Bulletin 3.30.25

And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. Nay, but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908; CH 8)

Jesus overcomes the darkness by entering the darkness. He overcomes the darkness by sharing the darkness. He overcomes the darkness by speaking the darkness in his prayer of lamentation and forsakenness. He overcomes the darkness of uncreation, and makes a new creation, by entering fully into the God-forsakenness of our condition. 

When Yahweh first created, He spoke in the calm power of a fiat, “Let there be light.” That is the way the world was made. It is not the way the world is remade. The world is remade from a cross. The world is remade when God the Son enters the darkness, suffers the darkness, passes through the dissolution of uncreation, in order to triumph over it. 

– Peter Leithart, The Gospel of Matthew Through New Eyes Volume Two: Jesus as Israel (2018; p. 343)

It means that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards. 

– C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950; CH 15

The Twenty-second Psalm (vv. 1-5) 

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? 

Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning. 

O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer; 

And by night, but I have no rest. 

Yet You are holy, 

O You who are enthroned upon the praises of Israel. 

In You our fathers trusted; 

They trusted and You delivered them. 

To You they cried out and were delivered; 

In You they trusted and were not disappointed. 

(Prayer)