Christ is a haunting figure

Christ is a haunting figure. And it is as though He were meant to haunt. His first gestures and words to His last were hauntings. It is His words especially that haunt. Fill the jars with water, He said, and the specters are still filling them to the brim, the wraith of Mary is still amazed. Give me a drink of water, and the ghost of the woman is still traveling though her town to tell her neighbors I have met the man who knows everything I have ever done. You could not remain awake for me, and the shadows of his disciples are still struggling for vigilance in that deep wood. Lazarus, rise! Now, though Lazarus has long since died, he remains there circling the tomb in regular spells, dismayed at having returned.

The Christ was meant to haunt. It is as though every other haunting is pale and insignificant compared to His archetypal haunting. It is a haunting–given flesh, and made to impact our flesh. Every reverberation of those words and gestures of Christ seems to confirm and reinforce our being spooked and taken in, as it were, by the ghost. Now, the figure of Christ can appear in hundreds or thousands of songs or films or animated series or pieces of theater, and they merely point out that if immortality is not eternity, it might be unto the end of the age. There is a way in which that ghost is here to stay. We are so thoroughly haunted that the denial of the ghost is another way to be haunted by the ghost, another and further haunting.

In fact, so deep is this haunting that there is a culture of the denial of holy things and all things spooky rooted precisely in being haunted. Haunted by specters that play and sing too close to the heart, this culture would rather they all fade away into doubtful images and lifeless propositions, while its own origin and staying power relies on the perpetual reanimation of these ghosts. The ghost of Lazarus, the ghost of the disciples, the ghosts of the Marys, the Samaratin woman’s specter, the centurion’s, his boy’s, Nicodemus’. All ghosts playing and singing around that archetypal ghost of Christ, that fleshly ghost and ghost of life, that Way of Life sent to haunt the living.

Christ is an inescapable figure. Once you’ve encountered Him, once you’ve been–spooked, that’s it. He stays with you, in all the cracks and creaks of things and even in the most voiceless moments. An inescapable haunting. Like the footsteps you have to hear in the abandoned halls of the earth since they are the footsteps of the house’s ruling spirit. Such a spirit cannot be exorcised or, if it could, it could only be exorcised by one and by one alone: the One with power over both the living and the dead. The most Haunting One. If that were to happen, if Christ were to finally deliver us from this haunting, maybe Lazarus and the Mary’s and all the rest would be free at last from forever spinning out their tales, but we, we…well, we would be lost, our sensitive hairs no longer standing on end.