After the ninth hour

Dead. That’s about it, really -

dead inside my head, dead

inside my heart as we lift the dead

weight of our friend who was more

than just our friend and take his

dead body to this raw tomb that

just happens to be waiting for him.

Was it all meant to work out

like this? What about the two

hanging, groaning, haranguing, 

praying? Praying in extremis.

Everyone does that. 

There is no feeling left

for a time like this. Only the 

raw hole where the emotion

raged and the terror flared

and burned all else to black

as the sky darkened

and the woman bustles

home and her thoughts 

turn to food and tasks

and children make their

demands that obliterate

all dialogue with self

and leave you safe

from this empty pain.

Leave the heavy weight 

of body and the weighty spice

to scent the darkness

till another day. 

Leave the dark sky

light a lamp

do not let the pictures

fill your head

the hammer blows

your inward ear

the dull thud of wood

in the hard ground.

No. It is finished.

But how, God, how

do we live now

in the world that is so changed?

©C.M.M. Good Friday ’13.

Thinking on Good Friday

Good Friday. A difficult day - what an understatement, really, if you think about it. Sun and sudden warmth, a fat bee raising clouds of pollen on the catkins which the blue tits had just vacated after a morning's swinging: all this life, this rebirth contrasts with the stark interior of the church, the bare altar, the cross alone in the middle of it, the brass eagle lectern lying as if in sorrow on the front pew ...

How often have I experienced this strangeness? I suppose for me it's maybe been 36 years since I sang the Reproaches in the Cathedral of The Isles, wondering at the mystery of it all; I can have missed perhaps one Good Friday service since then. And the strangeness is compounded, always, by the unheeding world down the hill, in the town, and nowadays in the online community. It used to upset me; perhaps it's something you just become used to because now I merely observe. And this year, as always, I thought of Auden's poem Musee des Beaux Arts, which points out that suffering is always going on somewhere, unnoticed by all but those most closely involved.

So today I'm thinking about suffering, and about all innocents who suffer despite - or maybe because of - their innocence.

Good Friday reflection

PASSION

Does it feel real? Crouching
in the evening chill while
leaves overhead silver in the breeze
I struggle for wakefulness
even in this cold. He is not asleep
but staring in the dark closes the eyes
on my blank mind. A sudden cough
startles but the numbness returns.
A lone insect whirrs and in the city
a child calls for its mother
as the feet stir the dead leaves
and the torches come
and the kiss betrays. Lord,
I whisper, I should have watched.

Is it real? The weight of wood
is real enough, but my bearing it
seems beyond bearing and cannot be.
The slow steps seem not mine,
but made by someone
I cannot bear to inhabit. The nails
oh the nails
hotly sliding through the jolt
the hammer makes
in my body in my body
in my body in my body
two strokes each
the strokes of an expert -
it is done. Up, up – lifted up and over
the heads of the crowd I see
the city in the noon light and know
this eternity will not last long
but is it real?

It is finished. Is it
accomplished? Your words, Lord.
The emptiness is there still
as the untimely darkness covers
my failure to attend. The cross still
stands, but empty now. Empty.

©C.M.M.

Cold passion

The triduum – the last three days in Holy Week – have their own momentum, such momentum as to make me wonder every year how people arrive at Easter without experiencing the journey towards Sunday. I’m talking religious people, of course; presumably the rest of the world spares the Passion nary a thought unless they happen to be watching the current version on the telly.

On this Good Friday afternoon, I’m already noting the characteristics of this year’s season. Last night, we celebrated the Last Supper at nine in the evening. As we entered the church, we noted new marks of vandalism in the porch – names and slogans scribbled on the doors and on the memorial cross, a small fire stinking in a corner, the water with which it had been doused staining the doormat. Encouraged to think of it in terms of the events we were recalling, I thought of the careless violence of life, the ribaldry of the thoughtless, the anger of the unloved. And somehow the familiar church didn’t feel as safe as usual, attendance less … mainstream, more outlandish than I’d been used to.

As if to underscore such thoughts, the gales seemed to attack us suddenly as we entered the phase of quiet contemplation round the Gethsemane altar. The words of the gospel reading were drowned in the sounds of great heaving gusts of air which rattled the slates high above and threatened to burst open the door. And again that sense of impending danger as the huge tree outside swayed unseen, groaning. And when it was over and the candles extinguished in the chill of midnight, we walked out into the assault of a snow flurry. The cold was intense; it might have been Christmas rather than Passiontide.

Today, as we watched at the foot of the Cross, it was even colder. Cold enough to freeze the emotions, cold enough to make us long for the brazier lit in the courtyard of the High Priest two thousand years ago.

So far, this has been a very northern triduum. No cosiness here, but a sense of threat, danger, hostility. Perhaps that is how it should be.

In the midst of life...

Snuffed
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Yesterday I referred to the feeling of headlong movement through Holy Week, and wondered at the time what it would feel like to be still and contemplative during this time. But when I consider this idea, as I did in fact have time to last evening during the Maundy Watch, I realise that perhaps the experience of breathlessness is closer to reality. St Mark's gospel has Jesus teaching, as it were, right up to the wire - right up till that last supper with his disciples he is teaching, countering argument, vigorously doing what he has been doing throughout his ministry, but with what looks like renewed urgency.

And then there is the prayer in the Garden, after which the guards come and he is taken off to face a hasty mockery of a trial. Within 15 hours, say, he is dead on a cross. In our tradition, we ponder on sign and symbol, we celebrate beautiful liturgies, we use music and silence to help our prayers. But of course it wasn't like that. Perhaps we should celebrate our liturgies in the supermarket, or in the main road, with people staring curiously or shouting abuse or merely tutting because we're in their way and they want past. Perhaps then we'd feel some of the pain of rejection and lack of interest; perhaps then we'd know what it feels like suffer intensely while the uncaring world gets on with its life.

Auden, in his poem Musee des Beaux Arts" makes the point " That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, " - while life goes on all around it. I have just told a bemused cold caller from somewhere far to the east of here that no, he couldn't speak to either of us because it was Good Friday and we were otherwise engaged and not wanting to buy insurance or a new phone system. He hung up without further ado and I came back to finish writing this. Life going on.

And now I shall wander up the road to church and have some silence.

Note: There is a new poem on Maundy Thursday over on frankenstina