Holy Saturday: who's in charge?

What I'm experiencing is finding myself quite well-suited to Shelter in Place as a lifestyle. Apparently some folks are bored. It's not possible to be bored in 7H. There's plenty to do, but if there's nothing to do at a given moment one can always contemplate, a busyness of its own. On the Beck sidewalk looking down over StAndrews, almost total stillness, little and no traffic moving. Traffic signals officiously stop-and-going nobody and nothing. No one out walking. Looking out and up from 7H sidewalk, if I were choosing a cloud word for what I snapped last evening, I'd say striated but I don't know cloud words. Will it still be beautiful when there's finally nobody to look up and say so? Do rats and fleas admire the sunset?

Various sorts of traffic on the Bay, that's one of the larger ships, just left the east terminal and

heading for Savannah, Georgia with wood fluff. Wood fluff? The new windows for the Bay side are in the garage downstairs, so that'll be starting soon; hope it doesn't mess up our new shutters installed as part of post-hurricane reclamation. 

I've not yet got back to any of my DVDs to watch films, but reading several books, two by Sönke Neitzel, one of which, Soldaten, presents the most discouraging evidence of human nature imaginable, based on documentation of ordinary soldiers at violence in wartimes, the psychology of it doubtless universally at work among us. What other creatures hate and are deliberately cruel to each other? And it neither starts nor ends with German soldiers during WW2, it's well testified from our OT book of Joshua, right up to Vietnam, My Lai, and present day. 

That the psychology of it explains it in no way mitigates culpability for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Find myself putting Soldaten down and delaying, sometimes for days, picking it up again. It's documentation, not fiction. We can know too much about what we are as human beings.

Clear that similar psychological elements are at play also in the American political scene, vehement hatreds and viciousness, though it seems to be somewhat in limbo during the covid-19 scare, suspension and changing of political activities, suspension of wars. In wiser worlds, wiser creatures might communally, as a society, pick up on the signs and change priorities so totally as to bring in a new age of worldwide respect. 

Books, there are plenty here, and plenty more on bookshelves in my office at church. Here I have three lined up, two to finish, one I've had around here several years, to open for the first time.

On the church calendar, today is called Holy Saturday. Theologically it commemorates the day after crucifixion and dying, when Jesus lies dead in the tomb. I remember this being contemplated by some folks including faculty when I was at seminary. That, Christians holding Jesus to be God, when God is dead there's no one in charge of the Universe. I've written about this several times on past Holy Saturdays, it being discussed seriously at Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary when I was there forty years ago. A confident mind might hope that the Father and the Holy Spirit could reign, manage, and hold things together while the Son was Not. But what about our prayers to the Father that close "... through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen", suppose that formula doesn't work because the Son doesn't live to reign on that original Holy Saturday? See, this is not just the human nature of the Son, this is the Logos, dead. Doctrinal orthodoxy, the Creeds hold that the Son was indeed dead, heresy to assert otherwise. If God is Three Persons, One God, can God live if one of the Persons is dead? Not to get into modalism, but we know what happens when one person of Siamese twins dies. Suppose it's Siamese triplets and one dies. This discussion may seem ludicrous, facetious, even blasphemous. But not so: if you put up a situation such as the Trinity, it bears exploring if you assert the death of one of them. Thus, theologically, no questions cannot be raised, even after doctrines are settled. But do all questions have answers? 

And civilization. At the covid-19 moment, human society seems to fall into the Day, Holy Saturday. Empty sidewalks. No cars on the roads. Businesses shuttered. A photo of one person, a medic, in an otherwise crowded subway car. Isolated cafes with signs out front, "Takeout Only". At the downtown post office, one or two people, now three, moving cautiously, avoiding passing close, nodding suspiciously, not speaking, all wearing face masks that bespeak the end of the world.

Holy Saturday.

T+