The Harrowing of Hell

This might be a rather confronting title! The term itself is not heard very often these days, in the circles I live in anyway. It refers to the time between the death of Jesus and his resurrection. Tradition (including the Apostle's Creed) has it that Jesus "descended into hell" before he rose again. What exactly that means has been interpreted in various ways. Currently I'm re-reading Cynthia Bourgault's book The Wisdom Jesus, specifically her chapters on the Easter events. I am pondering her discussion abut the fact that in our world darkness and light have to co-exist. That's just how the world works. In that case it isn't about trying hard to blot out the darkness so there is only light. Think about events in our world right now where people are trying to "blot out" what they consider to be darkness. The result is that both sides see the other as representing darkness and themselves as the light. And so the terrible dimensions of hell continue.

"The resolution doesn't lie in collapsing the tension of opposites by cancelling one of them out. Something has to go deeper, something that can hold them both". That 'something' is the love expressed in Jesus' life and death and in this time between death and resurrection.
Bourgeault suggests that Jesus was willing to "sit with... all the collective faces of the false self... the anguish of Judas, the indecision of Pilate, the cowardice of Peter, the sanctimony of the Pharisees; sitting there in the midst of all this blackness, not judging, not fixing, just letting it be in love. And in so doing, he was allowing love to go deeper, pressing all the way to the innermost ground out of which the opposites arise and holding that to the light. A quiet, harmonising love was infiltrating even the deepest places of darkness and blackness, in a way that didn't override them or cancel them, but gently re-connected them to the whole." p123

The word "harrowing" generally means something extremely distressing, agonising, hard to bear. To sit with all the darkness as described certainly fits that description. The other meaning of  "harrowing" is related to farming - turning over the soil, digging deeply into it to prepare it for planting and new growth. Perhaps this is also an apt way to use it. If love can infiltrate even the deepest places of darkness and blackness in ourselves and in our corner of the world there is hope for us all to be "gently re-connected to the whole" and thus participate in this way of "harrowing hell".