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.

Heads Down, Wearing Beige

Scene One: Good Friday morning.  There they are, the apostles, or at least the ones who did not betray Him.  We call them saints, don’t you know:  Saint Peter, Saint Andrew, Saint James, Saint John, Saint Philip, Saint Bartholomew, Saint Thomas, Saint Matthew Saint James, Saint Thaddeus, Saint Simon.

It's good that you should know what they’re wearing.  They’re dressed like mothers of the groom.  Mothers of the bride, in the movies, are the ones in charge (to the dismay of their daughter who is merely the bride).  Mothers of the groom, meanwhile, are bit players without speaking lines.  Now, if we were to give IQ tests to mothers of the bride and mothers of the groom, there would be no significant differences in their native intelligence; ditto for education, languages spoken, projects undertaken and completed, weight, height, and circumference of the widest part of the skull.

Because of this consistent lack of innate difference between the mother of the groom and the mother of the bride, the mother of the groom needs to be coached in remembering she’s not in charge.  There’s a specific piece of advice that’s passed down from mother of the groom to mother of the groom: Keep your head down and wear beige!”  While it’s possible that women might benefit from such a rule of not ruling, the behavior seems to come natural to men, or at least these 11…and me.  We tend to hide when we’re not in control.

Good Friday morning.  Peter, you know, the one who Jesus puts in charge, takes the lead in denying that he even knows Jesus.  But they’re all, for all we know, keeping their heads down.  So this morning, as I make an effort to put myself in the story, I find myself one of them.  The fire that we huddled around last night is smoking ashes, and my eye sockets feel as dry.  I’m sitting slumped over, my shame and my fear rooting my rear end to the dust on the side of the road where we sit.  We don’t even want to look at each other.

...

Scene Two: some days later.  It has taken a number of appearances from the dead and risen Jesus to get them beyond their shame, and even with their shortcomings we 2000 years later wake up and know it’s Good Friday.

So, we’re out of control.  So, we hide.  He will show up, again and again, and every time he’ll greet us as the angel Gabriel, as the Prodigal’s Father: Don’t be afraid.  I’m with you.  I find two messages in this.  In a world beyond our control, we need to learn together how to live and act and respond regardless of our lack of control.  Second, this song that sings itself in me from our years in Gesu Church in Detroit.

Even these eleven sinners became saints.  Let’s get over ourselves and focus not on our fear and lack of control, but on the hope that Goodness and Love is in charge, and we need to keep our eyes on that truth.

Get up!

Handling Mystery: My God!

A funny thing happened when I thought I might die.  I knew it would be fine, that it would all work out.  It was a knowing beyond knowing.  There was a peace in it like none I have never known. 

Perhaps part of it was my faith, knowing that it worked out OK for Jesus.  That sounds perhaps childish, but it is my truth.  This character Jesus has been with me all through my life, a relationship that I can comfortably call a lifetime friendship.  

The thing that troubled me most during his passion was that cry before he died – “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?”  But if we look at the place where he got that from, we can rest in his knowing that it would be fine, and despite the pain and sadness that he was experiencing, he was not abandoned.  Psalm 22, which begins with that “My God, My God…” line expresses doubt and fear for several verses before remembering in verse 25 that “God has not spurned or disdained the misery of this poor wretch, Did not turn away from me, but heard me when I cried out.”

Perhaps the deepest mystery was that Jesus could, amid such evidence of abandonment, know that he was loved and cared for and would get through this.  My friend Toni is going through cancer in Detroit, and wondering how God will provide for her son.  My friend Michael has his newly-minted Doctorate along with a pile of debt and is working as a substitute teacher.  Bart wonders when his time is up in the shelter whether he will go back to drinking because he can’t find work and there are seven months left until he receives his Veterans’ retirement pension. 

Tomorrow I will meet with my “Men of St. Joseph” and we will have a cup of coffee and look together at next Sunday’s Gospel.  Here as we begin Holy Week and see ahead of us the misery, pain, torture, and apparent abandonment of the Godly Son who came to save us, we are skipping to the end of the story to see how it all comes out.  Seems like cheating, doesn’t it?

But the “coincidence” that we guys would be reading the ending just as the crisis is forming doesn’t ruin the story for us, but exposes the real mystery.  Perhaps it is that Jesus could trust all along what was happening to him because he knew the ending, and that is the message he gave us when he called out his last words.  My God!  Help me to believe, as I did those weeks when I thought I might die, that your love is that real, your companionship that intimate, that the darkness does not matter at all.  Please sit and read Psalm 22.  It can change your Holy Week.  It can change your life.

What do we do in the face of this mystery?  Tomorrow.