Words of The Lamb magazine

by Ann Stout

Maundy Thursday

&&& My husband John asks me if Good Friday is as important to me as Easter. Easter is full of sunshine and pastel colors. Good Friday is a heavy place, a sluggish day. They are antipodes and one can only exist because of the other.
&&& I prepare for both at the Maundy Thursday evening service. Maundy comes from the Latin “mandatum”, or commandment. After Jesus washed his disciples’ feet for the Last Supper, he gave them a new commandment— serve one another.
&&& It has been a beautiful spring day. Though I have joined another church, I want to be surrounded with the comforting ritual and richness of my Episcopal roots. I remember last year when I poured the warm water over the strangely white feet of a strange man and cradled the high insteps as I toweled them off. I remember his feet, and not his face. I remember the feeling. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.
&&& But this year John isn’t interested in going, and a friend cancels at the last minute, and it feels less important without someone to share it with. By the time evening comes I am tired, worn out from a long solitary bike ride and a later walk with another friend. My ears are tired of listening, my body longs for the refuge and quiet of my home. If I skip the service, I will be there to offer comfort to John when he comes home after a hard day’s work.
&&& So, my feet stayed unwashed, and I miss touching a stranger, and fortifying my spirit for the sadness of Friday to come. It comes early. John doesn’t need me, he finds solace another way, and I feel betrayed. I spend a stormy night alone crying. God take this cup from me. I spend the midnight hours wandering the garden of my mind, cataloging the plantings and disappointing seeds of last year and hoping for resurrection in the morning. I weep, and then finally, I sleep. Not my will but thine be done.

Good Friday

&&& Good Friday dawns cloudy and humid; the former good weather as depleted as me. Although I’m sure the Farmer’s Almanac would disprove me, in my memory Good Friday is usually freighted with lowering clouds, a darkening around 3 p.m., a pre-tornado type of disturbance in the air. I pass the hours before The Hour with unimportant errands and a joyless purchase of Home Depot bedding plants. I walk the Via Dolorosa alone, with no one to help carry my cross — the feeling that something is just not right, and you know what it is, but it is too painful or tender to put words to even in the safety of your own skull, so you trudge along in silence, watching the hands tick towards three o’clock and then….
Nothing happens.
&&& And the empty feeling persists, and sometimes images of crying mothers and dead children and unutterable loss come which don’t fill up the emptiness but make it bigger, so that despite all the pain you are holding you still feel bereft. &&& Three o’clock finds me on my knees in my garden burying the bodies of the new plants under the dirt, waiting for the time the stone will roll back from the heavy darkness of my heart and I will be able to imagine colorful blossoms reaching toward heaven.

Tenebrae

&&& As evening falls, I head towards my new church to help usher in the darkness before the dawn. I am glad to be going on my own. I drive under the live oaks, their arching branches hurrying the evening on. The Resurrection ferns that cover the larger boughs are brittle and brown, all but dead, until the next good rain revives them. I pass the Holocaust Museum and park beside the gravel labyrinth. A slender girl in braids marks the path with her dusty feet. I enter the sanctuary, take a seat in an empty row, and lower my head to pray.
&&& A hand gently touches my shoulder from behind. I turn and see Jan leaning towards me.
&&& “I’m sorry to bother you,” comes her husky voice. “I just wanted to thank you for being so wonderful to the Marshalls, they really appreciate all you are doing.”
&&& I smile up at her. “Thank you for telling me that.”
&&&“You are just wonderful,” she says, and squeezes my shoulder. I turn back and feel lighter, somehow redeemed. Mrs. Marshall is in hospice care.
&&& Sometimes I visit her and rub her feet with scented oil. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. I look at the evening light through the windows, broken by the naked
branches of the large pecan tree. I can’t remember if it leafed out last spring after the big freeze. Did I miss its resurrection? Surely it can’t be dead. In a little while you will see me no
more, and then after a little while you will see me.
&&& Eight candles are lit near the alter. Eight candles in the Menorah. This Good Friday falls during Passover, a reminder that all our lives are entwined. They come together and pull apart again. Opening and closing like the ribs in our chest, moving as breath and spirit. The service starts and the sacred stories of Jesus’s last days are read — of love and betrayal, of friendship and broken promises, of fear and acceptance, of midnight gardens and unanswered prayers. After each reading a candle is extinguished, and I watch the worship leader stretch out her arm through empty space and lowers the brass candle snuffer over the golden flame.
Now here, now gone.
&&& Evening falls along with the flames. The window darkens. I love this dark church as much as I loved its bright aspect before. As much as I can love the dark parts of John. By the time the service ends the window is as pitch black as the mouth of a tomb, the branches have melted into the night and the candles are out. I leave in silence, but this silence holds hope and promise. A warm evening breeze caresses me.

