Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 17:08:36 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: M/B "In The Shadow of the Sun"

			"In The Shadow of the Sun"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 The nine year old boy, of waifish, almost elfish face, with
the thick blonde hair put his alabaster hands round my legs, around
my knees, for he worshipped me. At least he believed he did. And
he wept his tears into my flesh which would never really be able to
touch his. How could it? He told me, this fair haired boy with the
protruding lower lip, with the lithe supple body that was so in need
of the lack of penitence. For that was the main problem between
Stephan and me. The main problem in Father Atherton's church.
The boy told me secrets. He confided everything, in his breathless
chants, with a voice as clear and cool as a spring of blue water on a
hot summer mid-afternoon.

 I longed for him. As I have longed for so many children. He
would tell me what he and Father Atherton would do to each other,
and then the hour of prayer afterwards. In the sanctuary they would
have their dreams enacted and in the penitence box they would
have those dreams buried, never to be exhumed again. Until the
next time they fell into each other's arms. And afterwards, in the
dark cathedral of midnight hours, at least the midnight hours of the
mind, they would not embrace as priest and acolyte came out of
the confession stalls. They would look at each other only
momentarily. Father remembering this boy and the other boys who
lit the candles of a Sunday morning. Whom he loved beyond
anything else. The shy smiles. The wolfish grins. The giggly
knowledge. The games they came up with, always new to the man.
How they strutted. In their robes of Sunday morning. How they
strutted even more in their nakedness before the candle light of the
alter. Proud of themselves. Pushing their groins out. Pushing their
bellies out. To be tickled and touched by the man who was a hymn
at such times.

 Father Atherton, thirtyish, lank and thin, wearing wire
rimmed gold tinted spectacles, trying to appear so much older.
Trying to appear so much the wiser. But his brown hair was even
untipped by gray. He face was unlined. His eyes were brown and
mysterious. They held a certain depth that I knew was real. Though
he put on no airs. Though he never belittled anyone, save himself,
he thought himself there in his heavy sweaty robes not as a man of
god, but a minister to the children. To the acolytes. To the young
boys. Who sang with sweet bell sounds each mass.

 Who were lined together  a row, culling out the most
beauteous sound anyone could hear, cuddling the lyrics of the old
hymns in them with such grace and giving, they in their churchly
attire, with their brown hair and blond and red and black and their
faces thin or cherubic, their eyes filled with a tantamount to
mischief that each thought he committed alone. Not in guile did
Father Atherton look down at Stephan afterwards. After the
confession. But in meek supplication and a hand that could not
really touch the boy any more than could mine.

 They, the priest, and the alter boys and the choir boys, (it
seemed sort of a law in the Catholic church, started apparently by
Oscar Wilde or as he was known in that story, anonymous) one by
one, had made love all over the church. Wild and daring, sweaty
and intrinsic, hard and hard and crying out to the heavens in
rapture. Boys crying out, "Suck my dick", "go up me", let me see
your cum." How incredibly hot it made the Father to hear these
little woodland creatures talk like that. And he always obliged.
Always. With the church locked doors then. And as much of his
heart's doors too, but not as close, and not as often as he liked to
think. In the long fingered darker than dark fingers of shadows in
the sanctuary of its sanded brown hard wood benches covered with
the satiny green pillows, and standing one to the back or the front
of the other, leaning against the pulpit. Communing with their
bodies. Laughing with their souls. They had made love, Father
Atherton undone at times by them and getting carried away
himself, and yet, even so, they had felt of each other in a certain
definition of church, especially Catholic church, that gave a sort of
liturgy to it. "Say Fuck, Father, say Fuck, real loud and real proud."
And he would, as best he could, do so. But this being in the church
(and somehow it could have been nowhere else,  it just would not
have been right elsewhere, not for him--he oddly enough did not
mean it to be irreverent, he repeated to himself quite often) gave a
seriousness to it as though that would make the sucking and
fucking and the holding together something more than what it was.

