It's bright today --- sunny Good Fridays make me think of the irony of everything going on as usual, rather like the world in Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts," but instead of Icarus's white legs waving from the sea, the Crucifixion in a tiny corner, in a world where news travels slowly. A tiny thing happening, and a mundane thing, just another day in the life of the Roman Empire, another round of public executions to enliven, horribly, the ordinary noontime. Hammer strokes, a usual sound. You wonder where, in the reaches of space, those echoes are now. All of them must be quivering somewhere, vibrations out in that void. Only one set, though, vibrates through time, to disrupt our own air, our own day, our own world. One death, of all those who-knows-how-many cruel deaths, changed and changes and will always change, everything.
Here, of course, we're doing the usual Good Friday things: fasting, keeping quiet, eventually going back to church. After many years, all those things start to seem as mundane and un-profound as the Crucifixion itself must have seemed in its own time. This again. The year swings around, the mysteries present themselves as, perhaps, not so mysterious anymore, but part of the routine. But that's a human problem, not God's problem. This human problem, like any other, does not make God any less God, the profundity of what He has done for us any less than what it is. The human problem is just a thing to shoulder while getting on with the real business, which is not made less real by feeling, maybe, a little too familiar. That's simply another cross, and the only thing to do is pick it up and carry it.
I think I'll refrain from an outfit posting today. Just assume I'm wearing some red.