“Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” This admonition from St. Silouan is appropriate for Good Friday, when most of Christendom commemorates Christ’s descent into hell, where he shatters its captives’ chains. Many modern Western theologians have abandoned this teaching, but even if you reject it you are still, if you are a Christian, …
Like many, I passed this spring through Lent. It felt longer than in past years, because there has been a kind of Lenten work being done within me, it seems, since last fall. Nothing terrible, nothing traumatic, just a gradual scraping away of the soul’s fat, like miserable Eustace when Aslan sinks his claws into …
When we tucked what remained of that little girl into the earth, I was relieved it was over. I was filled with something that felt like transcendence. We had weathered the storm, we had kept the faith, we had given her back to God, and now we would await patiently the life of the world …
We stood in church and sang the hymns, the boys with their shirts tucked in for once, me in a tie for once. Caleb had written on his notepad: “He is risen. He is risen indeed. Eastre Day. Amen.” We sang the hymns and the sound of it would make even the heaviest heart lighter, …
And so they led him up the hill, and they nailed him to a cross, and they watched him bleed and die. From Frederick Buechner’s Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith: “What was brought to completion by such a life and such a death only he can know now, wherever he is, …
