Descendit ad Inferos (He descended into hell)

Night deepens.

The candle burns low.

I reach the next line of the Creed:

He descended into hell

And I pause.

The words fall like a stone into silence.

Yesterday he suffered.

Today he sleeps.

The world holds its breath.

God has gone quiet.

It is Holy Saturday.

The space between agony and dawn,

between “It is finished”

and “He is risen.”

Faith itself feels buried.

If incarnation was God with us,

and crucifixion was God for us,

then this—

this descent—

is God beneath us.

Love going lower still.

Christ walking where no light reaches,

among the dead,

the forgotten,

the damned.

The one who breathed galaxies

now breathes among bones.

The old icons call it the harrowing of hell.

Gates splinter.

Chains fall.

Adam and Eve are lifted by the wrists,

their surprise still echoing in the dark.

Even here, Christ says, I am.

He does not storm the depths

with violence or vengeance,

but with presence.

Mercy moves through the caverns,

calling names once lost to silence.

This is the descent of solidarity—

the God who was forsaken

finding the forsaken.

The Crucified walks the corridors of hell:

addiction,

despair,

trauma,

shame.

Every locked room receives a knock.

There is no depth where he has not been.

No darkness unvisited by love.

Even the language of loss

becomes a dialect of redemption.

He fills all things.

From tomb to abyss,

the map of death is redrawn by grace.

Hell itself becomes a doorway.

Back in the chapel,

the flame trembles.

No dawn yet,

no song of resurrection—

only stillness and the sound of breathing.

And I wonder,

if he descended even here,

then perhaps my darkness too

is not beyond his reach.

So I wait,

with the dead,

with the living,

with the long ache of creation.

And I ask the question

that shivers in every grave:

What if love is even now

at work in the dark?

-Rev’d Jon Swales

from the Creed collection.