This life is too beautiful not to wail, and cry, and withdraw into silence when it ends.
This life is too beautiful not to wail, and cry, and withdraw into silence when it ends.
O Lord, I heard Thy report, and was afraid: I considered thy works, and was amazed. —Habakkuk 3:2
A t my parish, on Good Friday, the priest and deacons wear black vestments. They wear them the same way that priests used to wear black vestments at requiems and funerals. The same way I demanded that they be worn for my mother’s funeral. This was all normal, before we decided that death and mourning were enormities too miserable to face squarely, and we decided to presumptively skip ahead to the idea of joy everlasting. Good Friday used to be known as Black Friday, before we gave that to the merchants.
I’m grateful that the traditional Liturgy of the Presanctified is nearly silent, and fearful that the high priest in Rome will ban it by next year. All the normal parts of the Mass that the congregation sings sweetly are stripped away. The drama of the Passion week is allowed to settle on us — the crowds that had greeted the Savior with palms and in hope, in His humbled version of the Roman triumph, now screaming hysterically for His execution. The betrayal of His chosen friend, Judas. Then Judas falling into despair and suicide. The denials by Peter, who had so recently vowed to die for Christ and only managed to maim someone. In the quiet, we can make out, faintly, the titanic culture clash between Jerusalem’s priests and its Roman rulers. The first, searching for any sign of blasphemy against the one true God. The latter, asking, half-cynically, half-philosophically: What is truth?
When the Passion of Saint John is chanted, the voice of the crowd is given to the choir, the representatives of the whole congregation. No sterner reminder could be given that every congregation, every gathering of God’s people, can be perverted into an appalling religious mob.
The Passion of Jesus Christ is glorious, but it is sad. The week began with thousands of Jews feeling their prayers for deliverance suddenly answered. This reputed miracle worker would restore the Davidic Kingdom, tear down the rule of the pagan Romans, and untie the knots that were binding Jewish society. His advent would undo and redeem the feeling of betrayal at those priests or tax collectors who seemed to collaborate with the occupiers of God’s Holy Land. After centuries of silence from the heavens, centuries like those passed in Egypt before Moses, God’s answer was here.
Then it all went sideways. The Prince of Peace was crowned with thorns. The religious mob goes down in liturgy and history mocking the Lamb of God. They spat on the very fulfillment of the promise given to Abraham after the angel held back his arm. The powers within the Jewish community and the Roman occupiers, always at odds, suddenly became collaborators in the most unjust murder in human history.
It’s fitting to wear black on Black Friday and at funerals, because mourning is appropriate to man. To try to skip ahead — turning requiems into mini-canonizations, or celebrations of the hereafter — is to do an injustice to this life.
In this life, we enjoy a world that God created and deemed “good.” If we live into old age, we begin to lose the good things of this life. Youthful vigor, usually. Like Christ in His final days, we suffer the loss of our friends — through betrayals, through indifference, and through attrition. Old age’s tortures are mild, but they have the same effects as real tortures: draining away the sharpness of our minds, the consolation of our memories, even our full capacity to smell, taste, and hear. Maybe even to know ourselves. Like Jesus, we come to depend on strangers or bystanders — Simon of Cyrene, Veronica, Joseph of Arimathea.
Life in this world is good, and we should hold on to it, if not too tightly. There is joy unending in the hereafter, but we need to mourn the joys that ended in this life. For me: listening to Miles Davis records with my uncle as a young child, seeing my children climb the impossible dunes at the Five Finger Strand in Donegal, smelling our home’s lilac bush in the humid summer days when I played catch with my youngest son, feeling the silky touch of my wife’s hair in my hands, hearing the crackling of lamb’s fat in the fire on Easter Sunday, shivering at the sudden chill on my skin as an Indian summer evening in Maine turned to night. In a way, all these glories die with me when I die. So too all the thousands of glories that attach to your life die with you too.
The great requiems from Mozart and Giovanni Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater were written to give God glory and to dignify any man’s or woman’s death — and life — with its proper due. The juice of a ripe pear, the incense of Korean viburnum, and the quiet diminution of your favorite love song are not fully honored until we are allowed to mourn again. God deliver us from a culture that would narcotize us, that tries to turn heaven into an opiate for our pains, rather than a reward for our suffering. This life is too beautiful not to wail, and cry, and withdraw into silence when it ends. Make priests wear black again.