 Here in purple glow of moon windows and the dimmed
glow gold chandeliers.. With the golden chalices on the altar. With
the huge high roof that stretched out beams of sunlight of mock
serious morning promises, through the stained glass windows,
through the forest smell of the church--the wood of it, the struts,
the pews, the hard wood floor. As man and boy would take off
their clothes of privilege and starvation and thus plunge into each
other and know the joy of love making, of pushing against each
other as they were trying to get inside each other's very skin--for
this was a place of terrible starvation, this was a place of terrible
hunger that was supposed to become rosy and fat on less and less,
on more and more denial of faith that was the body of a boy
coming , bucking, grinning, proud as hell, naked in the place
where the priest stood at mass before his worshipping congregation
and gave absolution. To everyone but himself. And remembered.
God the push pins of remembrance.

 And his boys. Where their flesh was meted together and all
those empty benches and the night time air of the place, moon
shining through the windows, coming to shadow and sound and the
need of hungry Father Atherton to have a boy's penis massaged by
the boy and by himself, to pray to him, to rise their penises as
though a resurrection of old beliefs in new wine skins, robed in
purple skies and angry black clouds, as thunder and lightning
broke the heavens and screamed for a man on a cross who could
no longer scream for himself. As Father Atherton did, weeping into
the necks of naked boys. Holding their naked bodies in his lap,
cradling them, like statue of Mary cradling the body of her dead
son. As Father Atherton did, holding them while they rubbed
themselves and climaxed, the little bodies shimmy shaking and
eyes wide and staring unashamed at the man who knelt beside
them, who touched their sides, their slim hips or their heavier hips,
who kissed them where their pubic hair would be some day.

 And all of it glazed and gleaned in that reddish glow, that
brown wood varnish smell of church and heaven mingling. The
miters tossing off little moments of time where the meters of penis
length against the priest's penis always brought dour expressions
to the boy's faces, Miguel and Michel and Stephan and Randolph
and so many others, who were laid in the red carpeted aisle, who
were laid on the benches, who were laid at the bottom of the
heavily ornamented and extremely detailed silver statue of Jesus
on the Cross, to the side of the pulpit. Who stabbed and were
stabbed with such princely daggers.

 The boys who said, oh Father Atherton, I'll never be as big
as you, and the priest leaning over them, leaning with his clothes
on or partly on or naked, taking in the boy from inches away,
putting his eyes to the boys' chests, saying to them I can see inside
you. And they saying, somewhat alarmed, somewhat curious, what
do you see in there? And the Father would be tassling the cross
round their necks, for he always made sure they and he wore
crosses especially when they were naked with him in the dark and
in the moan of the sighing and the brilliant boy lips that would
stretch outward and upward upon coming. And then release.
Release. A naked body shuddering with such life and glowing
ecstasy as if painted by a sunset deep inside. The father would say,
I see a very handsome young man in there, not as pretty as a boy,
but handsome, and successful.

 And the boys would reach their tiny thin or not so tiny thin
arms round the man's shoulder, asking him if they could do him
now, for it was fun for the boys, to do such things in church, to
remember them as they sat on Sundays and Wednesdays in this
place of God, with their parents and their friends--the boys in the
choir and sometimes on the pews with the others--for the boys
never told one another they were making it with the father. The
father who was kind and soft spoken and who had lonely eyes
sometimes so lonely they seemed made of brown wood, just right
for varnishing, had told them it would mean his neck if anyone
told. Not because he thought it was wrong, and the boy would
invariable shake his head, thus agreeing.

 But the priest was haunted. For he did think it wrong. He
thought it wrong to light candles and put a naked boy in the center
of them on the church kitchen floor. He thought it wrong to look at
them so lovingly in the flickering light, to look at them so hotly. As
though they were sacrificial virgins, the phrase made him wince,
but sacrificed not for his glory or God's most certainly, but for the
boys'. He came to know each groove of each boy. Each pleasure
each boy particularly loved. Whether they loved his sitting on their
penises and pretending they were so much bigger. Or they loved
sitting on his face and he eating their dicks and assholes.
 To introduce them to him and to introduce both he and the
boys to the door that would lead out of all this repression, all of
these dark shadows like stains of Jesus' blood all over this church.
To feel always in shadows in it. Heart sick. To look at the boy
choir of a Sunday morning in their white surplices, in the bright
lights of the place and the strong sunlight coming through Jesus
and lambs and Mary and Joseph there in permanence in stasis of
flight on the stained glass, huge with history, massive with
reprisals.

