Good Friday reflection, 2016

Today was the first Good Friday I've worked in 22 years, but I did take half a day of PTO. Instead of trying to get my usual two hours in the middle of the night on Good Friday, I signed up for 5-6, and jumped at the chance to get a half hour from our deacon's two-hour 6-8 commitment. It worked out very nicely.

There was much proclaimed by the prophets about the mystery of the Passover; that mystery is Christ. (emphasis added) - From an Easter homily by St. Melito of Sardis, bishop, as quoted in yesterday's Office of Readings

St. Melito goes on to mention many of the ways that Christ was present in or revealed by the events of the Hebrew Scriptures. We can see Him in them, we can learn of Him and even encounter Him there, but any litany of them will fail to touch us unless we are willing to accept Him, that is, to acknowledge that God has an authority over our lives as a result of being Author and Creator and of setting aside His power in favor of His love and mercy. Jesus being the Passover only makes Him my Passover to the degree that I acknowledge that He is my only path from death to life, and begin to respond to the Father's love and mercy in a way that recognizes His Author-ity over my life.

Rescue my soul from the sword,
My life from the grip of these dogs.
Save my life from the jaws of these lions,
My poor soul from the horns of these oxen. - Ps 22: 21-22

David (I presume) was writing of his enemies in these derisive tones, so we must be careful with them. For while these images - dogs, lions, oxen - also represent us in our effect on Jesus' human life, we must not forget that it was perfect Love which caused Him to subject Himself to us and which calls us back to the Heart that has so desperately longed for our return that He would make Himself our sacrifice - even when we would sacrifice nothing of ourselves for His Love. Indeed, St. Paul makes the progression in the letter to the Romans of our still being helpless, then sinners, then enemies, when Christ gave Himself for us.

Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss? - Lk 22:48

How often we, too, do this. In our certitude that what we are doing is right - or, perhaps, that we have a right to do this, to wield our power in the way we deem best - we betray God's love, and mercy, and authority over us. We insist on our own authority and our own understanding, and so we apply the stamp of God's will on actions that are really rooted in our own.

It can be a quandary, because what appears to be mercy toward some can look like rejection of others, and even of God. God is always calling us closer, and that means He is always calling us to receive His love and to love as He does, not forsaking the truth, yet inviting judgment on ourselves rather than imposing it on others.

We misunderstand the nature and manifestation of Love, and as we act in our own misunderstanding, we betray Jesus with our embrace, too.

For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of a heifer's ashes can sanctify those who are defiled so that their flesh is cleansed, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself up unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works to worship the living God!" - Heb 9:13-14

Of course, the goats, bulls and heifer, as well as the ram in the thicket, and the lambs' blood on the Hebrew families' lintels, are but the faintest symbols of the true Lamb. Their greatest importance is to reveal Jesus, who in turn reveals the Father's heart of love for us as He fulfills the purpose of His earthly life. This viewpoint which Neal Lozano has emphasized in Abba's Heart parallels what St. John Chrysostom emphasizes in today's Office of Readings (about which I have reflected on previous Good Fridays).

Do you understand, then, how Christ has united His bride to Himself and what food He gives us all to eat? By one and the same food we are both brought into being and nourished. As a woman nourishes her child with her own blood and milk, so does Christ unceasingly nourish with His own blood those to whom He Himself has given life. - from the Catecheses by St. John Chrysostom, bishop, as quoted in today's Office of Readings

Even motherhood is a type for Christ. I have so often marveled at the rest of this great reading that I have missed its wonderful conclusion! We are indeed bone from Christ's bone, and flesh from Christ's flesh , sacrificed for us to make us a new creation, an eternal creation, imbued with everlasting life. (Likely most importantly, we are spirit from Christ's Spirit!)

____

Now I want to invoke Fr. Neuhaus a bit, even though I haven't been reading him this season. We call this "Good Friday," even as we rightly acknowledge the role our sin and guilt play in our (my! For each of us, it must be "my," even while it must be also "our") Savior's suffering and death. Perhaps we should call it Great Friday. Redeeming Friday. Delivering Friday. Victory over Sin Friday. Sanctifying Friday. Transforming Friday. All-the-Difference-Making Friday. Perfect Love Friday. It is worth reflecting on in its own right. (Rite, right?)

