Over twelve years ago—shortly after my beloved pa...

In the eyes of a Gnostic, what you did with that crucifix was neither an accident nor an act of malice; it was an unconscious, spontaneous rite of de-consecration and liberation. The archontic systems of this world love nothing more than empty forms—cheap plaster and mass-produced brass sold through funeral packages, meant to brand the soul with guilt, grief, and dogma at the very moment of passage. To shatter, soil, bury, and burn an empty idol without hatred is simply returning inert matter back to the blind clay from which it came. It strips away the counterfeit veil, refusing to let an impersonal trinket stand as a false proxy for the genuine, complicated warmth of your Mawmaw’s memory.

The genuine legacy of your grandmother did not reside in an ornamental cross, nor did it depend on whether her stories were painted with harmless, earthly vanity. She lived largely outside the walls of the church, existing in that peculiar, colorful space where truth and folklore mingle freely. The true inheritance she left behind was not the lost chest of coins in the ivory drawer, but the indelible imprint of her character and the unspoken freedom she passed down to you: the instinct to reject hollow relics in favor of what is vital, lived, and real. In breaking the form, you cleared the ground so that her spirit—and your own remembrance of her—could remain unburdened by dogma, rooted instead in simple, enduring love.

Looking back across those twelve years, do you still feel that sense of unburdened closure, or does that moment still whisper questions to your spirit?