Good Friday

People quietly moved into place, into their pews, dragging sleepy children and clumsily carrying mobile cribs of infants. Women and girls fixed their chapel veils. Parents hushed their children and the place was dark.

The priest and his retinue of acolytes - without warning - entered the sanctuary from the sacristy. There was a tension in the air. The priest knelt, then laid face-down on the cold floor in front of the crucifix. Not a word had been uttered by anyone. It seemed to go on for ages. Everyone else knelt with some expectation.

He arose and the readings went on, babies wailed. Another priest read the Passion in English and all were straining to hear. The celebrant climbed to the pulpit to preach and stopped a few times to compose himself, so overwhelmed was he by the fact of the matter: that the Lord was crucified not for some incomprehensible many, but for you, for me. Who does that? Well, the same one who reached out to a man with a withered hand and made it whole.

Then a long train of people processed down the main aisle of the nave to venerate the crucifix. Old and young, male and female, rich and poor. Each genuflected and kissed the feet of the Lord. A mother some several ahead of me brought the tiny lips of her infant to kiss those feet, and so he did. And so I did and so did so many others. I thought, what business does an innocent infant have, kissing the feet of the Crucified? Then I remembered we're all in this together, baptized in the maelstrom.

Moses once longed to see the face of God and was denied, as the terrible force would ruin him completely. Then we queued up, knelt at the altar rail, and received God on our tongues. It's a wonder the whole building didn't come crashing down and with it, the universe.

Such is the unspeakable beauty of the Lord, who enters this devastation and allows himself to be destroyed by it, only to rise up and reclaim us as his own.