Good Friday - Suffering and Death - a poet

Just coming back from my Chair Yoga class and feeling particularly loose and comfortable in my skeleton as a result. A thread of texts from my Woodbury Friends Meeting reminded me of two things: the film - The Ten Commandments, and Shrove Tuesday pancakes!

For those of us who consume pancakes on Easter Sunday but don't any longer remember how the tradition began, here it is: On Shrove Tuesday, we frail and sinful mortals confess our transgressions and get ready for the fast - we "shrive" and hence, when we are through, we "shrove." To be thrifty, we use up our perishables (the tradition began before refrigeration) such as eggs and milk and fats, so we prepare for the fasting season by eating pancakes.

Today, for Christians, it is Holy Friday, or Good Friday. This is the day when Jesus Christ, having been tried and convicted on Maundy Thursday, of blasphemy by The Roman's puppet government in Judea (who actually thought he was a revolutionary and meant to overthrow the occupying Roman army) crucified him. He died between noon and 3:00 p.m. in pain and suffering. He actually was a revolutionary and did eventually overthrow the Roman army philosophically.

We all die eventually and many of us in pain and suffering, and I was thinking about that today because and old friend and gifted poet, Dan Maguire died recently. I only just found out because I don't have facebook any more having deleted it in protest of the junk that funneled through it like a sewer pipe. He was a brilliant, talented and vibrant human being who suffered a series of brain aneurisms, although I don't know if that is what finally killed him. He had moved to Baltimore and I lost touch with him but had tracked him down into a care facility in New Jersey. He had told me a long time ago that he was not able to take care of himself anymore and his home had fallen into squalor. His son had come to help him and undoubtedly surmised he needed full time care and gathered the other offspring to make appropriate arrangemtns. March would have been his birthday.

Like many old people, I am reminded of the other deaths that have been way staions on my own journey, my great-grandmother's death, my grandmothers' deaths, my own parents' deaths. I am the oldest sibling, so I will no doubt be the first of my immediate family of offspring to die. Usually I have said to myself and friends when we discuss age and dying, that I don't fear death but I fear disability. My mother suffered a stroke and 6 months of wheelchair paralysis before death saved her in December of 2000. I wouldn't want that fate. But my mother bore it with Christlike patience and submission.

My father's death was more rapid and he was fairly able until the last two weeks and then had hospice care before he was safely and humanely assisted out of his mortal coil. I have no idea what will happen to me.

Jesus was on the cross from 9:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. We know he asked God why he was forsaken. We also know that his being and his teachings went on to transform the Barbarous ancient world through the martyrdom of thousands of early Christians and disciples who spread the words of Love, forgiveness, compassion and generosity. Like Jesus they forgave their tormenters because the cruel and barbarous "knew not what they did." Thos lost souls were ignorant of and blind to the light of goodness and love. I haven't had much personal experience of committing cruelty but I am certain it doesn't feel good afterwards. I imagine it hurts like some internal bramble bush with wicked thorns.

Back to the origin of this essay, however, The Ten Commandemnts - the film! We were talking on the Woodbury thread about Easter traditions, hence the foray into pancakes. We also talked about the annual family film festival. All of us had shared the experience of watching The Ten Commandments and Easter Parade. I remembered the opening years of the great epics when Technicolor had just been invented and Cinemascope.

On our high school graduation trip to Washington DC in 1963, we were treat to the extravaganza of The Ten Commandments for the first time in Cinemascope. The movie screen was gigantic and the layers of heavy gold curtains were drawn back dramatically to the waves of orchestral music that washed over us and then BOOM! Huge, spectacularly bright and vivid colors so large and so loud that we were immersed in the film, drowned in it, swept away in it. It was as though God spoke directly to us in that film. Remember, television ahd only recently become available to those families with union working fathers who had the expendible cash to be able to buy this new luxury item. My grandfather had the first tv in our entire neighborhood, then my father bought one, and the screen was small and the images were in black and white.

I still remember the first movies I saw on the BIG SCREEN in technicolor - the great epics withe the swelling tidal wave of orchestral sound that carried them - Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and of course, that first introductory film, Ten Commandments.

I will watch that tonight on my small laptop screen through some streaming video service, probably netflix, but I will remember the glamor and the drama of the original viewing when I was a child and went to the matinee in our home-town theater with my blanket and my pillow because the Ten Commandments was sooooo long!

And all weekend, I will drift into thoughts of Jesus, how he died to show us the way to face our human destiny with the courage of gentleness and submission rather than the rage of unbridled beast-heart. I will read the Sermon on the Mount again and strive to incorporate those thoughts and instructions into my life.

Happy Easter! Jesus Christ and all he represent of the better part of human nature may have died in one way but his teachings have lived on into immortality in the souls of millions around the world.

Peace and Love!