April 4, 2026
+ One of the things, as you know, that I’ve been doing over
the last few years to counteract the toxic news and doomscrolling I sometimes
partake of is I’ve been reading books.
Lots and lots of books.
Over 200 last year.
Almost 50 this year already.
It’s been great.
It’s been great for my mental health.
It’s been great for my brain.
And it’s been great just reading amazing books.
One of the books that I’ve read in this time that quickly
became my favorite novel is a violent, bloody novel by a writer I’ve become
obsessed with, Cormac McCarthy.
The novel is called Blood Meridian.
I love that book!
Why? You might ask.
It’s an ultra-violent book about scalp hunters in 1859
Southwestern US and Mexico.
“You’re a vegan, peace-loving, pacifist, Father Jamie,” I
hear you saying. “What about this book do you love so much?”
That is the million dollar question.
I don’t know.
All I can say is it captured me as few books ever have.
So much so that last year, when I was in Arizona, I
actually sought out actual places referenced in the novel.
One of the places I looked for was an extinct volcano near
Flagstaff.
I think I found the one McCarthy is referencing in Blood
Meridian .
In the novel, he writes of this volcano this way,
Where for aught any man knows the
locality of hell. For the earth is a globe in the void and truth there’s no up
nor down to it and there’s men in this company besides myself seen little
cloven hoof-prints in the stone clever as a little doe in her going but what
little doe ever trod melted rock? I’d not go behind scripture but it may be
that there has been sinners so notorious evil that the fires coughed em up
again and I could well see in the long ago how it was little devils with their
pitchforks had traversed that fiery vomit for to salvage back those souls that
had by misadventure been spewed up from their damnation onto the outer shelves
of the world. Aye. It’s a notion, no more. But someplace in the scheme of
things this world must touch the other. And somethin put them little hooflet
markings in the lava flow for I seen them there myself.
I even wrote a poem about this visit to the volcano
referenced in this passage.
It’s in my new book, S/O/M/A
SUNSET CRATER VOLCANO
“Where for aught any man
knows the locality of hell.”
—Cormac McCarthy
Blood
Meridan
It’s all blackened—
black as the soil broken up in clods
freshly tilled for the spring
by plows.
But this is not soil.
It’s rock—
this “fiery vomit”
dried and molten
in its after-effect.
Despite my persistent heresy,
my universalist anti-infernalism
I too can gaze like the Judge
into the cone and see,
in the sharp, black stone,
cloven-hooves
and a glimpse into damnation.
Adiabolic as I may be,
I too have known damnation.
I have been marked by its weal
and carry within me its burns,
its scorched scarring.
Maybe that’s why this feels so
home-like, so familiar,
as if this is some lost homeland.
Maybe this is a return from the exodus,
a steady trekking back
to a place I never knew
but from which I rose
bitter as sulfur.
I use two words in that poem that may have caught your
attention
“anti-infernalism”
and
“adiabolic”
Anti-infernalism means not believe in hell.
And adiabolic means not believing the devil.
Think atheist—how atheism is not belief in a god.
I’m not an atheist.
Well, if we’re talking about a bearded man sitting on
a throne in heaven giving our judgements, well, I’ll be honest: I don’t believe
in that image of God.
But in just the same way I definitely don’t believe in a
metaphysical being with horns and a pitchfork and cloven hooves who sits on our
shoulders tempting us to do bad
I believe in evil, mind you.
I think evil is real.
But I don’t believe in the images we have collectively
created of the personifications of the evil that keeps us weighed down under
some ugly moral halter.
So then, you ask, why is this whole Harrowing of Hell so
important to you?
Well, it’s simple.
I love this day in Holy Week.
Outside of Easter, this is the day I love best.
I love this strange silence at the heart of Holy Saturday.
The shouting crowds are gone.
The cross stands empty.
The body has been taken down and buried.
The world, for this one moment, seems to be holding its
breath.
It seems like nothing is happening.
Awww. . . but it is.
We have been told that on this day—this quiet, hidden
day—Christ descends.
He descends into hell.
Not the hell we’ve been shown in cartoons, with fire and
pitchforks.
He descends to the place of the dead.
The place of absence.
The place where hope has gone to die.
He descends to where Adam is.
Where Eve is.
Where the dead
are.
That is what we see in the ikon.
He goes there not as a victim, not as someone destroyed and
defeated.
He goes there as a victor, as a conqueror.
The early Church loved to imagine this moment.
They said that when Christ entered the gates of
death, he broke down those doors.
The locks shattered.
The iron bars bent.
And Christ—still wearing the wounds of his death—reached
out his pierced hands.
Not to judge.
But to raise up those who are there.
And he took Adam by the wrist, not even waiting for Adam to
reach back, and pulled him up from the grave.
They imagined Eve, and all her sorrow, being lifted into
light.
They imagined that no one was too far gone.
Not even there.
Especially not there.
This whole morning is all about the fact that there is no
place Christ will not go.
No darkness he will not enter.
No depth he refuses to reach.
So, you’re still saying, “I don’t get it, Father
Jamie. You don’t believe in hell. So, what are you appreciating about
this day?”
I say I don’t believe in some metaphysical hell, some
cavern under the earth with fire and brimstone, with pitchforks and devils and
cloven hooves.
But I do believe in real hell.
The hell we have all experienced.
The hells we as human have created.
Maybe that’s what I love about Blood Meridian.
It is a novel about hell.
Hell on earth.
Hell of our own making.
Let’s face it, we all know something about that kind of
hell.
We have descended to those depth ourselves at times.
We know the hells that are not spoken about out loud.
The grief that feels like a sealed tomb.
The guilt that clings to us like grave clothes.
The pain that burns us like a crematory fire.
The sense that something in us, or someone we love, is
totally beyond repair.
We know what it is to feel cut off.
To be buried.
To be forgotten.
To be snubbed.
To be ostracized
To not be heard.
To be treated as less-than.
That is hell.
Real hell.
And into that hell, Christ descends.
Again and again.
Right now.
Still.
Not later.
Not after we’ve fixed ourselves.
Right now, when we are here, held in the prison—the very
hell!—of our anxiety and depression.
But precisely when we cannot move, when we cannot hope,
when we cannot even pray.
Christ comes to that dark and terrible place where we are
most lost.
And when he does, he doesn’t stand at a distance.
He doesn’t shout instructions from above.
He enters into it fully.
He comes to us.
He stays there with us.
He enters into our hells completely, all the way down to
its very bottom.
This is what I love about this day.
I love the fact that God is not only found in light.
God can also be found in the deepest darkness.
There is no place to which we can go—no depth, no
darkness—where God cannot find us and bring us out.
I truly believe that.
Holy Saturday is all about the fact that even when nothing
seems to be happening, everything is happening.
Right there.
Beneath the surface.
Let’s face it.
Resurrection doesn’t begin tomorrow on Easter morning.
It begins here.
Right now.
In this place.
In this silence.
In this hidden space.
It happens here in the breaking open of what we thought
could never be opened.
If it feels like our faith feels dim, if it feels like our
heart feels buried, if to feels like the world has gone quiet and we are being
ignored and discarded and forced out, when we are being ghosted by people we
love or respect, let’s never forget this fact.
We cannot mistake silence for absence.
Christ is not idle.
He is there, searching us out.
He is breaking down the doors of our own personal hells.
He is calling our name, even in this moment in which we
thought were lost forever.
Christ is still doing what he did then:
He is reaching into the dark,
He is taking hold of our hand,
He is pulling out of the darkness, out of our own personal
damnations.
And saying to us,
Come.
Let’s go from this place.