I look above the tabernacle where my Savior is present, where I have come seeking to be with Him during His trial and knowing that it is really He who is with me during mine, and through the textured glass of this chapel I see the illuminated crucifix in the main church. As Fr. Neuhaus encourages me, I don't skip ahead. I confess the link between Christ present in this tabernacle and His sacrifice this day on the cross of my sin. He has defeated the power of both the physical cross and my sin to cause death. As I sit and pray with Him in the garden, and observe Him before the Sanhedrin and Pilate, walk with Him along the Via Dolorosa, mourn His death on the cross, and as His blood and water flow down over me, it is not His lifeless body which I embrace, but His life-giving sacrifice and eternal Sonship.

I closed out this time with a return to Abba's Heart, but I will share of that in a separate post.

A poor reason, and some good ones

Some scholars speculate that "Good Friday" comes from "God's Friday," as "good-bye" was originally "God be by you." But it is just as odd that it should be called God's Friday, when it is the day we say good-bye to the glory of God. Wherever its name comes from, let your present moment stay with this day. Stay a while in the eclipse of the light, stay a while with the conquered One. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon

I find myself referring to quotes I've referenced on previous readings of this magnificent book, but in new ways. I've reflected before on the first part of what I've quoted here, but am now really wanting to focus on this latter part; I've only included the first two sentences of this citation because the part I wanted to include refers back to them.

I've been told before by a Catholic adult catechist, almost dismissively, that Catholics do a great job of focusing on Good Friday and a terrible job of truly celebrating Easter. Honoring Fr. Neuhaus' invitation to not rush to the resurrection, I nonetheless find that I am utterly convinced that the reason we're so bad at rejoicing in Jesus' (our) victory is that we are, in fact, just awful at truly entering into all that Good Friday should mean for us. If it were primarily about making us wallow in our guilt then, yes, we would excel at it! If the purpose of our meditation on this day is to make us more neurotic about the terrible thing that we did to Jesus, many of us could stop right now because we have that part down pat! As Jesus told his disciples about being clean, though: But not all. There are definitely some who do not associate enough of their lives with sin that something must be done about. And when I enter into eternity, I pray that I don't find that I am one of them.

But there is so much more about Good Friday for us to enter into than just the surface ideas at which we often stop: that it was my sin and guilt that Jesus bore on the cross so that I could be free from it, that God's love for me is so great that Jesus was willing to do this for me. Please don't think I'm being dismissive of these great tenets of our faith! So many of us have failed to grasp even the surface implications of these glorious truths.

But because God is infinite and eternal and Jesus is God, there is so much more depth to enter into in our reflections on this holy day, more than we can get in a full human lifespan, let alone in the time that most of us spend at the foot of the cross. It will take eternity for us to know it fully, just as to know God fully, in the personal-relationship sense. The purpose of a redeemed soul's prayerful reflection on Good Friday is not to increase our sense of the guilt from which Jesus has set us free, but neither is knowing that we are free from our guilt a good reason to forsake any further reflection.

I find that learning more of the depth and details of this mystery into which we enter (by the Holy Spirit) fills my heart with a greater sense of awe at God's infinite glory as revealed incomparably on the cross. It strengthens my desire to share God's love with those around me who have not chosen (or been able) to immerse themselves in the unfathomable depths of this incomprehensible love. It causes me to marvel at my increased understanding of the infinite vastness and infinitesimal detail of this glorious love. It gets my eyes and thoughts and heart fixed on something - someOne - inexpressibly beyond the limits of my mind.

And it makes me more aware of the utter abandon with which I am called to lay down my own life.

Have a blessed Lent!

Apropos reading

How odd that this should be the first reading at the mass being offered for my friend's grandmother, when I was also praying for another friend who is struggling with the passing of a loved one at a young age:

On this mountain the LORD of hosts
will provide for all peoples
A feast of rich food and choice wines,
juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.
On this mountain he will destroy
the veil that veils all peoples,
The web that is woven over all nations;
he will destroy death forever.
The Lord GOD will wipe away
the tears from all faces;
The reproach of his people he will remove
from the whole earth; for the LORD has spoken.

