The Day of Quietness

I wrote this play a couple of years ago and it was presented, in Russian translation, in my home church here in Ukraine. The idea came to me that we never hear anything about the Saturday between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection--precisely because, you might say, nothing happened that day. Heaven was silent; it was a "day of quietness". Jesus' followers, those who loved Him, could do nothing more than grieve, fear, wonder and ache. And, perhaps, hope? So the challenge I set myself was this: to create a dramatic piece about a day on which, essentially, nothing happens. (Drama about nothing--there's a creative challenge!) A day about which Scripture itself is silent. That Sabbath day was a day of silence in more than one way--a day of silence, or quietness, because Scripture is silent on it; a day of quietness because the Lord Himself lay still and quiet in the tomb; a day of quietness because the disciples could do nothing at all about...anything. And, unless in their hearts they were taking seriously the Lord's promise to rise on the third day, they couldn't foresee ever truly being able to do anything again. In a way, it was the end of the world--at least, the end of a world. And so, I attempted to convey this "limbo", this mixture of dread and faint hope, the confusion, the temptation to point fingers, to be bitter, to despair, even while trying to hang on to the love and spirit of Jesus' life and words. 

I make this play available for anyone's use, trusting that anyone choosing to stage it will be kind enough to credit the author. There is no need to ask my permission to use it, but I would love to know if it is being used and so would be delighted to hear from you if you choose to stage it, and to hear how it went. My e-mail address is given under the title of this blog. 

To God be the glory.... 

Easter Play: The Day of Quietness by Ken Sears

(At the opening of the scene, Mary the mother of Jesus is sitting between Mary Magdalene and Salome, who are sleeping. Mary is awake but extremely weary; she is starting to nod off. She just begins to sleep when there is a knock at the door. She hurries to open it.)

Mary: Lazarus! Thomas! Come in, come in!

(Lazarus and Mary greet each other with deep emotion.)

Lazarus: Mary… Mary….

Thomas: (seeing two people sleeping) Who is that?

Mary: Salome and Mary of Magdala. They only fell asleep this past hour. Thank God they're sleeping. It was a terrible night… terrible.

Thomas: Terrible nights are all that is left to us now. And days—  oh, God, days without life at all.

Mary: And are you a prophet now, Thomas? No. There will be no more nights like this one. There will be no more days like yesterday. Everything changes, Thomas.  Always.

Lazarus: And "the mercies of the Lord are new every morning." Even death cannot change that. The new day comes even when your heart lies in the grave.

Mary: Hope is a very severe master, Thomas. She doesn't let us lie long in our grief. She calls us early to rise and go to work.

(During the last two lines Salome and the Magdalene have woken up.)

Magdalene: "Are there not twelve hours in a day? Must we not do the work of the Father while there is light?"

Mary: Oh, Mary, Salome, we woke you up. I'm so sorry. I wanted you to sleep.

Magdalene: It was enough. I will not sleep again till I have fulfilled my duty to my Lord.

Salome: Nor I. We'll go today to anoint… the body.

Thomas: Today? You can't do that. It's the Sabbath.

Magdalene: "Is not the Son of Man also Lord of the Sabbath?" How can you even speak that way, Thomas? Can anything we do for him defile us, or break God's holy law? Didn't the Lord heal on the Sabbath?

Thomas: But… to enter a grave, to touch… the dead on the Sabbath day….

Magdalene: Didn't he touch the dead? Didn't he touch them and raise them back to life? Did that make him unclean, Thomas? Did it?

Mary: And are you going to raise my son back to life, my dear?

Magdalene: (shaken) Oh… no, I didn't mean—…  Oh, my dear, I only wanted—… I need to do something for him. (She weeps, with Salome comforting her)

Mary: I know. I don't blame you, but… today is not the day. Today is the day of quietness. He is quiet, where he lies, today. We too must be quiet. None of us can do anything for him now. Even to think that we can is, somehow, terribly wrong—perhaps even sin…. I feel this, I know it in my heart. Hasn't he shown us all – you, brothers, and you, my sisters, and… me – that we never really knew his purpose? Even when he told us, we refused to hear him; we said he must be wrong. "The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of sinners and be crucified, and on the third day, he will rise again." On the third day, the third day— (the Magdalene and Salome cling to Mary, with soft words of affection)—oh, whatever happens tomorrow, let my son rest quiet today (Mary breaks into sobs, with the Magdalene and Salome embracing her).

(There is a knock at the door. Thomas goes and opens it slowly. Nicodemus rushes in.)

Lazarus: Brother Nicodemus!

Nicodemus: (Sees Mary) I've seen you before, with him. You are his mother.

Mary: Yes.

Nicodemus: I—

Mary: I know who you are. And I know that he loved you. I also know what you and Joseph did for… for the Lord, yesterday. How can I thank you?

Nicodemus: Please, never again speak of thanking me. I feel I failed him utterly, I feel a criminal, a murderer.

Magdalene: Perhaps you are.

Thomas, Lazarus, Salome: ("Mary!" "How dare you?" "What are you saying?")

Magdalene: Perhaps we all are. I heard him cry from the cross—never, never can I forget the sound of his cry: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" That very moment the answer pierced my heart like a sword. I knew why he was abandoned—by his own Father in heaven! It was me. What all my sins deserved, Jesus was suffering there. He brought it all there… I never asked him to, I never wanted him to. But that was his plan the whole time. 

