Entering into Darkness (Abram Van Engen)

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Today marks the opening of Holy Week. A triumphal entry yesterday on Palm Sunday culminates, only days later, with Jesus crying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Monday begins a pilgrimage that ends at the cross. And those who journeyed with Jesus in his day had no idea that a light might still yet come. They had witnessed only an ending—a life snuffed out. It would have been reasonable, in their case, to despair.

 We are now, this month, experiencing and entering even deeper into darkness. What has come will likely worsen. The past weeks have brought terrifying scenes, and we will see much more in the time to follow. It may seem, for some, quite reasonable to despair.

I have found myself turning in these times to the priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. His faith was no carefree thing. He knew a great deal of seclusion and depression. At one point, he found himself on the brink of ending his own life. And it was here, at that point, in the face of such deep and utter darkness, that he turned back and refused despair.

I want to dwell on that refusal. But while Hopkins’ poetry is lovely to read, it can be quite difficult to understand. So just read—perhaps out loud, so you can listen to what he is writing—and I will try to explain.

Here, in one sonnet, is how Hopkins sings of his resistance to despair:

Carrion Comfort
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? 

   Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

The first word of this poem is no accident. It is the word of refusal: Hopkins will not give in. That word (that “not”) gets repeated three times in the first line and six times in the first stanza. Alongside that determined refusal, the poet asserts the word “can.” What can he do? He can hope. He can wish for day. He can, at the very least, carry on.

The second stanza raises a terrible question, though—the same question that arises in so many psalms of lament. Where is God, and why is he doing this? As Psalm 10 puts it: “Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” What causes the Lord to lay his “lionlimb” against the world, or rock it with his right foot? Where is God in Covid-19?

At first, the poet begins a possible answer. The darkness, he reasons, is a test. In stanza three, he comes to see his struggle as to means to clean him, to free him of chaff. It is a refining fire.

No doubt, there are ways that a personal searching of our hearts can be an appropriate response to great suffering. But by stanza four, the poet realizes that this explanation, in itself, is insufficient. After all, who should we cheer for in this soul-cleansing battle? Should we glorify the hero who passes through the test, or the God brought the test to pass?

What good may come of evil is the business of the Lord. As I suggested last week, we can still have eyes to witness grace in the midst of great tragedy and loss. But this is no explanation of the loss. Such grace does not make the tragedy right. As the theologian N.T. Wright has recently written, Christianity does not offer us a rational answer or an explanation of Covid-19. 

I tend to think, instead, that the question—why God?—is itself the response that draws us to him. For Hopkins, the poet turns from the posing of an answer to a stunned and muted recognition: the struggle, he realizes, has been with God. The repetition at the very end of the poem reveals just how startled he is by this recognition: “That night, that year / Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.”

The tragedy of this global pandemic is all too real, and only about to increase. We cannot diminish the numbers that will die, or treat the dying as mere numbers. The questions to be asked of God are hard and not to be denied. But I also want to suggest, with Hopkins, that the questions are to be asked of God. Insofar as we are raising them, we are wrestling, like Jacob, with God.

It is the same struggle that Jesus himself underwent. In the garden, facedown, he prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.” As he came to the cross, he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.”

In Psalm 22, that opening line eventually turns to praise. Near the end of the psalm, the writer raises a scene we all might hope to see again: “From you comes my praise in the great congregation.”

But on this Monday, at this beginning of this Holy Week in particular—entering deeper into a season of great sickness—it is right to dwell, as Christ did, in darkness. The disciples had no idea that their ending would mark a new beginning. In their own confusion and misery, we can see that the messiah who came to them did not offer an explanation. He offered, instead, a response.

Our hope and our comfort—far from the “carrion comfort” of despair—is that God enters the darkness himself.

Abram Van Engen is a Carver Project Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

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John InazuComment