Good Friday

There is no Easter without today, Good Friday. Without the death and pain and isolation of the cross, there is no triumphant resurrection. And too often, we like to gloss over today. We like to skip ahead to the good part. As a kid I always thought it weird that Good Friday was celebrated on Friday evening, and then a Saturday evening Easter Vigil service just 24 hours later kicked off the celebrations of Eastertide. Wasn’t Jesus supposed to rise on the third day, not the very next day? It felt too rushed to me twenty years ago, and it does even more now.

Too often, I think we just aren’t comfortable sitting with tragedy, with death. We’d prefer to skip ahead to when things get good again. So we heap well-meaning platitudes on those who need to wallow for a little, and we force-feed encouragements to those who need to fast for a day or two. Sometimes there are no appropriate words though, and the most helpful thing we can do is to just sit with and be company to those who mourn, like Job’s friends did, before they opened their mouths and made everything worse. Many times, when tragedy strikes, words of encouragement or attempts to find meaning aren’t half as useful as simply being present, whether that’s physically visiting someone or letting them know you’re there for them, you’re thinking of them, and you’re available to talk when the time comes for that.

Now, Good Friday is not fun. It’s deeply uncomfortable, in fact. I get why we like to rush ahead and celebrate Easter as soon as possible. But I also caution against this. Life doesn’t fast-forward to the good parts. Sometimes we go through years of Good Fridays at a time, with no clear Easter in sight. We need to make space for that too, and not expect everything to be bright sunrises, blooming lilies, and bare, empty tombs by the next day. So this weekend, take a moment to sit with the realities of Good Friday before rushing ahead to Easter.

Warning: This Post has No Conclusion

I know conventional wisdom says to know your audience and say what they want to hear and have an intro, three points, and always, always a conclusion. But I just don’t feel like following that right now. I’ve started six or seven blog posts in the last month and I haven’t been able to finish any of them. They’re not assembling themselves into anything coherent and I just can’t seem to find a conclusion or a main point to any of them. They’re all rambling and disorganized.

I thought perhaps that might be useful though, or at least mildly interesting. Perhaps people might want to read thoughts that don’t have a tidy answer and might not even be asking a question. So here goes:

Too often, theological and secular responses to suffering focus on the periphery. Too often, when we ask why a loved one had to die, we’re more concerned with why we had to lose them, rather than why they had to lose everything. As we practice theology, as we seek answers for the hard questions in life, we find meaning that suits the people who are still alive. That makes sense, as the living tend to be the ones having all the conversations in much the same way as the winners write the history books, but the answers of the living invariably fail the dying, just as history books fail to accurately tell the stories of the people who lose.

Because of this bias, we get platitudinous answers that just don’t work if you’re dying, however slowly. They’re usually vague and unhelpful, something about growing through hardship, a door closing and a window opening, or what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Sometimes though, what doesn’t kill just leaves you weaker, a little closer to death. Sometimes, what doesn’t kill you simply hasn’t killed you yet.

But it will. Give it time, and it will.

There aren't a lot of warm, fuzzy sayings for that. There aren’t a lot of comforting theologies that acknowledge this reality. That’s probably because dying isn’t particularly warm, fuzzy, or comfortable. But if we’re going to talk about suffering and death in ways that don’t fail people experiencing pain and hardships and wondering if they’ll live through the next day or week or month or year, we’re going to have to get over that. We have to do better than saying “well, I’m sure your impending death sucks, but at least you’re becoming a better person through it, right? Every cloud has a silver lining!”

Fortunately, I think people are realizing this more and more. There’s a growing focus on actually letting people tell their own stories, and it thankfully includes letting those who are themselves dying have a greater platform to speak on death than people who have thought about it from a distance instead of experiencing it firsthand. It’s still annoying to see books on suffering written by people with incredibly privileged lives who haven't really experienced anything especially tragic or difficult, especially as I’ve been pitching my book on—among other things—why suffering exists for over a year now, but it’s OK, I guess. We're trending towards more Own Voices in literature and public discourse, and that's all I can really ask for.

See, I really don’t have a conclusion here. Maybe I’m just whining. I’ll let you judge that for yourself.

Where, O Death, is thy Sting?

We’re all going to die. This gets covered in detail on Ash Wednesday, and we The Church tend to think about it more than usual throughout the season of Lent, so I thought it an appropriate subject for today. Death is the inevitable result of life, and eventually it claims us all. But that’s not the real tragedy. What’s sad to me is that so many people fear dying, rather than look forward to it at least a little.

And I get it. Nobody knows for sure what happens when we die. Every religion (and lack thereof) is a faith, after all, not a set of certain, verifiable knowledge. There’s something undeniably scary about that. Death is unfamiliar and unknowable, and all too often death comes too soon, too preventably, and so senselessly that we are right to lament it.

I also don’t mean to suggest that I can’t wait to die. I love life. I will never have enough time with my wife, and there are dozens of things I hope to accomplish yet in this world. That’s why I’m putting myself through just about every kind of cancer treatment ever invented and trying experimental therapies still in testing in an attempt to buy just a bit more time. So it’s utterly and thoroughly untrue that I want to die, and the sooner the better.

Yet dying means an end to suffering. For me, it will bring relief from the grueling slog of cancer treatments I’ve endured for over three years. So it’ll be fine, though much more for me than for those I leave behind. Others will be heartbroken or at least a little sad. I’ll simply be at peace. I thought I was dying a few months ago when I triggered a Code Blue during an immunotherapy infusion, and my only thought in that moment was “they should probably just let me go at this point, rather than continue working to keep me around.” Not in so many words, perhaps, but that was the gist of it. I’m glad that was my reaction. I’m glad I’ve made my peace with the inevitable, should it come tomorrow or in twenty years.

Too often, Christians are absurdly fearful of death. It makes about as much sense to me as those who simultaneously fear “signs of the End Times” while hoping for a sudden deliverance from this world and all its troubles. Those of us who believe an eternal life with God awaits us after death should look forward to that. Sure, saying ‘see you later’ to those who go before us—or those we leave behind when we go ourselves—isn’t exactly fun. But they’re only temporary partings, and life eternal that’s free from sin and suffering sounds pretty great.