You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.
"Oh yeah, it's Good Friday" I said to myself a few minutes ago as I drove past Christ Episcopal Church and saw the service times on the marquee out front.
We've come a long way since that spring noonday, not so long ago, when I ascended into the pulpit to blather at a roomful of true believers, the kind who make time for church during Holy Week on a Friday, about whatever inspired bit of psychobabble I'd written for the occasion. This was a big week for clergy, the biggest of the year, with three or four services packed into four days, culminating in the story of the empty tomb and the terrified women running down the footpath thinking graverobbers were nearby.
But that moment of rebirth and realization stands a couple days away. I'll miss that service as well, most likely, because we'll be in Boston with Issac and Olivia, and the pile of clothes Peg's left for me to pack is sufficiently informal that I may reasonably infer her plans do not include any sort of formal worship this Sunday.
Today is the low water mark of the narrative, when the betrayed Man-God betrayed himself stripped, humiliated, nailed to two boards in a public place as a warning to other zealots of what lies in store for those who defy the empire. And the story ends in death, the ultimate absurdity of human existence, ceasing to be. Although one might conclude from John's Gospel that the whole thing was a show, that Jesus sighed "it is finished" and played possum for a couple days, always knowing how the story would end, the earliest traditions make clear that there was a no kidding death, in agony, on the cross, with the victim crying bewildered at how he ended up in this awful place. His mother, his best friend, the passers by and scoffers; all of them witnessed a life coming to an end that day.
Is that the only way, death and rebirth? It is certainly the way of nature, with the detritus and organic ooze of past life providing the means of regeneration, season after season. Is Elohim trapped in this pattern himself, such that the only way he could proclaim something new, the Kingdom of God in this age, was by dying?
Hell if I know. I got the Cliff Notes version of seminary, and obviously my "formation" wasn't all that formative, given my relatively short tenure. A half-baked cleric, I am.
But I do find myself thinking of these things, perhaps out of habit, as I observe a season of my life coming to an end. Almost exactly two years ago the world shut down, and in the process gave us a once in a century opportunity to stop and observe how we were living our lives up to then, to take stock of priorities, to ponder and experiment with new ways of working and living. It was like the time from Jesus's baptism through the middle of this day, a moment of revelation and wonder, when things seemed possible we could not even imagine just a few weeks before.
Now that season draws to a close. Work intrudes more into each day, keeping me engaged well into every evening, as the justice system thaws and its gears start turning as before. The dream of working wherever one can find an internet connection now fades, with that sort of remote work becoming the exception for me rather than the rule. Florida Man finds he can't quite escape Florida. Even reserving the time to engage in this bit of intellectual onanism has become a major challenge, a constant exercise of robbing Peter to pay Paul as I shuffle my schedule every day.
But maybe there will yet be an Easter to this Good Friday, a new season of life that is, to use the well-worn phrase one learns at seminary to describe the age between the Ascension and the Second Coming, "already but not yet." Maybe some of what we learned during this Magic Time will stick, and we'll do things a little differently knowing that the office won't tumble to the ground if I'm not there. Maybe P and I will find a "place for us", as Stephen Sondheim put it, a place "where we'll find a new way of living."
Not now, however. The little alarm on my computer warns that in fifteen minutes one of my neediest clients has scheduled a call to tell me how to litigate his case, as he does for an hour or so every week. Of course I'll get paid for this exercise, but I'd forgo it all the same if I could. Somewhere, someday. Easter's right around the corner.
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