Good Friday

Woken by the cats again, this time very insistently, I fed them, then waited at the upstairs window to watch the light come in. The window faces sort of East, the sun's rising only blocked by the edges of another house. It was night, a single light on across the park.

I wonder what it is about this story that matters so much, and I've come to the conclusion that it's the most human of godly tellings. Inanna is a goddess who descends to the Underworld in search of knowledge, and is struck dead by a mighty sister goddess for her temerity. There is humbling, she must take off all her accoutrements to enter the house of death, but it is not ignominious, not disgraceful. Isis shrieks of the murder of her love, she helps to resurrect him, I can see her even now picking her way through the marshes of Khem to find pieces of his body, determined to bring everything back. And who can compare with that most terrifying of mothers, Demeter, raging for her daughter, ready to starve the world, forcing Heaven and Hell to compromise with her? By contrast, the story of Christ might seem small, with its details like the dinner at the inn, people's feet being washed, people quarrelling over the money spent on some fancy oil. But it's the small stuff we know, the personal we experience. Everyone knows someone or has been someone who was fitted up for something they didn't do, and absolutely everyone takes a beating and gets betrayed.

For me the most heart-rending representation of this is La Pieta, also called The Pity, to be found in St Peter's Basilica in Vatican City. Of the great artworks to be found there, this is the one constantly surrounded by visitors. It's sublimely beautiful of course, but that's just the craft of it. There's something familiar among all those superlatives; here's the boy who promised so fair, the kid who amazed everyone in school, here's the baby you pushed into the world and loved so well. Here he is now, broken meat, and you who were life-charged, this is all it meant, all it ever means. I'd be howling like a dog. But that's how it connects into the human, why it matters so much. Forgetting politics and fanaticism and control, all those agendas people tack on, it's something much purer, common to us all. It's loss.

Gods aren't meant to lose. Ragnarok covers that struggle with a fierce pragmatism, and of course a fantastic battle. But again, that's epic, powerful, grand, it takes everything with it. It's not plebian like some criminal bleeding out on a hill.

I waited for sunrise, watched the light go out across the park,heavy dew frosting up the cars, a walker with his dogs on glow-in-the-dark harnesses. I opened the window and let in the cold. A thud came from the bedroom where no-one's sleeping, so loud that for a moment I thought 'go see!' But no, not this morning. It would just be a curiosity, a diversion. There were birds everywhere, moisture on the trees curling upwards like smoke,a peach coloured horizon, and even as the sun announced itself in all this new turquoise, I noticed an effect of the light squeezed between a shrub and the streetlamp next to the house edging the suns way. It was a pleasant scattering of beams, shaped like a path headed straight for my door.