Good Friday

Good Friday doesn't really hurt because you know what happened on
Easter Sunday. It dawned on me one holy week so I told my friend the
Christian charismatic about lack of sacrifice in the shadow of Christ.
The disciples were in darkness, they didn't know how the story was
going to end, must have been agony and grief. Where can our agony and
grief be now? A man, whoever we say he was, nailed to timber, cruel. If
it was my brother, lover, friend, saturated in pain beyond pain,
tortured, brutalised so that I could only cover my eyes from the
theatre of anguish, then I might know what Good Friday means. But it's
nothing is it? It's just a carved memory, devoid of cries,

pain and bloody tears and sweat and heaving ribs, gasping for
existence. It's just a censored movie, the real scenes of torment cut
out, and anyway, we've seen it before and know the happy ending.


An unlikely ending, an ending that I and my
friends at best doubt, at worst obstinately disbelieve. In my world,
people don't come back to life. Death is the ultimate statistic, and
mourning is the utmost despair, the complete annihilation of hope. If
three days after I had cried grief's hollow and empty loss of love to a
dark sky, all the rules of the universe came undone and my friend came
back to me and touched me in the old familiar way, then I would,

for the rest of my life rejoice and amaze and in my
astonishment shake the shoulders of complete strangers and say, "My
friend died, but now he is alive again"

Do you on
Easter Sunday, in astonishment shake my shoulders and say, "My friend
died but now he is alive again"? Or do you go home and eat a roast
dinner and drink that best Claret wine you brought back from France
last year, then eat chocolate whilst watching the BBC's Easter movie?



For it is you who say the laws of the
universe were broken, that death was undone, not me. I do not believe.
Before you say I doubt like Thomas, remember Thomas was the only one
absent when the lord appeared to his friends. If five of them were
missing, five of them may have doubted. Also, Thomas knew your lord
before he died, but I did not. So when they told him that the lord is
risen, Thomas said he did not believe. When you tell me that the lord
is risen I ask "Who?"

I have never known and do
not know your Lord. If you are Christ in the world then Christ was a
loving compassionate man indeed, when he had the time and at the right
time, but sometimes the doors are locked and it is too late to

be there for us. The doors of the church have to be locked at
night, everything is locked to us. If you are Christ in the world then
Christ had charity standing orders but didn't have time to wrap his
arms around the lonely. Perhaps that's why you had to put him into
infinity, so he has enough time for all of us, because you certainly
don't.

When he died "It was now about the sixth
hour, and darkness fell
over the whole land until the ninth
hour, for the sun stopped shining?"
We are still in that
darkness, we never entered the dawn of Easter Sunday, the stone never
rolled back from the tomb. The sun never shines in our lives after
death; after we lose a person we truly love. So we sit under the fake
electric lights in the pub talking about how we plan to escape from
mediocrity, banality the pointless churn of middle-classity, but in
ourselves, we know that we never will, the lost, living, jilted
generation are forever banished to the cold streets.


The most
important day in the Church's year is Easter Sunday. But in my year,
the most important day is Good Friday. Every man that went before and
came after your lord, died like he did, and because I do not believe he
sprang back to life like a jaded marionette with new strings, Good
Friday is the end of the story for me. Good Friday says everything
about my world. Good Friday is forever.

When we
were children we always asked why it was called Good Friday when
something so bad happened and we were told it was because the man from
Nazareth died for our good, for the good of mankind, the world. Yet
these days I call it Good Friday because we remember death, something
we all believe in, we all understand, and I relish this day, not
because I believe death will be undone but because I believe that the
finality of death, the non-existence of myself eternally is the only
release from pain and suffering. And that is Good. That is Good indeed.


But what is it my friends and I are creating in
our obstinate disbelief?
Is it the death of our catholic
heritage or are we viewing a new equilibrium through a lens that is
clear and new. Is this despair and rough secularism, guided by nothing
except the raw moral law within us, the evolution of a new indigenous
religion? Will this create a world that is fairer that those that have
passed before us? Can anything ever reach us?


1995