all the symbolical realities of the world came to an end;

THOU: The lilies on your altar wilt and drop. It is time to throw them out. Will it be like this for us, too? With my tending to their cut stems, stripping the blown from the buds when I remember, and within a few days looking up to see I've let them rot in water? I want my prayer to be more vigilant than that, for it seems you require all of my attention. The flowers cannot stand in for my lack of ceaseless prayer, though I tend to think of them as a form of vigil. Now they remind me of what I do not give you, and of how much I refuse to receive, when even the tiniest gift to you (flowers in a vase on the altar) reveals something more of you, in time. There are times I let the dried roses in the vase stand weeks at a time to remind myself that the corpse on the cross is empty. It occurs to me now the empty vase reminds me of the vacant tomb.

There is so much of this in you, the emptying, the filling up, the emptying, the filling up, and always with either vacancy or fullness pointing towards one end: life in death. But what of the interim? In which it seems impossible that one thing substitutes for another? In which I am elided as I die to myself and you take your place in me? Or in which you are negated as I usurp your position with the fullness of myself? No. This is not a metonymical relationship between us, for these are temporal and spatial contingencies, these acts of substitution. --And our relationship is not cyclical, like the cycle of replacing dead blooms with fresh blossoms, though it feels that way to me because I am here, within time, watching change and decay for a sign of things passing away or entering in. The sun rises. The sun sets, as it does now. Another day.

How strange that the vacant corpse and the vacant tomb function symbolically in a precise parallel. Both signify the dark unknown, the terrible stripping place where the accidental layers are taken away and there is nothing to see. There is only the uncertain waiting in which I am certain I might never be answered. And yet the image of the corpse is transformed within the image of the tomb (and I am not forgetting these images are real--that you lived them out, within time, with me), and the image of the tomb is transformed within the image of the corpse. So much so that one does not exist meaningfully without the other. And yet only after the tomb is discovered empty can this be true. The vacant corpse does not reveal the vacant tomb until the tomb reveals itself as vacant, just as the vacant tomb does not reveal the fullness of your bodily resurrection until Thomas is invited to put his hand into your wound to touch your heart. He is transformed, in faith towards love, not because he sees there is something to see rather than nothing, but because he is placed back into your mystery, back into the terrible stripping place where the accidental layers are taken away and he sees there is nothing to see, nothing to grasp, that will lift him out of the incomprehensible and into self-assurance. He is returned to the grim reality of the corpse even as you stand before him, teasing him a little for his doubt. He is emptied out, entirely, and reduced to love, "my Lord and my God," for what could be more empty than the fullness of love?

It goes on and on with you in this way, Lord. Layer upon signifying layer building towards the simultaneous stripping of everything in sight. So that even if I reached out, plunged my hand into your wound, and felt your heart quivering against my palm, I would know far less of you, touching you, as a greater part of you is revealed. This is who we are together. We are not locked in a cycle of wills towards power in which your will is substituted for mine. I cannot take my own will in hand and throw it out or throw it over, and neither will you. For I cannot be forced into emptiness, and I cannot be rushed. You strip me down slowly so that I can see you stripped also, empty me and empty me so that I am full of love, but allow me to love you only a little at a time. Only as much as I can withstand.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

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"'It is vain for you to rise early' says one of the Psalms (126[127],2). Such were the sons of Zebedee who had already selected a position for themselves, one at his right, one at his left, before they had undergone humiliation in imitation of the Lord's Passion. They wanted to 'rise before the Light'. Peter rose before the Light, too, when he advised the Lord not to suffer for us. The Lord, in fact, had spoken of his saving Passion and humiliation, and Peter, who only a short while before, had confessed that Jesus was the Son of God, was seized with dismay at the thought of his death and said to him: 'God forbid, Lord! Save yourself. No, that will never happen to you!' (cf. Mt 16,22). He wanted to rise before the Light, give advice to the Light. But what did the Lord do? He made him rise after the Light by saying to him: 'Get behind me'... 'Get behind me so that I can walk before you and you can follow. Take the road that I am taking instead of wanting to show me the road on which you yourself want to walk'.

Why, then, sons of Zebedee, do you want to rise before the Day? That is the question we need to ask them. They won't be annoyed since these things were written about them so that we, too, might know how to keep ourselves from the pride they fell into. Why want to rise before the Day? It is in vain. Do you want to rise before being humbled? Your Lord himself, he who is your light, was humbled so as to be raised. Hear what Paul says: 'Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. Coming in human likeness..., he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Because of this God greatly exalted him' (Phil 2,6f.).

--Saint Augustine, Exposition of the Psalms, 126[127]

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