Love alone connects

The energy of Good Friday always feels strangely silent and empty. God is entering into the pain and torment of the world so fully that He seems more silent, less present, more removed, even gone.

This is as it is in true suffering. You are removed by degrees from the world till the torture of your physical reality overwhelms and annihilates you. Empties you of everything, it seems, except the pain, the exquisite moment of unutterable torture that defies description yet in which you are absolutely caught.

Communication is no longer about dialogue. Words seem empty here. The person can no longer speak and tell of their experience.

Few are able to bear the pain of watching, waiting, being, with the person who suffers to the end, especially if that pain is drawn out over years and years. This is no longer a place of comfort, yet it is a place of the heart. It is a place where love is required, where love alone connects and stays with that person, where that person also can still connect with you, through love.

Love borne of the Spirit, remains connected, aids in some unspoken way, takes wings and flies out to greet and touch and somehow give strength in the bleakest, most barren, pain- wracked place. Love alone survives and ultimately holds us and brings healing despite the pain and grief.

As Jesus is dying on the cross, few remained. It was a barren and terrible place to be. Even the Father must have wept. For His Son could no longer feel His presence, such was His agony.

And yet, it is in this most difficult place that love triumphs. Despite the suffering, Christ enters into every single moment of agony in the world. He draws it to Himself and is so overloaded by distress, shame, horror, guilt, hurt and evil, that it must have been almost impossible to feel His Fathers love, yet still He reaches out, knowing that He is love, knowing the gift He can give, knowing that as He is physically broken, so the Spirit that heals transforms, transcends is released for all time.

What Power of love is here in this place, that despite such agony, such separation from all that is good, hopeful, true, beautiful, uplifting, joyful, precious, Christ opens His heart as He is physically dying, to embrace each one of us and offers us new life, a new way, a new path of Spirit that brings us to everlasting Hope.

As we in our individual suffering, whether in the agony of the cross or watching at the foot of the cross, enter into the meaning of Good Friday and contemplate, through experience, His passion, may we be reminded that we are bearing witness to absolute love and that even if we feel Him not, because our own suffering and grief is too great, yet still He is present and holding us too. And this is the place of profound miracle, because of His most precious gift of life. May we each experience this Holy power on this bleak and saddest of days. Amen