Holy Saturday

&&& This day of this year is wholly wonderful. My son Edward flies in from Minneapolis with Lisa. They have come during Easter weekend, to escape the long winter and watch her new engagement ring sparkle in the sun. They are not Easter people, but they have come to visit and that is enough. With them I forget the silent grave. Their life spreads before them like a wedding feast that will never run short of wine.

Easter Sunday

&&& “Christ is risen!” greets me on a 5 a.m. text from my sister
&&& “He is risen indeed!” I text back, the way our mother used to. These words resurrect her. My other sister Elizabeth calls, and we sing together:
&&& Hail thee festival day, blest day that art hallowed forever;
&&& Day where-on Christ arose, breaking the kingdom of death!
I bring out the chocolate bunnies and peanut butter eggs and place them for Edward and Lisa to notice when they wake up. I drive to the Kolache Factory and bring the hot buns without crosses since Good Friday is over and Easter is here. Oh Death, where is your sting?
&&& I head to church and am glad to be going on my own. The others will join me later. I drive under the live oaks, their arching branches cradling the growing light. I pass the Art Museum and park beside the gravel labyrinth. The path is empty, the tomb is empty. I enter the narthex, put on my gloves, and lift my gleaming brass bells.
&&& The hand bells ring and sing as we practice, and then it is time for fellowship and more hot buns—homemade biscuits slathered with golden marmalade and cherry jam dark as blood. I sit at a table alongside a broken body and a resurrected family. The older son George has come through another difficult surgery. He is handsome and tipped sideways in his wheelchair. His blue eyes dart sidelong glances at nothing in particular.
&&& His body is dressed in Easter raiment, his loving mother sits beside him. His young brother Nick glowers, carrying all the emotional pain of this family in his tight body and tucked chin. If he was Judas, he would betray them. How dare I try and talk to him. He can control his eyes so he avoids mine. Susan limps over, drawn to George as we are always drawn to suffering worse than ours. There but for the Grace of God go I. She offers a gift, an Easter gift, and the mother opens it for George while Nick looks on since George cannot. And there is no gift for Nick. And it is a Veggie Tales book which George supposedly loves but how do you know when his eyes dart sideways.
&&& And George cannot choose to smile or frown, but Nick can, and chooses the latter. Their mother has a name, and I learn it is Elizabeth (nothing is coincidence, oh sister of mine and cousin of Mary and mother of John the Baptist who lost his head for Christ). I ask her the predictable question of what she does when she’s not doing what she does most of the time, which is probably caring for George, and she mentions her other-than-mother titles: editor of this and manager of that.
&&& Nick who seems to be ignoring us leans in and whispers to remind her of who she is.
&&& “Oh yes, I am a writer” she says. So am I. Nick the prophet, Nick the sage, nothing is coincidence.
&&& It is time for the service, so I head back to the sanctuary, and it is starting to fill up and I see everyone I love and some I don’t yet. Dan of the excellent letter writing skills and Easter egg colored jackets is in a corner and I talk to him about writing more letters, and Max arrives wearing a garment of white bright against his dark skin and he thanks me for the card I sent (the Howard Thurman one that I bought at the craft fair in Minneapolis visiting Edward and Lisa) and then we run out of things to say so he moves on because we have said enough.
&&& I look up and Edward and Lisa and John are there, and I am so happy to see them in this place I love, because it is like the beautiful Italian villa in the movie Enchanted April, and I know it will work its spell on them too. And I sit behind them but next to the slender young girl with the braids of the labyrinth walk who smiles a real smile at me, and the singing and the words and the service and the love and the bright white light falling on us from the window and the bells are enough. But then we are invited up, those who wish to, to sing the Hallelujah chorus whether we can sing or not and Lisa stands on one side of me and the girl with the braids on the other side. My cup runneth over. This Easter day is the antipodal one to Good Friday.
&&& The antidote to Friday. The Good. God.