Was Your Good Friday GOOD?

Today is Holy Saturday.  Will it be holy?  Perhaps it will be determined by the degree to which your Good Friday was…good.

What Makes Good Friday Good?  If we get it we’re literally stunned, stopped in our tracks.  The air escapes from our balloon.  Our car runs out of gas and coasts to a stop.  The computer crashes.  The dog stops barking.  The power goes out. 

I read Gerald May’s Addiction and Grace because someone I treasure was going through a really tough bout with alcohol.  But I discovered that I am addicted to momentum.  I like to be moving.  It’s hard for me to stop.  Good Friday service at Gesu Church in Detroit ended with a somber but clear message, a caution and invitation.

"The Great Silence has begun."

What made Good Fridays good was not the intensely reverent reading of the passion, crucifixion, and death of the man we had begun to know as Jesus.  It was not about the kneeling and standing and kneeling and standing and trying to get a sense of what it was like for him carrying that cross up the path to the top of the mound, or whether we could feel the nails going into our hands (or was it into the wrists, so the nail would not rip through and drop our bodies into the bloody dust?)  It was not whether these attempts to be there, to be Him actually took.  It was not the sensation of the cross on our own shoulders or the gentle hands and loving faces of those who paired up to let us feel its weight, lightening the load on those already bent by age but letting the rest of us be bent by it.  It was not even consuming the day-old Eucharist, set aside the night before after the Last Supper, when the altar had been stripped. 

What made Good Fridays good was the silence, the death knell, the non-ringing of the gone-bell in our vacant steeples.  Jesus was dead.  What made Good Friday good was the non-socializing as the feast of faces that normally was spread before us was instead a dusty plain of downcast eyes, the sound of shuffling amplifying the silence. 

Yesterday Kathy and I were able to come back home alone together.  Our son who has brought life and joy and humor into it for the past two months was spending a few days with our daughter and her family.  The noise of Livernois Avenue in our back yard in Detroit and Quarton Road in Birmingham are not here on Bloomfield Road in Traverse City.  It was silent.  Years of pruning on this day had shaped Kathy and me into a ready form for receiving silence, and it was a quiet day.  In the evening we found a stunningly good film to watch, As it is in Heaven, and we wept in gratitude for the gift of it, the perfect relevance of it.  Try it today...or any day.

What is Holy Saturday?  It is the Day of Internment.  When my mother’s intimately close brother died, I watched in curiosity as she sternly tossed a shovel of dirt onto his coffin, her chin pushing her bottom lip up into a momentary There! as she turned away with a sense of completion and finality.  It’s done.  He’s dead and buried.  We got through the family meal and she thanked everyone for coming, and then she came home and let it hit her.  Steve is DEAD.  Until she fell asleep that night, it was all she could think of.

Holy Saturday is the day when the Tomb shouts deafening silence.  Perhaps we should blow eggs today, violating the shell so that we can blow air into it, displacing the promise of life that had been protected there so that our decoration will not be spoiled by its internal decomposition.  Oh! That sounds edgy, doesn’t it?    Maybe Holy Saturday is feeling the edge, feeling the bite of the drill that threatens to empty us of hope and promise, challenging our attention to the superficial so that when tomorrow dawns we can enjoy a deeply blessed Easter, a celebration of the truth that death is not real.