The Golden Ass

Charcoal Drawing, by Regel
There was darkness when Jesus died, because he is life. When they took his naked and pale, beaten and bloody, limp and cold body of dry ashes down from irony's throne, the awe-pierced blackness of the skies became the utterly flat and breathless silence of a sealed tomb. Not the breathing and peaceful evenness of ocean's horizon formed by the inhale and exhale of the seashore. But the kind of overwhelming loss of all grounding approximated by the screechingly dull emptiness of radio static. You know there was supposed to be sound - intelligible voices, from the mouths and minds of living persons. The veiled structure of reality is shaken into sentence fragments when the Word falls into the ground alone. When my Lord died, we die with him. There is nothing left. Not bread, not water, not blood, not even dust. Hope is extinguished like the last, flickering candle. The only sound to hear is the clashing of our coins of betrayal against the walls of this tomb, echoing for days in our quaking souls. It is the voice of the reverberating agony of metal from earth's depths crashing onto the crowns of bloody nails. The repetitive rising and falling of choral songs of adoration and denial from the Lord's valley of death. Our flesh breaks; my breath is dispersed into vacuous silence.

Reflections on Maundy Thursday Service of Darkness, at Churchland Baptist Church.