Salome: If he had asked me, I'd have told him no— no—don't do this for me, Lord. No, Lord, you're… holy, I'm unworthy; it's not right, you don't deserve this suffering—

Nicodemus: Glory to the Most High, Jesus never asked any of us permission to do the Father's will—as if we'd have ever understood. (recalling, reciting the words of Scripture…) "Who has believed our message, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?" Now, as blind as I am, I begin to see… glory to the God of Israel…. "He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities… by his wounds we are healed… the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all… for the transgression of my people he was stricken… he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." [from Isa. 53: 1, 5, 6, 8, 12]

Thomas: "This is my blood which is shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins"…

Mary: All of it is what had to be—yes, and the sword that has pierced my own heart, too. It's terrible—it has always been terrible: we are in the hands of the living God and are undone… the world is undone. It's the end of the world. …I don't know what world tomorrow brings, but it must be a different one, a new one. There's no other possibility. (resolutely to the others…) So no more talk about which of us would "let" my son do… what he's done. It's… blasphemy. The whole world… all of heaven…  expects nothing from us, today. …Today the world is silent, silent—while Jesus is silent in the grave….

Nicodemus: "Be still before the Lord, all mankind, because he has roused himself from his holy dwelling." [Zechariah 2:13]  Oh, Lord… and when he rouses himself…? …But I have forgotten the reason I came here. Lazarus, I came to tell you you must leave the city immediately. The Pharisees have dispatched men to kill you. You're the greatest threat to them now… after Jesus. And in your case they won't bother with a trial. Who can charge them with killing a man who was already dead?

Lazarus: How do you know this?

Nicodemus: You know I sit in the Sanhedrin. I have friends, Lazarus, who aren't as full of hate, or under the power of darkness, as the rest. They tell me things they hear…. But we're wasting time. You must leave quickly. You are a living sign of Jesus' power. The Pharisees are intent on eliminating that sign. And this time, my friend, Jesus won't be there to stand in front of your grave and call you out.

Lazarus: Oh… no. The next time he will call me from my grave.

Magdalene: And me.

Salome: And me.

Nicodemus: (accepting the sense in which they speak) And me, Lazarus. And me. Yes. I believe. He is the savior of the world.

Thomas: "I am the resurrection and the life. Who believes in me will never die…."

Magdalene: "And I will raise him up on the last day…."

Salome: "The dead will hear the voice of the Son of man, and—"

Nicodemus: But how? …How? Now he is dead. Who'll stand before his grave? Who'll call him to come out, Lazarus?

Mary: (categorically) No one. … No one, Nicodemus. "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days…."

Nicodemus: But, but he was talking about the temple—

Mary: No. He wasn't.

Lazarus: In the grave of death, I heard his voice, telling me to live, and I had to live. I know who he is, Nicodemus: the Prince of Life. And you ask who will call him out of the grave? Why don't you ask who advised the Lord God when He made heaven and earth?

Nicodemus: Oh, I believe, I believe… but I can't understand—I am an old man—

Lazarus: You're a teacher of Israel.

Nicodemus: …. No, I was a teacher, but I knew nothing. I realized that when—

Thomas: When he spoke to you.

Nicodemus: Yes.

Thomas: Nicodemus… dear brother… none of us understands. We're  devastated and heartbroken. …I thought I understood when the Lord said, "Let's go back to Judea". I said, "Let's go back and die with him." Oh, I was so brave, Nicodemus, so sure of myself. And I understood nothing. He knew… everything: that we would all leave him; that he would die alone, there, on the cross; that my courage was just empty, meaningless words. He knew, and we knew… nothing.

Salome: No, you're wrong, Thomas. We knew he had the words of life—

Magdalene: And the power of life—

Lazarus: The power of God.

Thomas: …Yes, we did, and we believed.

Nicodemus: And we'll continue believing. It's all we can do. Our brother Lazarus could do nothing in the grave until the Lord spoke. Now we're like Lazarus in the grave. We're—dead with grief. Yet hope does live in us, all the same. We will hear his voice again.

Lazarus: And now I must go to Bethany. My sisters need me. They're surely in danger, too. 

Thomas: I'll go with you. And whatever happens, I'll stand by you, Lazarus, and Martha and Mary.

Nicodemus: Come, I have friends waiting to help us to get out of the city unseen.

Lazarus: Us?

Nicodemus: I'm going with you. I don't know what tomorrow will bring, but when it comes I want to be with the one who heard Messiah's voice call him from the grave to life.

Thomas: But, the sisters… who'll take care of them?

Salome: When you disciples ran away in fear, we women continued to follow the Lord, and now you worry who'll take care of us?

Mary: Salome, don't. Go, brothers, we'll be all right. John and Mark are coming soon. They went out to find Peter. I'm worried for him. I hope soon we'll all be together again. Lazarus, when you can, when it's safe, come back to us with your sisters. I… know that he will bring us together again—for His purpose.

(The men and the women begin taking leave of each other, with phrases like "Till we meet", "Go with God", "Peace be with you", when, before the men can exit, there is a knock at the door. They look at one another, and then Thomas opens the door. Judith enters silently and looks at the group. Thomas closes the door.)

Judith: My name is Judith. I am a servant in the house of Governor Pontius Pilate.

(The next three lines overlap)

Magdalene: Pilate!

Nicodemus: How dare you come here!

Salome: Like Judas, she'll bring the Romans here to arrest us!

Mary: No – let her speak! (everyone goes quiet; Judith stands uncertainly) Please, my dear, why have you come?

Judith: I… I… I have a message for the mother of Jesus. It was forbidden to me to tell it to any man, only (looking at Mary questioningly)… to you?

Mary: Yes, I am his mother. So then, you cannot tell me while these friends of ours are standing here? (Judith shakes her head) Well then, dear brothers, once more: peace, go with God.

Thomas: But—

Mary: It's all right. (The men leave.) Now, Judith, there are only us women here. You can tell us your message.

Judith: There is no message.

Magdalene: You lied?!

