Ping for later read.
5) IHS dies on the Cross
It is almost an impertinence, almost flippant for me to address this. The huge surd of death, the irreconcilable and unacceptable fact, the mystery demands silence. To judge by appearances, the dead cannot hear anyway. What is the good of our speech? If we had an explanation, still it would not solve the problem.
I think we cannot believe it,at least not at first. When one of my lambs died, my mind would play tricks on me. Even though I had felt no heartbeat, suddenly I was sure I had seen the lamb take a breath.
And that was 'just' a lamb. This is a man -- a man who welcomed children, whose shrewd wit made divine wisdom accessible to all his hearers, whose country analogies and, even, sense of the ridiculous (just for a minute imagine a man with a log in his eye -- "I think you're gonna need a bigger handkerchief there, buddy"), must have made his followers smile, before they became thoughtful.
Now he is still. Or his body is. Looking at the dead, we cannot say where they themselves are or what they are doing.
Their bodies rest.
When Holy John says, "the light shines in darkness," I suppose the usual image is of the darkness being scattered, obliterated by the light. My speculation is that there is a deeper light, one more powerful. It burrows into darkness, not only not grasped, but not seen. In darkness it gathers, like troops behind enemy lines, and prepares to burst through from the depth of darkness back toward us who, with our dim vision, cannot penetrate too far into the mystery of death.
Darkness closed over him as water closes over the thrown pebble -- a few ripples (earthquakes, torn veils) then all is still. The Sabbath of God begins.
6)Mary Receives the Body of IHS into her Arms
While God's Sabbath begins with the setting of the sun and the coming of the night, will Mary rest? Will she sleep? Will her sleep be deep? Or will it be broken as once the utterance of an infant and the swelling of her breasts disturbed it? Will her arms reach for the child not there, her cheek long for the silken softness of a missing child's cheek?
With the bereft, which is where we must be if we are to be with Mary, with our brothers and sisters everywhere who now are torn with grief, we must at least taste what it means to say, "Look, and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow."
If we are to return rejoicing, shouldering our sheaves, we must be ready to go forth weeping with seed for sowing. This is a hard teaching, too hard to bear by ourselves alone
We are not by ourselves alone.