 To look at the boys. To know all of them. To space them
out one night to the next. To know what their naked chests looked
like under their robes and their street clothes. To know that one at
least was naked under the robe, and when the boy was hard under
his robe, he would nod a special nod to the father who would blush
from embarrassment--sometimes the little prick, not so little could
be seen jutting at the robe, but only if one looked hard enough--and
he did--because it had been the Father's suggestion sometimes, and
sometimes theirs, to laugh about later, the both of them, as they
held each other in Father's study, as they rested their bodies on his
couch of leather and pricked at each other's bodies, while he
studied the smoothness of limbs of the boy, the smoothness of
chest, the way the tiny little roseate sunset nipples would get hard
when he blew on them his warm breath of man. And crumpled the
boy to him like a fine snowy morning when everything is clean and
pure and right with the world.

 But in all of it, in the center of him, the devil was there.
Father knew it. Though none of the boys, including Stephan,
wanted to confess after they had made love, after they had bent
down on their knees on the steps to the alter, their bodies naked,
their buttocks spread by the man's fingers, as he rubbed KY on
them and adjusted his condom--the boys always liked to put the
condom on him, or for him to put it on them, when they changed
positions--and slowly with great patience and care inserted his dick
into them. How they rode back and forth on him, and how they
were so eager to get him to cum and themselves as well, as he rode
them like a bucking bronco. Looking at the statue, this one, but not
the other, almost never the other, of the huge Jesus naked on the
cross right there above and to the front of them. Then in
confession, Father became a rigid in the worst sense of the word
recalcitrant priest again. And the boy had to swear by Holy Mother
it would never happen again. Which left some of the boys in tears
afterwards. Knowing it would indeed not happen again. Though it
did. And again the ritual after. So they began to look at that part of
it as something to help ease the Father's guilt. They did it for him,
more than for themselves.

 And during their sex, they looked at the eyes that did not
cry tears. At the hands that had not ministered to anyone. At the
words of the Bible ensconced in that sick twisted image that had
lead to such flights of misery and war and murder and suicide and
witch hunts.  Somehow seeing love and redemption of pain by yet
more pain. More death. More guilt. As the little boy butts tightened
their sphincters on his penis making it hard, so hard. As he held his
hands like flights of doves to their delicate sides and precious rib
cages. To the sanctity of life, the true sanctity of those tiny bird
cages that tried to keep those insubstantial hearts beating a while
longer. To stave off time and age and eventual death in whatever
way it was to come to each of them.

 He remembered reading in a story, to ease a character's
guilt, he just thought of lungs full of cancer or all the other
monstrous things, wars and killings and destructions of souls while
the human being was still alive hollow inside-the tortures that God
had invented, or had been said to, the ones that man had invented
to get away from a world too much with him, and had paid the
ultimate price of , for instance, heroin O.D., and the ones man had
invented using God as excuse for all sorts of insanity and whipping
boy at the same time. And how could this, in parallel with those
things and infinitely more, how could this be so wrong. The boys'
with their hair sweating, their hard penises and balls being shaken
back and forth as the Father entered them and rode them. The
human organs loud and clear, while the long gold pipes, like huge
metal elongated bellows of rolls of gold ocean, of the elaborate
church organ were stately and still and blew only hot or cold air on
them.

 The sweat dark tight sweaty holes these boys had. The
places of the utmost secrecy. The places where they wanted him to
go. Where they needed him because their parents were most strict
Catholics and would not allow them around girls, save those who
went to public school, and then only in classes, never outside of
school. And the Father was there. The Father was kind when boys
started telling him, each individually, in his study, their faces
sweaty and their eyes closed, here in the 21st century, think of it,
he wanted to say, their shame over finding pleasure in rubbing
their penises hard. Here in his sterile office with its leather couch
and leather L Z Boy, its cozy fireplace in winter--scene of many
trysts--its soft shag brown carpeting. And his hard wood desk with
the glass top over it. The brown paneled walls on which were
photos of woodlands and quail and cats and dogs, paintings some,
and his degrees on the wall behind his desk. And he wanting to
touch the bowed back of the confessing boy.

