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.

Where are You Bound?

Yesterday I was moved by the circumstance of Mary and Martha in John's Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus.  They had lost their brother.  It was memory of my niece, the heartbreak of my sister-in-law and brother-in-law fresher on the anniversary of her death that made me think of the grief of those left behind by death.

But I have been moved since then by the call to enter the story as Lazarus, and what is in my mind is how he was bound, bound, bound.  Two weeks ago, it was the Samaritan woman at the well whose attitude of stubborn self-determination that bound her.  It took repeated logical argument to draw her beyond her suspicion and hostility to trust and hope.  Last week it was the blind beggar who was given sight not instantaneously by magic mud, but also by going where he was sent and doing as he was told.  They were not zapped, healed in a moment by the touch of the healer like they do on some of those “faith healer” TV shows. 

Healing is not an event, but a process of letting go of what binds us. 

So I’m Lazarus.  Bound, bound, bound.  The stone is rolled away, and the voice calls, the voice of my friend Jesus is one I recognize even through these wrappings.   I’ve awakened from my acceptance of the Big Sleep, and decided to return to the life I left, with the complex love of my sisters for each other and for me.  I’ve decided to return to the world of mornings and their call to action, and nights and their call to rest.  I’ve agreed to accept hunger and thirst in exchange for savor and refreshment. 

But I emerge haltingly, my hands and feet tugging at the rags of my shroud, like a convict being let into court in shackles.  And I do not weep at the sight of blue sky or the faces of my sisters, or Jesus.  My sight is obscured by that same shroud, even as the coins had fallen from my eyelids when I’d sat up.  It strikes me that Lazarus is bound in his mobility by the shroud...and all of his senses too.  I see in myself that when I was given freedom to retire, to be released from the daily requirement of going to work, that I discovered that I was not able to move around freely, my mobility bound by another layer of binding.  I discovered that my senses were not open to my new surroundings, bound as I was to my past.

So here we are nearing Holy Week, called to drop our daily grind like the Samaritan Woman and accept our gift of sight like the beggar, and now to let go of our bindings, bindings, bindings that we have allowed ourselves to be imprisoned in, just as Lazarus.  We’ll not climb Calvary in our shroud.  We have a couple of weeks to get with the program, to not only emerge from our cave but to reclaim our mobility and respond to our senses as we try yet again to believe that we can take on death with Jesus, and emerge from it.