Salome: Just as I said, she's a traitor!

Judith: No, no! I beg you, listen! I couldn't tell you why I came while they were here. My mistress would have punished me severely. I had to make them leave.

Mary: If you serve in the house of Pilate, then your mistress is Claudia, his wife.

Judith: Yes.

Mary: Why did she send you to us?

Judith: She didn't send me.

Mary: Oh… dear, now you make my head spin. There's a message, there isn't a message, your mistress has sent you, she hasn't sent you—please… we've borne enough these last hours…. I'm listening, Judith: why are you here?

Judith: Forgive me, I didn't mean to torment you, truly. I'll speak plainly: My mistress didn't send me here with a message. I've brought my mistress here to see you.

Salome: The governor's wife— you led her here?!

Magdalene: Why?!

Judith: She's suffering terribly. She's desperate to know more about this Nazarene, the one that Pilate—! (Seeing the grief on the women's faces) I'm sorry.

Mary: How did you know where we were?

Judith: Jesus the Nazarene had followers even in the house of Pilate. It wasn't difficult for me to find out.

Salome: But you were not one of his followers?

Judith: No… not yet—though word about him had come to me: reports that sounded wonderful, but frightening, too. A strange hope began to rise in my heart… But now it's too late.

Mary: No, Judith, not too late, not too late. … But where is your mistress?

Judith: She's waiting, hiding in a side street, till I come and let her know it's safe. She feared Jesus' followers would take revenge on her for Pilate's deed.

Mary: Revenge? That is not the Way Jesus taught, Judith.

Judith: I know that. But my mistress doesn't know.

Mary: Go, bring her here. Tell her that we receive her… with love.

Magdalen: Yes. With love.

Salome: …With love.

(Judith goes out. There is no dialogue while the three women wait. They sit quietly, reflectively, until there is a soft knock at the door.)

Mary: (gently, steadily) Come in.  

(Claudia enters, with Judith following. Judith closes the door behind them. Claudia stands, nervous, uncertain, but also trying to maintain her accustomed air of power and authority. She is not sure of her position here.)

Claudia: (her gaze settling on Mary) You are the mother of the man Jesus, the one they crucified yesterday?

Mary: Yes.

Claudia: And now he's… dead?

Mary: Yes.

Claudia: Truly dead?

Mary: …His body is lying cold, without breath,  or heartbeat, in the tomb. If, dear lady, that's what you mean by "truly dead", then… yes.

Magdalene: What—are you afraid he's not dead?

Claudia: (stares, hesitates, admits…) I'm… afraid. Of what, I don't know, I don't understand.

Mary: Come, please sit. Tell us. We'll help you. (Claudia sits) And you, Judith— come, sit.

Judith: No, no. I may not sit down in my mistress' presence.

Salome: In this house, she is not your mistress. (Claudia starts at this; Salome looks at Claudia) We are free women here.

Magdalene: No, not "free". We're the slaves of another Lord, the only Lord… and he is not Caesar, he is not Pilate.

(Claudia stares at Salome and Mary Magdalene, struggling with her emotions. Then she speaks, saying "Yes" as if saying, "I understand".)

Claudia: Yes. (not quite making direct eye contact with Judith) Judith? Come and sit with us. (Judith hesitates; Claudia looks directly at her, speaks more sincerely) Please. (Judith sits with the other women; there is an awkward pause…) I don't know how to begin… (The other women make no reply to this; Claudia searches for something to say, addresses Mary) Please receive my… deep sorrow for your grief.

Mary: I receive it.

Claudia: (a moment as this sinks in, then she loses her composure, stands up again in frustration and exasperation) I cannot sit! (Judith starts to get up) No, Judith, you don't need to. (Judith sits down again; Claudia paces for a moment, till finally her agitation explodes in words…) Who is He? Who is your Son? What is he going to do? Will he destroy us—me, my husband, the empire—for the… sin we've done? Please tell me. I'm losing my mind, I can't stand it anymore!

(The women are stunned at the outburst and its import. They look at each other in amazement. Mary Magdalene expresses their feeling…)

Magdalene:  How do you know of His power?

Claudia: Then it's so. Your faces tell me. My visions were true. What have we done? Oh, my husband, my husband…!

Mary: Please, whatever you've done, the Lord's power is greater—not only to destroy but to save… to forgive.

Claudia: Forgive? (pondering, shaken, then, not accusingly but in a kind of perplexity and grim irony, half to herself…) Forgive… is this not truly the highest treason, the worst insult? Who dares to forgive Pilate? To forgive the imperial power of Rome?

Salome: The King of kings, God's Anointed.

Magdalene: The Son of God.

(Claudia is speechless at these words. Mary steps in.)

Mary: Tell us what you saw. What were these visions?

Claudia: (pulling herself together to speak) That night… before they brought… Him to my husband, all night I suffered tormenting dreams.  There was a… Power, not a man I could see but only a presence; it was… ultimate Power, the source of all power. And it was something else—it was… Life, too. I can't say how I knew these things, but I did know. Then I saw a hand, just a hand, reaching for this Power, to destroy it, and I knew whose hand – my husband's. I was filled suddenly with the most awful terror, and I screamed at him to stop— "Don't touch him!"—but he didn't stop. His hand touched what… no one must touch and, immediately, everything, the whole world, became a whirlwind and chaos: flying, spinning away, coming apart, even my own soul—my soul was being ripped apart. And there was a voice, so strong it shattered the chaos itself. It roared continually like a mountain crashing: "The kingdom of the world is fallen! The kingdom of the world is fallen!" Never stopping: "The kingdom of the world is fallen!" In all of that terror and chaos, and the endless thunder of that voice, I was… being annihilated. It was a madness I knew I could never, ever escape from.

