The Angel At The Tomb
All
around still dark of night,
So early in the world this day...
And the warmth and dawning light
Are still a thousand years away.
In Holy Week, Boris Pasternak.
The Angel at the Tomb spoke to all the great of the West, as they beheld
the emptiness:
Obsessed
with your own thoughts,
Encircling the round world with the imaginations of your hearts,
Obsessed with your own wants,
Filling God’s earth with your knowledge of mere created things,
You do not hear the voices of the hundreds of millions of starving, begging:
Why are you so swollen with your self-importance, while we are dying,
swollen with our hunger?
And for a second time the Angel spoke to all the great of the West, as
they beheld the emptiness:
Obsessed
with the bubble of your self-admiration,
Spreading your hollow self-worship over the face of the earth,
Obsessed with the science of your civilized death,
Making weapons and armies to destroy the whole world,
You do not hear the voices of the hundreds of millions of orphans, crying:
Why do you tell our parents that they can live without the Truth,
and let them die with the Lie?
And for a third time the Angel spoke to all the great of the West, as
they beheld the emptiness:
Obsessed
by the dream of your imagined greatness and the pride of your minds,
Thinking yourselves higher than Almighty God,
Obsessed by the holocaust of your devisings and the orgy of your destruction,
Making yourselves lower than the raging beasts,
You do not hear the voices of the hundreds of millions of babes, whimpering:
Why do you lose faith in the Most High and turn life into death, tearing
us bleeding from our mothers’ wombs?
And the Angel turned to all the simple of the earth, as they drew near,
tempted by the imaginings of all the great of the West, and He spoke for
one last time:
Seeing how
many centuries have passed since the sickness began,
Seeing how the deicides decreed the death of God,
Seeing how, denying God, they became fratricides, willing death for you,
Seeing how, denying God and brethren, they became suicides, creating their
deaths,
Why do you Christ-seekers not understand that the West is the empty tomb,
hearing:
Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.
Fr Andrew
Great Friday 2005
