All Saints’, Dorval
April 18, 2025
Photo: Angela Recine-Estima
The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood –
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
(T. S. Eliot, of course.)
I find myself turning to poetry a lot on Good Friday.
There’s something about this day that defies logic, that eludes words, that evades all our human attempts to understand and pin it down. Gazing at the cross, we know that somehow we are looking at that which makes sense of all our contradictory human experiences, but we can’t explain how or why.
This is the day on which we lose everything, on which we descend into the unthinkable depths of utter human abandonment and despair, the day on which God feels a million miles away, and yet we call it good. There is no way to square that in the realm of logic, and so we might as well not try.
There is a word that we use in church, but that we don’t use in the season of Lent. It begins with A (or possibly H, depending on how you render it from the original Hebrew), and it means “praise the Lord.” Of course we still praise God in Lent, but we give up this particular word as a way of setting this season apart, of reminding ourselves that sometimes everything is stripped away and we are confronted with the emptiness lurking at the heart of the human experience.
Except that sometimes we use it anyway. We use it at funerals, because every funeral is a little Easter. And yesterday we used it at the Maundy Thursday service, singing triple A-words in the hymn “Let all mortal flesh keep silence,” as we placed the bread and wine on the altar to celebrate the Last Supper. This Lent, it almost felt like we might as well not have bothered to give up the A-word, I was hearing it so often.
And then the bishop tripped up and used it by mistake during Tuesday’s Chrism mass at the Cathedral. And then, just this morning, Peter Lekx had us sing a grace over the Good Friday breakfast at Christ Church Beaurepaire, that used the A-word as a refrain – and when I pointed it out to him afterwards, he realized he hadn’t even noticed it was there. Which, if anything, is an argument for abstaining from it during Lent – so we actually notice it, instead of just perceiving it as filler!
And in a few minutes we’ll hear it again, over and over, as the liturgical dance team invites us into contemplation via another art form.
I remember when it would have been shocking to hear the tune of this song by Leonard Cohen in church, not because it was using the H-word during Holy Week, but because the original lyrics are about sex and death and nihilism, and it made people uncomfortable to hear them in such a context. But Cohen was nothing if not an excellent theologian, who used scripture – the stories of David and Samson – as a jumping off for his meditations on his own experience and the meaning of life. Which is how scripture is supposed to be used. And if there’s ever a day to be shocked in church, today is that day.
The song that the dancers will use today is not the complex and many-layered original, but rather a straightforward recounting of the story that we are here to tell. But you should still let it shock you. Not just because it’s using the H-word on Good Friday, but because it is a story that should shock us.
We abstain from things during Lent – the A-word, alcohol, sweets, meat – in order to create a contrast between Lent and the rest of the year, in order to remind ourselves to pay attention, in order to prepare ourselves to be shocked and unsettled once again by a story that is sometimes so familiar that we miss how very disturbing it is – and yet a story that we cannot let go of, because we know that it sits at the heart of everything.
And so we gather here, in a church stripped of its adornments, to focus on the cross. To admit that we are out of our depth, that the world is a terrible place and full of suffering, to acknowledge that if we were to really think about the way things actually are we would barely be able to get through the day.
Of course we know that it doesn’t end here. But for today, we stay here. We stay at the foot of the cross, where only poetry and paradox begin to make any sense.And after the dance, with the words that we’re not supposed to say – after we have grappled with this story in poetry, and in movement – we will be invited, ourselves, to come forward and reverence the cross: to kneel and touch it, or kiss it, or simply take a moment to be beside it, to lay our eyes on it, to breathe with it, to approach as closely as we can to this unbearable thing that somehow makes everything else bearable.
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.
You may remember that Leonard Cohen died in November of 2016, just a couple of days after Fascism 1.0 was elected in the US. In church that Sunday, exhausted, terrified and grieving, I listened while the worship band played the original song, with the words about King David and Delilah and the Holy Spirit that really make you blush if you pay close attention to what they’re saying.
And as I sat there, words began to come together in my head: words from Ecclesiastes, from the prophet Amos, from Pilgrim’s Progress, from the Commendation service used at funerals. It felt almost involuntary, as though something was speaking through me: something that both acknowledged the awfulness of the moment, and offered the hope that there was a way through.
The silver chain is snapped in two
The golden bowl is broken through
The pitcher in the dust will not renew you
The trumpet sounds on the other side
The grave below gapes deep and wide
And with our tears rolls down the …
It’s coming, friends. But for now, we stay with the cross.
Amen.
Leave a Reply