 Wanted to tell him it was like that for him too when he was
a child. And it doesn't have to be. But it does. Of course. For the
Father had never masturbated one time. Had never made love to a
girl in college one time. Had never been seduced by that first boy
one time. None of these things had he done one time that he was
not pulled into his guts by his crashing guilt and his deep and
eternal shame. But he had to tell the boy. This one in white shirt,
blue short pants and blue jacket--from their parochial school of
this diocese. Or this other boy or that one of regular school clothes,
who went to public school. He had to tell them, at much risk, this
even, to himself that it was not a sin. That all boys did it. He did it.
And it was stupid and cruel to lumber children with this nonsense
of it's going to develop cancer and fall off if you don't stop and all
that other ancient garbage that should have died with the alienists
who promulgated such rot for money and power and out of
hopeless stupid superstition and anal retentive problems.

 Invariably the boy would look at him incredulously over
the desk top, some of them their eyes hardly clearing the desk top,
You? And he would shake his head and he would close his eyes.
And they would ask him about it. And he would tell. His heart
triphammering. His mind so frightened. His palms and underarms
sweating. Was it liturgy or litany? Was it an attempt to break the
boys out of prison for his own personal pleasure? We all have
needs. All have pleasure. I wanted to say so often to everyone that
it never was rote with me, the father thought. Telling them. And it
never was rote because he was a real human being. He was not
officious. He did not have the devil inside him. It was hard to get
the sex words out, when he talked with them. And they had to help
him as often as not.

 If you would like true rote, true litany, then recite the
catechism five hundred times before you go to bed. If you like true
rote, and can face it for what it is, say one thousand Hail Marys
before you retire each night and each morning, as soon as you
awake. If you want indoctrination, listen to the pseudo-rock group
of teenagers in this church--a tradition long before the Father got
here--whose songs contain almost subliminal messages, much like
the Beatles' White Album was supposed to, "that hook kids to
Jesus--we just have to have the right bait."  (church bait?) That was
what the previous Priest had said, his hands blessing the musicians
and touching their flustered flushed cheeks after a concert they had
given one summer night in the church parking lot. If you want rote
and indoctrination, try these things. And more.

 Father Atherton this night, after Stephan had said good
night wistfully in this place that made so many echoes that words
even spoken loudly were drowned out by a rushing series of echoes
as though some wild flock of angels were bound to come by and
everything had to be made the ready for them, where mortal man
could not attend. But could only caretake. Could only keep the
candle in the window. Waiting for the second return. The second
coming. And if the Father loved the alabaster nakedness of the
young boy with the candles on the kitchen floor around him. If the
Father loved to stroke a three or four inch old hard penis with holy
water. Loved to see the boy weave a bit from side to side as the
man put his too thin too all the time pursed lips to the boy's penis
and his balls, treating them as the Sunday morning sunrise miracle
they were, thus how could God create such beauty and then damn
me for loving such beauty?  If these things were wrong, then why
was caning right? As it was practiced in the parochial school.
Which he had tried to stop. But not too hard. And to no avail. Was
making a boy's butt bleed so moral and so for his own good. And
was kissing a boy's willing butt so horrible, so bad? It made no
sense.

 And the boy would sometimes put his legs round the
Father's hands on each side of him, and put his heels round the
sides of those hands, and struggle to bring out of himself his first
ejaculation, there on the kitchen floor or in the other room that was
the study or in the church proper itself or in the foyer where the
parishioners would hang their coats and chat to each other before
going into service.

 How Stephan especially wanted to greet sad eyed Father
with their glad tidings that unto us this day has been born a boy
who has finally learned how to cream. And sometimes they did.
Sometimes they did when they were too young supposedly to do it
yet. They did. The Father had read puberty is coming faster and
faster to children. Some as old as six or seven have developing
pubic hair. Little boys getting larger penises. Father Atherton had
noticed this himself. Little girls are growing breasts when they
should be some years away from that. God saying the world is
ending? God saying children get it while you can? Or God saying
it's all hell anyway, innocence lost, forget it, have a carnal circus
before I cast the lot of you down to hell?

 This evening in the cold sanctuary, after Stephan had come,
the Father had had the boy turn over on the carpeting in front of
the first pews, and had massaged the boy's tender delicately
shaped back that arched like the neck of a lovely swan. The man
put his face to the boy's buttocks which were shaped like little
curved flowers in a summer field. He kissed the boy there. He
opened the pads of flesh and kissed him and tongued him on his
button there. Stephan laughed and squirmed and held his left leg
up enjoying this, relaxing with it, laughing at God with it. For that
was part of it. They had had no one warm to turn to. Not in this
parish. Hard lined. Strict. Almost fundamentalist all the way
round. To which the Father had had to play. Because he did not
want to have to be dispersed to another parish. The father had told
them not to laugh at God, not to do this for this reason. Though he
knew they did, they pretended that was not part of the motive. He
tried to keep as much questions to himself about this whole thing,
but this part especially, out of his head, save in his nightly
tormented dreams which he could do nothing about and which he
woke from with trembling fear and a hard cock.

