Blog Anniversary - Good Friday, 2006

Holy Week: Good Friday

Creator's evening service emphasizes Good Friday as the darkest night. It is the dark night of our souls,. This is the night faith is tried, when the consequence of faith is frightening to us. This is the part of the three-part service where the altar is stripped, and where we understand how deeply and constantly we betray in life what we profess to believe.

Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation writes:

Souls are like wax waiting for a seal. By themselves, they have no special identity. Their destiny is to be softened and prepared in this life, by God's will, to receive, at their death, the seal of their own degree of likeness to God in Christ. And that is what it means, among other things, to be judged by Christ.The wax that has melted in God's will can easily receive the stamp of its identity, the truth of what it was meant to be. But the wax that is hard and dry and brittle and without love will not take the seal: for the hard seal, descending upon it, grinds it to powder.

Therefore, if you spend your life trying to escape from the heat of the fire that is meant to soften and prepare you to become your true self, and if you try to keep your substance from melting in the fire -- as if your true identity were to be hard wax -- the seal will fall upon you at last and crush you. You will not be able to take your own true name and countenance, and you will be destroyed by the event that was meant to be your fulfillment.

Jesus helps us deal with our fears, our knowledge of death, and our knowledge of injustice in the world. This is the night when this is the most visceral.