Shopping for My Favorite Christ

A soul finds solace in a broken Christ who offers presence, not perfection.

The market exists in the lacuna between one breath and the next, in the silence that follows a question for which there is no answer. You do not journey there; you simply fail to return from a certain kind of thought. Its geography is not of space, but of need. The sky is a fixed, perpetual twilight, the colour of a day-old bruise or the inside of a closed eyelid. The air is thick, cool, and carries the scent of old stone, melting wax, and the faint, coppery hint of spent miracles.

I moved through the crowded aisles, a ghost among seekers. To my left, a Christ of radiant alabaster stood bathed in a beam of manufactured light, his palms upturned in a gesture of flawless benediction. His eyes were pools of painted compassion, but they saw nothing, demanded everything. His grace was a transaction, and my soul had no currency left for perfection. Further on, the Revolutionary Christ smoldered with righteous fire, his gaze promising a purification that felt like annihilation. I flinched from his heat; my world was already ash, and I had no need for a conflagration.

I was not seeking a saviour. I was seeking a witness. I carried within me not the grand, tragic sins of epic poetry, but the small, shameful failures that etch themselves into the bone: the kindness not given, the truth left unspoken, the slow, quiet cowardice of a life lived in the shadows. I needed a god who understood the ache of a bad back, the despair of a burnt meal, the terrifying weight of a sleeping child’s trust.

I found him where the light gave up entirely, in a cul-de-sac of forgotten inventories. He was not presented on a plinth or framed by velvet. He was simply there, leaning against a stack of dusty ledgers, as if he, too, were waiting for someone who never came. He was fashioned from common plaster, the cheap kind that reveals its coarse, grey aggregate when chipped. And it was chipped—his left hand was a ruin, the fingers broken away to a blunt, gritty stump. The paint, once white, had yellowed to the colour of old teeth or neglected lace. His face was not handsome. It was long, the lines around his mouth deeply carved, not from dramatic suffering, but from the slow, grinding pressure of existence itself. He looked tired. He looked like he had been disappointed.

But his eyes… his eyes were not focused on me, nor on some celestial horizon. They were turned inward, gazing upon a memory of such profound and ordinary sorrow that it stole my breath. This was not the God who roared from the whirlwind. This was the man who sat in the garden, alone, and felt the cold sweat of true, gut-wrenching fear. This was the son who had perhaps disappointed his father, the friend who had been betrayed for a handful of coins, the teacher whose simplest lessons were met with blank stares. This was a Christ acquainted with grief, not as a concept, but as the familiar, worn-out coat he wore every day.

I reached out, my own hand trembling, and placed my fingertips upon the broken stump of his. The plaster was cool and porous, drinking the warmth from my skin. There was no vision, no voice, no seismic shift in the cosmos. Instead, there was a settling, a deep, resonating click as of a key finding a lock it was always meant to fit. It was the feeling of being seen—not my potential, not my sin, but my sheer, unvarnished is-ness. The quiet humiliation of my anxieties, the secret pride in my small generosities, the vast, lonely landscape of my inner world—it was all known here. This broken god did not offer to absolve me or fix me. He offered to sit with me in the un-fixedness. His grace was in his shared fracture, his divinity in his impeccable, heartbreaking adequacy.

Tears I did not know I had been storing began a slow, hot descent down my cheeks. They were not tears of joy or relief, but of a final, exhausting surrender to being understood. I did not pray. I did not ask for anything. I simply stood, my hand on his, and let the silence between us become a communion. I was not filled with light; I was accompanied in my darkness.

When I finally withdrew my hand, the connection did not break. I turned and walked back through the labyrinth of shining, demanding messiahs, but their calls were now distant, meaningless noise. The hollow in my chest remained, but it was no longer a void. It was a space now inhabited, a room where the dust motes danced in a sliver of light. I stepped through the market’s vague perimeter and back into the world. The street was the same, the sky unchanged. But everything was different. I carried no trophy, no certificate of salvation. I carried only the memory of a rough, cool touch, and the profound, unshakable comfort of a shared and perfect brokenness.