 There had been that scandal at the last two parishes Father
Atherton had ministered. The Church had had to pay a great deal
of hush money, and transferred him both times, they seeing
absolutely no hypocrisy in it, for the Church is a business like all
others. The Boy Scouts also transfer scout masters who get caught
with boys. Also pay bribe money to parents who are so outraged
that only a great deal of coin can calm them down. They, in effect,
acting as their sons' pimps.

 The church elders advised him that he would not be happy
should such a thing happen in this parish as well. So there was
always the horror of that to think of. This great and noble Holy
Roman Catholic Church always so concerned about the children,
always so concerned about propriety and devoutness to one's
duties--who gave us among other things, the Inquisition, and
among other things a Pope who aided Adolf Hitler, and a church
only vaguely grudgingly sort of admitting it now, but that was
history, you can't blame us for that. Or for all the other witch hunts
and hangings and cutting in half and sticking severed human heads
on poles. Or throwing Galilio in prison till he recanted in his proof
that the Earth revolved around the sun. Or using starving dying
Third World country children as exploitation for money from
parishioners that go to the "charities" own greedy selfish ends. As
bad or worse than any televangelist who does the same thing. And
those boys who die yearly of, or are maimed physically or mentally
and emotionally from the canings in their church schools. Oh yes,
they had much to be superior about. Much to be holy about.

 Tonight, when the boy and the priest had interlocked in all
the ways it was possible to interlock. When the boy's asshole had
finally been strong enough, and conditioned enough to take the
priest's six inches all the way, and the boy had let the priest come
in him for the very first time, the sheer exuberance of it, the sheer
exhilaration of it, to let the sperm, if it were not confined in the
condom, enter the boy, it had seemed to the Father it was making
love. It felt like it. For maybe the first time. And for Stephan then
later, to lean against the front of the alter while the naked man
with his lean white hairless body, only a small patch of hair above
his hardened penis, and for the boy to put his little rose petal lips to
it, kiss the tip of it, to look up into the man's eyes, with such a
wise warm mischief in his own, and gobble him up like a candy
cane, to take him all the way in, go up and down on it, and do to it
with his tongue what the man had done to the boy's with his
tongue so many countless times before, all of this felt like love.
For the first time.

 With the door of thick hard evergreen wood forever closed
between the boy and the man. Still the huge steel veil fell between
them. Feeling the boy's chest, playing spoons on his ribs with his
fingers, tickling the boy's delightful V, and his crotch high in the
air as the man took the little alabaster balls like golf balls in his
mouth and rolled them around a bit, while tickling the boy's navel
and those young tiny tits, while the golden haired angel faced kid
giggled the night away. Still as the boy had touched him, had
examined the man's naked body as well. There fucking on the
royal red steps to the alter. On the aisle red carpetings lush and
thick. On the choir benches, though they were hard and not padded
like the pews were and gave both man and boys terrible butt aches,
but still holy unholy fun. Still and all, they did not, could not,
really touch each other. Ever. Nor father and the other boys. It was
always at a shamed distance for the man.

 And Stephan had walked away from the priest this night.
For the priest had wanted not wanted him to. Stephan had wanted
to sleep with the man, to cuddle up in that lonely bed with him,
(the only place, which for some reason, they had not been together)
to put his slightly elongated head on the man's naked chest, to feel
the chest breathing calmly and restfully up and down the whole
frightening dark night long. And that was why he had come back
an hour later, Stephan, to in surprise find the church doors still
unlocked from when the priest had unlocked them when Stephan
bid good night. For even in this small town, church doors were
locked as were all doors late at night, for such had become the
need everywhere.

