Concerning the Icon

  Up to the front resolutely, passing a scattering of the devout lighting tea candles or on their knees in abased introspection. Ahead was suspended the faded form of a man, hidden by darkness of time, of light, and men. Ahead was the form of responsibility. Here was, in icon, his destiny.
  Polished alabaster, faded, pitted, browned through time and stained by the smoke of the very sacraments of his worship, the crucifix hung over a gilded altar, haloed by a bronze corona like the Bethlehem star had exploded, shimmering in the half-light. Kevin paused before the sculpture, the flickering candles shifting the emotion of the Christ’s face as surely as it had when he’d first hung there.
  The human mind, Kevin reflected, has a curious way of glossing over the shocking, horrible moment it just beheld, burying it as if it cannot exist if it falls outside of the prosaic; you catch ghosts, and weep for reasons you’re not exactly sure of triggered by simple melodies or resonating poetry, but have to force it back into the significance it deserves.
  Maybe a lifetime of excoriation had brought him to a point of a spectator, but even now he looked at this symbol of the most horrifying event in history, an execution practice unparalleled in pain in cruelty, and was amused at its use as scenery, passed by but for pangs of angst or invocation to serenity. It was Good Friday. The one night this horror is hallowed. And here he feels alone.
  And yet, here was the pull of gravity. Here he was drawn from the vestibule’s event horizon to the very singularity where hung the Christ. It was as though every moment in his life was a raindrop spiraling down the pane, slowly gathering into this pool at the end. This is where it all stopped, regardless of the conclusion, here was the fulcrum.