The Harrowing of Hell

A couple of weeks ago, the conversation on our Coming Home FB page got around to the subject of hell, and a friend reminded me of Cynthia Bourgeault's discussion of hell in her book, The Wisdom Jesus.

Part of her discussion includes this exerpt from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

"That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, fired into it, a blue streak of non-being, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very compromising terms that are the only ones that being offers.

"The world has to sign a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which everything, even every hydrogen atom is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die...The world came into being with the signing of that contract."
(end of quote)

Dillard's picture of that "blue streak of non-being" set Bourgeault to thinking. She continues writing:

"It had not previously occurred to me that this irreducible brokenness might in fact be part of the givens of this realm itself. It was simply not one of the options that my classical theological training would lead me to consider. In our usual theological take on the Christian mystery, with the emphasis so much on personal sin, we lose sight of the fact that death and finitude really are collective, the backdrop against which everything else unfolds."

She takes the conversation further by writing about the Christian take on darkness and light, and tells about a woman who questioned, "How could this darkness exist? How can we remove this darkness from the planet."

Bourgeault's respnse was, "Don't you see that by judging it you only make it worse? By trying to stop the black, to make it all white, all good; by saying that this we can accept, and this we must reject, you keep empowering that cycle of polarization that creates the problem in the first place." Bourgeault continues, "I think this has always been the fatal trap in the 'God is Light' roadmap, the orientation that cleaves to the light by trying to deny or reject the shadow."

Then she began writing about The Harrowing of Hell, the idea that Jesus descended to hell before he rose from the dead. That's not found in Scripture, but it is a huge part of Christian Tradition, with the idea even being included in the Creed. So, what did Jesus do there? Tradition teaches that he preached to the unbaptized, but I do love Bourgeault's take...What was Jesus doing there?

"He was just sitting there--surrounded by the darkest, deepest, most alienated, most constricted states of pained consciousness; sitting, if we can imagine it, among all those mirroring faces of the collective false self that we encountered earlier in the crucifixion narrative: the anguish of Judas, the indecision of Pilate, the cowardice of Peter, the sanctimony of the Pharisees; sitting there in the midst of all this blackness, not judging, not fixing, just letting it be in love. And in doing so, he was allowing love to go deeper, pressing all the way to the innermost ground out of which the opposites arise and holding that to the light. A quiet, harmonizing love was infiltrating even the deepest places of darkness and blackness, in a way that didn't override them, or cancel them, but gently reconnected them to the whole."

Thanks for putting up with the long quote, but these are ideas that I've thought myself and now someone's put voice/and words to it. I've pondered Dillard's "blue streak of non-being" that's shot through the whole of creation, and I've pondered Jesus just sitting in hell with us until the light comes--I've pondered it all through Lent. I've gone through my own dark night, and Jesus sat with me. The light's coming again. And I have friends who are sitting in their own hell--their own darkness, and I know Jesus is sitting with them. They may not know it, but I know it, and I can pray it for them--that he stay with them until the light comes again for them.

This isn't one of those paintings I want hanging over my sofa. Not sure I'll ever even enter it in a show; all I know is that I had to paint it as a "Thank you" to the One who is always with us, whether we know it or not or whether we believe it or not.

This I know, True Love Wins--every time.

Ponder Jesus with you in your darkness on this Holy Saturday, then have a blessed Easter tomorrow.