On the Uses of the Cross

 

I read about the Catholic Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa blessing the city of Jerusalem with a relic of the True Cross in response to his having been prevented from celebrating Palm Sunday mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre yesterday afer having done something along the same lines myself. At the end of a mass protest against the Israeli-owned Rafael weapons factory on Scotswood Road, there was a moment of silence, after which attendees of the demonstration were invited to place daffodils we'd been given in the fence to remember the children killed in Palestine by that factory's products. As I was still carrying the palm cross I'd picked up at the church service I'd been to earlier in the day, it seemed an appropriate gesture to put that in the fence as well. So I did. 

Yeah, I've started going to church again. Trust me, no-one is more surprised or embarrassed by this development than I, and this blog is not going to turn into an effort at evangelism, an activity I am highly suspicious of in most of its forms. You really don't need to tell people about Jesus, folks: He's a foundational figure in Western culture. He's in paintings. We say His name when we jam our fingers in the door. To paraphrase Hank Hill, you're not saving someone's soul when you tell them a very well-worn story about the crucifixion like it's news, you're just making Christianity more cringe. But I did think it might be worth getting some of my thoughts about the cross down here, partly because a particular attitude to the cross among certain types of soi-disant 'Christian' is somewhat responsible for my recent transformation into some kind of church lady, and partly because, with Good Friday coming up, I want to take issue with those same crucicentralist attitudes more generally.  

Some of you may not be interested in reading a long ramble about the cross,  and if you're one of those I'll give you the nut graf here and let you get on with your day. The German liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle, who coined the term 'Christofascism', wrote that adherents to that particular perversion 'know the cross only as a magical symbol of what Jesus has done for us, not as a sign of the poor man who was tortured to death as a political criminal...a betrayal of the disappointed, a miracle weapon in the service of the mighty'. And the argument I'm going to make here, such as it is, is that, especially in times like our own, we really ought to be focusing more on Jesus the tortured political criminal than Christ Pantocrator, and that should inform the way we look at the cross. Or, to put it another way, we have to regard any image of the crucifixion as being fundamentally substitutable with this image: 

And if you want, you can stop reading here.

Sölle's words struck me because during the recent street activism I've been doing defending those housed in Newcastle's New Bridge Hotel against the fascist thugs who come out every weekend to hurl abuse at them, one thing I've noticed is that some people on the fascist side really do wave the cross about like it's a magic wand. They seem to believe that the crucifix has the same effect on Muslims, socialists and queer & trans folk that it has on vampires: that if they only angle it just so, and say the correct form of words (fascists are big on that phrase, 'form of words', have you noticed? Nigel Farage often uses it in his non-apologies. If you think about it for a while, it tells you something about them), the Power Of Christ Will Compel Us to take up our placards and banners and walk, giving the fash an unbarred run-up right to the hotel door. To me, this kind of carry-on is performative at best and at worst, frankly, a form of idolatry. Because if you're waving the cross around as a totem, then your engagement with the act it represents is fundamentally shallow and devoid of meaning. 

So I decided to start setting some of these characters straight. The admonishing of sinners is, after all, one of the seven spiritual works of mercy. And one way in which I did this was by making and holding a placard reading MATTHEW 25:35 ('When I was hungry, you gave me something to eat, when I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink, when I was a stranger you welcomed me in.'). Now, initially, when I started using this reference, it was just as a kind of theological gotcha. But the more I actually looked at and thought about the particular chapter it comes from, the more I came to see it as central to Christianity itself - as the core ethical challenge which the teaching and example of Jesus boils down to. 

So as a quick summary - Matthew 25 is the chapter in which Jesus outlines the parable of the Sheep and the Goats. You probably already know this, but basically the idea is that at the end of time, on the Day of Judgement, Jesus is going to call everyone who ever lived in for a meeting and divide people into two groups based on their conduct in life. He duly does this, and when people in each group ask why he's put them there, he says it's based on whether they were nice to him or not. And people in both groups point out, not unreasonably, that they haven't actually either done or refused to do anything nice for Jesus himself, at which point he pulls a substitution move, pointing out that 'whatever you did (or did not do - AJ) for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did (or did not &c)for me'.

