A weak spring sunrise struggles to bust through fat, fleshy buds on the strengthening limbs. Birds calls incessant, ravenous and ignorant. Mild lunches thrown into stuffed backpacks, so many feet shuffle and clomp out the door. The dishes wait under a leaky faucet, along with deadlines and phone calls and paperwork and promises.
It is Good Friday. Does the world notice? Do I?
My intentions were good. They usually are, but my avowed morning reading lasted a mere week of Lent.
After the palling significant of Ash Wednesday, I’m buried again in soccer gear and carpool and The Usual. I feel disappointed, disconnected. And the sun’s half-hearted attempt to coax a smile is irritating. Don’t shine on me. It’s Good Friday. Have you no shame?
I have been drawn, instead, into the Passion of Friday Night Lights, which I’d been avoiding on the grounds that I get carried away, with story lines and characters. But I finally bit the fruit and fell headlong and knee-deep.
I wonder what it means that my best spiritual insight comes at the hands of novelists and Hollywood, which wouldn’t know authentic faith if it came labeled in a jar.
My dear new (fictional) friend, Tami Taylor, said this:
There is no weakness in forgiveness.
There is no weakness in His submission to authorities. There is no weakness in his scathed body. None whatsoever in the stumble to Golgotha and none in the final desperate gasp. There is none, no, no weakness at all, in a descent into hell, a place from which he spared us. And there most certainly is no weakness in that linen wrapped skin. No weakness in an empty cavern tomb.
So maybe I fail in my religious pursuits. Maybe I am weak. Maybe I lack discipline and faith. And maybe, when the bleak sun pokes a weary finger through the buds, and reaches my bare skinned face, maybe when I feel a glance of warmth in new spring, I can know where the real strength is.
