The silence

I spent part of yesterday catching up with Diarmaid MacCulloch's radio essay, broadcast over five nights, on 'Silence'. I'm not at my intellectual best at 10.45 at night ( some might ask when am I ever at my intellectual best, but let that pass) so the five podcasts of fiften minutes each proved a blessing early on Holy Saturday.    

There's a symmetry in listening to an essay on silence on the most silent day of the Christian year. But a dissonance too; a wordy beginning to a day which is essentially about a quiet processing of the pilgrimage of the last forty days, or at least the last week. The silence of desolation and grief, inevitably bound up -we know the outcome of the story in today's resurrection- with incipient joy.

So the silence of yesterday was not empty. It wrestled with the many faces of love, the many costs of love in the life and death of Jesus. It backwashed into the wrung-out liturgies of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, surged greedily into today's resurrection, and finally found a resting place in the fact of God, allowing Holy Saturday to bring its own balm;

Silent, surrendered, calm and still, open to the word of God, 

Heart humbled to his will, offered is the servant of God,