To see things as they are is the great thing. We frequently flatter ourselves that we see through the stories we tell, reducing them to a sort of puerile or adolescent escapism, but there is one that grounds and fixes all the rest, more real than reality. The lines to follow, closely adapted from a podcast series I prepared a few years ago, spin out what I mean.
In Holy Week, the Church’s official prayer grows ever more tense. The propers are terse, laden with foreboding. Her music wanes, tempos irregular. Harmonies wither as the hour of Passion approaches – and then, eruption of lament to break the heart and shatter the sky – then thunder and then a soul-slaying murmur on Good Friday – the cacophony of a death rattle – then silence and the darkness of the tomb.
Sometime later, a solitary voice pierces the gloom. A light flickers, grows, and sends the splendor of its glory without end into the world replete with deathless joy.
The days of Holy Week mirror the Days of Creation. First, the riot of color and pomp that greets Our Lord as He enters the Holy City. The sounds and the colors and even the textures and olfactory delights follow. They grow, then quickly dim and fade, stripped of their complex vitality until there remains only the clatter of the crotalus – a death rattle – and then silence.
Stat Crux dum volvitur orbis, the maxim reads – and there it is. There He is, hanging from a gibbet. Good Friday.
In the Triduum, we hear the story again and again: Our Blessed Lord’s self-gift prefigured — perfectly accomplished – before His agony and the insult and injury and torture and murder. Then, His lifeless Body still warm and sticky with blood and grime and filth, hastily deposed.
“There is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness,” to hear the ancient homily attributed to Bishop Melito of Sardis tell it. “The whole earth keeps silent because the King is asleep.”
“The earth trembled and is still,” he says, “because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and Hell trembles with fear.” Holy Saturday.
I have mentioned elsewhere that my favorite moment of the Easter season is the first singing of the Regina Coeli at the end of the vigil:
Regina coeli, laetare! Alleluia! Quia, quem meruisti portare resurrexit, sicut dixit! Alleluia! Ora pro nobis Deum! Alleluia!
That ancient Eastertide prayer of Marian devotion has a simplicity and a frankness that has always powerfully affected me: Why do Christ’s faithful remind the Mother of God to rejoice?
I think it must be that we feel a peculiar solicitude for the Mother of God, whose Son suffered in His human nature and died for our sins. She is the New Eve, Mother of the Firstborn of the Dead. She remains the Mother of Sorrows.
His rising did not erase her grief, though she knew that He was to destroy death, but transformed it – turned into something not different but more like itself, indeed uncannily so, making it unrecognizable.
One may think of the Pevensie children, who, on a hunt in Lantern Waste, came upon the lamp post they had known when they were children and described it as “something out of a dream, or the dream of a dream.” Our Lord kept His wounds not for His sake, but for ours.
A moment ago, I was saying that Christ’s rising transformed Our Lady’s grief – turned it into something more like itself. The Gospel readings of Holy Week are rife with turnings of different kinds.
God turns defeat into victory. The angel turns away the stone guarding the sepulchre. The Roman authorities with the Chief Priests and the Scribes and Pharisees turn the story into something else. Mary Magdalene turns and turns and turns again, at the sight of the angel and of Our Lord.
We are offered an image of conversion, which is another word for turning, or a word for a kind of turning I have described elsewhere as:
[A] matter of emigration from ourselves, as we are, and a coming into something that will be like a received mode of speech, a discovery of ourselves as participants in a conversation that we did not start and cannot finish, a conversation regarding precisely the question of who we are and where we find ourselves.
This is at once conversio and conversatio, where this last is an outpouring of self into a community of sense. (The Soul of a Nation, 98)
Mary Magdalene’s turning may be a turning-in-place, but this turning is also of another kind. Listen to the Evangelist:
Mary Magdalene stayed outside the tomb weeping. And as she wept, she bent over into the tomb and saw two angels in white sitting there, one at the head and one at the feet
where the Body of Jesus had been. And they said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they laid him.”
When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus there, but did not know it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?”
She thought it was the gardener and said to him, “Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni,”
which means Teacher. Jesus said to her, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Mary went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and then reported what he had told her. –Jn. 20:11-18
The verbs in the passage themselves tell a story: when it starts, Mary is staying – abiding, the Greek says – at the tomb; then, she sees something. At the messengers’ prompting, she stoops – almost “has a gander” – turns and then sees someone – Our Lord, it turns out, only she does not see Him – does not recognize Him – until an exchange with Him (she takes Him for the gardener – and is she wrong?). She turns again, and sees Him at last.
“Rabbouni,” she says, and He orders her to go bring word to the disciples, and she goes – the Greek says it with a word that means coming and going – and does as her Lord had commanded.
That second turning is most telling: I cannot take it as anything other than the turning of conversion.
I think of it as a pedestrian thing. I did a double-take when I saw our neighbor out for a walk – this was before Covid-19 and masking and social distance were the order of the day – I was in my own thoughts and wasn’t expecting to see her – wasn’t expecting to see anyone, if memory serves – so I did not notice her until she greeted me and by then I was past her. I had to turn around to return her salutation. I probably ought to have apologized for not recognizing her, but that ship has sailed.
Community of sense: It does make sense, after all: Resurrexit, sicut dixit. “He rose, just like He said he would.”
I’ve talked a good deal elsewhere and at length, about how Christianity transforms the order of society. It brings a new social reality and opens new possibilities for common life. One thing Christianity cannot do, however, is force anyone to see that the world is good.
Nevertheless, Christians testify to the goodness of the world. We do this by showing the goodness of the world, and we show that by living lives of sanctity in it. Just how we are supposed to do that is a subject for another time, and probably best left for someone else to tackle.
St. Paul tells us that the world is groaning in travail – in labor – which brings sharp pangs at ever shorter intervals broken by dull pain, anxiety, boredom, all of which press on competing desires: to meet new life, and to be done with it already.
The joy of Easter will give way to humdrum each year – perhaps it already has – and it will give way again and again, each year we spend this side of celestial Jerusalem.
The world is passing: Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and forever.