NB: read/comment on Mom's post below before this one. I wrote this while she posted hers, and would hold off a few days if it weren't that this very day is the topic below. As symposiums go, the timelessness of themes should always trump the schedule of considerations. Thank you, Mom, for yours. Here's mine, very happy to have had Kirsten visit us this Holy Week:
Among the joys of seeing Kirsten on Good Friday, as she
performed with the Lake Forest band in St Simon and Jude’s church, north of the
Jewish Quarter (and a Mendelssohn opus aptly included), was the reminder that The Brothers Karamazov is the piece of
literature most interwoven with today, Holy Saturday. Kirsten is starting to
read Dostoevsky’s greatest novel—years earlier than the rest of us even knew it
existed. She knows Alyosha—read ‘Joshua’ in Russian—is the seminarian who glues
the book together, and all others, beyond the brothers themselves, have their
archetypal roles. “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter is coming up, and what a
day—Holy Saturday—to remember that most magnificent ‘poem’ as Ivan calls it,
“an absurd thing, but I want you to hear it.”
For Holy Saturday does more battle in a day, with more than
a test of wills at stake, than the 40 days Jesus spends in the desert, tempted
voraciously by Satan. I’ve wondered what that reunion might be like, when Jesus
‘descended unto hell’ which can never by definition be familiar, acceptable,
convalescent, ‘this too shall pass’. Reunion? Who knows? Does Satan show up in
the lake of fire, tempt and taunt further, hiss rhetoric that only fallen
angels can conceive? Does Jesus argue back, quote scripture, ‘look to the
cross’ so-to-speak? Does the rich master of Lazarus weigh in, or deign to have
someone greater than Father Abraham speak on his behalf? Does God the Father
watch God the Son tread waters unimaginable, rendering the tears of Gethsemane
a ‘drop in the bucket’? I remember in college a book entitled ‘How Big is Your
God?’; today we should paraphrase: ‘How Hellish is your Hell?’, especially when
your God and Savior faces it on your behalf?
When Tom Zahr ‘came forward’ at First Baptist Church, and
Pastor Gimmi non-scriptedly asked why he did so today, Tom replied with an
obvious tone: “because I don’t want to go to hell.” I’ve used—misused—that line
for years as an all-too-facile outlook of why we do anything right or wrong. On
Holy Saturday, Tom (if you’re reading), you’re right. None of us want to go to
hell. And yes, there are myriad renditions of hell on earth, and none of us are
in a position to assess their verisimilitude to what Jesus faces today. But
today—today—Jesus descends unto hell on our behalf. And though we know Easter
Sunday is coming (what literature studies calls ‘dramatic irony’—the audience
knows what the stage players do not), we should not pass through this day without
profound sorrow. Our Savior and friend is suffering there beyond measure. And
like Tom knows, he’s doing so on our behalf.
Thank you, brother Dan, for hosting Kirsten in Prague on Good Friday night. That was a highlight of what was already a memorable Holy Week for her.
ReplyDeleteAnd thank you for giving me yet another way of looking at the Brothers K, through the premise of Holy Saturday, that unique place in our journey when we all know what happened but don’t yet comprehend what it means for us. We can intellectualize it like Ivan, but our poem will never be complete until we consider what happened after Christ left the room, or, like the apostle Thomas, until we can see the evidence for ourselves. We can feel it viscerally like Dmitri, or Peter, but we always seem to have that congenital buffoonery in our blood. Even sensing it spiritually, like Alyosha, or John, in the hours before Easter we cannot be certain that our faith is ready for the world. What a book! What a story - and yet it is all premised, like its John 12:24 epigraph, on what happens the day after the end of it.
Last year I finally sat down and reread Hamlet. This year, as soon as Kirsten is done reading it, I will pick up Dostoevsky’s finest again. Oh, wait, I have more than one copy here! Three cheers for Karamazov!