The Bells of Good Friday

I am in Oxford this Good Friday, perched near the High Street with the bells tolling each hour and its half, for a small research trip to the Ashmolean to see the exhibit about Knossos and its excavation by the infamous Arthur Evans. Old friends will be there in the glass cases, and I’m sure I’ll cry— ceramic friends I mean, on loan from the Heraklion Museum in Crete, where I’ve traced the path in and out of two thousand years of pottery and stone work and jewelry over and over again, different stops in front of artifacts along the way like icons that shine with a radiance I recognize absolutely, but cannot name. It will be strange to see them so far from home, and also lovely.

But I’m not writing this piece this evening because of my research, or my relationship to Minoan artifacts, or because of Arthur Evans and his misguided yet devoted and at times visionary (while at other times utterly appropriative) relationship to Bronze Age Crete. I’m writing it because Good Friday and the bells and the nearness of Cretan vessels tucked safely behind glass down the road have put me in mind of another Good Friday four years ago.

On that other Good Friday, I was living in Crete. The memory of the bells that night has been haunting me since I woke up, even though Orthodox Easter isn’t for a week. But it’s Good Friday on this island, the island of England. The churches of Oxford are humming with preparations when I walk by. The story of Jesus’s death and resurrection is in the ground and air today. And a part of me is still there on my porch four years ago in Crete, hearing his death bells ring from mountain to mountain, and then the next night, seeing people pour out of the little church by the sea with candles lit, lighting each other’s with the flame from Jerusalem, surrounding me— he has arisen, he has arisen! Christos anesti, christos anesti! And how all the while the sea never stopped lapping the shore and a little ways off the island with its Minoan ruins glowed by the light of the bonfire lit to burn an effigy of Judas, and the stars of the hunter hovered above the Bronze Age stones, and I was overwhelmed by the potency of what I was standing in the midst of.

I don’t have very much I can speak to from a religious or theological point of view. I have a whole lot of thoughts about the institution of Christianity which I’m sure those of you familiar with my work can guess at. But there is something outside the confines of the institution, at the heart of the mystery, that I have found myself circling ever since my first months in Crete. I share all of this simply from my experience, from my feelings, and from my instincts, because all of these I do know and can speak from.

Remembering Holy Week in Crete, I am put in mind of the living water of God that Jesus offers to the Samaritan woman at the well— which to me is the unending presence of Love that wells and wells from the heart of life and of the Divine, through us, to us, and from the still absolute centers of our own beings outward to all other beings. You know what it feels like to glimpse this. To sit within this. To speak and love from this place. And you know what it feels like not to. (I certainly do!)

Well, that Good Friday especially, all those years ago, was like sitting inside the living water. Like the bells were moved by them as by a great sea across the entire island. The whole point of the thing came crashingly, tidally alive for me as I stood on my porch. Those bells delivered something absolutely true right to the center of my heart.

I wrote about it four years ago, and the original essay is published in my book The Venus Year. But like certain pieces of writing, every time I return to read it, I want to change things. I want to add, cut, modify, and reweave based on new angles of memory, or new seams of understanding. I’ve done so here, to share this (Western) Easter weekend. For those of you who have the book, this isn’t exactly the essay in there, but it’s (sort of) close. :)

Easter, an essay

originally written spring 2019, expanded spring 2023

Into the dark night, the bells of the neighboring village ring that Jesus is dead. It is a slow, two-toned ringing over and over, hour by hour as the stars thicken and the small owls call. Dogs bark. The sea is darker even than the sky. The sound—into the stars and dark and mountains, the sea, the quiet night green, the barking dogs, the loneliness of distances—loosens itself from time. Jesus is dead, right now. Mary is weeping on her knees, her hair cut off to the chin in mourning. Her headscarf has slipped, and she is covered in stars. She will not leave the lemon-blossom woven coffin. Her keening is in the bells and in the dark warm night. The sound of the bells travels far. Beyond our mountains, and down by the sea, other churches are ringing them. There is nowhere the news doesn’t reach.

The bells loosen everything in me, and in the mountains. Whatever we may be hiding from ourselves, grief can do nothing before such a sound but rise through the body and stop you where you stand to listen. This is the sound of what it means to lose someone you loved, whether to life or to death, whether human or animal. This is the sound that says, he will not return ever again in this form, he will not return, he is gone, he is gone, he has gone beyond the beyond, where we cannot follow. 

The bell is the sorrow of Mary, the sorrow of Jesus, the sorrow of all those who loved him. It is their humanness, even though divine, that reverberates across millennia, so that people kiss the coffin still, and the old man in the corner of the church weeps. I saw him while I sat obedient in the pews, nervous that I’d forget to keep my legs uncrossed, nervous that I would make my general ignorance and foreignness obvious. I listened to the liturgy of mourning in Greek, recognizing very little but Christos and Panagia and Theotokos. There was the scent of myrrh. Old and young women from the village had spent the night before adorning the white coffin with impossibly ornate strings of flowers and light— red and white wreaths, wild roses, burning candles, needled strands of lemon blossom. An icon of Jesus was laid like a body in the center.

