Daily Signet

In Holy Week, the Christian world commemorates the Passion of Jesus Christ and the stories of the week leading up to the crucifixion are solemnly recounted: the masses who once were so moved by Jesus, now turn inside out and cry, “Crucify him!”. Here, the cruelty of crowds, of bullies, of their collective phobia—their unleashed rage as they mock him, crown him with thorns and parade him with their scorn. Here, Jesus carries his own cross to a place called Golgotha—the place of the Skull—located near a garden where tradition has it, Joseph of Arimathea owns a tomb. And at Jesus’ crucifixion, mixed into the wine to slake his thirst, a gift once given him by the magi, now offered again by a Roman soldier: myrrh, used to embalm the dead. Here, we feel the length of hours from the sixth hour when darkness descended to the ninth hour, when he at last cries, “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me.” Here, the mysterious rending of the veil in the Temple. Here, the deep, weighted depression of darkness as it falls over the land and silences even the disbeliever. Is there anything more piercing, more silent than the vacuum of forsakenness? This is the mysterium tremendum of a story of the disintegration and collapse of hope into a tomb that then breaks open with life: the seed in the husk that must die to sprout, the God in the man that must die to resurrect. The mysterium is in the death, the tremendum in the stone rolled away.          

Benjamin Martin

On This Day…

Maya Angelou born 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri, died 2014: author, poet, dancer, civil rights activist.
Works: A series of autobiographical volumes, many collections of poetry
Quotes: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”