The Christ of this particular crucifix entered my life in a jumbled antique shop in Guadalajara, beautiful, grimy and mute, the unprotesting lamb led to the slaughter, covered in wounds, his glass eyes half closed, his heart-shaped pale face inscrutable, his outstretched arms longer than his entire lovely body, as if they enclosed a universe of pain.

But when I lifted the little rag that girded his waist I was both unsurprised and disappointed to discover only a smooth polished junction where his thighs met his lower belly. Why is Catholic spirituality so afraid of sex?

I bought him anyhow, for three hundred dollars, and carried him through three airports home to Ottawa, where officials insisted on feeding him through an X-Ray machine to be sure that Jesus wasn’t a drug mule. That final indignity enhanced his innocence in my eyes. It was part of his story, like the beatings and blows and the falls and the final tortured death; like the personal petitions and joys and sorrows, unknown to me, to which he had listened, or seemed to listen, over the past century, in his previous life, before he entered mine.

He has hung on my wall ever since, part of the furnishings, more decoration than object of devotion, the centerpiece that breaks up my library. Until last July when, still in pandemic lock-down, I took him down, cut away his loincloth and endowed him with something that his original creators refused to give: a set of male genitals.

**

I didn’t worry about the why of it. I just did it. It was the impulse of a morning, and a means of avoiding some duty piece of writing. But the rule with artistic projects is expansion. You fashion the penis and the balls and attach them and then you realize that he needs body hair. And also, he's filthy. He's hasn’t been dusted, let alone cleaned, in at least six years. And then, as I cautiously and gently clean him, using a bit of mild hand soap and a soft cloth, I marvel, as if for the first time, at his beauty.

He is not an original work of art. He's the product of a studio, and may have emerged from some kind of mold. But what a studio. He’s eighteen inches tall, mounted on a once-purple, rounded processional cross with decorative gold-painted ends. His glass eyes are blue and his highly polished flesh is white--a reflection of the prejudice of the Spanish elite for whom he was originally made. He has eye lashes and real hair, along with a carefully shaped and painted brown beard. His crown of thorns is real--a neat nest from an actual bush, cut and twisted into shape a hundred years ago.

And his wounds. Oh, his wounds. One of the many things I love about Mexican culture is its deep understanding of both suffering and joy. This Jesus suffered with the mute patience of a beautiful animal. He carried the traditional wounds on his hands and feet, along with a gash in his side. But he also had cuts and scrapes on both knees, bloody marks on his face--and then there was his back, where his flogging had peeled away the perfect surface of the doll's white skin to reveal a matted mass of horrifying blood.

This Lamb of God knew what suffering meant. This lamb of God embodied suffering.

Should I paint him brown? I wondered. It seemed an obvious thing to do—but I tried different pigments on his glass-like impervious surface, and every clumsy brush mark showed. It was like trying to paint a bottle. His color—a preternatural white—was part of his design. Some things you just can’t change—like your sexual identity (I happen to be both gay and Catholic).

I could, however, attach paper clay to his smooth surface, and it accepted paint. So I added some touches of body hair at his groin, and soon found myself creating a rug of swirling fur on his chest, his belly, his shoulders. I painted his eye lashes black. I renewed the horrifying red of his many wounds. And then, in a moment of inspiration, I took off his crown of thorns and painted it gold, at the same time refreshing the gold on the rounded ornamental ends of his cross.

So ended the first day. Back on his wall, he seemed to pull the room toward him, framed on both sides by my jostled collection of books, my worktable on his left, a row of puppets, unlikely acolytes, on a shelf beside him.

**

That night I sent his photo to a couple of friends.

“Haven’t his wounds healed?” one asked, in reply.

I remembered something that a Carmelite nun once told me, on a visit to her convent in Montreal. We sat facing each other in the bare, white-painted second floor parlor, the wooden bars of the grille between us, her brown habit and white wimple leaving only her hands and face visible. Her face always seemed youthful in its quiet animation, despite its fine veil of tiny lines.

"He kept his wounds, you know,” she said, speaking of the resurrected Lord. “He didn't have to keep them, but he did."

I thought of old devotions, now out of fashion—of “hiding” our wounds in his. They’ve turned to gold and ours can, too.

So the next morning I took him down and painted his wounds gold, including the broken, flayed flesh of his back. I left some traces of blood, as a reminder of their reality. Healing sanctifies, but cannot cancel the pain. Then I edged the swirling mass of his body hair with the same gold. I also gave his new cock a touch of gold, since sexuality is a blessing, not a curse.

Before, he was a dusty decoration, the unprotesting lamb led to the slaughter, the wholly passive victim of torture. Now, naked, vulnerable, beautiful, he radiates latent power. He has become an icon of healing. And only now do I realise that I have made him deeply gay.

**

The church treats gay people like me in precisely the way that most of its artists have treated its Lord, over the centuries. First, you cover up the shameful parts--don't look, don't tell. But then, just in case the naughty or the curious peek beneath the loincloth—there’s nothing there. Sexual identity? It doesn’t exist. There’s a “disorder,” “an inclination toward an objective evil,” to quote the authoritative guidance to the American bishops of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before he became Pope Benedict XVI. So let’s just leave the genitals out.

That teaching remains a source of needless suffering for people like me, who seek to reconcile the deepest aspect of our identities with the heterosexual bias of the church to which we belong. It also aligns the institution with voices that loudly contradict its most basic teachings on huge contemporary issues: the plight of refugees, immigration policy, respect for the environment, access to health care, systemic racism.

And by making sexuality an object of shame, it institutionalizes hypocrisy. Are the sex abuse scandals an accident? I don't think so.

Isn’t it time to take the loincloth off?