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Inspiring the Archdiocese of Baltimore

Women are pictured in a file photo praying at the Stone of Unction, or Stone of Anointing, representing where the body of Jesus was prepared for burial after the crucifixion in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Old City of Jerusalem. (OSV News photo/Debbie Hill)

The tomb of Christ and the atomic moment


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OSV News Filed Under: Commentary, Lent

In Lent, we expect the sojourn through the desert, encountering spiritual heat, thirst, mirages that disappear as we draw near to them. Sometimes, we find ourselves encountering Christ there and sometimes we meet ourselves as moments of our past rise up out of the desert sands, gleaming in harsh light like a burnished sphynx, impossible to ignore.

This year Lent has brought me, most unexpectedly, into the very tomb of Christ. To see where my wandering prayers had led was jolting — a moment of wonder as I encountered such a small, shadowy place, the only light being what was permitted to sneak through the cracks, between a stone and the walled entry it pressed against. In that spare illumination I perceived a shelf. And upon the shelf before me was the wrapped body of our murdered Lord.

“What am I doing here,” I all but gasped aloud. “It’s not Holy Saturday! This has not happened yet, so why am I here?”

But of course, the death of Christ has happened, will happen and is happening even now. I know and accept that outside the construct of time we are forever and always at the Last Supper, at the Crucifixion, at the Resurrection. One of the gifts of the Rosary is that it helps us to place ourselves at these moments, daily, weekly, yearly until it seems true that time ended with the sacrifice of the Lamb, with the tearing of the veil and the rolling back of the stone, and the rest is all merely illusion and catching up.

Still, Catholics are trained to the seasons, and it seemed very wrong of me to be in the tomb, keeping watch over the body of Jesus, particularly so early in Lent.

Obedient to where I had been led, I nevertheless kept asking, in the lowest of murmurs: “Why am I brought here, before this shroud, my Lord’s bruised and bloodied body beneath it?”

And why have I felt so deeply, every day since then, that this tomb is precisely where I must stay through these remaining weeks?

Holy Saturday is, of course, the day we recognize the emptiness and grief of a world without Christ. We have no Mass; bells are silenced. The promised glory of the Messiah is dead, and we wait through the dull hours until finally comes the Easter Vigil, and the return of light, joy, promise and hope renewed: He is risen,” we proclaim, “truly, he is risen!”

“Why am I here,” was the question. The answer I received seemed to be, “because I am the restoration you seek.”

My personal life is full of people in need of help — people recently laid off and discerning what God has next for them; people seeking healing of serious sickness, people suffering from depression, crippling anxiety and mental illness, or facing challenges to housing, finances and marriage.

People in need of not just healing but full-on, yes, restoration of the physical, the spiritual, the material.

And so, it has become my daily habit to bring all of them with me, into the tomb, where one must become little to enter — supplicants as small as mice, squeezing into the blocked chamber. I lead each one to the Body, placing their need before the Christ: “Lord, behold your little ones! He needs a job; she has cancer; she can’t walk anymore; they are apart … Lord, they beg your restoration…” Restore them, restore us, restore me.

We stand before Christ, transcending time, awaiting the moment when the energy of light and life — unleashed at creation, and subsumed (just once) into the quiescence of a grace-filled womb — flares through that enshrouded body, reanimating, resurrecting.

It is the light of complete restoration, glorifying matter which has been tortured, shredded, pierced, mocked, betrayed, blasphemed, despised and denied — the atomic moment unbearable, not survivable by ordinary things and people; the burst that comes not from without but (as with creation itself) from a great within. It will flash through every wound, every scratch and scourge, every thorn-pressed, flogged or pierced line where hatred and injustice has drawn blood.

This is the restoration I have been led here to request. One so supernatural, powerful and permanent that it singes the woven shroud, wound by wound, yet leaves no fire, consumes nothing of earth or human hands. “For I will restore health to you, and your wounds I will heal” (Jer 30:17).

Restoration is the promise, eternal and beyond understanding. I invite you to join me in the tomb, before the Body, to share the moment of mystical renewal which is happening, even now, at this precise instant in which we live.

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