Canticles of descent: five reflections for a day of darkness

Re-greening Easter: Good Friday

‘The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it's not working.’
—Richard Rohr

‘Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me.’
—Emily Dickinson

‘Meditating on Good Friday’ (1961) by Stanislaus Rapotec

Dear reader,

If you knew all of my inadequacies, my faults, my blind spots and hypocrisies; if you knew all the things I’d done to let people down, all the times I’d willfully ignored the right thing because I wanted to do the easy thing, all the harm I’d caused myself and others, then you would possibly think twice about that subscription. Or perhaps you would simply nod your head and say, ‘me too’.

If you knew all of my disappointments, my failures, my losses and my deep sorrows; if you knew all the times I’ve been hurt, all the times I’ve been lied to and betrayed, all the times I’ve felt small and weak and unimportant, then you would possibly wince and think of how unlucky I’ve been. Or perhaps you would simply nod your head and say, ‘me too’.

Here’s the rub:

We’ve all been there. The shortcomings. The heartbreaks. The cacophonies of grief. There is, along with the joy and the wonder, a tragedy inherent to existing. If you have not felt it, it’s only because you haven’t been alive long enough yet.

A spirituality that ignores this, or offers mere platitudes in response, is not a spirituality. This is why Good Friday is essential, and shouldn’t be brushed aside in favour of Easter Sunday, or discussed only in the context of Christian salvation and substitutionary atonement and all the other ways the story is made smaller than it actually is.

I write about this a great deal, and as such I thought I’d weave together some extracts from previous letters and essays. My hope is that it will feed your spirit, provide an introduction to my writing for those of you who are new here, and form something of an alternative sermon for this day of earth-tremors, and darkness, and torn veils.

One: ‘Do not make a binary of life’

From The pregnant silence

‘I will give you the treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret places.’
—Isaiah 45:3

We are a be-lighted people: soaked in glare, saturated by luminance, strangers to the dark.

This is true both physically and spiritually. Electricity has ended our night-knowledge, while a Christian obsession with light-as-good-and-darkness-as-bad has got us running scared from our own shadows.

We are over-illuminated, and consequently blind to so much… How much have we failed to see because we have switched on the narrow beam of a torch in a panic instead of letting our eyes adjust to the darkness?

Do not make a binary of life; God is one, light and dark, spring and winter.

Face your shadows, take them by the hand. No more grief-neglect; no more striving only for brightness when that is not what a full life consists of.

Two: ‘To be human is to walk with a limp’

From The curse of the unimpeded human

‘The impeded stream is the one that sings.’
—Wendell Berry

There’s one unusual story in Genesis that is particularly relevant here. It’s a story about God physically assaulting someone.

Jacob, who would later father a son who would star in a musical, is minding his own business when a man, later revealed to be God, comes out of nowhere and starts wrestling with him. All night. When it becomes clear that God ‘could not overpower him’ he ‘touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched’ (Genesis 32:25, NIV).

Not only does God initiate a wrestling match, he then cannot see any other way of winning the match except by cheating, which he then promptly does.

It’s all very mythic. A story that started off being told around campfires in the desert, or perhaps whispered in strange lands by a people in captivity, or exile. Weavings of meaning for a people uncertain of their future.

Only after this wrestling match and hip-wrenching does Jacob move into his destiny as patriarch of an entire people. It is as though the wrestling was a kind of initiation rite—something he needed to do before he could become who he needed to be. And his name thereafter, and the name of his people, was forever ‘wrestles with God’.

These bones that are broken

There is a deep truth staring out at us from the firelight of this story. To be human is to walk with a limp.

We see this in storytelling generally. There needs to be conflict, obstacles, deaths for the protagonist to be reborn out of. It is there in the concept in ancient Greek myth of katabasis: the necessary descent to the underworld that the hero must take in order to obtain what they need to complete their quest.

Stories, especially myths, are there to tell us about what it means to be alive. A frictionless story is devoid of spark. And so it is with our lives. These wrestling matches we undergo, these bones that are broken are one of the things that gives life its depth. The song of human life cannot arise without these descents.

Three: ‘Hope begins with an acknowledgment of reality’

From Anthems of troubled light

‘The Lord is close to the brokenhearted
and saves those who are crushed in spirit.’
—Psalm 34:18

The first note is that of a sudden plunge—the realisation that something has gone horribly wrong. It is discordant, disorientating. It swells, joined by the harsh melodies of rage, sorrow, helplessness.

Kinah is a Hebrew word meaning ‘lamentation’. It refers to songs of grief—collective wailings unleashed in the face of devastation. It is a musical rending. It is an irrefusal to face the difficulty of it all.

How long, Lord, how long? When are we going to stop losing? Where is the breakthrough, the turnaround, the change in tide?

The quote above, Psalm 34:18, is, unfortunately, often used as a kind of saccharine cure-all for those who are going through hard times. It is perhaps the religious equivalent of ‘Cheer up, things aren’t so bad.’ But that’s not what it says. It says there is such a thing as being brokenhearted; there is such a thing as being crushed in spirit. God does not prevent that from happening. What it says is that there is something about being in that devastated place that brings you into proximity with a weeping divine.

