Good Friday Meditation

Apr 18, 2025

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

I wake up and dive into the early-morning routines, starting with walking the puppy around the block in the predawn stillness, which quiets my mind and grounds my body in the natural world. Taking note of the day, I marvel that it’s going to be just another ordinary day, mostly devoted to puppy care and, with luck, a bit of time for other pursuits.

For most of the past, oh, 50 or so years, I have entered this day, Good Friday, prepared to abandon my usual routines. I’ve done it differently over the years. Some years I’ve fasted the whole day, consuming nothing but water until Saturday morning. Some years I’ve gone to the Good Friday procession organized by a multicultural Catholic church. The procession enacts the Way of the Cross, as the actors, most of them from our Latin American communities, lead a crowd of onlookers for at least a mile down a major street (closed to traffic) to the church. This procession has taken place every Good Friday for many years, but I wonder whether it is happening today. So much has been lost this year.

Several hours later, after some active play (aka behavior management) and a longer walk with the puppy, I open my email inbox and skim the subject lines on top. There is this, from The New York Times: “Christianity in the White House.” I don’t open it — too depressing.

Instead, I read a few Substacks that arrived today, starting with I’m here, you’re not alone, from Sarah Bessey's Field Notes. This quote catches my attention:

I’ve heard that most of our theology is autobiography. I think that’s mostly true. I think we will often unwittingly project what we learned about authority onto God.

That is my experience. In this stage of my life, I’ve at least partly separated from the voice of divine authority that’s been my constant critic since childhood. Though she’s still a part of me, I’m learning how to recognize her (my anger and impatience are clues), thank her for her concern, and let her know that I’m in the driver’s seat now.

Sarah Bessey’s Good Friday essay was written in April 2015; one month earlier, she had given birth to her youngest child. The paragraph continues:

And then we will parent our children in the way that we believe God is parenting us. So if we believe God is a terrible judge with exacting standards and a trapdoor to hell, then that changes how we move through our lives, how we judge others, particularly our children. And yes, I think that damages people.

But what if we see God through the metaphor of a good mother with a newborn babe? then what do we see instead? After all, the metaphors for God’s love are diverse and imaginative all throughout Scripture . . . — Sarah Bessey

I’ve been exploring some “diverse and imaginative” spiritual paths, outside of the authoritarian, patriarchal religion that formed me. These wide open new paths invite a sense of springiness — in both the season and the step — which I also find in a fantastic essay on The Egg by Rebecca Scolnick. Her expansive spiritual compendium of everything eggy opens with this:

The egg is one of the oldest symbols seen across cultures and traditions, representing fertility, creation, transformation, vitality and the hope of new life. It holds the entire cycle of life, death, and rebirth within it, naturally embodying the process of what’s grown in the darkness coming into the light.

Its gooey, yellow yolk invokes the creative power of the sun, as well as joy, happiness, energy, and more, and the bright white albumen (egg whites), as well as the shell-casing, symbolizes cleanliness, purity, and new beginnings. Many creation stories and myths begin in some form of Cosmic Egg (named Hiranyagarbha in Hinduism), representing the womb space from which the world, and its various creators were born.

But then, returning to Christianity, today’s post by Nadia Bolz-Weber reminds me that this religion throughout its history has been much wider, deeper, and more diverse than the narrow slice that I learned — the same tiny, one-dimensional segment that gets most of the media attention.

In The Dogs of Good Friday, an excerpt from Bolz-Weber’s 2015 book, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People, she recounts a Good Friday practice of the church she leads. After the liturgy everyone went to a place in the city where an act of brutal violence had occurred, “where blood had been spilled and hope had been absent.” They prayed, then laid down tulips while singing “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?”

Bolz-Weber describes part of the liturgy enacted at the church earlier in the evening.

Two young women, neither likely to ever be in a church, sat side by side and sang the Solemn Reproaches, a Good Friday rite dating back to the ninth century.

The congregation sang the Trisagion—Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal, have mercy upon us—as a response for each of the reproaches.

Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal, have mercy upon us — all those authoritarian words.

But Bolz-Weber continues:

As Kate and Megan sang this ancient chant, it felt as though their voices were reaching through two thousand years of Christian faith and bringing back into the room with them the full force of humanity’s folly; we humans don’t really know how to respond to the kind of grace and love shown us in Jesus Christ. Each reproach built in force upon the last, as did the congregation’s sung response. And somehow the truth of God and humanity, the truth of a gift and the rejection of a gift, was made real in the vibrations of our singing. So that even the most cynical and nonreligious among us for those moments could not keep from weeping for the ways in which we sometimes reject goodness, turn from love, and make choices that no one who loves us would ever make on our behalf. But it wasn’t guilt we were feeling. At least not the church-made kind. I know what that feels like, and this was different.

Because Good Friday is about us entering the difference between God and humanity and just touching it for a moment. Touching the shimmering sadness of humanity’s insistence that we can be our own gods, that we can be pure and all-powerful. Some may think that spirituality means attaining a disembodied transcendent state somewhere up in the ether. But that’s not where we find God . . . that’s just where we try to be like God and that’s different. — Nadia Bolz-Weber, The Dogs of Good Friday

Yesterday I read the post for Maundy Thursday by Robert P. Jones, which has this subtitle: “There is a simple theological word to describe the gleeful abandonment of morality by Trump and his accomplices: evil.”

Jones writes about the present state of our nation, in which “nothing represents who we have allowed ourselves to become more than the unlawful abduction and disappearance of Kilmar Abrego Garcia by the United States government.”

The title of the post contains a quote from, in Jones’s words, “the heartbreaking plea that Kilmar’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, made outside the Federal Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, approximately 10 miles from my home. As I am marking Passover and Easter this week (I can’t quite bring myself to say ‘celebrating’), I am meditating on her grief and her plea for justice for Kilmar and her family.”

He continues:

I am planning to watch her statement again twice during Holy Week. First, I’m watching today, which is Maundy Thursday on the Christian calendar, a time marked by communion and other ceremonies like foot washing, which reinforce our awareness of our common humanity and the ties that bind our frail human lives. Second, I’ll watch again on Easter morning, as we are celebrating the themes of resurrection, new life, and hope. I invite you to join me in incorporating these viewings as a religious practice, watching intently and reading slowly her pleas.

I accept the invitation. As this Good Friday turns into evening, I have watched the video of Jennifer Vasquez Sura’s statement (Jones helpfully includes the link) and will view it again on Sunday.

I can’t think of a more appropriate observance of Easter this year.

Walking along the dark and quiet street this morning, I thought of Jones’s essay. What shone into the predawn darkness of my mind was the word he gave me for my non-observance of this solemnly religious day: “As I am marking Passover and Easter this week, (I can’t quite bring myself to say ‘celebrating’) . . .”

Marking . . . the right word for what I’ve been doing with this particular, ordinary day.