Good Friday - Holy Cross Monastery

So tired...to be expected, of course, when one gets up in the middle of the night.

Strangely outside of things and not sure why. Trying not to try, not to scrabble - to come back to just being here, and being with whatever's here.

Maybe I keep feeling out of touch because I keep insisting on trying to be in touch with what I thought the agenda was, at the beginning of Lent, instead of being where I actually am. And still, always, the little critic that says too late, too little, too much, not right. And we know all the verses to that old song.

Sad, mostly, is how I feel; sad and lonely and trying desperately not to be lonely. I don't really relish being away from home so much, for so long. I feel disconnected, uprooted...homeless. And yet when I finally after much travail came in the door Wednesday, that familiar scent washed over me and some part of me said, "Home!"

Difficult vigil - very different to settle. I did sit and watch; more than that I cannot say. And then in slipping out to go up to get the baskets, I discovered that the clouds had parted and the full moon was bright enough to walk by - so I took a detour from fetching the baskets to walk the labyrinth in the moonlight, in the middle of the night.

The path twists and turns, with only enough light to see by and not stumble (mostly). It's like the road I'm on - I simply hardly know where I go next or how to get there - I just try to keep walking within the lines.

I keep remembering something Bede said a couple years ago at one of the meditation retreats - that the more difficult it is to meditate, the more persistent you must be, because it usually means for him that something is about to break through. It would explain the seemingly endless tricks the split-off keeps tossing up.

Brief naplet before the morning meeting. More later.

Odd little dream - I was going on business to Dublin, although Don kept thinking I was going to Edinburgh, and I suddenly realized on the Friday before I was to leave that I had no passport, and so was frantically trying to call to see if I could arrange one.

Maybe not so odd...frantically trying to arrange a passport seems as good a metaphor as any for the temptation I fall into to be elsewhen or elsewhere, to try to relive or recreate rather than simply being with what is.

I did not ask for these wounds, any more than Jesus asked to be crucified. Whatever the sick and twisted in me may have done in complicity with my abusers - a torment he did not face, since he was without sin - I never asked them to abuse me. I never asked for betrayal, or abandonment, or scorn.

To kiss - to bless - the instrument of suffering -- more: to kiss and bless the very figure of suffering...I still do not quite consciously understand. I feel its power, but I do not quite understand.

I love that Bede is doing the talks this year, and that they're on the liturgies themselves: what will happen, and some of what that may produce.

And he reminds us that we cannot help that our minds wander; it's what minds do. Just keep bringing ourselves back, and being here, and wandering...and bring ourselves back...that's the practice. No one can pay perfect attention to everything; there's too much of it. Just notice what things your mind fastens on; go from there.

I find it interesting that my recollections of these days are always that they are deep days, full of awe and love and sorrow and joy. But when I go back to read what I wrote about them, the writing is full of struggle and frustration at my own inability to let go. Fascinating.

The hard day, the dark day, is almost over. I am astonished that I have spent almost no time focusing on the horror of Jesus' crucifixion, or grieving as one of the disciples who doesn't know he's coming back. I've just been here, been present as much as I can; felt mostly sad at what we human beings can do to each other - because we're still doing them.

Feeling, I think, a little of something Bede was talking about - the consolation of knowing more deeply that he is there, he has been there, he understands - I am not abandoned. Although I haven't spent time with it in the same way, I feel more like I'm inside it somehow...as we were last night, I feel gathered and held in this great heart; and although outside there is pain and horror and death, in here it is quiet and steady, going about its business, preparing for that which comes.

Before I forget again - it's Bonestark's Law that, simplified, says that the older an observance is and the more important, the more conservative the liturgy.

Funny - the place where I misted over tonight was the gospel, when Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus come to take the body of Jesus - come hurriedly and secretly to honor the body of their friend, and hastily wrap him and lay him in a tome nearby because it is near at hand and the hour is late. There's a tenderness, a loveliness of action - and yet a sadness that they could only bring themselves to come secretly at night. Perhaps if they were braver, less fearful, they might have spoken to prevent this horror instead of coming only belatedly to give honor to the dead who is now beyond any help but God's.

Prevent it! Prevent God from loving us so deeply? Even to enter this deeply into what happens to us in our lives? It was inevitable that this should happen - not that God somehow needed Jesus' suffering to forgive us - but that God needed to be this deeply part of us, this intimately connected to our mortality. Mere old age would not have done; what could an old man full of years who died peacefully have to do with the victims of Hiroshima, of Auschwitz, of the World Trade Center? God needed, God willed to be abused, to be killed - to show us, to give us the faintest glimmer at least - of how far he will go for us. We just wouldn't, just couldn't get it any other way - anything less dramatic and extravagant, we would not believe, could not identify with the utter abject blackness of the pits into which we cast ourselves. He could only rescue us by jumping in after us, even if it meant dying.

Almost dinnertime. I'm oddly not as hungry now as I was earlier - though I was having an awful time staying awake in Vespers. More later.

Excellent dinner - tuna casserole, salad, fruit - lovely.

Just not sad...not like I've been sometimes. Relieved. Comforted to know God does come into our lives and will come into our lives - just see if he won't! He will find ways, because it is his deepest desire - to be in it with us, to share with us in our humanity, and to share with us his divinity.

Wisdom says, "Be where you are. It is the only place you can be, and it is right where you need to be."

I also seem to be outlining a book in my head. Scary but hardly surprising.

I just have this strange sense of peace, of reassurance - "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

I cannot begin to imagine trying to explain this to the guys in Atlanta. Jay, I think, and Geoff and Larry, might get it; but I do not know about Brad or Bill. Well, I suppose we'll find out.

It also looks like I can make it for Pentecost - only just, but that still counts!

Guess I'll go read until Compline, and then bedtime.