Sitting there, my feeling was still abstract, academic—here was the death of the vegetation god, I thought. See how he is honored, just like all the older flower kings, lovers of their Goddess—Isis’s Osiris, Aphrodite’s Adonis, Ishtar’s Tammuz. Once women made flower pots for Adonis and threw them, weeping, into the sea. See how all of this is really an elaborate metaphor for the life and death of green, of plants, of that which nourishes us. The queen bee and her sacrificed lovers, the moon-priestess and her sun-beloved, rising and dying and rising again…

But alone under the stars on my porch later that night, the long, slow tolling is first of all the sound of loss. A very specific loss. Not a vegetation god but man. They say he was the Son of God yes, but he was also a man born from a woman. And the sound, which does not relent— it rings on for hours— sets a rhythm of loss through my body, so that there is nowhere to hide from what I mourn, nowhere to turn away, only the name of one I loved, and let go of, over and over, not in death but still a loss so great that it is the only space to understand it in, for what was is dead, and what will be can never return to what was.

Eventually I can really do nothing but perch on my wall and weep. I find myself even begging for the sound to stop. Please, please I say out loud. Please stop, oh god, they’ve killed him. Please no. What have we done, what have I done, please no. But there is no escaping it. Even the sea hears this news. There is no village whose bells aren’t ringing. I imagine all of Crete as one bell, and the next night, one light. Years later, I hear the exact same bells rung in a western village where I am living for a man’s funeral. But here, now, these are Christ’s bells and they ring past midnight. And they ring everywhere. I can hardly breathe or think until it is done. It is not two thousand years ago this happened. It is now, it is now, it is now, say the bells, say the mountains.

Was it ever simply the “vegetation god” we mourned in older rituals, or was it always our own dead, our people, our own mortality, our changing, inextricable from the earth but also singular, personal, beloved? And now, here, the bells are ringing for one who brought a Love so radiant to earth we are still only beginning to reckon with the depth of it, the reverberation of it, and his sacrifice that bridges worlds. His sacrifice that collapses certain wefts of time into a single blinding point. There is the whole green world in this yes, the whole animal world, the whole mineral world, the whole earth, the whole sky, all the waters, fertility and animal ecstasy and babies and loss and rebirth and renewal yes, and also this single specific man. I don’t understand it. All I know is that on my porch in the dark, it is alive, and it undoes me.

                                                                        ***

I wonder how many others have stopped on their own porches or at their kitchen windows, swaying. I wonder how many others are weeping too, remembering someone, or some choice, or some time, feeling grief rise and rise to their throats, pulled up by the sound. Maybe only into such vastness and also such love, the bell tolling mountains and ages, can we surrender what we have carried. Finally he is not just a silent scream inside me, but the reverberation across the whole land. Everybody is carrying this with me.  I am carrying him—someone I loved, and also the one brought down from the cross, embalmed with aloes and myrrh, wrapped in linen by hands that loved him— with everyone else. I am carrying what they have lost, too. We carry all of this together. We are none of us getting out of here alive. We carry our mortality together. We carry the mortality of the ones we love together. We carry our wrongdoing, and we carry our greatest, deepest, sweetest hopes and longings.

The Marys know what we have seen. What we are living. They know what we are crying over. He knows most of all. They all say —we each have travelled to this place. You are not alone. He went there, beyond the beyond, the one for whom the bell tolls, and she knelt weeping, hair shorn in the dark of the mountain valley as the stars thickened softly in the warm night. They have gone before us. We too will survive it. So the bells say.

There is a profound peace in the silence that follows, at last, beyond midnight. Only cricket song, and the dogs barking, and the small shy owls, and the stars again.

But Mary remains in the sea-warm dark, head bowed, holding a soft but unwavering light. For three days and nights she will stay by his body. Under her cloak, she is another woman. Under her cloak, she comes bearing deep red eggs.

                                                                        ***

By the sea the next night, they burn a great effigy of Judas in the bonfire. At midnight people pour suddenly out of the church carrying the candles of his renewed life toward the bonfire. The light has come from Jerusalem, it is said. The old women receive it first, the ones who’ve been there all evening praying. People light each other’s candles, fathers and mothers and children and grandparents, until everywhere around me in the dark are little flames.

So, it has happened. The miracle. Mary Magdalene brings her oils to anoint his body, weeping, only to find the tomb empty. The Gardener speaks to her, and, turning round, she does not know him at first. Then suddenly she knows him, oh does she, with her whole being! — Rabboni? Rabboni? It is you!

Children light firecrackers and somebody sets off a series of fireworks over the island of Mochlos, so that briefly the four-thousand-year old ruins are illuminated under the showers of sparks. My favorites are the golden ones that fade slowly, falling in arcs of light like grape clusters. I’ve loved those best since I was a girl. There is light everywhere now— the fireworks, the bonfire, people I know and people I don’t know milling around with candles, hugging each other, hugging me, getting the flames very close to everyone’s hair.

Young men—and old—light off homemade bombs that make me nearly jump out of my skin. The village dogs are terrified. One goes into a panic and tries to dig herself to safety in the hearth. The whole next day her face is gray from the ashes.

