Good Friday

I often don’t know what to do with Good Friday. Somehow this day with Jesus is most profound when I do nothing, allowing Jesus to do everything.

After the stripping of the altar last night, everyone left the church in silence. June and I drove home with little to say. We jotted down the addresses of a few homes for sale in a small corner of McDonough, Georgia, while driving around. Then we headed back to Jackson Lake.

I woke up this morning early. After Prayers I went outside to put a few things away in case of rain. In an hour or so we’ll drive back to McDonough to help the parish at First Baptist Church provide and serve dinners for an anticipated three hundred less fortunate people who surely need and appreciate a decent meal. No doubt there will be preaching and singing of songs. While I will listen, I suspect that mostly I'll simply try to help out as best I can whether serving dinners, doing what's asked, or simply enjoying the faces of people whom I'd like to know.

While I realize that some of us will worship in various churches (the folks at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in McDonough will do the ten evangelical “Stations of the Cross”), my own Good Friday afternoon will most likely be a walk somewhere as I look for some quiet time, some opening for solitude and silence. During that time (if it comes), I’m not sure what I’ll do, say, think, or whatever. I might well be at a loss for words and thoughts, more of less feeling empty, dried out. It during such times when I may not know how to pray that I remember what Francois de Salignac Fenelon (1651-1715) once said:

MANY are tempted to believe that they no longer pray, when they cease to
enjoy a certain pleasure in the act of prayer. But, if they will reflect that perfect prayer is only another name for love to God, they will be undeceived.

Prayer, then, does not consist in sweet feelings, nor in the charms of an excited imagination, nor in that illumination of the intellect that traces with ease the sublimest truths in God; nor even in a certain consolation in the view of God: all these things are external gifts . . . .

Remember our Lord abandoned by his Father on the cross: all feeling, all reflection withdrawn that his God might be hidden from him; this was indeed the last blow that fell upon the man of sorrows, the consummation of the sacrifice.

Never should we so abandon ourselves to God as when He seems to abandon us. Let us enjoy light and consolation when it is his pleasure to give it to us, but let us not attach ourselves to his gifts, but to Him; and when He plunges us into the night of Pure Faith, let us still press on through the agonizing darkness.

Moments are worth days in this tribulation; the soul is troubled and yet at peace; not only is God hidden from it, but it is hidden from itself, that all may be of faith; it is discouraged, but feels nevertheless an immovable will to bear all that God may choose to inflict; it wills all, accepts all, even the troubles that try its faith, and thus in the very height of the tempest, the waters beneath are secretly calm and at peace, because its Will is one with God's. Blessed be the Lord who performs such great things in us, notwithstanding our unworthiness.

Christian Perfection, VII, On Prayer