Judith: (overcome, in frightening awareness…) He is the Son of God. He truly is the Son of God! (hides her face; is comforted by one of the other women sitting with her)

Claudia: When day came, it was a miracle… that I survived such a night. But then they brought him, and I knew. That Power had come—that Life! What I saw in the night… was happening, it was real. I tried, again, to stop my husband, I told him: "Don't touch him!", but he—he— Oh-h-h, what will happen now?

Mary: Now you must sit, dear lady. (Mary helps Claudia to a chair)…A messenger from heaven announced to me that I would bear the Son of God. He told me, "Don't fear". I tell you now: don't fear. With God all things are possible. What you need to do now is believe, hope for the mercy of the living God. And… wait. This is what we're all doing now, today. We can do nothing else.

Claudia: Wait…. For what?

Mary: (with quiet certainty, directly) For the kingdom of God that appears when the kingdom of this world is fallen. He will bring it soon. Death won't stop Him.

(Suddenly, without knocking, three men enter: Peter, John and Mark. They are harried and entirely consumed with their own thoughts, particularly Peter. They stop short, as if interrupted, upon seeing Claudia and Judith.)

Claudia: (rising, a little panicky) Judith—Judith?

Judith: (also rising in response) Yes, my lady.

Claudia: We must go now. (Looks at Mary)

Mary: Trust, and wait. He has power to save… and forgive.

(Claudia nods. She and Judith head to the door.)

Magdalene: You have His followers in your household, including Judith here. Be assured: when the time comes, we will send word to you.

Salome: One thing more, Lady Claudia. (Claudia looks at her) Before you can gain everything—everything: his Life, his kingdom—you'll have to lose … everything. (Claudia perhaps shudders slightly, nods very slightly, gestures to Judith and the two of them exit. After a moment's pause, Peter speaks.)

Peter: The Roman – who was she?

Magdalene: (with a hint of defiance) Claudia, wife of the governor Pontius Pilate.

Peter: What? What are you—? Have you lost your minds? She'll turn you all over to Pilate, and they'll kill you all! What were you thinking? You can't—

Magdalene: Is this what you've come back for, Peter? To give orders?

Peter: Clearly, someone must. Oh, you foolish women—

Salome: How dare you—!

Mary: (rising) Simon Peter son of Jonah! (She fixes him with her gaze; she does not raise her voice but she is trembling with fierce emotion) There will be a day, Peter… when the Lord makes you… a shepherd of His people. Of His people, Peter... yes, there will be a day. …But today, Peter— (the intensity of her emotion is expressed by speaking even more quietly) be quiet.

Peter: (struck still, ashamed, hides his face) Forgive me! Oh, forgive me.

(Peter drops his hands from his face, gazing downward, shakes his head, turns, heads to the door.)

John: Where are you going?

Mark: Peter!

Peter: I'm leaving. Everything is finished.  (To all) Forgive me the pain I've brought you. I only came back at all to—to say goodbye to you.

Magdalene: No!

Salome: What are you saying?

Mark: No! You can't betray Jesus like this! (This is a "bomb"; Peter is again struck still; Mark repeats, with controlled passion…) You can't.

Peter: Mark… oh, Mark, you don't know what you're talking about.

(As the following lines are spoken, we see Peter's attitude of shock, indignation and shame over the account of his denying Jesus being known to all.)

Mark: Yes, I do. You've already denied Him.

Mary: …We all know, Peter.

John: I told them. 

Peter: John! Why?

John: …Dearest brother… "nothing is hidden that won't be known". I didn't mean to shame you, but— it's not my fault. I won't answer for anything I said. (Looking at the women) When we came to the house, we were all of us out of our mind with grief and horror. And it all came pouring out of me like it was happening all over again. Everything: what they did to Him… what He went through… and when you said you didn't know Him—  (Peter makes to head for the door again, but John stands in his way) No! Mark is right. You can't leave us. The Lord won't let you.

Peter: The Lord? Or you?

John: "But I have prayed for you, Peter… and when you've returned, strengthen your brothers…."  He told you what would happen, and you didn't believe it. You wanted to be the one who loved Him more than any of us. And you never stopped to think how you insulted us, Peter. You were so sure that we… that I…would leave Him but you wouldn't. Oh, Peter—how foolish your pride is… but how great your love. 

Magdalene: "To him who loves much, much will be forgiven."

Mark: Peter, I'm waiting for Jesus. You will wait with me. …You begged him once to leave you, because you were a sinful man and unworthy. Well, look—nothing's changed!  …"The Good Shepherd will give up his life for his sheep." …It's done, Peter: he did it—he's given up His life.  …You thought you were the greatest disciple, and now you think you're the worst traitor….  Peter, you're nothing. And I'm nothing.  And you and I will wait for the Lord, together. …You begged him to leave you—he said "No." Now you can't leave. …He promised to come back for us…. 

Peter: (quietly, almost to himself, almost in prayer) No… no. I'll never …never deny him again… if only he'll….

Mary: Yes, Peter, he will.

Peter: …All the others… we've got to find them. 

John: Yes, brother.

Mark: Let's gather them all, quickly. 

Peter: (looking at John) You know where they must have gone….

John: I think so. The cave, under the Garden. On the Mount of Olives.

Peter: Yes.

Mary: Go, bring them. We must be together, and ready. 

Peter: (shaken at the thought of needing to be "ready" again; in quiet intensity…) Lord. Make us ready…

(Peter and John head for the door; Mark stops and speaks.)

Mark: Peter! John! (They look at him; Mark is afraid to speak the next words) And if we… find Judas? (They stare at him, unable to respond)

Salome: If you find him, then—it's God's will. And if not, then… God's will.