And this is actually worth thinking about, this interchangeability Jesus insists on between Himself, as Son of God, and the least of us. It's something I think a lot of us pay lip service to, but actually think about it. What Jesus is asking us to do is to treat people we regard as the absolute lowest of the low, the most abject, outcast people, with the same love and reverence we treat, or would like to think we treat, Him with. 

I actually think this is the hardest possible thing to believe in the Bible. Genuinely. It's comparatively easy to believe all the miraculous stuff, because obviously the Son of God can work miracles, right? That comes with the territory. He doesn't have to be constrained by the laws of biology or thermodynamics - He has a note from His Dad. But to actually believe, and to act on the belief, that the lowest drug addict on the street putting their hand out to you for a quid, or the most annoying dickhead on the bus watching TikTok on they damn phone, is as holy and divine and worthy of your time as the Messiah, that's fucking impossible (which, I think, is why the only prayer Jesus specifically directs people to pray in the gospels includes a line where we admit we fucked up and apologise for it). But just because it is impossible, that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to do it as much as we possibly can. 

And the thing is: that interchangeability of Jesus with the lowest of the low should also govern how we look at the crucifixion, and not just because that event, allowing Himself to be tortured to death over the course of a day to save every human being who ever has or ever will live - yes, including those who blasted rope to Waluigi hentai - represents the ne plus ultra of this universal compassion Jesus is trying to teach. 

A theological text of profound importance

But because, as I've mentioned before here, crucifixion was a punishment the Roman Empire reserved for the lowest of the low, and to be crucified was not just mean to be as painful as possible, but as humiliating as possible. Imagine what a crucified body smelled like, after bleeding and baking for hours in the Middle Eastern sun. Imagine the pain and strain on the joints of the body. Imagine how weak you would feel, forced to adopt an unnatural position and knowing that the only thing that holds you up is the very torturing frame that you're pinned to. Imagine the special humiliation of being raised up, literally looking down on everyone before you, but all of those people looking back up at you and jeering. Because you're filth. You're scum. You're the lowest form of life. You must be - because you're up there on a cross. 

And I do mean a and not the cross. Because what I'm trying to do here is not the traditional Christian move of focusing in a nigh-pornographic way on the sufferings of Christ. Mel Gibson has you covered if that's what you want. I want you to imagine specifically what crucifixion felt like to someone who wasn't the Messiah. To someone who was just a schmuck who got caught. And there were a lot of those schmucks: at least 300,000, according to conservative estimates, but maybe as many as two million. After Spartacus' revolt, the Emperor Crassus ordered six thousand of the former gladiator's supporters to be crucified. Kinda puts all those RETVRN memes into some kind of perspective, huh?

Every single one of those people suffered and was humiliated just as much as Jesus, and when we treat the cross as some kind of wand and Jesus as some kind of superhero, we do those people, and Christ Himself, a disservice. Because if you accept the challenge of compassion represented by Matthew 25 - and it's my contention that, as a Christian, you really should - then you have to see every single one of those people as being as worthy of love, honour and empathy as Christ. And when you do that, something becomes very clear. 

The important thing about the crucifixion is not that it was a horrible thing to do to the Son of God. 

The important thing is that it was a horrible thing to do to anyone. 

Fuck it

 Given that the current revelations look like they might take down not just Keir Starmer but his entire government, here are the pages of my most recently completed graphic poem zine, in case there turns out to be no point actually printing it because the people satirised in it get kicked out on their arses for being best mates with Peter Mandelson. 

My planned new pamphlet, stuckfearkarma, will now revert to its original working title, Fifteen New Poems by AJ McKenna. 

