Your holiness Gregoire Haddad
“I tell you the truth, everyone
who sins is a slave of sin”
The homeland is forsaking freedom every
day. Every second, the nails of sin are budding in the cotton that fills the
mattresses of the poor and the pillows of the children, sneaking like thieves,
sucking the principles of happiness, to go back and spread among their ragged
shoes detecting every shiver of frost in their ever sleepless fingernails.
The meek of the earth are shaking to the
wind of snowy trees and standing on the bedrock of runaway rivers, nevertheless
their blessed waters fail to straighten the wrinkles on the dry cotton, frozen
underneath their veins scorched by the wicked souls of rulers and tycoons.
You were the noble guardian who taught
that honest theft from the rich isn’t the deadliest of sins and even more, how
it's a necessity to live and not to be slaves… For “not on bread only shall man
live”
Like a sweet bird song you screamed:
keep their filthy clothes and cruel strings away from your bodies! Be careful
not to let them weave like gallows of eternal suffering and chock our hopeful
voices.
You carried the lash of the temple
moving from one religion to the next, and with it you burnt the lying and
pretentious strings, after they had turned them to ropes, ropes seeking but
pleasure in tying the perfect knot between the hands and feet of the wretched
scattered upon crosses rising above tombs long forgotten amidst the howls of
beasts and owls.
They tried to sedate the tongues of the
meager but they kept writing the truth about the human history with ink made
out of wine aged for eons in the cellars of righteous monasteries.
Suddenly these tongues began thundering
and burying the money hyenas amid the oak trees, their roots went around their
necks and pulled them down to the bottom of the earth to raise on top of their
minds layers of dark rock.
Among the displaced we saw you, as you
prayed on your knees and moved around softly and gently just like a ballet
dancer, carrying the emblem of righteousness, straight from the lines of truth
of the Holy Bible and what's in between.
We are all witnesses to your sermons,
how genuinely they reflected the sayings and doings of Jesus Christ, all the
opposite of nowadays’ interpretations and forgeries.
It was you who practiced the true
teachings of humanity, in a country colonized by debauchery, where rotten mud
covers the bodies of clergymen and politicians.
It was them, they painted the altar with
the different colors of mud, and they broke the Holy Grail after they had
filled it with various explosive liquids. As soon as the heat of the candle
came near it, it blew up and the fire escaped burning down the benches in the
halls and the ceremonial pictures on the walls, turning everything to ashes.
The iron melted onto the confession chair reducing it to nothing but dim
cinder, instants after the treachery of Judas.
Till now treason is still festering,
aggravating and accumulating… but they’re proud of it. Like their daily prayers
they practiced it devoutly, up until war horns were blown from the mosques and
the churches and every house of prayer where true faith was absent. Then came
the black nails, flying in all directions, piercing the flesh of men and beast
with their heat and fire, and amidst the red roses the nails settled…
I entered the temple and saw you alone
standing tall on the altar, your white robe filling the space in the abandoned
church, it even poured out of the broken doors and windows to cover the burn
marks and the corpses of good poor worshipers.
And the Divine Liturgy started over the
sounds of destruction melody, over gutters of blood and pain lullabies of the
Sorrowful Mother and Father in Heaven rosaries, buried under the rubble and
hundreds of candles, hung on chandeliers buried under thousands of pages of
gold-plated bibles, burning in oils...
And to the music of red wine dripping
from the old monk’s jug, I saw the scent of incense escape the burner of your
young hand and merge with the red of warm ember to cover your forehead and wipe
off the anoints of all the rotten customs you have rejected in your immaculate
secular spirit.
You white beard went whispering in the
ears of others, the innocent hairs scattered in a December rainstorm and at the
end settled amongst nature’s grasslands where grows justice for humanity and
all the religions: “whoever has ears, let them hear”!
