He Who Walked Among Us UPDATED

“Would you like to see my soul?” asked He Who Walked Among Us. He repeated his question again and again, to each and every passerby in the crowded European streets. Some would look at him pityingly, not realizing what he was. Some would, often without realizing it, touch the crosses about their necks as they walked by ignoring his question. There were many lunatics on the streets. Why should this stranger not be among them?

He Who Walked Among Us persisted with his question. “Would you like to see my soul?” The strangers began to think him mad, the children began to tell the kind of story that only children can tell with minutiae spiraling into the whirlpools of hyperbole, dipping their feet into the outer tides of absurdity. He Who Walked Among Us was both man and legend, something to be both feared and admired. But aren't the two inseparable anyway?

Once a girl, in naïve curiosity, never having heard the legends, and not the type to pay heed even if she had, peered into the paper cup that He held.

“Oh”. Was all she could reply, eyes never wavering from the contents of the cup, trying to absorb it all at once. “Oh”. If you were to ask her later, she would say that she saw a swirling mass of color and depth and pictures of animals and tea kettles, and Scottish plains and settling embers. She would then think for a moment, trying to remember, pointlessly ,this dream that she had while she was awake. It was not a sight that could be described in words. It was a story she told her grandchildren so wide eyed that they told their grandchildren, and every time they'd set out for the city, they'd half seriously keep an eye peeled for He Who Walked Among Us, offering a gaze at the soul in his paper cup.

There was a gentleman, garbed all in red silk, clearly a monk of some sort. He Who Walked Among Us nodded to him in recognition, and the monk nodded back. He knew He Who Walked Among Us well, even though he'd never seen him before in his life. Something suddenly sickened the Monk, filling him with memories of the street gangs, the cold concrete, the obligatory noodle broth his mother used to cook, all of the hideous things he had put aside to join the monastery and be able to replace his blue jeans with red silk.

Little by little, He Who Walked Among Us became discouraged. No one wanted to see his soul. As the years went by, there were no more Monks and no more little girls. Only gray shapeless, formless blobs playing follow the leader.

We all have Him somewhere in us still. His very absence is what keeps Him still alive. We all have it in common. Each of us, one day, independently, decided to fold over the limbs of He Who Walked Among Us, and place him as a puppet on a shelf along with the grievances and the disappointments that remind us of why we put Him there. We fashion our masks out of warm clay, and don them greedily the moment we learn how, often never to remove them. There is a reason that he is “He Who Walked Among Us” and not “He Who Walks Among Us”. In the tense there is a telling story, of a youngster burned one too many times to put his hand back into the fires of flame and passion. I'd like to say that I'm different, that I still proudly parade my paper cup, and sometimes I do. But if you were to meet me, it's just as likely that my paper cup would be filled with coffee, or hot chocolate, as the soul that so few want to see.