Between Sorrow And Joy

I recently read someone’s observation that Good Friday is the end of all things, and also the beginning of all things. The phrase is a barbed one; it stings and stays with me.

I think on how Christ’s disciples must have felt after their master was lowered from the cross. limp and bloodless and silent as a slaughtered lamb. The women took charge of caring for His body, and they must have discussed the burial details with the generous Arimathean, Joseph, and the men present must have seen the body taken away, and then the reality settled down on them. How silent it must have been. In their shock and grief, how they must have missed His voice, His proddings, His questions, His affection for them. And there they sat in that rented room above another room, reminiscing in whispers, perhaps quietly weeping, accusing themselves, voices strangled with hurt and impotent anger about the civic and ecclesiastical cruelty they had witnessed…and hadn’t tried to stop.

How long that silent Saturday must have felt to them, the followers who were in raw pain, the pain exacerbated by being stretched like harp strings by the tension, the waiting, the fear of being arrested and charged as His followers. The questions clanging around in their minds, the doubts, the dismal fear that they had wasted their time, that they had been misled. How many of them grit their teeth and vowed to never again follow a charismatic leader, never again to throw all their energies and loyalty towards one person or one idea or one goal.

And how they must have thought, What for us, now? We are lost, we are abandoned, we are rudderless on this vast lake with its storms and waves and winds…and who will pilot us? What will we do? To what will we turn next, and how will that end up?

How I relate to this speculative scene. How I understand such ragged feelings.

Here I am, between faith and Faith, between being merely taught and being loved and tended. I want to be strong and free, but I also want to sit in the presence of Someone Who actually knows truth, not merely blathers about what he was told truth is.

The disciples shivered and waited, and they were rewarded with the glad news that He had been truthful and that He was arisen from the death they’d witnessed. I sit here, tucked into myself, ranging across the desert of my own fear and anger and suspicion, waiting for something inside me to shift, to turn, to push up like a seedling towards light and warmth.

I went out just now and took a cutting from the dogwood nearest to the house. I put it in a little Japanese vase and set it up on what I think of as my Catholic shelf in the living room.

I do not know how this interior battle will end. I do not know many things.

But I am glad the dogwoods bloomed, and that I am in a house full of love and warmth and peace. This is the last stretch before Easter Sunday. Who can say what will come tomorrow when that great fiery orb climbs up above the eastern ridgeline?

Perhaps there might even be joy back there somewhere. Joy or contentment. Either would be welcome.

~ S.K. Orr