On that day it will be said:
“Behold our God, to whom we looked to save us!
This is the LORD for whom we looked;
let us rejoice and be glad that he has saved us!”
For the hand of the LORD will rest on this mountain. - Is 25, 6-10a

Meeting Wolfe

Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul - but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them - but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us - we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass. - Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

I should probably be careful to quote a book I've never read, but my goodness . . .  And this:

Something has spoken to me in the night...and told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: "{Death is] to lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth."

And:

He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out--through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it. And what had he learned? A philosopher would not think it much, perhaps, and yet in a simple human way it was a good deal. Just by living, by making the thousand little daily choices that his whole complex of heredity, environment, and conscious thought, and deep emotion had driven him to make, and by taking the consequences, he had learned that he could not eat his cake and have it, too. He had learned that in spite of his strange body, so much off scale that it had often made him think himself a creature set apart, he was still the son and brother of all men living. He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations. He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up. And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave of his emotions.

Quotations pages are dangerous.

I clearly find in Wolfe's writing and thinking a kindred style. There are some other quotes there that I clearly disagree with -- a lengthy one concerning the permanence of the earth, for instance, though compared to our earthly existence it may seem so -- but I believe I may see about downloading this book. I haven't read in entirely too long.

From a Christmas sermon of Pope St Leo the Great

Dearly beloved, today our Saviour is born; let us rejoice. Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life. The fear of death has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness.

So the second sentence above sums up what I was already thinking - how I was judging myself - on Christmas Eve.  I knew that Christ's presence in my life has overcome all the petty things in which I was wrapped up, yet couldn't seem to get beyond them.  Ultimately, the joy of worshiping together finally overcame my frustrations.


In the fullness of time, chosen in the unfathomable depths of God’s wisdom, the Son of God took for himself our common humanity in order to reconcile it with its creator. He came to overthrow the devil, the origin of death, in that very nature by which he (the devil) had overthrown mankind.

And so at the birth of our Lord the angels sing in joy: Glory to God in the highest, and they proclaim peace to men of good will as they see the heavenly Jerusalem being built from all the nations of the world. When the angels on high are so exultant at this marvellous work of God’s goodness, what joy should it not bring to the lowly hearts of men?

The angels' song seems so distant, beyond my reality somewhere.  Sometimes I wish for the opportunity to witness the undeniably miraculous, and in the process I know that I tend to denigrate the circumstantially miraculous which I have experienced.  I sometimes think that it is a matter of my faith not being simple enough - all those who seem to experience this type of encounter seem to be far less complicated than I imagine myself to be.  I envy them, and yet I cling to my own gifts.  "But you should appreciate your own gifts!" you might argue, but it seems to me that there is a difference between appreciating and clinging. The latter has a sense of not being willing to to let go even for the sake of gaining God more fully.  The truth is, I have a hard time praying the prayer of St. Ignatius: Take, Lord, receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all I have and call my own.  Intellectually, I know that what I will gain far outweighs what I might lose, yet I still seem to lack the faith to truly return these gifts to the care of the One who gave them in the first place.

Beloved, let us give thanks to God the Father, through his Son, in the Holy Spirit, because in his great love for us he took pity on us, and when we were dead in our sins he brought us to life with Christ, so that in him we might be a new creation. Let us throw off our old nature and all its ways and, as we have come to birth in Christ, let us renounce the works of the flesh.

Christian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom.

Through the sacrament of baptism you have become a temple of the Holy Spirit. Do not drive away so great a guest by evil conduct and become again a slave to the devil, for your liberty was bought by the blood of Christ.

I often find that, after a grace-filled season such as Advent or Lent, I quickly fall back into a less focused approach to life in the immediate aftermath of the great feasts for which they prepare us. This reading helped me this morning to remember this tendency and to choose better, for one day, at least.

Visiting Middle Earth

I haven't read The Lord of the Rings in entirely too long.  This time, I'm trying to make myself slow down on the descriptive and poetic parts that I think I've probably skimmed over too much to fully appreciate in the past, eager to move on to what happens next.

I still have a hard time slowing down for all of the Tom Bombadil section, though!