The Time of Hell

Fresco, by Fra Angelico, c. 1430s

“What time is it on the clock of the world?” Grace Lee Boggs asks us. As Holy Saturday gives way to Resurrection Sunday, the time remains, definitively, the time of the tomb. The time of hell.

In the Christian tradition, the day between Jesus’s public execution and his resurrection is a day – a time – when death reigns, a time when the quiet after execution is loudest. It is also, according to the tradition, the day of the “harrowing of hell,” when the executed God descends to the tombs of hell to break open the gates and release the captives.

William Stringfellow writes that “the first place to look for Christ is in hell.” Hell, the place of separation from God, turns out to be the place where God dwells, rebelliously.

Throughout much of the tradition, hell is figured as a kind of prison, which is why prison has been described again and again, for centuries, as a kind of hell. In some depictions of the harrowing of hell, on the day before his own prison break, Jesus frees masses of people from a subterranean darkness – a tomb. It is no mistake that some of the first chaplains and wardens of the first American prisons told those they confined that they would be “buried from the world,” that they would, in some sense, be made to die. It is no mistake that some of the earliest American prisons were nicknamed “the Tombs.”

Even as Holy Saturday becomes Resurrection Sunday, we remain in the time of the tomb, the time of hell, the time in which more and more people are being buried, alive and dead, from the world.

This is the time of hell: the time of growing state terror, when the carceral fascism at the heart of the American project reveals itself for all to see, unmistakably. The time of the broad daylight disappearance of the enemies of pseudo-sacred colonial racial capitalist order. The time of genocide, and the time of the criminalization of those who identify and condemn it as such.

This is the time of hell: the time of impending death by mass deprivation. The time of monsters exercising the godlike power to secure the illusion of paradise for a few by making masses of people vulnerable to premature death. The time of defining and dispossessing people out of existence.

If it is, and will remain for some time, Holy Saturday, the time of the tomb, the question becomes: how will we orient our spirits, how will we organize our communities, to make room for the God within and around us to harrow hell on earth today? How will we and the God incarnated in our rebellious collectivities harrow hell as it manifests in the cages of Louisiana, El Salvador, Tennessee, Palestine, and everywhere people are disappeared, buried alive, eliminated? How will we harrow the hell-without-walls of organized abandonment, apartheid, dispossession, deportation, and disposal?

What will it take? How will we nourish our spirits to summon and sustain the courage? What is our first next step? Who will we take that step with?

As those of us who aspire to follow Christ celebrate the resurrection, I hope we will remember, insistently, that the first place to look for the one who comes to bring release to the captives is among the captives, here, in the hell that remains.

If resurrection will mean anything in this time it must mean a prison break.

Find your people and roll away the stone.

Take it, break it, and build with it something the mortal gods of death could never imagine.