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What I remember most about Good Friday was the solemnity. The day was different than any other. We were off from public school — a time that usually meant my friend and I were playing half-ball on Tree Street where he lived, but we couldn’t play on Good Friday. It wasn’t appropriate. Yet the weather incongruously always seemed bright and sunny, as if Satan himself was trying to tempt us to go ahead and play anyway.
On a typical Good Friday morning, my friend and I would play quiet board games in his home like Parcheesi and Monopoly. His mother would chastise us anytime that we raised our voices. At noon, she would ask me to go home because the next three hours were a time for quiet meditation. My mother would ask me why I wasn’t in church for the Stations of the Cross. I secretly found that ritual almost unbearable.
The bad guys would do all sorts of horrific things to Jesus. The details were graphic and excruciating. Yet all we could do was sit passively and pray while he was beaten and spat upon. The details of the crucifixion chilled me to the bone. I was filled with a need for revenge, as if Jesus were an action hero who would smite his tormentors. It would always end the same way – his pleas for intercession unheeded, his forgiveness of his enemies “for they know not what they do” (why didn’t he wreak havoc on them instead of forgive them for surely they did know what they were doing), and ultimately death.
As a Christian, I knew that the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday was his ultimate triumph, but I needed a kind of Lone Ranger ending — the bad guys are locked up and the masked man riding off into the sunset with a hearty “Hi-yo Silver, Away!” Of course I didn’t share my qualms with Mom. She always won the argument by placing a guilt trip on me if I didn’t go to the services: “It’s OK to spend three hours at the movies, but it’s not OK for you to spend three hours in church.” I never thought to ask my mother why, if she were so devoted, she didn’t go to church. It was only years later that I realized the issue of birth control kept her out of church during her child-bearing years.
In those days, many shops were closed in observance of Good Friday. The regular baseball season was still weeks away, but spring training games were played at night or not at all on Good Friday. Life seemed to resume after 3 o’clock. As teenagers, we always greeted 3 o’clock with a sigh of relief. We were not into solemnity. All Fridays were meatless back then. We believed that just about any sin could be forgiven, except eating meat on Good Friday. At that time I had not yet read Dante’s “The Divine Comedy,” but I was sure that the deepest circle of the inferno was reserved for those who bit into a cheesesteak on Good Friday.
Through the years, my belief system changed. I came to realize that more and more it was difficult for me to accept what I considered symbolic stories of living a good life. It no longer seemed reasonable that any organized religion exclusively has all the answers. I think it is important that we all live good and moral lives and the rest of the stuff will sort itself out. Some may find that sad. They use the term “fallen Catholic.” I don’t consider myself “fallen” from anything.
I don’t blame the Catholic Church for not changing to accommodate to my beliefs. My attitude is if you don’t believe the tenets of a religion, you leave and let the others who find solace in the church continue to do so. I don’t agree with the quote from Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, cited in a column last week by Christine Flowers, about atheists: “God exists, whether we find it convenient or not, and atheists can think whatever they choose about him. What they really can’t do is create a sustainable basis for human dignity without a God who guarantees it. The founders could never have developed the nation we know in an environment without faith in God and without the legacy of biblical vocabulary, faith and thought.”
I believe as the Dalai Lama said, “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
One does not either gain or lose faith because it is “convenient.” Such a statement trivializes the thoughtful process many of us go through when we make such a decision. Our founding fathers expressed the need in our Constitution to separate church from state because they wanted to guarantee our citizens freedom from religion as well as freedom of religion. They were also intensely aware of the dangers of intolerance and religious persecution. There are many examples of bad governments that abuse their people that were formed on the basis of a belief in God. Those of us who are not as certain whether there is a benevolent deity watching over us still live lives of human dignity as much as those who do believe. And while religion may have a place in the public square, it has no claim to infallibility when it enters the world of politics.
Peace.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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