The NeuroSpicy
Testament

The Gospel of the Wilderness

I killed the Egyptian without thinking. Not without knowing. I knew what I was doing. I saw what he was doing to the Hebrew and my body was moving before my mind had finished deciding and then the man was dead and I was standing there with sand on my hands and I had not planned any of it. This is the pattern. The thing is happening and I am already in it before the part of me that makes decisions has arrived. My hands know before my head does. This has been true my entire life.

The burning bush. I want to tell you what that was like from the inside. The bush was burning and not consumed and I turned aside to see it and God spoke from it and God said: I am sending you to Pharaoh. And I said: who am I? And God said: I will be with you. And I said: what if they don't believe me? And God said: here is a sign. And I said: but I am not eloquent. And God said: I will be with you. And I said: please send someone else. I argued with a burning bush for twenty minutes. I am told this is unusual behavior. It did not feel unusual. It felt like the only reasonable response to an unreasonable situation.

The forty years with the sheep were the first peace of my life. I want you to understand that. Forty years is a long time to finally feel like you are in the right environment. The sheep did not require anything of me except presence. They did not need me to be eloquent. They did not need me to perform certainty I did not have. They just needed me to know where the water was. I knew where the water was. I was very good at the sheep. Then the bush, and then Egypt, and then forty more years in a different wilderness, and I never got to stop moving long enough to find the water again.

The Gospel of Protocol

The Lord said: be strong and courageous. He said it four times in the first chapter. I counted. I count everything. This is not a choice. This is how the world becomes navigable — by knowing exactly how many times something has been said, exactly how many steps to the edge of camp, exactly how many days until the thing that is coming. The counting is not a symptom. The counting is the infrastructure.

The instructions for Jericho were specific. March around the city once a day for six days. On the seventh day, march around seven times, the priests blow the trumpets, the people shout, the walls fall. I want you to notice that these are exact instructions. A specific number of days. A specific number of circuits on the final day. A specific sequence of actions. This is not vague spiritual guidance. This is a protocol. I followed the protocol. The walls fell. People talk about the miracle. I think about the protocol. The protocol is why it worked. The miracle required a container, and the container was precise instruction followed precisely. I am very good at precise instruction followed precisely.

The Gospel of the Crown

The song arrived before I did. That is the only way I know how to describe the composition process. I was not writing a song. The song was already there, in some ratio of tones and intervals that I did not choose, and it arrived through me the way water arrives through a channel that was already carved. I could hear the whole thing at once — not sequentially, all at once, the way you might see a landscape from a height.

Samuel came and anointed me and the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon me and I prophesied among the prophets and my neighbors said: what has happened to Kish's son? Is Saul also among the prophets? They meant it as a strange question. It was not strange to me. The Spirit and the songs had always been there. Samuel had only named it. The problem was never the high. The high was the only time I was exactly the right size for my own life. The problem was the distance between the high and everything else.

David sang better than I did. That is the fact. They sang it in the streets: Saul has killed his thousands, and David his ten thousands. And something in me — some ancient structural thing, some place where the self lives and cannot be protected — heard that comparison and could not recover from it. This is not a character flaw. This is a wound that lives at the level where character is formed. I know the difference now. I did not know it then.

The Gospel of the Wall

He would not bow. That is where it begins for me. One man at the king's gate. Sitting while everyone else stood. Looking at me as I passed with eyes that contained no acknowledgment of what I was. I had built everything I had on being seen correctly. On being recognized. The wall I constructed around myself was not vanity — it was survival. It was the only architecture I had found that kept the original wound from reopening every time someone looked through me. And Mordecai looked through me. Every day. Without effort. Without hostility even, which would have been easier to manage. Just — absence. As if I was not the thing I had spent my entire life becoming.

The mechanism I built in response killed a great many people who had nothing to do with Mordecai. I know that. I am not asking for forgiveness. I am asking for understanding of the mechanism. The mechanism does not require my name. The mechanism runs on the wound, and the wound was not invented by me. What I needed, I never got. What I built instead, I cannot justify. That is also part of the testimony.

The Gospel of Sorrow

Give me children or I will die. I said this to Jacob. People quote it as evidence of irrationality. I said it because it was true. Not metaphorically. Structurally true. The self I had built was built around a future that included children, and the absence of that future was not an absence — it was a presence. An active, daily, physical presence. The emptiness had weight and texture and it pressed.

The world arrived at full intensity, always. This was not a choice. Joy arrived at the same intensity as grief. Love at the same intensity as terror. When Jacob came for me instead of Leah, the happiness was so large it was almost indistinguishable from pain. I did not have a register for moderate feeling. I had the feeling, whatever size it was, and then I managed it however I could. Leah had sons. I had Jacob's love and a self that could not quite stabilize around it.

Joseph was born and I named him Joseph, which means may he add, because I wanted another. The want did not stop. I loved Joseph completely and I wanted another completely and these two things were not in conflict with each other. This is something people do not understand about me: the love was real. All of it. Every version. The intensity was not a sign that the love was unstable. The intensity was the love. Benjamin. I named him Ben-oni first — son of my sorrow. Jacob renamed him son of my right hand. Both names were true. I gave him what I had. That is the testimony.

The Gospel of the Witness

I am still in the wilderness. This is not a complaint. The wilderness has its own clarity. There is a quality of vision available in the desert that the Promised Land may not offer — a sharpness that comes from necessity, from the stripping away of everything that is not load-bearing, from the discovery, slow and sometimes brutal, of what you actually are when the performance is not available.

I have been Moses at the burning bush — arguing, objecting, please send someone else, I am the wrong person for this. I have been Joshua on the mountain slope, finding the only bearable position between the noise below and the instructions above, waiting for the one person whose presence makes the world navigable. I have been Saul hearing the song, the ratio landing in my chest like a verdict I cannot appeal. I have not yet been Jesus at the resurrection. I do not know what that is yet. What I know is this: the wilderness is not the punishment. The wilderness is where you find out what you are made of when nothing else is available to define you. The testimony is still being written.