SLOW : andrew dowsett : collected musings
Good
Friday.
We
spent an hour contemplating the wounds of Christ and placed our own drop of
blood (red glass beads) on, or near, the cross in symbolic recognition that our
wounds (the wounds we have inflicted and the wounds we have suffered and
endured) are taken up in his, and transformed by Love.
Good
Friday.
There
are two hills in my parish on which a large cross is processed and erected
every Good Friday.
The
hills are formed of (what is locally known as) Magnesian Limestone. They date
from the Permian Period, some 275 million years ago, a period that saw three or
four massive extinctions concluding with the one known as the Great Dying. Of
course, the continents and seas were different then, to how our world looks
now.
I
understand this cognitively; but when I climb the Tunstall Hills today I do not
understand myself to have any part in their distant past, or distant future,
only in their present.
Between
3.00 p.m. on Good Friday and sometime before dawn on the following Sunday, we
who confess dependence in God proclaim that, in Jesus, God is dead.
Not
that God has experienced death and so is able to identify with our experience
of death. We confess that God is dead.
God
will not stay dead, for death simply is not strong enough to hold God captive.
Nonetheless we proclaim not that God died once upon a time, some two thousand
years ago, but that God is dead.
We
confess this because faith is not a cognitive belief, such as my understanding
of the hill from where I can stand at the foot of a cross and look down on St
Nicholas church; faith is experiential. As we walk through the Triduum of the
evening of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and the early hours of
Easter Sunday, we are drawn into those events.
And,
being drawn into them, they shape us in particular ways, in union with God, in
and with and through Jesus.
Do
not rush through these hours. Do not rush to proclaim, He is risen!
Do
not push away the God who would draw us into his death, for there is no other
way to be drawn into his Life.
Good
Friday.
The
ground behind the vicarage rises steeply, such that I can stand at my kitchen
window and look out on the hedge that demarcates the boundary between our
family home and the church above and beyond. The hedge is made of many things,
but mostly Pyracantha shot through with bramble, sharp as hell, an encircling
crown of thorns. The longer I am willing to stand and watch, the more I see.
Robins, wrens, sparrows, blue tits, blackbirds, all in their turn darting in
and out. The crown of thorns is a haven, protection from marauding local cats,
a nesting place to nurture young, a living thing of beauty.
The
wounds of Christ are the place where power is made perfect in weakness. For
there is no greater weakness than a man tortured and subjected to public
execution. And there is no greater power than the ability of Love to draw to
those wounds every wound that has ever been inflicted, every wound that has
ever been suffered, and to cleanse them such that what is inflicted is forgiven
and what is endured is beautified.
Such
is the mercy of God, to endure the worst that we inflict and to be one with us
in what we suffer, that we might be one with God in the glory of Life.
The
more we can bear to watch, to hold our gaze and not turn away, the more we will
notice. Such wonder! What mystery!
