Colette Scharf, “Empty Tomb and Three Crosses”
Spiritual Sunday
I share a Donald Hall poem to mark this first Sunday of Advent. Advent always strikes me as a contradiction: Christmas is in the air but we focus for a few weeks on the darkness that leads up to it. The church music is heavy, as are the purple altar cloths. We know the story ends happily yet we are caught in the grip of the fearful suspense.
Hall’s poem links Advent to the days before the Easter Resurrection. The cradle that will hold the Christ child and the tomb that will hold His adult body are both empty and the poet is filled with “horror vacui” or horror at the void. This linking is also to be found in T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” where the birth of the Christ child is linked with “a water-mill beating the darkness,/And three trees on the low sky.” There the Magi narrator asks,
Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth,
certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had
seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different;
this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like
Death, our death.
Hall’s poem also alludes to Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” where the poet describes birth and death as inextricably entwined..
So Advent is, first of all, a season of death. It is because the darkness weighs so heavily upon us, however, that Christmas seems miraculous. In reply to the poet’s horror, God answers with a child and a star.
Hall speaks to this veering between spiritual emptiness and the “rebirth of everything possible” in a Paris Review interview. He is describing the minister who drew him to Christianity:
Watching him, listening to him, I became aware that it was possible to be a Christian although subject to skepticism and spiritual dryness. I used to think that Christians believed everything, and all the time, which is nonsense. If you have no dry spells, I doubt your spirit. We watched Jack live through the deserts when he would give sermons that were historical or philosophical. After a while he would liven up, go spiritually green again. He was a great one for Advent, the annual birth or rebirth of everything possible.
“Advent” reminds me of the powerful simplicity of Christina Rossetti, who also wrote Advent poems and who may have inspired Hall’s lyric: .
Advent
By Donald Hall
When I see the cradle rocking
What is it that I see?
I see a rood on the hilltop
Of Calvary.
When I hear the cattle lowing
What is it that they say?
They say that shadows feasted
At Tenebrae.
When I know that the grave is empty,
Absence eviscerates me,
And I dwell in a cavernous, constant
Horror vacui.
Note on the artist: The artist’s work can be found at http://fineartamerica.com/products/empty-tomb-and-three-crosses-colette-scharf-art-print.html.
