SOMETIMES IN SPRING
J. Grant Swank, Jr.
It was that stark bony look. Calvary was smitten. Its face was just as we had been told in Scripture: rocky and dented with eye sockets, protruded with a nose-shape and vacant with the stare of death.
Along with other tourists, we trudged up the mountain, cameras in hand.
Three scrubby trees were at the very top. There Priscilla sat near some twisted tall grass spikes as I focused her in direct center of the photo. I imagined that that is where the crosses would have been punched into God's otherwise good earth.
I recall it as a hot day in May.
More photo-taking. Not much said. It was another vantage point, another imagining. It was sitting for awhile to think back.
Then it was time to leave that Place of the Skull--Golgotha.
In the valley was the waiting Garden Tomb. We meandered toward it, in no hurry, sensing a reverential cast to all of nature. Greenery was carpeted everywhere. Bundles of flowering buds peered up to greet us. Conveniently, sunshine spilled into all the gaps.
Slowly I made my way to Joseph of Arimathea's empty gravesite. That room had been carved out of a hillside. A tough trough had been dug length-wise in front of the tomb's strikingly beautiful crude stone door. Snug inside
that trough, a weighty rock slab would have been rolled to seal shut the hole.
No entrance. No exit. Tight. Any corpse inside was there for good, or whatever. Robbers would have stolen from the tomb if the stone had not been surely secured.
I picked my way inside that cool room. Centuries after the fact, there was now no rock slab to prohibit. Morning air brushed my back, moving me on till completely inside the eerie resting place.
Gradually my eyes adjusted to see the remains of shelves where bodies once had been positioned.
History has a way of hacking stone into pieces from once-neat slabs.
There I pictured His young frame wrapped carefully in meticulously clean cloth strips, spices tucked in about that sorry piece. A separate cloth would have been wound lovingly about his bruised, bloodied head.
How old he must have looked when wrapped. It took but a few torturous hours to rearrange a muscled, healthy casing into a mutilated mess.
I suppose that May day there were others making the same interior pilgrimage as I. In fact, I know there were.
But I don't recall any shadows but my own. They spread across the tomb's interior as ghost misfits, strange guests not feeling at all comfortable.
Timeless. It seemed as if I exited time with no desire to return.
But time called out its practicality.
And with that, I again was back in the morning sun, milling about with the many as we hunkered down on rocks and patches of grass to say our prayers, hear the Scripture account and eventually receive the sacrament.
There was no reason to chat. No one wanted to chat. There was too much going on inside us--not so much noise but voices from another time and friends from another culture than our own.
Could we keep those friends near us when boarding the plane for Rome?
I concluded: there was simply no way around it. One could not get to the dawn of that marvelous first day without first trudging up Skull's Mount, then lowering one's self into a valley where a borrowed tomb stood motionless--awaiting the gawking and the saved.
Sometimes in spring when I meander about Maine’s Lakes Region, I get that same feeling from the sun, especially when near a garden.
It was that stark bony look. Calvary was smitten. Its face was just as we had been told in Scripture: rocky and dented with eye sockets, protruded with a nose-shape and vacant with the stare of death.
Along with other tourists, we trudged up the mountain, cameras in hand.
Three scrubby trees were at the very top. There Priscilla sat near some twisted tall grass spikes as I focused her in direct center of the photo. I imagined that that is where the crosses would have been punched into God's otherwise good earth.
I recall it as a hot day in May.
More photo-taking. Not much said. It was another vantage point, another imagining. It was sitting for awhile to think back.
Then it was time to leave that Place of the Skull--Golgotha.
In the valley was the waiting Garden Tomb. We meandered toward it, in no hurry, sensing a reverential cast to all of nature. Greenery was carpeted everywhere. Bundles of flowering buds peered up to greet us. Conveniently, sunshine spilled into all the gaps.
Slowly I made my way to Joseph of Arimathea's empty gravesite. That room had been carved out of a hillside. A tough trough had been dug length-wise in front of the tomb's strikingly beautiful crude stone door. Snug inside
that trough, a weighty rock slab would have been rolled to seal shut the hole.
No entrance. No exit. Tight. Any corpse inside was there for good, or whatever. Robbers would have stolen from the tomb if the stone had not been surely secured.
I picked my way inside that cool room. Centuries after the fact, there was now no rock slab to prohibit. Morning air brushed my back, moving me on till completely inside the eerie resting place.
Gradually my eyes adjusted to see the remains of shelves where bodies once had been positioned.
History has a way of hacking stone into pieces from once-neat slabs.
There I pictured His young frame wrapped carefully in meticulously clean cloth strips, spices tucked in about that sorry piece. A separate cloth would have been wound lovingly about his bruised, bloodied head.
How old he must have looked when wrapped. It took but a few torturous hours to rearrange a muscled, healthy casing into a mutilated mess.
I suppose that May day there were others making the same interior pilgrimage as I. In fact, I know there were.
But I don't recall any shadows but my own. They spread across the tomb's interior as ghost misfits, strange guests not feeling at all comfortable.
Timeless. It seemed as if I exited time with no desire to return.
But time called out its practicality.
And with that, I again was back in the morning sun, milling about with the many as we hunkered down on rocks and patches of grass to say our prayers, hear the Scripture account and eventually receive the sacrament.
There was no reason to chat. No one wanted to chat. There was too much going on inside us--not so much noise but voices from another time and friends from another culture than our own.
Could we keep those friends near us when boarding the plane for Rome?
I concluded: there was simply no way around it. One could not get to the dawn of that marvelous first day without first trudging up Skull's Mount, then lowering one's self into a valley where a borrowed tomb stood motionless--awaiting the gawking and the saved.
Sometimes in spring when I meander about Maine’s Lakes Region, I get that same feeling from the sun, especially when near a garden.
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