 The boy walked into the building, into the sanctuary. He
had been feeling a little pain in his anus from his first real fuck this
night. But it felt like a good pain. He could still pretend that Father
Atherton was back there. Still inside him. With the purple shadows
of the church and the windows and the candles yellowing it, with
vague chandeliers still dimly lit, and the hollowing out holiness of
the cathedral, and the whispering sandals shushing in front of him
and in back of him and to the sides. He was going to tell Father
Atherton the truth--that within those bony knock kneed pigeon
toed scrawny chested tiny dick and balls body of his, his noble
head and face (for Father had always said as much) his deep eyes
(again, told often, all the kids at parochial school just called him
fairy and queer and so on, no one had ever really been kind to him,
especially not his parents, no one save the Father)  he had made a
decision. That boy and man were going to run away this evening.
They were going to run away to a place somewhere that didn't
make the both of them scared all the time of being found out. That
didn't put this guilt in the Father, and truth to tell, in himself as
well. That if two people found each other, they should hold onto
each other because if they don't, they might never find another
person again, and what a terrible life that would be.

 He was halfway up the aisle, remembering and hardening
again as he remembered how great it was to be sitting there naked
on the top step to the alter, to sit there with his legs spread
unashamedly apart and the good Father's mouth hungrily on him,
proving to both man and boy that the only way to slake hunger was
to eat, to consume, to allow being consumed--nothing else made
any kind of sense at all. To play to the invisible audience that
would be there Sunday. As each boy on each successive night did
with their appointments with Father Atherton.

 Eat me, Jesus, Stephan said aloud, then said it even louder.
The echoes hummed and rang in their disapproval. Stephan
stepped up the wine red carpeted steps. He was a bit afraid, but
more sad and angry. He stepped up to the huge ornamented silver
cross of Jesus on the cross, naked, save for his genitals covered by
a wrap that was not original with the commissioned statue, his
crowned with thorns, feet and hands nailed--this sculpture made
before the scientists had proven he had had to be nailed by the
ankles and wrists to be supported at all--his body in a frozen
forever writhing, his mouth in a soundless scream, his eyes wild
with fear and death soon coming. The boy could see the prisoners,
in his boy mind, to either side of the Savior, to whom Stephan and
some of the other boys as well told of his time with the Father. In
joy. In rapture. In defiance. In anger. In supplication. In pain of
want and in pain of hunger. Please, Jesus, please. Can't you make
people look into their own hearts instead of ours for a change?
Can't they see all the hate and violence and murder and suicides
are so horribly wrong? Something? Anything? Or is it we have
hearts, defiant and hurting still? And they have lumps of coal in
their chests instead?

 Stephan stands before me. Holding my legs that are not
really of silver, but of hard cold metal and brass. He weeps on a
statue that can not feel his tears. He tells me how much great fun it
is the be undressed by his servant, as the Father calls himself to
this boy and the others, and means it. How nice to run round the
church naked. To hold his penis out and be proud of the little flesh
of joy cane that lists a slight bit to the left. to feel his buttocks
flashes of white marble caught by the father's hands, to ride on the
naked man's neck, to rub his boy penis into the back of that neck,
and the man to finger Stephan's ass while the boy is riding him--to
know the Father would never be interested in a man or in a
woman, because this is the whole of him. This is the giant size of
this slim, slight man with the regular six inches and the heart that
so giantly worries about so much and tries to give as much back to
the boys as he can--thinking he cannot, but he does, far more than
he can ever know.

 Stephan kneels to me, bows on his knees, and he knows.
He has always known. Like Father Atherton has seen. Like the
boys here and the other parishes know. That it will come crashing
down and a good man will die. Will kill himself or have it done for
him. And boys will break and families dissolve. And psychologists
will make a fortune off all of this. Alienists still and all they are.
Thinking, all these adults to whom love is hate and hate is love, it
is the fault of this pederast. It is the fault of this wicked wicked
man. Stephan looks up at me and in his high sweet voice, with his
front teeth exposed like rabbit teeth I would love to kiss, whose
body I've seen naked, (and all the other boys here naked as well),
whom I would love to have sex with, whom I would love to come
climbing down off this screaming agony that I am for the
amusement of parishioners who are glad it is me and not them,
who say to themselves and each other, they would gladly have
taken my place, which is a damned lie (had they come strolling by
Golgotha on that fateful day and had I asked them to do so, they
would still be running, let Jesus do it, is their cry) so they can be
holy and sacrosanct so very easily and with absolutely no burden
on their backs at all. As is on Father Atherton's for instance and all
the other men, and yes, many many are priests, who find the beauty
of the stillness of the winter snow or summer soft night in the face
of a boy who gazes for however briefly fondly back at them.