(The men leave.)

Mary: "Enough for today are today's troubles."  I feel in my heart, sisters, we've survived today's troubles. There's time now to rest, time to gather strength for tomorrow.

Magdalene: Tomorrow Salome and I will fulfill our duty to the Lord, and nothing will stop us.

Mary: (gazing at her pensively, with a slight smile and a slight weariness) …Maybe. …Maybe not. Or perhaps, dear Mary, you don't yet know what your duty to the Lord is… tomorrow.  (Magdalene sinks into an embrace with Mary. Then Mary says to the two women…) Come, we'll prepare something for the brothers to eat… when Peter brings them back.

(Mary and Magdalene exit left, as Salome prepares to follow, gathering a few things from the table. Salome stops, gazes forward "distantly", speaks…)

Salome:  Oh Jesus, Lord Jesus, see how your flock needs you. There's no way ahead for us without you. You must return to us.   …Oh "Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world"… rest now, "it is finished".  …Oh Son of the Living God, we wait for your glory….

Mary: (gently, from offstage) Salome?

Salome: (softly) I'm coming. (picks up a plate and cup or two, and gently exits)

The End

Dorothy L Sayers, "On Forgiveness"

A number of years ago I took part in a convention of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, in York, England, where I read a paper on an essay by DLS written during the Second World War, "Forgiveness". I actually had no title for my paper, or any intention of giving it a title, until I was asked just moments before "curtain" what my paper was called. They wanted to project the title on the screen behind me. I frantically shook my imagination into action and came up with the title as you see it below. The "friend" referred to is Charles Williams, whom I quote several times--and indeed afford him the final word--and the reference to Sayers being "at her weakest" should explain itself in the paper itself... or else I have miserably failed to convey my idea. 

ON FORGIVENESS: SAYERS AT HER WEAKEST (WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM A FRIEND) 

by Ken Sears

There’s a reason why Dorothy Sayers never indulged in a mental experiment to show how all human creativity reflects its first source in the gods of Hinduism. She didn’t believe it. She was certainly imaginative enough to have done it, and well, had she wanted to. But she was too honest to. Not to mention too busy to waste her time, and ours, on anti-reality.

Mary McDermott Shideler, in her introduction to Charles Williams’s Arthurian poetry, writes, “All man’s concerns are rooted in the question of what is real” [emphasis mine]. C.S. Lewis says that what makes you a man instead of a rabbit is that you want to know what is real, not just what you might get by with. In Mind of the Maker Sayers writes, “We must not… try to behave as though the Fall had never occurred nor yet say that the Fall was a good thing in itself. But we may redeem the Fall by a creative act.”

Her categorical “must not” was rooted in a reality in which Sayers believed,  passionately. Only passion could have generated all her plays illuminating the truth of Christ.

Now, Sayers denied the sort of thing I’m saying. “Nothing would induce me,” she wrote, “to set down my ‘religious beliefs and convictions.’  Setting down what I understand to be the Church’s beliefs and convictions is a different matter.” And in another place she insists that she writes only “the opinions of the official Church, which you will find plainly stated in the Nicene Creed, whether or not you and I agree with it.”

Sayers clearly preferred this stance; dare I say it’s the role she liked best in matters religious. She played the role unevenly, however. Mind of the Maker explores – and asserts – things not quite “plainly stated in the Nicene Creed”, and her essay “Forgiveness” speaks to a far more compelling crisis than a failure to accurately register Church teaching “whether or not you and I agree with it”. Her “nothing would induce me” seems, laudably, to stop short at her passion for creating and the horror of world war.

Even in Creed or Chaos? she writes, “It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe.”

“Fatal”. “Vitally necessary.” “Insist.” “Explanation of the universe.” This isn’t the vocabulary of someone who’s playing it coy with her personal convictions. Moreover, no principled person could insist that the story of a crucified man who rose from the dead was “a rational explanation of the universe” unless she happened to believe it was the rational explanation of the universe. Let alone suggest that getting it wrong was in some way “fatal.” Even if she only meant “fatal” to the Church as an institution, why should she care?

          Also from Creed or Chaos?: “The brutal fact is, that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ.”

Again, why should she care?

She cares because she believes. And in “Forgiveness” she publicly, transparently, cares and believes that people engulfed in a real cataclysm really need to know the forgiveness rooted in the real structure of the universe.

Sayers’s friend Charles Williams wrote his own book on forgiveness during the war and he says, “If there is one thing which obviously is either a part of the universe or not – and on knowing whether it is or not our life depends – it is the forgiveness of sins.”

Sayers’s friend Williams will accompany us on our way to a weak conclusion. Weak, why? We’ll come to that, but let the wartime words of British Catholic Caryll Houselander serve as adumbration. She declares that, longing for the “redeeming of the world, the healing of the wound, the making new… no one… need be appalled by the vast size of the world’s tragedy, or by their own obscurity, littleness or limitations, because

He hath put down the mighty from their seats

And hath exalted the humble.”

“Forgiveness.” I counted seven parts in this essay (fortunately not seventy times seven). The first part discusses what forgiveness isn’t, and Sayers quickly dispenses with the most obvious: forgiveness isn’t non-forgiveness. If you hope never to see so-and-so’s face again, though of course you forgive him – you haven’t.

The next is even worse, what Sayers calls hypocritical, self-interested forgiveness. “Well of course I forgive Ted for being such a louse. He does sign my paycheck, after all….” (Not forgiveness!)

Then Sayers goes after “priggish” forgiveness, the superior kind that’s gratified at vindication and absent compassion for the repentant. It’s humiliating to take “forgiveness” from someone to whom your grief isn’t also a grief but a triumph. Sayers warns that that kind of forgiveness may provoke the offender back to his crimes.

