Portal of the Mystery of Hope - The Conclusion
by Charles Péguy
Feast of St Euthemios the Enlightener of Karelia
Anno Domini 2020, April 18
by Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) c. 1656
Night, you are holy; Night, you are great; Night, you are beautiful.
Night of the great mantle.
Night, I love you and I salute you and I glorify you and you are my great daughter and my creature.
O beautiful night, night of the great mantle, my daughter of the starry mantle
You remind me, myself, you remind me of the great silence that existed
Before I had unlocked the firmament of ingratitude.
And you proclaim, even to me, you herald to me the silence that will exist
After the end of man’s reign, when I will have reclaimed my scepter.
And sometimes I think about it ahead of time, because this man really makes a lot of noise.
But above all, Night, you remind me of that night.
And I will remember it eternally.
The ninth hour had sounded. It was in the country of my people of Israel.
It was all over. That enormous adventure.
From the sixth hour to the ninth hour there had been a darkness covering the entire countryside.
Everything was finished. Let’s not talk about it anymore. It hurts me to think about it.
My son’s incredible descent among men.
Into their midst.
When you think of what they made of Him.
Those thirty years that He was a carpenter among men.
Those three years that He was a sort of preacher among men.
A priest.
Those three days when He fell victim to men.
Among men.
Those three nights when He was dead in the midst of men.
Dead among the dead.
Through the centuries of centuries that He’s been a host among men.
This incredible adventure was finished.
The adventure that has tied my hands, God, for all eternity.
The adventury by which my Son has tied my hands.
Tying the hands of my justice for eternally, untying the hands of my mercy for eternally.
And against my justice, inventing a new justice.
A justice of love. A justice of Hope. Everything was finished.
Everything that was necessary. As it had to be. As my prophets had foretold it. The veil of the sanctuary had been torn in two, from top to bottom.
The earth had shook; rocks had been split.
Tombs had been opened, and many of the bodies of saints that had died rose again.
And around the ninth hour my Son had uttered
The cry that will never fade. Everything was finished. The soldiers had returned to their barracks.
Laughing and joking because another task was finished.
One more guard duty that they’d no longer have to make.
One centurion alone remained, and a few men.
Just a simple little post to guard the insignificant tree.
The gallows where my Son was hanging.
Only a few women had remained.
His Mother was there.
And perhaps a few disciples as well, beyond that we can’t be sure.
Now every man has the right to bury his own son.
Every man on earth, if the great misfortune befalls him
Not to have died before his son. And I alone, God,
My hands tied by this adventure,
I alone, father at that moment like so many fathers,
I alone was unable to bury my son.
It was then, o night, that you arrived.
O my daughter, my most precious among them all, and it is still before my eyes and it will remain before my eyes for all eternity
It was then, o Night, that you came and, in a great shroud, you buried
The Centurion and his Romans,
The Virgin and the holy women,
And that mountain, and that valley, upon which the evening was descending,
And my people of Israel and sinners and, with them, He who was dying, He who had died for them.
And the men sent by Joseph of Arimathea who were already approaching
Bearing the white shroud.
*Full book-length poem in The Portal of the Mystery of Hope
translated by David Louis Schindler, Jr., published by Eerdmans (1996), and available at Eighth Day Books
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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