 I cannot speak to him. Only remember boys I knew in
Palestine when I was a boy and during my brief stay here as a man.
Rushing with them into the fields of summer under the hot golden
rod summer sun, all flowers and hay and fields of sheep and lambs
abounding. And we two. Lifting up our own clothes. Exploring
each other as I long to explore these boys now. The almost always
nakedness we were allowed back then. How men and boys greeted
each other by slipping their hands under the other's thigh or
squeezing gently their genitals. A most common custom then.
What would these so called students of the Bible and men of God
think if they knew that?

 And how we made love, we two ten year old boys, on the
sweet limpid green summer grass of a July day, and Mary coming
to find me one day and discovering me and a friend of mine
cuddled up in each other, and the fear my friend and I felt, melting,
though, that fear, when she laughed and held out her hand to me,
telling me it was time for our evening meal, and as we put on our
clothes, the other boy and I, she told us we both had penises to be
proud of, but not to let the High Priest see us in our naked
condition, especially when we were hard, because there would be
no time for him to count the ram's horns left at the temple by men
who raped girls and women, and who got away with this terrible
crime, while the girl or woman who had been raped, had she not
cried out at the time for help if there had been someone to help
her--such kindness to such laws, such respect of women--would be
stoned to death for her sin. That scenario still plays well today.
Especially with Christians.

 A chill at what mother said went through the three of us.
Not for us. But for her. Anything can be taken out of context, then
and now. And then and now, it doesn't take much to inspire a great
many men, and women too, to pick up some rocks and let fly. I
dressed. My friend dressed. And we went on our way. My child
hand holding my mother's. I tried to tell them, the people of Israel
back then, when I was there as a boy and as a man. I tried so hard.
But on the cross then I knew, I could save no one, I could make no
one hear me. I could not make words themselves shine with the
light they should shine with because of what I too had, in spite of
my mother's putting a good face on this particular incident with
my friend, been raised with.

 And Stephan cries in his hands. Kneeling beneath me. I
cannot help you, my child. I cannot help the Father. I could not
help me. Beside me, you see is a statue of Mary. She is berobed
and she is dressed in funeral color garments. There is a yellow
candle always lit before her. She weeps into her hands. She is of
pale alabaster. The Father and Stephan and the other boys have
never paid her any mind in their secret rendezvous here. They have
paid even me more mind. The Father, in this way, especially. But
out of his fear. Not anything else. Most everyone else who takes
my name into his mouth, spits it out for his own benefit, for
justification of his own ax to grind. Father Atherton says her name
only when he has to in his sermons. He prays to her only when he
must before his congregation. Otherwise, they've nothing to do
with her. She is like the sponsor of a TV series.  Even the clever
commercials, who remembers? And this is a TV series. Which is
mass. And which is the father and his boys, sad to say, though it
could have been, could be so much otherwise. Can't they see how
this is the way it starts? The bigotry and the violence and the wars?
Can't the father see that when a young boy is coming in the
priest's mouth, it is everything to do with gentleness and not
cunning, with fondling and comforting and not placating? Their
bodies say yes. Their words too.

 But their hearts? No. Not very often indeed. Not really way
deep inside. The same for most of the people who come to church
here to allegedly worship. Mostly they worship their own
self-righteousness and all the lies they've told themselves down
through the years.

 . They seem most ashamed of my mother. The woman they
claim to revere. I cannot say a word. I could not say a word when I
was alive here. They will have to do it for themselves. For if flesh
is to become armor, and crudity is to replace joyous and creative
love making, as the years advance, then even this is all for nothing.
If male dominates, then it has to have someone to dominate. As
always.

 So. Cry, Stephan, I would say to this boy here, whose heart
is breaking, cry for yourself and remember this when you grow old
enough to have a beard. Remember who will turn you in. Or who
you will turn in. Remember my childhood friend in whose arms I
tangled and with whom I made love, so many times, especially that
day in the sweet sunshiny clover and hay we rolled around in, and
dusted off each other, the day Mary found us and smiled so wisely,
and I think, so sadly at us. His name was Judas.

 Do not allow that to become your name too. But that will
be your name. That of you and of your legion. It will. And soon.

				  THE END