It is Good Friday as well as the day before Passover. The lilacs are in bloom, and I can’t separate their color and even fragrance from the color of the cloth used to hide statues and the statue of the christ on a cross in my village church, when I was a kid, on this day. The bells stopped ringing the hours and no mass was celebrated until past midnight Saturday, or rather Sunday. No sacrifice but one, the infinitely repeated, enforced self-giving beyond the horizon which we’d like to forget in our modern economic systems. The divinity gone while nature is in its inchoatic glory. As if the god could then become quietly, habitually, and unthreateningly present for the rest of the year. In my village, one had to wait for the all-white glory of the midnight mass and the rekindling of an uncertain light in the cemetery, later processionally glorified in the progressively lit church: Lumen Christi. I can only think of Dylan Thomas’ Fern Hill for a sense of this glory:
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And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all Shining, it was Adam and maiden, The sky gathered again And the sun grew round that very day. So it must have been after the birth of the simple light In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm Out of the whinnying green stable On to the fields of praise. |
But in the afternoon ceremony of Good Friday, at 3pm, while the Stock Exchange is closed (at least the brick and cement one), the passion story of the gospel of John is dropped on Catholic people and others throughout the world without explanation or commentary. Incendiary dynamics of the contemplation or imagining of the beating and killing of an innocent victim and the treason of followers and believers everywhere, beginning with their leader and foundational figure, Peter. The word Ioudaioi (Jews) appears 67 times in the gospel of John, sometimes with positive meaning. But this is lost on the people who listen to the passion story in silence. No music, no bells, no statuary, a dangerous, chaotic moment. And even with music, since streaming Bach there must be, what can an aria like Ach mein Sinn from the Passion according to John do for all readers and traitors, mes frères, as Baudelaire would have it? It moves me to tears, though I try to fight the schmalz back as best I can. And so does erbarme dich (Delphine Galou) from Bach’s Passion according to Matthew. For what good? I can’t separate the power of the liturgical week from what much of Christian and Aufklärung Europe, and their inverse and perverse heirs, did to Jews in 1939-45. Neither can I separate it from the political and social slumber which seems to affect many Christians and others in the industrialized world today, especially in the United States. Forbidding days or days of awe for me: ימים נוראים.