Letter to a Little Man

 

I drew the above as a design for a protest sign, which I want to display when counter-protesting the fash as a counterpoint to their shite, expensive, AI-generated banners of the likes of Charlie Kirk. I like the idea of toting something handmade, homebrewed, put together on a shoestring with real creative effort honouring real heroes instead of something expensive and fake bigging up a dickhead who died the way he lived - making a tit of himself on a college campus spreading hatred against black folks and trans people. Basically I'm trying to put into practice the things I said about getting as real as we possibly can in opposition to the fake, AI-fuelled social media world the fascists are all desperate to be stars of in the interview I did for We Create Together last month: 

After having drawn it, though, I read some posts about how many more people than just Pretti and Good have been murdered by ICE in the past year or so, which led me to tracking down The American Prospect's Running Count of How Many People ICE Has Killed and Injured. And I felt that I should also do something to honour them, too. And, because I have previous form for writing protest poems about events in Minnesota, and because a poet whose work I greatly value told me once I seemed to do my best work in the form of a direct address, I wrote this: 

Letter to a Little Man 

Your cheque bounced, Donald: as you knew it would.

It bounced for Alex Pretti. It bounced for Renee Good:

A mother shot dead in her car. A nurse killed like a dog,

And both would be the first to say they’re not the only ones. 

It bounced for Jaime Alanis: they threw him from a roof

In Southern California, and Robert Valdez too:

They ran him over with a car, and then, in Illinois

They shot Silverio Gonzalez, after he dropped off his boys

And daughter at their school, in ‘ Operation Midway Blitz’;

And then, on a highway in Virginia, a speeding truck would hit

Jose Castro-Rivera as he tried to flee your thugs;

Isaias Barboza and Keith Porter they just shot down with their guns

In Texas and Los Angeles: we know the names of some

Who had their fingers on those triggers, but most remain unknown

Because your murderers wear masks and turn their backs to hide their shame,

And what we also know with certainty is these are just the names

Of those they killed in public: behind the high white walls

Of your detention centres you’ve killed five-and-thirty more

That we can name. I’ll name them here. Their names should be remembered: 

Genry Ruiz Gullen. 

Serawit Gezahegn Dejene. 

Maksym Chernyak.

Brayam Rayo-Garzon. 

Nhon Ngoc Nguyen. 

Marie Ange Blaise. 

Abelardo Avelleneda-Delgado.

Jesus Molina-Veya.

Johnny Noviello.

Isidro Perez. 

Tien Xuan Phan. 

Chaofeng Ge. 

Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas. 

Oscar Rascon Duarte. 

Ismael Ayala Uribe.

Santos Reyes-Banegas.

Norlan Guzman-Fuentes. 

Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez.

Huabing Xie

And Leo Cruz-Silva…

I’ve read lists of names like this before, by my city’s Civic Centre:

The victims of a genocide you’ve revelled in abroad,

An act that you applauded (and the watching world abhorred)

And which you sought to imitate at home, from sea to shining sea

With your American SS, your pampered paramilitary

Who panic if they think they hear a car alarm or whistle,

Their mascot your sham Superman who couldn’t pass the physical

(I queued to see you once, Dean Cain, at Gateshead Metro Centre;

If I ever see your face again I swear I’ll fucking end ya);

Who cry unfair at protesters in blow-up frog costumes,

Who fifty motivated Angelenos forced back into their HQ,

And who are being beaten back in Minneapolis and Maine

By a people who have woke up and who know ‘never again’

Is more than just a formula of pious, empty words

And that a riot isn’t violence but the cry of the unheard

Who will remain unheard no longer as we make some fucking noise

In Minnesota, Philly, California, Illinois,

Virginia, Texas, Venezuela, Greenland, Palestine,

And everywhere around the world where people choose to rise,

Refuse to bend the knee and make it known we’ve had enough

Of your clan of child molesters and your camo-suited thugs.

