Ritual Flame
To be completely in love is religious in a way. To love wholly is to let it consume your mind, body, and soul until she sinks into the cracks and valleys, filling fracture lines with the gold of promise. You begin to center love as a lifeline and spiritual practice; Religions form to make sense of the world and answer questions of purpose. Societies grow around the principle of her touch and easy magnetism. In her sweetness you find salvation. The nonbeliever is drawn to her word. When the body is one’s temple, it is only natural for it to become a place of worship.
There is a gorgeous danger in slipping over the line of faith into psychosis, in becoming so in love with confinement that you know that you will never question, never leave. Sacrilege as saccharine as warm, thick honey dripping over your tongue, the sensation of viewing someone as godlike. In grateful awe of her gifts, she appears in images in the water and behind closed eyelids. Every hope, every question, every fear becomes small in comparison to majesty. Your newfound savior has appeared to you with a crooked smile and open arms and has deemed you worthy – nothing else is needed of you when you could be falling to the ground in prayer instead.
To waver in belief is to have the world ripped away. Sugar burns, scars the skin; Your god shows omnipotence in being unreachable, a mystery beyond interpretation. She flickers through the smoke of ritual flame and her face dims in mind’s eye, never stopping again to look through you, appease your desperate reach towards the intangible. The temple withers as the light outside disappears, and with her betrayal, she takes the chandeliers and fire of belief with her. She leaves behind only smoke shadows on yellowed wallpaper, mold in the floorboards, and your toppled shrine. She leaves you in a temple where there is no god, weak and still knelt. The last candle flickers, feeble yet withstanding, in hope that she will return and restore the will to discover fire once more.
But the flame and sunlight made their way into this temple long before the shrine was erected, and will again; Clear away the altar and save the last candle to hold up in admiration of the ivy snaking along dilapidated walls, the stained glass windows, the busts of figures left untouched since her blinding visit. There are ornate paintings on the ceiling created over decades of stories that you have forgotten in haste; There is dust on the shelves of holy texts you shoved aside for your flowery prose and new verse. Wipe it away with the palm of your hand, and tuck the poetry into a volume of its own. There is an easily found space for it on the shelves that contain multitudes and hunger for more.
Look at the library from a distance and see that the sum of its parts is far greater. The flickering flame burns brighter and ignites the burnt-out wick adjacent.
There is freedom in the way the light comes back in, slowly, as you push away the wreckage and rebuild what stood from the beginning. Enlightenment creeps back in with the appreciation of the structure of self, past, present, and future. In time, the dust is gone. You find holiness in the type of love that emanates from the walls without need for a single being. You no longer look for her resemblance in the trees, nor hear her messages in the bumping of its branches along the gabled roof.
One afternoon, sitting in the middle pews and revisiting an old volume that recounts the sensation of your childhood cat falling asleep on your chest, let the page envelope itself in light. Feel no need to shield your eyes, nor protect the skin from burning. This sun is pleasantly warm and calm, invited in by a temple ready to receive it and bask. Looking up at the ceiling, you realize for the first time that she was not a cruel and unjust god, simply a false one. She is not to thank for the glow, and never was; the mural above the lectern never bore her likeness after all.
Cover Photo by Matej Novosad.