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…

Elizabeth Barrett Browning born 1806 in London, died 1861 in Rome: poet
Works: Sonnets From the Portuguese, The Cry of the Children, Aurora Leigh
Quotes: “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; and only he who sees takes off his shoes; the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.” “Who so loves believes the impossible.”