PDF=Public Display of Faith

Good Friday is the saddest day in the liturgical year. ~ Joan Chittister

Suddenly the joy of friends breaking bread is transformed into the sorrow of witnessing an excruciating death. The One who was hoped to be the Messiah instead is whipped, mocked, beaten, scorned, and crucified. Hope crumbled for many that day. The same friends who lounged at table with the Christ, who were part of that first Eucharist, fled in terror. All that they had understood was now being shattered. What would happen now?

It is hard to comprehend that first Good Friday—what the apostles must have thought, how Mary and the women must have felt, or how Jesus could have endured it all. Who knows what I would have done if I had been there? It is a question that confronts Christians daily: Can I take up the cross and journey to Calvary with Christ?

Today, my phone rang early with an invitation from my friend, Kathleen, to join her in the Public Way of the Cross at the Cathedral. I was still horizontal when she called but I had been awake for half an hour so I agreed to go. The day was overcast and cold, just like Good Friday should be. We arrived to a packed Cathedral and ran into many of the faithful people that we know. A faith community was gathering to show its solidarity for our beliefs. There is always something profound about that.

Today’s journey took us past the House of Peace which welcomes refugees and women who are trafficked, to the doors of a shopping mall where gangs and drugs create chaos, to the Remand Centre where we were reminded of our own chains that bind us, past the Legislature to pray for our leaders and the upcoming election, and finally to the Hydro Building to serve as a reminder on this Earth Day, how fragile our environment is. Five stops walked in just over an hour probably by a crowd of several hundred faithful. A powerful public display of faith as I coined it during the walk.

As I walked though, I also remembered the very first time I did a PDF like that. I was living in Washington, DC and attending a dynamic parish called St. Augustine, the Mother Church of Black Catholics in the Nation’s Capital. We gathered too on a rainy Good Friday morning and sang such beautiful songs as we stood as a presence in the drug-laden, violence-ridden neighbour. We sang outside crack houses and stood on corners were homicides had occurred. We prayed for the people in the neighbourhood and in the nation. I still see one of the men singing, “Let my people go” and the goose bumps are as real now as they were then. I had never experienced anything like it and the transforming effect remains with me to this day.

This is a sad day….if we live as if we do not know what is to happen in the next 24 hours, we live without the hope that is ours. Sometimes it is a good exercise to live into that darkness fully and to learn the lessons of it. Good Friday….why do we call it good? That was a question that Fr. Brian would pose to those of us gathered at the 3:00 Service to hear his outstanding homily. Why not sad, as Chittister suggests, or bad? Good Friday is good news for sinners. Then Brian would ask if there were any sinners amongst us and hands shot or straggled up. Holy people scared him, he’d joke, putting us all at ease by raising his own hand. Brian's gift in that homily was also one that used to confuse me. It took me awhile to figure out, and maybe even come to agree with, the concept that today was not about Jesus dying for us. Good Friday is not about us. Today is about God manifesting God's awesome and enduring Love through Jesus. Today is about the love of God for us and his commitment to be there no matter what the cost is to God.

This afternoon I will join my community to behold the wood of the cross and I will know that it is Good Friday, as this is the day that I learn the healing and redemptive power of the cross and the sacrifice made for me this day on behalf of a Loving and Good God. This day reminds us why that little babe in Bethlehem was born and if we can stand in the shadow of the cross, we will share in the glory of the Resurrection.

Where will you stand this day?

Peace,

Suzanne