Then comes conditional forgiveness, which says: relationship with me is possible only if you feel good and dreadful for what you did, and it never happens again. Which leaves two perplexing questions gaping wide like a great gulf fixed: how dreadful is dreadful enough, and, how long is “never”? More to the point, how do you determine it’s “never” happened again until “never” has come and gone? Isn’t that pretty much the same as saying “I will never forgive you”?

Sayers writes, “We are forced to remember that no man is so free from trespass himself that he can afford to insist on condition.”

Which implies that… God can. So, does He?

Via words from William Blake, Sayers seems to say “no”, that God forgives because He simply forgives (just like He tells us to).

Blake: “Doth Jehovah forgive a debt only on condition that it shall be payed? …That debt is not forgiven! …Jehovah’s salvation is without money and without price, in the continual forgiveness of sins, in the perpetual mutual sacrifice in great eternity… [T]his is the covenant of Jehovah, ‘If you forgive one another, so shall Jehovah forgive you; That He Himself may dwell among you.’”

Interesting that Sayers quotes Blake on forgiveness because so does Charles Williams, though Williams cautions that Blake was a heretic. Williams also admits he wishes Blake had sometimes explained what he meant! I agree, particularly on the phrase “perpetual mutual sacrifice”.

In any case, just as Sayers appears to be making it as-simple-as-that, she turns around and says, “The whole teaching of the New Testament about forgiveness is haunted by paradox and enigma and cannot be summed up in any phrase about simple kindliness.”  And she illustrates with Jesus’s healing of the paralytic:

“Whether is easier: to say Thy sins be forgiven thee or to say Arise and walk? But

that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins (then

saith He to the sick of the palsy) Arise, take up thy bed and go.” The irony is so

profound that we are not certain which way to take it. “Do you think forgiveness

is something glib and simple? To be sure – it is as simple as this. Does it seem to

you formidably difficult? To be sure, so is this – but you see it can be done.”

Far from simple kindliness, the Son of Man’s competency to forgive correlated to His power to heal the paralyzed man.

            From what forgiveness is not, Sayers moves to what forgiveness does not. First, it does not wipe out consequences. “It is scarcely necessary”, she writes, “to point out that when a debt is cancelled, this does not mean that the money is miraculously restored from nowhere. It means only that the obligation… is voluntarily discharged by the lender.”

            I made the same point once to a shop lady in Jerusalem, saying that if I were to maliciously destroy her merchandise, but she chose to forgive me, it wouldn’t end there. There’s still the cost of the merchandise. By forgiving me, she’d have chosen to absorb the loss herself.

            I made that point, too, also in Jerusalem, to a university professor. In a lecture he had made the not-so-subtle hint to us Christians in the audience that God’s telling Abraham to spare Isaac showed God wouldn’t allow an innocent person to be sacrificed for others (get it?). I went up to him after the lecture and said, “That’s why the Incarnation is intrinsic to the Atonement.” He stared at me blankly and said, “Why?” “Because”, I said, “only the one who’s been sinned against can absorb the full brunt of the offense – that’s what it means to forgive. If God asked someone else to do it – you’re right, it would be unfair.” The professor grew very still and said, “I never thought of it that way before.” I couldn’t help but think, “You are a teacher of the Jews and you don’t know these things?” God is the shop owner who eats the loss, the Lord who is also Lamb.

            But Sayers provocatively nuances this principle with the following: “[I]f you are forgiving and I am repentant, then we share the consequences and gain a friendship.”

Bravo. If forgiveness eventuates in reconciliation, sharing of consequences is inevitable, for the consequences have reshaped the terrain which the reconciled must walk together.

The word “terrain” helps perhaps to follow Sayers’s exegesis of the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant: “that”, she writes, “forgiveness is not merely a mutual act, but a social act.” She speaks of injuries being “forgiven all round”, lest presumably unforgiving Law dominate the terrain. Now Sayers still hasn’t mentioned the war outright, but no one could fail to note how the present emergency nuanced her biblical exegesis.

Which is a good thing; if Scripture can’t speak to the exigency of the moment, what good is it?

Unfortunately, there were those who wondered what good Sayers’s essay was in the current crisis! For those inhabiting the historical context of “murdered citizens, ruined homes, broken churches, fire, sword, famine, pestilence, tortures [and] concentration camps” the question may well have been, “How dare you talk of forgiving all round?”

It’s not what the newspaper editor wanted to hear, so he rejected the essay. Sayers explains in her foreword: “[T]he Editor of a respectable newspaper wanted (and got)… Christian sanction for undying hatred of the enemy.”

The second thing Sayers says forgiveness does not, is remit punishment, at least not “primarily”. This is difficult, because her analogy of the lender swallowing the debt and her talk of “forgiving all round” seem to argue precisely the opposite! But she notes how this works in child-rearing, where you surely forgive, and love, your naughty child – but you punish him, too, because he needs to learn a lesson. I’m just not sure how to extrapolate grounding your 13-year-old for a week to hanging the convicts of Nuremburg. One might say, you can’t, because the first is all about a personal, nurturing relationship while the second is about social justice. But, didn’t Sayers say forgiveness was a social act?

All I can say is, I heartily agree with Dorothy Sayers when she says, “Forgiveness is a difficult matter”!

And it doesn’t get easier when Sayers turns to what forgiveness is. I want to focus on two assertions that make for a slight logical muddle in this essay. First: “Forgiveness is the re-establishment of a right relationship” – in short, reconciliation. To be very precise, it’s not. It may lead to it but they are two different things, which is why we have two words for them.

