Sgrios Mass: In the Shadow of Sgrios

Look at your hands — the skin is not as it was. The flesh thins, the bones press nearer to the surface. The hair pales, the joints ache, the strength you had slips away. You call this aging. I tell you, it is decay — and it is holy.

For our god is not a perfect idol, untouched by the world. He is not gilded, nor made in marble. He is the rot that does not end, the flesh that never stops falling away, the god whose being is an unending feast of decay for the darkness from which he emerged. He is perpetual ending — and in that ending, perpetual truth.

Sgrios’ hunger is ceaseless, and so too do we hunger. Not for bread alone, nor for fleeting pleasures, but for the stripping away of all that hides the bone. We hunger to see the world as it truly is — to taste the end of things and know them without their veils.

You may think hunger is a wound, a lack, a punishment. It is not. Hunger is the sign that you are still moving toward him. To be full is to be still, to stop the journey, to fall into complacency. But to hunger without end — that is to be alive in the shadow of Sgrios.

And so we do not ask him to fill us. We do not pray for the hunger to pass. We ask instead for the strength to carry it, to let it guide our steps, to keep us tearing away the false, the rotten, the needless — until only truth remains.

Your life is not a climb toward a lofty peak. It is a long, slow unmaking — and that unmaking is sacred. You are already becoming what you will be in his embrace. Every ache, every crack, every loss is proof that you are moving deeper into his likeness.

So do not despise the wasting of your flesh. Do not curse the appetite that nothing satisfies. These are his gifts, marking you as his own. Let your hunger drive you. Let your decay humble you. Let them be the current that carries you to the far edge of all things.

For you are already in the holy work of ending — and Sgrios walks beside you in every step that falls away.

As written, this is the end of my mass for today. Yet as I have read back over my words, I find myself unsettled. The image of Sgrios as nothing more than perpetual decay and hunger is not a revelation, but a relic of dogma from a bygone age.

When I reflect honestly, I realize that no Aisling has ever set eyes upon Sgrios. To say he is decay incarnate is not unreasonable, for he is indeed the metaphysical force of decay in our world. But does that make it truth? Is it reasonable to imagine a divine being existing in a state of corruption as mortals do? Does it follow that he wounds our souls at the threshold between death and life, taking for himself what is meant for us?

I cannot give you a definitive answer. I have yet to discover my own truth. But I know this much: I am no longer convinced. And so I pray that you take from my words today not only what was intended, but also a resolve to question. Do not accept without examination, as I once did, even in matters of faith. Let us carry forward a spirit of vigilance. Now, let us pray.