[An accompanying playlist for this article can be found here]

“O come and mourn with me awhile,
O come ye to the Savior’s side
O come, together let us mourn,
Jesus our Lord is crucified.”¹

“The sun is dead, or maybe just fading out.
It hits my skin for the first time in days and days.
As I slip into the air I feel the warmest winter
That I can remember;
Breathless is the empty world.
Aimlessly walking through a vacant city,
The architecture is all alone.
If this is the end I don’t feel a damn thing.
My tired feet matter no more.
It seems the things I tend to believe always fall to my feet
To dig my shallow graves”²

“The lash whistled like a singing wind” over Jesus’ back.³ The lash echoes throughout history, quite obviously for us here in the historical wake of his coming, but also for the disciples before his Passion. The season of Lent returns us to the weeks before the crucifixion, where Jesus, our blessed teacher and healer, our Lord God and Messiah, openly anticipated his own gruesome death. To apprehend the weight of the resurrection, we must first understand the despair that accompanies the death of God. We must be thrown into the darkness that is Lent—the sharing in our God who has come to die for a plan that is, to us, opaque.

In our lack of understanding, we might be like Judas and look for a way to betray the Lord.⁴ Even in the sin of an unwitting betrayal, we may come to hate ourselves, for we have betrayed our Love and the very ground of our beseeching. We hesitate to, but we can sympathize with Judas’ suicidal condition: “First I need to save the life of God/So that God can come and save me from myself/If I have to walk alone I’m giving up/I can’t stay here knowing love is not enough.”⁵ This suicidal contrition is a false contrition for it neglects the true reason our sin can be so grievous. It is not that we are utterly depraved, a grotesque metastasis of evil—though I do sometimes feel “I can’t stand myself.”⁶ On the greatest of contraries, our sin is evil to the degree that it is set against the good, in this case the goodness of humanity that inheres in each of us by the most gracious gift of God. But there can be no pure opposition in our sin, for in existing—in actuality or even potentiality—the good we are created for already begins to win out. And for this reason, God does not hate us. He loves us with the utmost tenderness. And we are assured of this on Ash Wednesday: “Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing that you have made.”⁷

We still, however, must mourn our Lord’s coming death and the loss of our innocence. True mourning is not intensity of emotion or pallor of countenance, for this merely signals that we seem to have lost something. True mourning only comes when we understand what we have seemingly lost. If we lack understanding, therefore, we cannot mourn perfectly. Mourning without this reckoning spins itself into a vicious cycle that eats us alive. This vicious cycle jitters and beckons for relief. Is his death my fault? How can I atone for so grievous a sin? How could anyone bear to look at me? I miss him terribly. I wish I could not picture his blood torrenting on the ground and splattered on hotel bedsheets. How immeasurably guilty could I be? We ought not valorize the nihilistic despair that threatens to confect itself out of this state. On the contrary, we should recognize that nihilism as an affect desperately pines for grace and the death of death. Our inability to mourn perfectly beckons for grace. This pining does not come from nowhere.

Even if we do not understand it immediately, our very being “fight[s] and fight[s] behind these eyes to find a sign of life.”⁸ Divine boundlessness does not only mean that the finite intellect cannot attain perfect comprehension of God. It also means that God comes to us infinitely knowable and infinitely revealed, as St. Thomas teaches.⁹ To have boundlessness only on one side introduces finitude into the nature of God and forgoes the wonder of the incarnation. The only way to understand our sorrow is to reflect on and commune with the Good we mourn, however thankless this task may be. For this reason, mourning is an ongoing process for us until we are brought into perfect communion with the Good himself. However, in this we can see that all evil depends, quite desperately, on the good, as St. Augustine famously teaches.¹⁰

If we understand who Christ is—and who he is to and for us—all the more perfectly we will mourn. And the more we mourn, the more the glory of this person is shown, until we die or death is killed. Glaring through this veil of death and despair to see Christ himself, we participate in the work of God to bring all things back to him anew.

And that is the Devil’s sorrow and full of evil he is esteemed, for all that God suffers him to do turns us to joy, and him to shame and woe. And he has as much sorrow when God gives him leave to work as when he works not. And that is because he may never do as evil as he would like, for his might is all taken in God’s hand….He shall be scorned at doom’s day generally of all that shall be saved, to whose consolation he has great envy. For then he shall see that all the woe and tribulation that he has done to them shall be turned to anchors of their joy without end. And all the pain and tribulation that he would have brought them to shall endlessly go with him to Hell.¹¹

Lent, then, is not opposed to anticipating a glorious redemption albeit unseen, for in Christ we are constantly given this very promise through his death. But of all deaths, his is the darkest. For in our seeking, God “blacked out every light.”¹² Even to Christ, it seemed that God had forsaken him.¹³ We can have faith not because his suffering is worse than ours, but because our suffering is contained in his. And he thanks us for it.¹⁴ “This is the darkest place you will ever know. Now open your eyes.”¹⁵ Shall we dare sing into the shadows: “A good God’s a dead one. A good God’s the one that brings the fire. A good Lord is a dark one”?¹⁶

Even the feared and infamous poets of our day unwittingly bespeak the beauty, divine in nature, for which our nihilism grasps.¹⁷ God has come to us to take on our suffering; our whole being thereby is compelled to bow to him alone, even though we cannot comprehend his glorious plan. As Catherine Pickstock writes:

That ultimate worship, like all preceding worship, enacts and celebrates the outgoing of all things from God, and the return of all things to God, including the rejection of God by created things through the perverse will of human beings and fallen angels, and the divine overcoming of this rejection through the ‘mystery’ of the divine descent and human elevation.¹⁸

Only when we understand, then, will we mourn perfectly. And when we mourn perfectly, so too shall we worship and surrender ourselves—not to despair but to Light from Light which surrounds us, born of the Star of the Sea. The only problem of finitude arises when we rely on it for a task for which it was never created. Not even our prelapsarian parents could ascend by their own lights to comprehensive understanding of themselves and their world, much less God and his most glorious and merciful plans. As fallen, then, we are ever more powerless to make ourselves understand, to mourn, to worship perfectly. Thus, “only God can face the darkness of the night and redeem fallen creation.”¹⁹ Lent is the season to confront ourselves with our desperate need for the abiding love of God and his faithfulness to give himself to us. And in this, without seeing, we can trust God to fulfill his promises, for he is Good and he is Grace, unfazed and unconquered by death.

To understand my sorrow,
I must know the good I mourn.
Abandoning secret hope,
I love you this brooding morn.

The everlasting hills rise
In desire taken hostage.
Immortal Flesh will bide,
Not mire, the wakened ridge.

In knowing the good I mourn,
I love you better and more.
Showing face from hood, heart torn,
Recalling feathers and gore.

Weathering more, so much more
Than I could divine from the birds,
Let go to be held in store for
The Blessed Good, The Vine, and Word.

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