“I meant it as a meditative exercise,” pastor Thorsten Nolting told Reuters. “I wanted people to think about what weighs on them down in the darkness and gather the energy to resist it.”
Nolting, who said that parishioners who participated in the grave experience had a “resurrection,” told Reuters that his meditative exercise, conducted a few days ago, was spoiled when journalists “wouldn’t go away.”
A local newspaper reported that one of the participants was trembling some 20 minutes after his the holy hole experience.