I have become like one who has no strength, lost among the dead.
Will your loving-kindness be declared in the grave?
Will your wonders be known in the dark?

Sometimes you don’t know how close to death you were until you’ve been pulled out of the grave.  I’ve spent a long time in the darkness, working out my faith with fear and trembling.  I didn’t realize how dark it was, how tenuous my faith has been.  I didn’t realize how emotionally tiring the past few years have been until I went through the liturgy of Holy Week.

The darkness of the Psalms of Tenebrae was painfully familiar.  I was once again grasping for his hem.  I was back on the stony ground, don’t leave me without a blessing.  It was the dark nights of the soul and the tears and all the ‘what if they are right’s.  What if I’m as wrong as the Pharisees were wrong about Jesus?  It was the darkness closing in at night and laying wide awake in bed, terrified, lonely – and when the emotional darkness closes in and depression crouches at your door – and what if it’s been a long enough, dark enough struggle to stay permanently – and when it feels like Saturday for such a long time – when tears feel ever present and maybe I’m tired of being such a feeler and what if I’m using alcohol to numb and I’m so tired of the dark and is Jesus really worth all of this?

Is he really worth all the doubts and the pain and the loneliness?  Is he worth the arguments and the frustrations and the misunderstandings?  My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?

By your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

Where is the redemption?  Where?  Where is the mud in my eyes so that I might see?

By your holy cross.  That damned cross.  That ubiquitous symbol of Jesus has become a bludgeon and I’m so tired of seeing it.  It’s on the altar, in the stained glass, walking down the aisle, people bow to and make the sign of, and why?

It has become so shrouded in penal substitutionary atonement and I just can’t function from a Good Friday theology rooted in Genesis 3 anymore.  I need Genesis 1.  I need an empty grave theology and why is that cross everywhere?

We glory in your cross – what does that even mean?  Why, why, why the suffering and the pain?

And then like a slow awareness spreading over me, as we repeat the liturgy and walk around the church, station after station, this small band of us, the 12 who showed up on Good Friday, it begins to seep in.  The cross is empathy.

We cannot always stand upright.
We share in his passion.
We bear our cross.
We walk in the way of his suffering and share in his resurrection.
Give us grace to accept sufferings.
Her tears run down her cheeks, and there is none to comfort her.
By your death you took away the sting.

And by this point the

Holy God,
Holy and Mighty,
Holy Immortal One,
Have mercy upon us

14 times over, has worked its gentle truth on my heart.

The Holy Week liturgy began with Palm Sunday celebration but quickly led to being a member of the crowd crying ‘Barabbas’ and ‘crucify him’, and ended with me standing and trying not to collapse into a puddle of tears as I read the final station.  If there’s anything I hate more than crying in public, it’s crying in front of people I don’t know very well.  But I stand and all of a sudden I know it to be the truest thing in the world.

You will not abandon me to the grave.

As I look back on these 6 months of being in the Episcopal Church, I realize I have been slowly led to the doorway of the open grave and I haven’t even known it.

Instead of bitter gall, I have been drinking the waters of affirmation and inclusion, being reminded so often that Episcopalian is about recognizing the image of God in everyone, loving God and loving others.

It feels like I am one of the dead, resurrected and walking around, all of a sudden surrounded by people who look and breathe like me.  I’m at church with feminists and universalists and people who drink and swear and talk without feeling like there are things you should or shouldn’t say, and I just kind of marvel at them, as if they are exotic creatures I’ve only heard about but never seen in daily life, and Lord, it is so freeing.  I am Lazarus and they have been unwrapping my grave clothes, but none of us even knew it.

You will not abandon me to the grave, and it’s true and all of a sudden, I know it, I feel it, and I know that this fragile thread keeping me connected to the Body, keeping me connected to Reality has  strengthened because of the people around me.  And all of a sudden all of the evangelical talk about ‘community groups’ makes sense, only it’s happening organically and maybe it’s just me.  Maybe there’s nothing inherently special about this building, this priest, these people so different from each other, their traditions and the Southern history, and why is this church, this faith, saving my life right now?  Why did Jesus heal some people and not others?  Why did some bodies come to life that Good Friday but not others?  I don’t know.  All I know is I am turning towards the light as one no longer abandoned, and for the first time in a long, long time, it feels like Easter.

Let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new.