That may sound picayune, but slighting that distinction is what immediately leads the engine of Sayers’s logic ever so subtly to stall. That’s in the next assertion. If you listen carefully you’ll recognize that she must have felt something was “off” but she fixed it, as a writer, stylistically more than theologically. She says, “[I]t is impossible to enjoy a right relationship with an offender who, when pardoned, continues [in short, willfully to be your enemy].” But of course, if forgiveness is reconciliation, you can’t logically adduce that forgiveness obtains where reconciliation is absent. No, not even by replacing “forgiven” with “pardoned”! It’s only here, significantly, that Sayers suddenly gets writer’s scruples about overusing the word “forgive”. After this foggy patch it’s all “forgive” again.

Now that second assertion by Sayers was quite right – you can forgive, from your heart, your recalcitrant enemy –  precisely because her first assertion was not quite right; forgiveness isn’t essentially reconciliation, though it hopes for it.

And of course Sayers knew that, one benignly imprecise formulation notwithstanding. She says, “[W]hile God does not, and man dare not, demand repentance as a condition for bestowing pardon [forgiveness], repentance remains an essential condition for receiving it [reconciliation].” So my only criticism is that that first, “not quite right” assertion together with the needless introduction of the word “pardon” could lead one to the notion that God magnanimously bestows some judicial sort of pardon-without-condition, but another, heartfelt, “relational”, dare I say cathartic sort of “forgiveness” materializes only upon repentance.  I would dispute that. The forgiven may know the catharsis only upon repentance, but the forgiver has already substantiated it in forgiving.

One day I came to a new understanding of this that changed my life. I could talk about this for two hours, except that I must not talk about it for two hours! In brief, it dawned on me that, far from minimizing an offense, or concluding that you somehow deserved it – what I call the Gospel of Extreme Niceness – real forgiveness meant calling a crime a crime. That’s why Charles Williams called his book The Forgiveness of Sins, not The Forgiveness of Unintended Inconveniences. It’s a naming that liberates, that means your pain is perfectly justified. Forgiveness means judgment.

For that reason Charles Williams writes, “Love, we have been told, is slow to anger; it is, as a result, slow to forgive, for it will not be in a hurry to assume there is anything to forgive.”

Next, forgiveness means suffering. There’s the paradox: you suffer for the crime you’ve judged, drinking its pain to the dregs, never hoping the offender can undo it. He can’t, anyway: who can turn back time? So you let the vain hope die in you. Forgiveness is a kind of death, a small Golgotha.

Sayers’s words in Creed or Chaos?, though not on forgiveness per se, fit perfectly here all the same. She writes of “the vigorous grappling with evil that transforms it into good, … the dark night of the soul that precedes crucifixion and issues in resurrection.”  C.S. Lewis said that “in reality every real Christian is really called upon in some measure to enact Christ.”

Enacting Christ. A small Golgotha. Crucifixion that issues in resurrection. Forgiveness means resurrection. Having embraced the pain to death, you’re free. That’s the great and tragically secret secret of forgiveness: that before anything else, it’s for the forgiver’s sake first. “Forgive us our debts, O God, so that You might be free of them!” And so He did.

And so must we. Charles Williams writes of Christ’s atonement: “He as Man would forgive thus, because men also should not merely be forgiven but also, in every corner of their natures, forgive.” Our union with the risen Christ makes us not only Forgiven Man, but Forgiving Man and in like fashion: “Forgive one another just as God has forgiven you in Christ.”

Finally, forgiveness means an open door. It invites reconciliation. But (!), authentic forgiveness will not be held hostage to repentance. There’s an audacity, if not ruthlessness, to forgiveness: “I will forgive, whether you like it or not!”  While we were his enemies Christ died for us….

Now I must add a word about humility, because all this “I will forgive you no matter what you feel about it” can sound rather like the priggish forgiveness Sayers criticizes.

It’s not.

To the soul that really passes through that small Golgotha, there’s no place left for arrogance, but only a redemptive compassion. Charles Williams depicts this so well in “Percivale at Carbonek”:

In the red saffron sun hovered the Grail;

Galahad stood in the arch of Carbonek;

The people of Pelles ran to meet him.

His eyes were sad; he sighed for Lancelot’s pardon.

Joy remembered joylessness; joy kneeled

Under the arch where Lancelot ran in frenzy.

The astonished angels of the spirit heard him moan:

Pardon, lord, pardon and bless me, father.

Galahad the sinned-against, to angels’ astonishment, begs forgiveness of Lancelot the guilty, the miserable, the joyless. “Joy remembered joylessness.” Perhaps this approaches what Blake meant by “perpetual mutual sacrifice”….

            Sayers addresses the mutuality of forgiveness, which can’t have won her any points with the newspaper editor. She writes, “It is very difficult to forgive those whom we’ve injured”, and, “no man living is wholly innocent, or wholly guilty.” So, if every act of forgiveness is a small Golgotha, it is also an imperfect, remotely approximated one – and that on an individual level. How much harder, then, for Sayers to recommend this unsatisfying act to a whole, deeply aggrieved nation? Her answer to this difficulty is: “[F]orgiveness is the establishment of a free relationship.” Free. You can’t nickel-and-dime forgiveness; who owes whom more…. Just as you can’t be slightly dead, you either die to the offense or you don’t. Charles Williams says, “Forgiveness is… a thing to be done… easily or with difficulty, but there is only one alternative to its being done, and that is its not being done. … The Christian has no doubt of his duty, though he may have every difficulty in fulfilling it. … The phrase ‘things that cannot be forgiven’ is therefore to him intellectually meaningless.”

            “But are there not crimes,” Sayers seems to argue back, “which are unforgivable, or which we, at any rate, find we cannot bring ourselves to forgive? At the present moment, that is a question which we are bound to ask ourselves.” And here, about five-eighths through the essay, Sayers explicitly addresses the war for the first time.

