For many, this may well be a sterile liturgy that simply tells a story far removed from our experience. Yet for me, it is tantamount to reliving the events of the day someone I loved very much died. I think of my son Michael. Could I bear to relive his death every year in vivid detail, complete with passionate music about how he died, embroidered with graphic scenes of the suffering he endured? And hearing the words of people who were there tell how it went?
I don't think I could do it. Seeing and hearing every nuance of the way Michael died would be devastating to me. Its difficult enough to look at pictures of Michael that portray happy events like Christmas and birthday celebrations. It would get no easier over time. In my thinking about his death now, I am less distressed than I was the year it happened, mostly because my memory is so selective about what I choose to recall. And when the horrifying scenes try to surface, I can refuse them.
But the portrayal at Asbury does not allow you to refuse to think about what happened that day. Even if much of what I am seeing and hearing is someone else's idea about the way it happened, it is still extraordinarily jolting. I cannot help but cry, feel wretched, want to make the lash less ripping, the nails less piercing, the pain and blood stop, the cruelty to go away.
It is much easier on the heartstrings to consider this less intense poem I wrote awhile back - but perhaps not as effective in helping me appreciate God:
God yet man
One fatal moment.
Jesus' cry
For our atonement.
Blood for Adam
And for I
Spilling from
His riven side.
Satan doomed.
Sin defeated
As the royal blood depleted.
Soon victorious He'll stand
From his throne the world command.
Bow your knee,
Your heart,
Your head.
Knowing this - he's not long dead.
He'll arise and so will I.
He will meet me in the sky.
Life eternal we will share
As we breathe celestial air.
Well, packed into those words reside all the angst and trouble of the crucifixion, even though one cannot hear the reality anywhere nearly as well as I could hear it in the noonday service. I will continue to attend the Asbury service for as long as it is offered, and to reflect on the reality of the gift offered to us all, reveling in the music of Bach and Schutz, Barber and Billings, Noble and Victoria. I will be drawn into the works of El Greco and Wyeth, Tintoretto and Schipperheyn, Picasso and Delacrois and Cranach, Ruebens and Botticelli. What a fabulous and age spanning perspective on a passionate and essential event in the history of the world.
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