I have a love-hate relationship with writing. I hate a blank page. I love having words to edit, lots and lots of words. I hate having to write a lot to begin to feel creative. I love when the river of prose is flowing. It hate that what I write never seems finished. I love it when I actually like something I've written.
I have a love-hate relationship with gardening. I hate the fallow plot in early spring that so closely resembles a blank page. I love planting seeds and young plants and watching them grow. I hate weeds. I love mulch. I hate dead plants that didn't winter over like the label promised. I love to see the bushes and trees with buds bursting with renewed life and vigor. I hate killing frosts in late spring. I love cold hardy plants and perennials. I hate that by mid July, with little time to tend it, my garden will have gotten away from me. I love the growers market where I can buy the things I wish I'd been able to grow.
I have a love-hate relationship with Good Friday. I love the liturgy for this day. I hate that so few people participate in it anymore. I love the drama and music that sweeps us up into the story and makes it real again, even though we've heard it a million times. I hate that is has the longest reading of the church year. I love that God was willing to go to such lengths to claim us as his own. I hate that once Jesus has died, for at least a time, we're left with a blank page.
Blank pages: empty, stark, white, wide-open pieces of paper that hold nothing, they reveal gardens not yet planted, plans unfulfilled, and make pronouncements of death - the ultimate blank page. Blank pages stare back of us, and can, ever so briefly and in the oddest way, have power over us. They simultaneously hold both the promise of what could be, but is not yet, and the dread of our deepest fears.
Still, the blank pages of our life are gifts from God. They were given to be filled, read, torn, crumpled, retrieved from the garbage, filed, folded, sent, received, returned, buried or burned, read, pondered. They can be vessels of promise as much as devices of demise. The possibilities are endless. On this day, Jesus has left us with only a single blank page; and the possibilities for it are both ended and endless. His death reminds us of things that we do not wish to be reminded. And the absurdity of the events that drove him to the cross seem bizarre to us: Do they not? How bizarre that Jesus' acts of mercy and kindness, healing and restoration, his proclamations of truth and wisdom, could end in this way. Isaiah frames it this way: "By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living.... although he had done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth."
We are vexed, stunned; bewildered by the speed at which injustice is dispensed. And yet, we, ourselves, by our inaction and muted voices, insure the proficiency of various machinery of injustice in every quadrant of the earth: child labor, human trafficking, modern slavery, torture, false imprisonment, bigotry, political corruption, environmental rape, preventable illness, hunger and thirst. The silent role we play by our direct and indirect acts of co-mission, and more often, omission, is a blank page we dare not fill with the ink of truth, lest we be crucified.
At the time of the veneration of the cross, during the Good Friday service, the weight of our guilt and the depth of our dependence on God for redemption is blatantly apparent. The Rev. Vicki Hesse observed the following regarding this ancient practice: “….the [veneration’s] physical and social awkwardness can sharpen one’s experience of spiritual gratitude and self-offering in a way that remaining seated [in] one’s pew cannot.” She recalls the first time she attended an Easter Vigil at an Episcopal church: “I had no idea what was going on. I found myself standing up and being swept along with the others toward the front of the church, where two acolytes were holding a wooden crucifix. I could see people ahead of me bobbing and kneeling in front of it. But then—to my horror—they kissed it too! I had never witnessed such behavior in the Evangelical churches of my childhood or adolescence and was not quite sure how I felt about this spectacle. But the prospect of stepping out of line was even more uncomfortable than that of going forward, so I stayed where I was and surreptitiously noted the number and style of bows, genuflections, and kisses of those ahead of me. [She concludes by saying] “[I]t is precisely this physical and social discomfort that conveys the painful reality of our inescapable spiritual ambivalence.”
In my experience, the blank page of the cross compels me to cross the line of liturgical perfection and enter the realm of unpredictable chaos. The only other time I have experienced this sensation was at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. As I stood facing the wall, my face inches from it, I could hear the weeping of many of the women around me, some had their hands against it, some or the sides of their faces pressed against the cold stones, some knelt in front of it with their foreheads leaning into it, some were pushing small white pieces of tightly folded paper into the rough edged crevices, many stood facing it bowing rhythmically, reverently, almost trance-like, while praying the scriptures aloud from an open book of Hebrew text. I was overwhelmed by presence of every soul who had stood where I was standing. In my imagination their translucent residues passed through me and around me. Millions of souls were there. Likewise, when I kneel before the cross on Good Friday I am no longer aware of myself as an object of others curiosity but am enveloped by the millions of faithful Christians who for centuries have knelt, or stood, or fallen or prostrated themselves at the foot of an empty cross. I am humbled to acknowledge the way their eternal presence has filled the vacuum of history.
On this day, in this moment, from this place all we have is a fallen hero, a victory for the wicked, an empty cross, and an occupied tomb; a blank page. We must do with it what we can: love it, hate it, ponder it, wonder about it, use it to scheme, to justify, to get real, to get a new perspective, to be inspired, to start over or use it as a starting point, write upon it a letter or plot a garden, embellish it with lovely drawings or silly doodles, sit with it and hear what we had not heard before. Dare to touch it and know the anguish of God.
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