“It is here especially”, she says, “that we must make a great effort to clear our minds of clutter.” The “clutter” being, as Williams put it, “the massacres, the tortures, the slavery, which have appeared in Europe of late.” How callous it seems to call it clutter. But just as a young mother in London couldn’t allow fear of the next bombing to paralyze her from giving the baby its next meal or bath – the bath must overcome the bombs – so forgiveness must overcome manifold evil. The bath doesn’t excuse the bombs, nor does forgiveness minimize atrocity. It defeats it. 

            Looking forward to the enemy’s hoped-for defeat, Sayers asks, “When the war comes to an end, is there going to be anything in our minds, or in the minds of the enemy, that will prevent the re-establishment of a right relationship?” She’s still wrestling with the question of the unforgivable. And she will conclude it exists. But first, she points out one “monstrous, shattering paradox”, that is, that the worst sin of all, the “deliberate murder of God”, is forgiven… “for they know not what they do.” If the worst sin is forgivable, how can anything be unforgivable?

As we’ve seen already in this essay, it’s never quite that simple.

The ones, Sayers contends, who knew not what they were doing, were the Roman soldiers who really thought, at first, they were executing a criminal, but whose hearts were not “impenetrable to light”.

It was the others, “who had seen the healing power of God blaze in their eyes like the sun; they looked it full in the face and said that it was the devil.” That’s what she calls the “ultimate corruption”. Ultimately corrupt, unforgivable men engineering the murder of the Innocent…. Now that part might have been more to the newspaper editor’s liking, had not Sayers immediately followed with, “I do not know that we are in any position to judge our neighbor. But let us suppose that we ourselves are free from this corruption (are we?) and, that we are ready to greet repentance with open arms….”

What if it’s not there? Worse, what if we meet a fundamental absence of conscience and all possibility of its recovery? Here lies the unforgivable. Not in what someone’s done but in what he’s become. It’s not the scale of the sin but its direction. You can forgive the Holocaust before you can forgive Mein Kampf because, one way or the other, your soul can somehow survive Auschwitz. But Hitler cannot survive Hitler. And his self-destruction is not for you to forgive.

But what of the others, the millions of minds the monster infected, those Sayers calls “the innocents”? Where do you begin with them? Sayers’s suggestion:

For whether is easier: To say, Thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, Arise and walk?

But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then

saith He to the warped mind, the frozen brain, the starved heart, the stunted and

paralyzed soul) Arise, take up thy bed and go to thy home.

If you think you can’t forgive them, the throngs who hailed the monster while millions perished – alright, set that aside for now. Think of healing them instead. And perhaps in the healing, you will find that you are forgiving, that you have forgiven.

            And with that we arrive at Sayers’s disturbing conclusion. Disturbing, because the usually mightily convinced and awfully persuasive Sayers concludes ominously inconclusively. Ominously, because the weakness of her conclusion reflects her anxiety for the future:

            We, as a nation, are not very ready to harbor resentment, and sometimes this means

            we forget without forgiving – that is, without ever really understanding either our

            enemy or ourselves. This time, we feel, forgetfulness will not be possible. If that is

            so, and we make up our minds that no right relationship will ever be possible either,

            I do not quite see to what end we can look forward.

            It’s as if she uncharacteristically runs out of steam. Perhaps hope. This is an ending in weakness. Sayers could be categorical, the master of her medium, on how her plays were to be done, or a mystery crafted, or Church teaching not diluted. But here the medium is out of her hands. It is the private space of men’s hearts, and it is the future. With unaccustomed wistfulness she seems to say, “I know we need to find it in our collective heart to forgive, or worse horrors may await us. But I fear we just… won’t… manage it…. And, that whatever I say won’t, finally, make any difference….”

            Charles Williams writes, “It is easier to write a book repeating that God is love than to think it privately. Unfortunately, to be of any use, it has to be thought very privately and thought very hard.” Not surprising, then, that Williams’s work on forgiveness ends with what Williams called “a lame conclusion”.

            Crystal Downing writes how Sayers “relished role-playing”. Does the fragility of this essay come from Sayers’s having no role – at least not a comfortable one – in which to speak these lines? Real forgiveness – giving it, begging it, advising it – admits of no role-playing.

            Nor of academic distance. Sayers doesn’t exposit forgiveness as an article of Church doctrine but urges it on her wounded and aggrieved nation, commends it as of the order of reality – Reality in which the Creator concretely consummated forgiveness in His own sacrificed Person. She believes it.

Paradoxically, when Sayers’s belief is most interiorly constitutive, her adducing of it is most couched in weakness. For the Christian this is no surprise. The supremely convinced apostle Paul tells his flock, “I came to you with weakness and fear and in much trembling.” And his Lord tells him, “My strength is made perfect in weakness.” There is a helplessness and an imperative in commending forgiveness. Williams writes, “Can any writer lay down such rules, for himself and for others? No, and yet, without those rules, without that appalling diagram of integrity, there can be no understanding of the nature of the interchange of love, the truth that the fact of forgiveness is absolute. Immanuel… by his life as forgiveness…showed it as an absolute.”

Sayers, with Williams, wrestled with the appalling weakness of the Unimposable Absolute. As did the Lord of lords when He summoned men, “Come, follow Me”, and they said “No”. The frustration is only compounded in commending an intensely personal and Christian imperative to a very mixed and traumatized nation.

Williams says, “Vengeance then is forbidden; …justice is impossible; what remains? …forgiveness? The thing possible between men and women individually is almost impossible communally. …It is a very lame conclusion. Mortal ones are apt to be. Only divine conclusions conclude.”