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Ave Maria

Source: Luke 1:28


I built this huge cathedral. Alone. But what holds these stones together is folly, not pride. Even if I had lived to be a thousand, I would still have needed a thousand years to build it, to slake the lime of my shadow in the water of your light. And yet it took me far less time than that to complete this monumental task. It was a risky life work; it harmed me. It fed on my blood and my spirit, where it moved in with obsessive madness. It sucked away all the available life around me; that's why it's located in the middle of nowhere, in a place no one else can understand or imagine. But I did it for you.

And so, before I leave this life, I salute you, petite, marvellous Mary.

My desire for the transcendent, my love for the beautiful, the madness that gnawed at my dreams, all those hard drugs my spirit distilled, helped me hold on. But now they don't matter. At all. They were only illusions.

I held on. I built on. I built up.

And now I'm getting ready to die, to let my body return to dust.
In humility. As gift.
All I have left is this handful of prayer and stone that my love casts toward you like seed. To you I offer this gift of all my love and all my strength: authentic treasures from a simple human being. Those suns shining in my mind, burning it, and warming it too: they're all for you. I will them to you: you are my only heir since fate took away all the others.
Like this cathedral when it has returned to dust, the love that haunted my light long after my death will continue to pray toward you, because into the service of that love I poured all my freedom.

You.

I know what gift you give me.
Higher than the steeple of this church is the blue of the sky. And the blue of the sky is another name for the infinite. That is where you look when I want to be seen. I looked toward you to be seen.
And you looked.
With attentiveness.

Full of blessing, full of grace.

In the dense intensity of your eyes, I feel my gaze dissolving.
It is as if the whole universe were rewriting my name behind my eyes.
A word that is flawless, if you pronounce it.
A name at peace at last.

I look at you too,
and I think no more.
You have just eclipsed the universe.