When you sing a song of lament, you find that you are resonating with something potent and holy.

Hurl it at the sky

Hope begins with an acknowledgment of reality. Hiding from the bitter and tumultuous doesn’t help anyone. Nor does a kind of sunny optimism. Life can be tragic.

So let it out. The sadness. The disappointment. The grief. Name it, express it, hurl it at the sky, dig it into the earth. They are large enough to hold it.

We begin here. Because after the song is sung, in the haunting silence that follows, a fierce yet delicate thought may come.

If you are able to sing a song of destruction, it is because you have not been destroyed. You have been lashed at, crushed, thrown against the rocks; yet you nonetheless linger, and you may discover that you are not alone.

Four: ‘What holds our galaxy together’

From ‘Our bitter and exquisite mortalities’

There is an uncomfortable, yet, once we get through it, liberating truth about the way existence works.

Death is the great and hard inevitability, yes, but so is life, because as much as life leads to death, death leads to life. We would prefer it not to be so, but there cannot be one without the other. It is the most central of cycles, essential to the way the entire universe functions—from the cosmic to the earthy and human.

The night sky is so bright with wonder because of endings; endings that formed you, too. Stars are born in the fallen bodies of other stars, and the ejections from those stellar deaths formed the elements that created you and me. We would not exist without the death of stars.

A death more all-consuming than we could imagine lies at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way: a supermassive black hole, its event horizon a constant scream of the light that cannot escape it. Yet this cosmic doom is part of what holds our galaxy together.

We do not like the gravity of life, its heaviness, yet without it there would be no life at all.

The engine of growth

Within your body, one million cells are dying every second. That sounds rather alarming, but it would be far more alarming if it wasn’t happening. Because without all that dying, you’d be dead. Some of the world’s most grim diseases come about when something goes wrong with the body’s ability to recycle itself.

The leaf-fall of autumn will go on to form the ground beneath our descendant’s feet. Soil only exists because of decay, which means food only exists because of decay, which means we only exist and are sustained because of decay.

Eden was a paradise, but there must have been death there—if not, there would have been no soil for the flowers to grow in. Without endings, there would be no garden for God to walk through in the cool of the evening.

This is what is so troubling about plastic. It doesn’t die. It doesn’t rot. And so it does not allow other things to become.

Endings can be an engine of growth. It is not hard to follow that thread to the spiritual implications.

What it leads to

Have you ever thought about how strange it is that the central symbol of Christianity is an instrument of death? Why not an open tomb? Or a ray of light? Or frankly any symbol other than one of catastrophic loss?

Why? Because of what it leads to.

The symbol of Christianity does not need to be one of resurrection, because resurrection is inevitable. It takes care of itself. But such beginnings can only take place when preceded by endings. ‘Unless a seed falls to the ground…’

The endings we experience in life can be agents of transformation. Without them, life is saccharine and void of wisdom. Without the sweet leaf-rot that comes from letting go, there is no fertility, there is no growth.

Rewritten

Our problem is that we want life without death. What resurrections have we failed to be witness to because of our refusal to put something in the ground? Never failing, never losing, never letting go—this creates plastic people, anti-life.

Life is hard. Unquestionably, and, at times, unconquerably hard. We must let the hurt hurt, and not attempt to cover it with platitudes.

Our losses can be rewritten. Not glossed over, not anesthetised, not changed in and of themselves, but woven into a larger story. The ending still stings, we still grieve, but we see it in the context of what came after.

Five: ‘The universe itself is bent on restoration’

From Anthems of troubled light

‘It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy?’
—Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Anakephalaiosis is a Greek word meaning ‘to sum up’ or ‘to bring everything together’. It is used in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians when he describes God as ‘[bringing] unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ’ (Ephesians 1:10)… It is about a thread of reconciliation that runs from heartbeat to epoch; from the human to the cosmic.

Anakephalaiosis expresses belief in an overarching story—a conviction that, somehow, all things are ultimately being drawn toward goodness, even if we cannot see it from where we stand.

This kind of hope looks at our deepest wounds—both our own and the world’s—and dares to proclaim that they will not be the end of the story. More than that, it insists that these wounds are themselves part of it. What seems awful at the time can be written into a larger narrative that both includes and transcends the darkness.

However loud the shrieking of these days

You will have seen this at work in your own life. When I look back upon my moments of failure, heartbreak, anguish, I can see how they have been woven, slowly, by some tender hand into a bigger story. Seasons of brokenness, over time, become a chapter; and not the final one.

Anakephalaiosis is hope as a cosmic promise, a faith that the universe itself is bent on restoration. This hope does not dismiss or trivialise the hardships we endure; it holds them within a larger vision. It is the courage to press on, even when we do not see how the journey ends, believing that, however loud the shrieking of these days may be, they will not have the final word. Instead, they will be formed into larger anthems, ones in which the light, however troubled, however fading, still sings.

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