The empty doorway

During our visit to Lourdes, France, the bishop who accompanied us suggested that we do the Way of the Cross on a hill behind the basilicas of the Rosary and the Immaculate Conception. The wife and I had second thoughts about joining.  It was the beginning of winter and our teeth were chattering from the cold.  The icy winds from the Pyrenees, already cruising above the River Pau, would find us, as we clambered up the hill, easy targets.  Besides, the climb was not exactly child’s play. But all of these objections dissolved when I saw an octogenarian with a cane take the lead and stand  beside the bishop in front of the first station.

And so we followed the steps of Jesus, from the time he was condemned to death to the time he was crucified and laid in the tomb–and risen from the dead–the Via Crucis or Via Dolorosa–retracing a similar route that pilgrims take in the actual places in Jerusalem.

Each of the fourteen stations had accompanying it a sculptural work that displayed life size figures, such that one could do the Via Crucis without a written guide by merely contemplating the scene. I was particularly struck by the twelfth station. The three crosses–of Jesus and the two thieves–stood near the top of the hill with the snow capped Pyrenees in the background. In such a setting, it was impossible for one not to be drawn into contemplating the mystery of God’s love.

As we walked down to the remaining stations–the old lady with the walking stick still in the lead , deferentially just a few steps behind the bishop–I wondered what the sculpture for the last station would be. Would the risen Christ be portrayed as in a painting by Rubens, sitting, holding the flag of victory, being administered to by angels? To my amazement, however, at the fourteenth station, there was no Christ at all, only a circular stone moved away from the entrance of a cave.

It did not take me time to realize that this was in fact what John mentioned in his Gospel. He wrote that early in the morning of the day after the sabbath, Mary of Magdala saw the tomb open, the stone blocking it pushed to the side. When she informed them of this, Peter and John ran to the tomb and found it exactly as she had said, open, empty.

This was the physical proof of the Resurrection–the empty tomb, although later Jesus would appear to many people, among them Thomas, whose skepticism Jesus dispelled by inviting him to view and touch his wounds.

Emptiness is a sign of defeat, but not when the emptiness results from the disappearance of something undesirable. What can be more undesirable than death? What greater victory is there than that over death?

In his poem, Ars Poetica, Archibald MacLeish includes this in his list of images about poetry–

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf

An empty doorway–I’ve seen a number of this in our neighborhood. Homes empty and half-empty because of departures–families fearing bad times and fleeing to the U.S or Australia, children trying their wings elsewhere after graduation, or brought by their partners to their strange countries, and, yes, death, which literally discharges a home of life. I pass by these abandoned houses with a heavy heart, recalling the times when they bustled with activity and laughter.

Who knows if right now these missing neighbors, wherever they might be, are going through desperate times, and, because of crises in their work, health or relationships, their daily walk is a veritable Way of the Cross. Then I hope that soon they will get to the empty tomb at the Fourteenth Station–to the Resurrection of Christ,  when it will all seem that someone has arrived at the  doorway and a leaf bud has broken out of a nearby bough, like a tiny green wing. And a new story of joy begins a page.