The Book of Longings

“Anger is effortless, Lucian. Kindness is hard. Try to exert yourself.”

When it came to children, they didn’t much consider the agony of birth and the possibility of death; they thought instead of God’s mandate to be fruitful and multiply. It seemed to be a command God had devised with men in mind, and it was the only one they were universally good at obeying.

Instead she told me that I had traveled to a secret sky, the one beyond this one where the queen of heaven reigns, for Yahweh knew nothing of female matters of the heart.

“What if the point of his sending it is to make you search yourself for the answer?”

In this manner I discovered that God had relegated my sex to the outskirts of practically everything.

“Meekness. It isn’t meekness I need, it’s anger.”

The anger made me brave and the grief made me sure.

I tell you, there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls. So it was with the words I wrote. They reveled till dawn.

When I was finally able to read the Scriptures for myself, I discovered (behold!) there were women.

To be ignored, to be forgotten, this was the worst sadness of all.

If God were a wife, she would have acted sooner. It took a year for him to take mercy on me.