Iyesus

My mother had died in the loving hands of Coptic Christian nurses. I was moved by their joy and kindness.  They were so gentle and their laughter so pure it might be direct from heaven.

He was handsome and kind. Not at all like the black men in American pornography.  He was gentle like the romantic pornography of Japan.  We met as two children curious and unafraid. Jesus is said to be the stranger. Limited we cannot know the unlimited but by grace.  I knew him as he knew me.  Friends. He’d come to Canada to live and this was my country.  I thought him an Adonis but he was smaller sized like the historical Jesus. Not the blond viking Jesus of height and strength. More the quiet man who beckoned little children to come unto him.  We’d gone for a swim and our bodies glistened in stark contrast.  The song Ebony and Ivory captured the sense of similarity and difference.  The mystery of knowing.

Years later I’d journey to Ethiopia to visits the sacred sites of Lallibela and Lake Tana.  There I’d see the 14th century painting of the black Jesus.  

Today we are learning that our tribe of Homo sapiens lived side by side with the Neanderthal, we almost certainly genocided.  That’s what we do.  Afraid we kill the other, focussing on the difference.

My first doctor as a young man was black. He was kind and intelligent. Only older did I learn of the racists of Black Lives Matter. The men and women of politics, money and  power who don’t remember that we played as children not knowing the history of difference.

You touched me with kindness as your sisters had touched my mom.   

In Jesus there is no colour or tribe.  Christ is universal. 

If our spaceships land in another galaxy there too will he be. Love.  

Christ Jesus, God of love.