The Place of the Skull

You begin climbing.

At the first steps are the demands that have kept you alive: hunger, protection, desire, the urgent wish to secure your place in the world. Bring their force with you.

Higher, the passage opens through the heart. In the sacred geography of the journey, the heart becomes an altar: the place where what we value can be brought into dedication. Love and grief appear together. The longing to receive love is here, along with the fear that asks love to prevent every loss.

Continue with the whole of it.

At the throat, what has been felt approaches expression. The words you have spoken gather beside those you have withheld. You recognize how much of your life has been shaped by the need to explain, defend, persuade, or be understood.

The ascent continues toward inward discernment.

At the top of the body’s central passage, the brainstem joins the work of the head to the life below. The vagus nerve extends through relationships with the heart, lungs, and digestive organs. Its branching invites the image of a living tree.

We have reached a crossing.

The force gathered through the ascent encounters the demand that has followed us from the outer court: the demand to remain the unquestioned center of our own world.

This is where the crucifixion imagery enters the inward drama.

Golgotha means the place of the skull. In the Gospel accounts, it is the place of Jesus’ execution. Jesus is a Jewish man within a history of Roman rule and Jewish religious life; the inward reading does not erase that embodied history.

It allows the story to become a question addressed within us.

What must relinquish its claim to rule?

The identity that insists every wound must be avenged. The fear that requires every future to be secured. The inward voice that wants spiritual life to serve its own immunity from loss.

These can be brought to the crossing.

The sacred oil of the allegory is carried upward as the force of life becomes available to a deeper allegiance. Its crucifixion names the surrender of the demand that this life revolve around the defended self.

The vagus nerve remains a nerve, carrying its bodily work. The cross belongs to the meaning through which we contemplate the passage.