Today is Good Friday. This morning, getting up at 6:00 am in order to go to Morning Prayer, was very difficult. This body was weary and aching and not willing to cooperate. I certainly was not standing in judgment of the disciples who couldn't stay away to pray with Jesus, the night he was betrayed.
Grief weighed heavily on them, along with great fear. They knew what was coming. Jesus had talked about it. They didn't want to know, stayed in denial, slept through Jesus' anguished prayers, ran away or denied him when the moment came of his betrayal and being taken away to be crucified. We heard the passion story read last Sunday, and this week, those of us immersed in the life of the church, are walking through it in detail.
Last night people stayed and kept vigil through the early morning hours at the church. One friend was there by 3:00 am and was still there for Morning Prayer.
This morning, when we arrived at the church and I walked to my preferred spot to sit, I knelt for a moment of silent prayer as I sometimes do, and then sat back in the pew, looking at the alter. Woosh...There it was, the altar, stripped and bare, no altar candles, the eternal flame which always (almost) burns in its red glass was extinguished, and the little door on the place where the elements are kept (I know there's a name for this, but I'm still a new Episcopalian, so you'll have to allow me some slack), was open and the elements gone. All of it was a poignant reminder of the stark absence of hope those early disciples and the whole world felt that First Good Friday, and that can appear in our lives at any moment. Tears came, and my heart felt both full of a kind of wonder as well as bereft of the symbols and signs which have come to mean so much to my faith these past months.
It is only temporary. But as Barbara Crafton talked about in her beautiful essay today: don't try to tell that to someone who has just lost their beloved to death. The reality, the emptiness, the terrible separation that feels so permanent, comes with a grief that feels inconsolable.
Many years ago, on a Good Friday (forgive me, if I've told this story a dozen times before), I traveled by subway from Brooklyn to attend a day long service at St. Patrick's Cathedral. I arrived early, and went exploring and discovered the chapel in the front of the main part of the Cathedral. As I turned the corner and walked into that space, my senses were suddenly filled with a great perfume, like the scent of the oil that must have filled the room when the woman who anointed Jesus' feet broke open the alabaster jar. Everywhere you turned, flowers filled the room. They were for the main part of the Cathedral for Easter, but here in the smaller space, those flowers were an astonishing and glorious gift. That year had been full of such sadness, as I was teaching in an inner city school, and the stories of the people and the children, hurt my heart.
Yes, the poor will always be with us, but the extravagance of God's love, poured out, is a precious and lovely anointing on our broken world.
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