In a few hours, God willing, I’ll be standing in church, tears streaming down my face, inwardly reciting St John Chrysostom’s Paschal Homily as my beloved priest preaches it in the matins of the Feast. Last night, as we processed around the temple with the plashchanitsa, the cloth icon of Christ entombed that spends the rest of the year on the holy table, I felt again what comes to me every year. The Lord has brought me to another Pascha. I have been blessed to reach another Pascha. In a way, nothing else matters to me. This is all I hope for, to reach this brightest of all Feasts again before I leave the earth.
You can read this homily, but you must believe me when I say that reading it is the faintest shadow of hearing it proclaimed. Hearing it proclaimed not just in the context of Lent, of Holy Week, of the church’s theanthropic liturgical catechesis to roll away the stone from our hearts. Hearing it proclaimed in the context of my life, my hard heartedness, my despair, my confusion, my failure; in the context of the sweetness and beauty of life that seems, when I trace its roots, always to lead me back in the end to the grief of my own fragility, vulnerability, subjection to vanity and death; and of course not just my own, but the death of those I love. The Paschal Homily is the archetypal sermon, the ur-sermon, just perhaps as the anaphora of St Basil is the archetypal theology.
Nothing matters more, to begin with, than our belief that this is all true, that this homily is preaching the truth. Yet there is an infinite distance between wanting to believe that it is true, and actually believing that it is true. “O Lord, I believe — help my unbelief!” Wanting to believe that it is true, and that prayer for faith, are with me all the time. I can forget consciously that this desire is there, of course, but it is present in my heart like a deep strain of music, so deep and so quiet that sometimes it is a kind of musical silence, upholding my heart secretly in the midst of all my cares and sins.
Wanting-to-believe includes this experience: that this faith is supremely desirable because it alone makes sense of anything and everything. Sometimes a verse of a hymn, or a sentence of Scripture, or the sight of an icon, or a liturgical gesture, or a story from the life of a saint, or the scent of incense, or the melody of a hymn, reveals to me how the totality of the faith coheres, how it is utterly harmonious, how it encompasses everything, how all the disparate, prismatic expressions of the faith derive from the central light. Yet even that perception is not yet belief; it is only a prolegomena to belief; it is only the intensification of the desire for belief.
Wanting to believe that the faith is true is present always. Believing that it is true comes in flashes. I have come to regard those flashes with gratitude rather than with grasping. There is a kind of willing “dwelling in death”1 that accompanies this gratitude. I am not yet the kind of man who can live in the knowledge of this truth. Truth is known in the heart. My heart can’t be faithful and still. My love is too poor. Therefore the experience of this knowledge only comes as a grace. Grace is a gift. I can’t control it. This is the whole point.
Last night, after the Lamentations and as the clergy prepared to take the plashchanitsa in procession, God gave me this grace; I felt, I knew, for a moment, that the noble Joseph’s taking the Lord’s most pure body down from the Cross and laying it in a new tomb is not an event distant from us in time and space; that it is present now, that we are there, that we are eyewitnesses, that the Lord of Glory lies before us, ready to be lodged in a narrow tomb.
How would your heart respond if you were there, with St Joseph of Arimathea? What love and fear and gratitude and tears would you find within yourself? How would you say farewell to Him? How would you kiss His wounds?
To be there, and know the truth — as much as that truth can enter my human heart — of the abasement and kenosis of the Son of God, descending into and beneath every terror, into the utmost closure and constriction, into death in a sense so deep that we can’t comprehend it? Into desolation, into emptiness, into a total loss?
O Life, how canst Thou die? as the Lamentations sing in the voice of the Mother of God.
From this grace, the grace of seeing for just a moment, this reality, I learned something; this I think is why the Lord gives us graces, not simply to console us (though of course they do), but to teach us, so that they lead us on our own path to transformation, so that He can prepare our hearts for greater graces yet to come. Graces are seeds, promises, instructions, invitations.
I see that I still live in the fear of death. And I see that I still strive to resolve that fear by human means, by my own will, by my own power. But there is no resolution to that fear but the Cross and the Resurrection. There is no resolution to that fear but the kenosis of the Son of God. Nada, nada.
Darkness, in this sense: I have to give up my self-reliance and put my trust in the Lord.
No trust in “the immortality of the soul.” No trust in metaphysics. No trust in “universalism.” No trust in apokatastasis. No trust in theories, no trust in thoughts, no trust in theology, no trust in the Church, no trust in liturgy. Trust in the Lord. A trust that does not see. A trust in darkness. Nada, nada.
Maybe that trust in the Lord bursts forth like a blossom with all those other things bathed in the light of the Resurrection. I have also experienced the grace of seeing the historical flesh of the Church as evidence that this blossoming is true and real. But they are not the root; they are the flowers.
In the end, as Ben Sasse is doing with such humble lucidity, I have to face death with nothing — nothing but the Lord Who delivers me, and His whole creation, from death. To let go of everything as with tears I let go of the living Lord and kiss Him as we place His body in the tomb of all our hope.
And my eyes fill with tears already as I think of the radiant Night to come. As I think of the first Paschal hymn in the darkened temple:
Thy Resurrection, O Christ our Savior, the angels in heaven sing; make us worthy also on earth to glorify Thee with a pure heart.
“Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not.” (St Silouan of Athos)
I won’t be able to make it to the service tonight. Please say a prayer for me if you think of it.