I am not fond of the unexpected bomb-blasts—why do people celebrate Jesus’ resurrection with so much gunpowder, I ask a friend, getting a little sick of the sound. But sometime in the night I wake, remembering the Kouretes, the young men called on by Rhea to protect baby Zeus from Kronos in a cave high in the Cretan mountains, which they did by dancing and shouting and banging great shields in a deafening cacophony. I’m still not entirely sure what it means, but maybe, like the burning of Judas— as old as Dionysos, far older than Christ, a knitting together of older and newer ways—the fire and the blasts burn away poison, dread, fear, betrayal, and all that needs to die in order to make way for life reborn.

                                                                          ***

A red egg sits on the other side. 

I don’t know anything about its story in the Eastern tradition that night. I just know that I’ve seen a lot of red-dyed eggs since Thursday. Only red, no other colors. People have brought such red eggs to our house. They are beautiful and bright. We are not meant to eat them until after the resurrection.

After midnight, after Jesus has been resurrected, I eat a traditional meal, a soup of goat intestine and liver, artichoke and fennel, with my then-boyfriend’s family. As is customary, we hit our red-painted eggs against each other's to see whose shell is strongest and breaks all the others. This brings great luck, and protection. His mother wins, and I am glad. She’s been at church all evening with the other women of her village, mourning Jesus’ death with more devotion than anyone else I know.

When I ask, people tell me that the eggs are painted red for the blood of Christ. For the miracle of his death and resurrection. I’m unconvinced at first when I hear this, because I don’t yet know the story of Mary Magdalene and the red egg, where this particular tradition comes from, so it seems like a stretch to me. I think to myself— it’s an egg, and it’s red. Surely this is also the blood of a woman? Surely, somehow, it is both? I mean, an egg? And in my mind I keep seeing red eggs under Mary’s cloak where she is kneeling at the foot of the cross in unthinkable grief. Where she is bowed at the tomb. Which Mary is it I see in my heart’s eye? Mary his mother, Mary of Magdala, both? I’m not sure. Sometimes they blend into one.

Much later, I read about the legend of Mary Magdalene going before Emperor Tiberius Caesar in Rome to proclaim the miracle of Jesus’s resurrection. She is the first to officially speak the words Christos anesti. But the Emperor laughs at her when she speaks them and says that a human being can no more be resurrected from the dead than one of the eggs on his feast table might turn red. She then picks one up and in her hand it promptly, miraculously, turns red. According to this legend, the Emperor then takes her more seriously, and agrees to exile Pontius Pilate for condemning an innocent man to death.

Life-blood red stains the egg of resurrection. Somehow I am brought back to the beginning of everything with this red egg. A young virgin Mary faced on a bright gust of wind with the Archangel Gabriel, telling her she will conceive and bear the Son of God. Mary whose womb is the red egg. Mary whose blood during childbirth is never spoken or written (that I know of). Jesus born as all humans are into a tide of female blood, blood also of the cosmic womb since he was both man and God. Somehow, this is a woman’s mystery as much as a man’s mystery that Jesus knew, that Jesus went inside of. A wombic mystery. Somehow he goes away into the womb of death, his wounds spilling blood that later Christians will worship and even take refuge within, and emerges from the tomb alive again. Mary Magdalene sees him there, and the eggs turn red in her basket (so another story goes), and worlds that have never touched with this kind of absolute love are married, united in him.

On the porch that night, with the bells ringing and ringing, maybe some of what I felt was the feminine courage of his dissolution, of his giving away, of the body itself as the sacrament. At the same time I felt the masculine courage of a father placing his body in front of his children and his beloved, to take the arrow instead of them. I felt also, unexpectedly, a kind of labor; the courage of a mother giving birth not knowing if she will survive, as no mother can be certain of, surrendering absolutely to pain, and only then being utterly transformed as she births a wholly new life.

I felt his body radiating outward an almost unbearable and yet wholly inevitable Love.

And so somehow, the living water is red as well as a clear upwelling spring. It is both.

                                                                     ***

The next morning the feasting begins. We will eat and drink all day, and most of the night. Small birds seem to be making love constantly on the roof-tiles. Bees fly in and out of my studio all day, and swallows. One lands on the lightbulb, swinging. All the traditional songs are love songs. The flowers are starting to go to seed, and Orion and Taurus and the Pleaides set before midnight in the sea. 

Every day for the next forty, people will greet each other saying Christ Has Arisen, and In Truth He Has—Christos anesti; aleithos anesti. Just as Mary Magdalene first spoke. It is said that on these forty days, the dead walk among us, and the spirits, and the saints. Flowers are blooming everywhere now. They cannot be stopped, nor the fruits (pomegranates are swelling, grapes are swelling, figs are swelling), nor the spring waters rising, nor the new babies being born. Because meanwhile, as Jesus is being crucified in one liturgical cycle, in another, Mary is now almost through her first trimester of pregnancy, swelling in time with the fruit.

And so it begins all over again.

Interior of an egg painted with the Nativity of Christ (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, England)