From a blog written by a friend.
Good Friday
by Ariel
After the frosty silence in the gardens.
After the agony in stony places.
The shouting and the crying.
Prison and palace and reverberation.
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains.
He who was now living is now dead.
We who were living are now dying.
With a little patience.
T S Eliot, The Wasteland, "What the Thunder Said".
And there you see it: the death of every hope. The end of a long journey. Plans, hopes and dreams crumble irrevocably into rubble. As with all wasteland, it looks desolate, but you take away fragments, which can be more powerful than the whole in provoking memories and intentions, and part of the world’s pain. Fragments taken out of context can assume great significance, stand for much more: the ruins of the old Coventry Cathedral are far more striking than the old church in its entirety would ever have been, and Baalbek, fallen columns and chunks of masonry everywhere, is still a wonder. When you’re not handed something perfect on a plate you have to think for yourself.
And do you rebuild? What caused the collapse, exactly? The construction, or the foundations? Was it ever practical in the first place? Do you walk away to start something else in a different place, or set it aside, chalk it up, leave it?
The Crucifixion is one of the things that shattered Christianity for me years ago. I have had arguments with street evangelists who insisted that it was an act of love. I said to them that setting someone up for murder is not in my view an act of love, and if that’s how God treats his nearest and dearest, what hope is there for the rest of us? For whatever reason, the street evangelists didn’t seem to register this, or attempt to counter it, just repeated that it was an act of love and moved on. It raises many questions for me which I have not yet found answers to. Currently I take the view that this was not God's doing, but humanity's; that it was not required by God.
For me the most poignant moment is those words from the cross: Eli, eli, lama sabachthani. I don’t speak Aramaic, but they are close enough to Arabic, which I am more familiar with, and when I pronounce them as if they are Arabic, it brings home that sense of immediacy of that cry from the heart. God, God, why have you forsaken me? That cry is still current, timeless down the ages.
In the Catholic church you can still find the wonderful old traditional service of Tenebrae. It is a short service performed over the Triduum before Easter Sunday. It is hard to find, though locally, the Dominicans do it at Blackfriars Priory in Oxford. I can only say that I find it intensely moving. There is a forthright, powerful beauty in the chant that rips away the accretions of everyday life and brings the immediacy of those events right to me. The Easter story is the hardest, but the loveliest of all the Christian progression, and Tenebrae speaks across the centuries, as the chants shorten, become more urgent, moving towards the inexorable conclusion with the great cry and the crash. It doesn't matter whether you've walked the Lenten path or not. It still has the power to pull you in, make you part of this, shatter plasters over cracks, and fragment the bareness of Lent with what is really behind it. The enormity of that amazing message begins on Holy Thursday morning, impossible to ignore.
And you live, you wait ("we who were living are now dying, with a little patience") until Easter Sunday. We live, in effect, through our own personal harrowing of Hell, through the greyness and sometimes bleakness and hopelessness of Lent, when we walk sunless paths that seem to go on forever, with self-chosen burdens that we sometimes wish we hadn't started, until at last we arrive at that extraordinary moment between doubt and faith, when you wonder about the tomb. What will you find? Will it be empty for you? Is it empty because there is nothing there, or is it empty because it housed a miracle which could not be confined by it?
