There is a disorienting emptiness about this day.

The altars are stripped and bare; the tabernacle is empty; our images and statues are covered over; our holy water fonts are empty; our candles are extinguished.  Our liturgical celebration itself is disorienting, stripped of many of its normal, stabilizing paces and rhythms.  

It is the Church’s dark night of the soul.  

We have no beauty to awaken longing; no ugliness to cause a cathartic shock that would alert us to what we are lacking.  Just… emptiness.  Caused by the lack of a Presence.  And this Absence throws us back into ourselves, into the Hell of our isolation.  Today, Christ’s Body descends into the Netherworld – a world locked in on itself.

Obviously, this is not a terribly pleasant experience.  But it is also the most common experience of our day-to-day life.  We are not usually living in the joy of the contemplative awareness of divine Beauty.  We are normally just living in the monotony of the workaday world.  But we don’t normally experience it as such, because we have so many ways of distracting ourselves.  But today, those are all gone.  In our fasting, we are stripped bare and we experience the emptiness of a life that is void of the Presence of Jesus Christ.  It is a depressingly diminished existence, but we are at a loss as to how to get out of it.

“He descended into Hell.”  

In the Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis imagines the process of purification that one suffers on the way to Heaven, on the way to Life.  As one approaches Heaven, he grows more real; he realizes that Hell is imprisonment in non-reality, and the more one accepts that non-reality, the more his heart shrinks until the beauty of reality can no longer make itself felt within him.  Lewis wonders if someone from Heaven could shrink enough, could get small enough to still get into that diminished place.  His guide responds, “Nothing like small enough.  For a damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself.  Good beats upon the damned incessantly like sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it.  Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes tight shut.  First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.”  

“Then no one can ever reach them?” Lewis asks.

“Only the Greatest can make himself small enough to enter Hell.”

Today, the Body of Christ descends into Hell.  Jesus empties Himself, makes Himself small enough to fit into our diminished existence.  The Good Shepherd runs in pursuit of His lost sheep.  And following a long tradition, we devoutly kiss the vehicle that brought Him there.  We venerate this Holy Tree, which gently held our Savior fast, to lead Him to where we were.  We adore the Holy Cross, because by its light we see that the Shadow of our existence in exile, the Shadow of our emptiness, is only a small and passing thing; light and high Beauty await those who trust their Lord and allow Him to carry them back Home to the Father.