is not difficult. It is fluid, a current flowing through the marrow of my bones. It is instinct, primal and unyielding, becoming effortless, like breathing or bleeding. It is what remains when hope has crumbled to dust, and the body still kneels, not out of belief, but because it knows nothing else.

VI The blood looks like wine.

The wound looks like Grace.

And the silence, finally,

Starts to sound like God.

Written By Ash