The cheque that bounced in ’26 is not the one King tried

To cash back in the sixties, the promise, long denied,

Of life and happiness and liberty to be enjoyed by all,

No: your bouncing cheque’s your undertaking that you’d make us crawl.

You can’t. We won’t. We never will. No matter what you do

All people of good will will never kneel for men like you. 

And now your cheque is bouncing, Donald, as we always knew it would,

Because when, Mr President, was your credit ever good?

Yes, the allusion to Wilhelm Reich is intentional. I've been thinking a lot about his work on the psychology of fascists, and particularly his own angry direct address to them and their ilk, Listen, Little Man!, a lot lately. 

The YouTuber Shaun is doing a fundraiser for the Women's Foundation of Minnesota's Immigrant Rapid Response Fund, which seems like a good thing to donate to, if any of the above has moved you to do so. 

Heartcore Zero

Hand on heart

they pledge allegiance to a piece of cloth:

to colour, pattern, line and shape, 

to (what they do not see as) abstract art

They (would not say they) touch themselves

and that is all they do. 

I, instead, extend my hand to you

because I know your struggle is mine too. 

Blood, guts, Seven Sisters

Again, one thinks of Bacon, those figures in rooms

devouring themselves, each other, the marks

they are made from, paint slapped to canvas like a hand

to flesh; of Bellows, those smears crashing each

against the other, of some scene rehearsed

somewhere deep inside the body and translated

into image, into practice, into play 

that is not play. One thinks of Brite

described by Straub: true artists circle 

like a bird of prey. One thinks of Gunn. 

A Christmas Poem, sort of

 

Nativity by Sadao Watanabe

Look, I'm as surprised as you are. But for the past three months I've been involved in street activism in defence of the people my government has chosen to bang up in a condemned hotel for the 'crime' of seeking asylum, and I've been thinking a lot harder about what all my ethics boil down to, and in the end, late one night or maybe early one morning, I found that at the most basic level my answer to that question was a cheesy little hymn they made us sing in primary school, based on Matthew 25: 35-40. Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me. 

I guess you never entirely outrun the ethical instruction you receive during those formative years. And while I ain't running back to the bosom of Holy Mother Church anytime soon, I have found myself struck by the poetry of a child born to parents put on the move by a tyrant who rules under the sign of the eagle, denied reasonable accommodation and forced to settle for the only thing available to them. Have you ever been in a stable? You know how they smell? You know what animals do in them. And you also know what people do when they die. I've always been struck by something Alan Moore has a character remark on in Promethea, that 'crucifixion was something you'd do to a dog', that sites of the eagle-tyrant empire's preferred method of execution also reeked of urine, blood and excrement. That the Most High both began and ended His time in human form down in the goddam dirt. If such an observation seems blasphemous to you then I'm sorry to say you're not paying attention - it's the whole fucking point. 

So I was thinking about all this - about the parallels between modern-day migrants and the Holy Family, and those between the empire that nailed a guy they saw as just another Jewish radical to a piece of wood and the one that currently pepper-sprays priests, and the ongoing genocide in the place we sing sentimental songs about at this time of year, and what my government does to people who are protesting that genocide, and indeed what that government is doing to people like me, and, well, this happened. I don't know if it's entirely finished or if I might go back and heavily rewrite it, but it felt important to get this version of it down now even if it does change a great deal. So: 

The Nativity at Night by Geertgen tot Sint Jans

Evangel

forthe Filton 24

Heaven comes to Earth in shit and piss and rotted straw.
A light to change the world shines through a creaking and neglected door,
while bureaucrats whose papers bear the ruler’s eagle sign
turn over in their sleep and dream about tomorrow’s lines,
and hoteliers chide servants to prepare the breakfast rush,
and vagabonds alone look on the miracle and scratch
skin on their wrists where fleas have bitten them, and drawn a little blood,
as, almost unremarked, love is delivered up of love
 
