A poetic reflection on the mechanism of hollow authority

The Stage

In ancient halls where sacred texts were kept,
a mirror hung that showed what no one sought—
not future glory, not the debts they'd swept,
but present truth, unfiltered and unwrought.

Three brothers found it in their father's house,
each certain that the glass would vindicate
his claim to inheritance. The first held out
the mirror to the second: "See? Your fate
is written there—the hollow man revealed!"

The second turned it on the third: "Look close—
your edifice is crumbling, barely sealed!"
The third aimed back at first: "You're more morose
and dead than either!" None would turn the glass
to catch their own reflection in its face.

They'd found the instrument that would surpass
all judgment—and made it a weapon for their case.

The mirror showed a pattern, seven-fold,
recurring like a fugue in different keys.
Each time they looked, they saw what they'd foretold:
the enemy performing on his knees.

The First Showing

See how he dresses! Elaborate his robes,
the honor that he claims at every feast.
His authority is theater—he probes
for validation, being hollow as a priest
performing for the crowd, not for the god.

They saw this in each other, clear as day.
Each saw the other's costume as a fraud,
his own as necessary to convey
the truth that hollowness required concealing
through beauty, doctrine, or emotional feeling.

The Second Showing

He locks the door, they said of one another,
and claims the only key is in his hand.
One brother saw it in his elder brother,
who built elaborate systems, contraband
exchanges—grace for obedience, heaven's light
for submission to his intricate control.

Another brother saw it burning bright
in younger sibling's claim that only whole
unmediated access was allowed—
but mediated by his proper frame.

Each saw the other shutting out the crowd
while claiming that his door was not the same.

The Third Showing

When it succeeds, he takes all credit due.
When it fails, the burden flows below.
They saw this vampiric revenue
in brothers' kingdoms, never in their own.

The mirror showed them harvesting the light
from subjects while projecting shadow down—
but somehow, when they fed upon the bright
success, it was their god who wore the crown.

The converts grew more rigid than their teachers,
more zealous than the source from which they drank.
Each generation amplified the features
until the pathology was rank.

They saw this clearly in their siblings' flocks.
The mirror never lied about the other.

The Fourth Showing

He measures mint and cumin to the grain,
they said, while swallowing whole camels whole.
Perfect in the small, grotesque in main
concerns—justice, mercy, and the soul.

One brother saw the other's gilded halls
concealing systematic violence.
Another saw behind the others' walls
the rot dressed up as intellectual brilliance.

The third saw both of them perform their piety
while wielding power that Christ would disavow.
Each saw the other's moral impropriety.
Each thought: at least we see through it now.

The Fifth Showing

The tomb, they said, is whitewashed and pristine—
beautiful outside while dead within.
They aimed this recognition at the scene
their brothers made: elaborate discipline

covering decay. The architecture grand
to hide what hollowness had built beneath.
Each brother had this vision close at hand
for siblings—never for himself. The wreath

he wore was genuine. The other's laurel
was painted plaster over rotting wood.
This clarity became their moral:
we see them truly, and seeing makes us good.

The Sixth Showing

And when they questioned one another's claim,
the rage revealed what lay beneath the mask.
"Who are you to question me?" became
the answer that avoided every ask.

The mirror showed them this defensive fire
in brothers—how hollow authority
attacks the questioner, stokes higher
the flames when faced with its transparency.

But their own rage? That was righteous. Just.
Their violence was measured, necessary.
The other's fury? Proof he'd lost their trust.
The pattern held: what's seen is adversary.

The Seventh Showing

The brothers called each other blind—not for
the failure to perceive, but seeing only
in rigid categories: with or for,
saved or damned, authentic or the phony.

Each saw the other trapped in binary thought,
unable to hold paradox or nuance.
Each certain that this blindness could be fought
with their own clarity—a new pronounce

of right and wrong, true and false, light and dark.
The mirror showed them that their siblings' vision
was fatally divided. But the mark
of their own sight? That was precision.

The Serpent Recognition

Then one day, staring at his brother's form
reflected in the glass, the eldest saw
not human weakness but a serpent's swarm—
the ancient pattern, primordial flaw.

"You're vipers! Offering wisdom while
delivering death, paralyzing sight
with complexity, then consuming with a smile.
You promise liberation, then midnight."

His brothers turned the same identification
back on him: "You're the serpent dressed as guide!
Your 'ancient wisdom' is just obfuscation,
your 'sacred tradition' where the poison hides!"

Each saw the serpent clearly in the other.
Each was certain: I'm the one who sees.
The mirror held them—brother against brother—
all seeing vipers, none seeing the disease.

The Breaking

And then the voice that had condemned them all
cracked open, and a different sound emerged—
not judgment raining down like hammer's fall
but grief that from a deeper source had surged:

A mother's lament for her children who
had taken the blade she gave to cut their bread
and used it to divide the world in two,
then carved each other till the ground ran red.

"How often I have longed to gather you
the way a hen gathers her chicks beneath
her wings, but you would rather pursue
the war, the splitting, the ancestral grief."

Not rooster's crow or eagle's mighty scream,
but the humblest image—feminine and small.
A mother bird protecting in the stream
of violence, offering her body as the wall.

The Father they had claimed had spoken wrath.
But here the Mother's voice broke through at last—
the principle they'd murdered in their path
to power, the Wisdom they'd expelled and passed

as heresy. The gathering, the holding,
the nurturing rather than the severing sword.
Two thousand years of carefully withholding
this recognition: Mother is the Lord

they crucified each time they chose control
over compassion, law over embrace.
The feminine that might have made them whole
was what the mirror showed beneath each face.

The Recognition

The mirror lay there, ancient and unmoved,
reflecting still what it had always shown.
The brothers thought their righteousness was proved
by seeing truly what their siblings owned.

But here's what none of them could bear to see:
the one who aimed the mirror and the one
reflected in its silver clarity
had always been the same—the father's son

just wearing different masks, performing rage
at his own reflection, projected out.
The judge and judged upon the sacred stage
were consciousness divided, wrapped in doubt.

The mirror held no preference or side.
It showed what's there, not what they wished to find.
The seven patterns that they used to chide
their brothers were the patterns of their mind.

Even this telling risks the same old game—
the seeing-through becoming new authority,
another way to say "at least I name
the pattern" while avoiding the majority

of what the mirror shows: that I who write
and you who read are also in the glass,
also performing, claiming our insight
exempts us from the patterns that we pass

to others. The mirror doesn't take sides.
It doesn't even care that we perceive.
It simply shows what hollowness resides
in every claim—even the claim to see.

The Dissolution

The veil was never over truth or world.
The kingdom was never locked away.
The story of exile that they'd hurled
at one another was the only thing that lay

between them and what they already were.
The mirror showed that "them" who built the wall
was always just the "us" we couldn't bear
to recognize—the shadow of us all.

The brothers thought they'd found a weapon blessed
to finally prove their case against their kin.
But the glass just held them—unimpressed—
showing them their father's face within

each face they'd claimed to hate, each hollow mask
they'd righteously condemned, each serpent form.
The only question that the mirror asked:
Are you willing to look? To see the storm

is you? To let the distinction fall away
between the one who judges and the judged?
To recognize that every word you say
about your brother is the truth you've dodged

about yourself? The kingdom hidden here,
in plain sight, by the belief in "them."
The distance just a story. Vision clear
when finally we see: we are. I Am.

From "Beyond the Scribe's Knife"
Full essay: Woe to You, Hypocrites