The First Great Silence

Tomorrow it begins. We call it Holy Thursday. The downhill movement begins, gathering momentum, clearly unstoppable, riding on tracks laid by Roman occupation and legalistic dehumanization of the Scribes and Pharisees and the complicity of the Judases who thought they knew what the Messiah OUGHT to do. Then there is Good Friday, and the question of why we call it GOOD. But today, Wednesday, has no name.

Can you remember riding a roller coaster? Which part of the ride do you remember? Was it the height of it; was it the weightlessness of the drops? Was it the way the car eventually slowed down, the ups and downs becoming less and less steep the feeling of it coming to an end? Was it sitting in the car while it is loading, listening to the voices of the strangers who would soon be screaming and bouncing, all of us one voice, one 64-armed, 32-mouthed caterpillar that screams. Or was it the forward lurch of the coaster as it is grabbed by the hook under the track, the hook that is attached to the enormous, silent motor that pulls the cars up and up and up, 64 eyes looking into the blue sky, 32 hearts whose pounding would be audible except for the clank-clank-clanking of the ratchet that prevents the car from a backward slide in case that enormous silent engine failed?

I recall the moment at the top, when we are being nether pulled up nor let fall, when 64 lungs involuntarily suck in all the air that they can hold, all the air that will, moments later be released into the first of a number of screams that will be heard past all of the other screams and laughter and calliope sounds and not –so-silent enormous motors and cotton candy sellers all the way across the amusement park and into the mundane world beyond.

I’ll call this unnamed Wednesday the First Great Silence. Did the morning creatures two millennia ago feel in the stillness of the soil that the enormous engine had stopped? Did the birds hear the clank-clank-clanking slow, and then stop, and did they choose not to sing? Did the folded beggar at the gate notice, while the busy ones walked by, on their good legs? Did the women somehow know, at the morning well, looking at the dust, unable to look the truth of it in each others’ eyes?

We are here, you and I, at the top. Once it begins, we are carried wherever it takes us. That’s what the word Passion means. Tomorrow we will feel the movement begin, and soon it will be hurtling, and there will be screaming and it will be too late to get out. And so soon we will be there at the bottom. There at the bottom will be Saturday...
The Second Great Silence:
Momentum all spent, all humanity’s weak legs will disembark,
Will step fumblingly onto ground that is so unmoving,
All ears will hear no bird in air that is so still,
All eyes will look at the dust,
All hearts slowing,
Not yet knowing.

Morning will reveal
Stone rolled away,
Evil derailed.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.