What's so good about this Friday?

WhenI was a child I truly believed that Jesus died on the cross for us.

I was told that death by crucifixion was the most painful death that could be imagined and I found it unbearable to think about.

All that was many many years ago, and many bitter and cynical thoughts have possessed me since that time.

But now, again, all this is beginning to speak to me.

I don’t know why.

They do a service on Maundy Thursday in the cathedral here, and I’ve never taken it seriously. I think because I imagine it having something to do with the Queen pretending to wash people’s feet.

So I didn’t go in person, but instead, feeling curious, I watched it online.

It is still here: 

St Marys Cathedral Maundy Thursday

It amazes me to say it, but:

It’s beautiful. The singing is lovely, the sermon was very moving, and so was the moment when the clergy moved among the people and washed their feet.

And very dramatic and very strong the stripping of all the church ornaments at the end, and the lights going out, and the whole space left in darkness.

I went to an Easter Saturday service on a Greek island once.

Some kind of sacred flame had been flown in from Jerusalem; after midnight had struck, and Easter Sunday had begun, the light was passed from hand to hand and we all lit our candles one by one until the whole church was ablaze with lights and then the bells started ringing and massive fireworks lit up the whole sky.

There was a kind of joyous madness to it that moved me very deeply

Maybe because it was easter, or maybe something whose roots lay far deeper , I don’t know.

But I do know when I went to church here in Edinburgh last Easter Sunday people would come up to me and say things like

Christ is risen!

And I was supposed to say

Alleluia!

Only I couldn’t, because I didn’t believe it was true.

And I still don’t, because my mother died very suddenly in the early hours of the morning of the day I was suppose to be taking my first communion.

And still deep within me is that moment of utter trauma and horror when i was told that I had lost her for ever.

In early service this morning we read psalm 22

“I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart also in the midst of my body’s even like melting wax. 

My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleavers to my gums; and thou shalt bring me into the dust of death”

And the Psalm took me right back to that moment, my mouth horribly dry, a huge painful lump in my throat,

“I cry in the day-time, but you do not hear me; and at night also I find no rest”

And that’s how it was, when my father told me,

“Mummy’s dead”,

The morning I was so looking forward to seeing her,

And then that night took me back to the boarding school and left me there

And I knew I could no longer count on my family at all.

That all happened 62 years ago now, and the pain of it has never really left me.

But I know also, somehow, that my mum’s love has also never really left me, and that it lives on inside me

And that it’s her love that somehow, against all the odds, has kept me alive all these years

And taught me that I too can still give love

And that may be my love, too, will live on after I’ve gone.

Maybe that’s true on a larger scale also.

Maybe there is a cosmic love out there, and in me too,

That in the midst of all the hideous cruelties we inflict on our Mother the earth and upon each other

Maybe in the end it’s that love that will endure.