to keep a meeting at a different hour, still marked by blood and filth
when, under the eagle’s imprimatur, love incarnate must be killed
with whip, with thorn, with nails, with spear, with gun and bomb and drone,
with lines half-dreaming drawn on maps, with cries of bring them home,
with bodies bulldozed into pits, with pits where poisons burn,
with environments made hostile and legitimate concerns,
with a voice that yells incessantly that freedom isn’t free,
with the criminalisation of the act of empathy…
 
but love is not killed with a nail, nor gun or bomb or drone;
love will not be turned back by any border we have drawn;
love excavates the bulldozed pits and gives the bones a name,
love sees through all our rhetoric and shifting of the blame,
goes willingly to prison for the sake of those we hate,
as it was twice confined in filth at the insistence of a state:
love came into the world behind a creaking and neglected door
and changed the world by showing us we have to change it more.

Face Front, True Believers!

 

It's no exaggeration to say that The Author Has Been Tweeting: A Graphic Poem, copies of which began shipping this very morning, represents the beginning of something I've wanted to do for something like a quarter of a century. I don't mean the subject matter, obviously: who could have predicted, back then, how the person who inspired its (entirely fictional, and there's a disclaimer on the back to that effect) main character would turn out? No, I mean the form: the idea of doing a poem as a comic. I think this is a brilliant idea, and I'm surprised people don't do it more, because it just seems to me that the two forms - sequential art and poetry - go together so well, and complement each other in fascinating ways. A poem moves from verse to verse on the way to its conclusion: a comic does much the same thing, moving panel by panel. So many great passages in comics feel like a kind of poetry anyway: why not try doing that deliberately? As I say: a great idea. 

But not an original one. Because, like most great ideas in comics, it comes from (or at least I got the idea from) Mr Alan Moore. 

When I said 'something like a quarter of a century' in the first paragraph I was allowing for the possibility that I might not necessarily have picked up a copy of Caliber Press' Alan Moore's Songbook when it first came out, in 1998; but, you know, I could very well have done. I was an inveterate haunter of my local branch of Forbidden Planet in those days, regularly popping in to spend some of my student loan money on the new issues of Preacher, The Invisibles or anything else that caught my eye. And, at some point, this collection of work written by Moore for Caliber's series of Negative Burn anthologies must have fishhooked my ocular socket, because I bought it, I devoured it and, years later, it's still one of my favourite entries in Moore's canon. Note that I don't say the best: it obviously isn't that, it's a caprice compared to, say, Promethea, a mere bagatelle when set beside From Hell (which also, incidentally, combines comics and poetry - Gull, the absolute madman, is always slipping into iambics to deliver his various speeches, especially on his epic coach ride through London with Netley; as indeed does V in his eponymous series), but, well - how can you not love a comic which features a jaded Godzilla, fantastically drawn by Art Adams, declaring that he's tired of 'Trampling Tokyo'?

Moore's Songbook - and yeah, sure, he called them songs and he even actually sung some of the fuckers but a song that you read on the page, if it's good, if it hangs together and is deep enough, is still a poem, just ask Leonard Cohen - was proof of concept, and for years I dreamed of working with an artist to set some of my own work, not to music, but to images in the same way as various artists, commissioned by Caliber, had done for Moore. But it remained a dream, a project for a rainy day or that moment all artists dream of when someone with access to several suitcases full of large-denomination bills asks you 'so. What would you really like to do?' until last year, when I started drawing and learned, to my surprise, that not only did I not suck at it, but that if I worked at it I could get pretty good. 

And now here I am with The Author Has Been Tweeting, my first graphic poetry zine (there will be more), which you can buy from my store on ko-fi right now! Putting this together has been a fascinating process and I'll probably talk more about it in future entries - in particular, as someone who regularly creates videos to go with her poems, I want to talk about the cinematic qualities of comics as a poetry medium - but for now it's just turned five on Friday evening and I feel like having a celebratory beer. So, until the next time, Gojira, Gojira, GO!