I am writing this just ten days before Good Friday, a dozen days before Easter. I feel compelled to speak of these central feasts of the church in relationship with the world around us.

It feels odd to call Good Friday a central feast, doesn’t it? Most of us feel like the resurrection is the big deal; the crucifixion was the seemingly necessary nastiness beforehand. Resurrection, on the other hand, means that the story has a happy ending, so we can relax. We can be hopeful.

But if we’re really interested in hope—not just cheerful platitudes, but the kind of hope that has traction in a world where bombs are dropped on schools and dairy farms, where hundreds of protesters are gunned down in the streets, where vanity and greed are worshipped—then let me invite you to spend some time with the crucifixion.

I’m not asking you to get sappy sad; I don’t think it’s useful to beat our breasts, weep hysterically and say, “I caused this.” We can say, however, that Jesus died for our sins. More accurately, that Jesus died BECAUSE of sin, because the instinctual nature of human beings is to be fearful, confused, and defensive. Those feelings, unexamined and unchecked, always result in harm to others. Our fearful, self-protective, instinctual decision that only our own comfort and safety matter—that constitutes the heart of sin. 

But we humans are more than instinctual beings, aren’t we? 

I ask you to consider the fact that Jesus, a real human being with all those instinctual reactions, still managed to hang onto his soul during his execution by the government. He was not exempt from the human experiences of abandonment, humiliation, and pain. But that wasn’t the entirety of his experience. There was “more.” In the midst of his own dying, he lived out that “more” by expressing compassion to the thief hanging beside him, and forgiveness to the centurions who mocked him. In the midst of his own dying, he was able to keep contact with the Infinite Holy, God His Father, The Love-at-the-Centre-of-the-Universe. Even as he cries out at the end, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” that cry claims relationship. He is aware of the MORE.

What the crucifixion tells us is that to be a full human being is to be tethered not only to the instinctual body but also and always to the spirit, to Love. The crucifixion shows this in a particularly vivid way. It lets us know that we too are capable of being tethered to both body and soul. We have a path, a way, shown to us by Jesus, where the spirit wraps the entirety of our lives in “more.” Where LOVE wraps and grounds all that exists. This is our hope, our grounded hope: that walking the way of Jesus will ultimately connect us, forever, to the MORE. That walking the way of Jesus is how we heal the world and heal ourselves from this painful fracture between body and soul.

In stillness nailed,

To hold all time,

All change, 

All circumstance in and to Love’s embrace. *

Blessings in this Passion Time,

Therese

This poem was written by an unnamed nun in the congregation of the Sisters of the Love of God.