I attend my first evening service on Good Friday. Lamentation service. It has none of the joy and fun of our Sunday services and this is frightening. It feels like Religion. Somber and reverent.
We begin with the descent into the darkness of sorrow. As we go down, I cry. I cry and I worry; this service has just begun and already I’m losing it. I don’t want to be publicly weeping for a whole hour. Though this is the safest place I know to be distraught.
I am acutely aware of the few bodies in this cavernous space. Fifteen attendees, two ministers, one pianist and one singer.
The service has a reassuring rhythm: a reading, followed by all of us singing a refrain three times together, then a candle is blown out, the singing bowl struck and we sit in silence. Six times this repeats.
The readings are brutal – they are the narratives of suffering: a psalm; a witness account of the civilian bodies littering a Ukrainian town; the last day of Jesus’s life. Then we sing.
The purpose of each part of the service becomes clear to me in a slow unfolding. I understand early why we sing together, why the refrain contains the words ‘stay with me.’ I want to bolt. I do not want to face the violence, inequity and pain. I crave the uplift, the comfort: I need to be held. I gasp out the refrain desperately, clinging to the guiding, sublime voice of the singer on the chancel. I hear the breath of the others around me, our off-key and whispered notes. I hear the deep, foundational baritone of one of the ministers: he is hidden from my sight by the lectern and his voice echoes slightly, as if it emanates from the walls themselves.
I spend the first quarter of the service with my eyes closed. Even when I open them, I struggle to watch the moment when the candle is blown out.
When we begin, there are seven lit candles on a table on the chancel. My minister unhurriedly walks to the table, adeptly unhooks her mask from one ear, leans over and blows out the flame.
The flame disappears. The wick’s ember glows momentarily and disappears. A trail of smoke rises languidly upwards, then with the same sudden absence, is cut from its source, like the string of a balloon released. The smoke stays in formation, rising untethered, then blurs away into the background of the immense organ.
Once, after I watched this progression several times, I catch sight of the faintest cloud, high up, and I am reassured. I am looking for anything to break my fall.
Last summer, I read a book by a therapist whose clients came to her wanting to stop feeling their grief and despair. When she explained she would not stop these feelings but instead guide them through this pain, they were terrified: they would not survive such a journey, they would drown.
A women was murdered here this week. She was known and loved by many, though I did not know her myself. Her murder, like all murder, was sudden and brutal. She was stabbed in the chest and she died on the side of the road.
Something is happening in this darkness. I begin with my grief, my face hot and wet, pressure behind my eyes and sobs in my throat. I fear I cannot stay in this place. I breathe, I sing. I stay in the room but I am looking for the door. My companions ask me to stay. I ask them to stay. We covenant: I’ll stay if you stay.
When the fear releases me, I look around. All the terrible things: the violence and dehumanization; all this suffering. I stop crying. Right now I am safe, even in the darkness.
Before this service began, I realized there’s something about being here at night that’s exciting. I remark to a friend that it reminds me of being in the school at night. She laughs and says she cannot remember that long ago. Then she says, you can run in the halls at night.
What halls am I running in tonight? What rules do I get to break because I am here now?
There is a change in the light. The stained glass of the windows do not glow. They hold back the night. I am struck by the size and darkness of the organ behind the chancel. Its contrast with the white walls is so stark that I am amazed at my past inattention to its presence in the room. It dominates, it demands, even from its alcove, even with its silence.
The end arrives. It’s not dark in the sanctuary, just dim. We all sit in silence, invited to stay as long as we want. I breathe and center myself, wondering if others feel the anxiety of leaving first. The first person will break the spell, give others permission. I check in with my body and know that I want the fresh air of outside and that settles it. I quietly and deliberately gather my things and walk out.
Outside the church, I hear laughter and traffic. The air is not quite warm. I pull down my mask and breathe in this little city on an April evening. The dark is festive with street lamps and headlights. The stillness is full of distant activity from the bars downtown. It is spring before it is green, before we love it and enjoy it, when it is all promise.
I drive up out of town slowly, the road is pitted with holes and ridges of pavement patches. An animal crosses ahead, small and lithe, the bouncing graceful gait of thin legs and tiny hooves. I slow further, the next deer is not far behind, the mother perhaps. I wonder if taking this route home was a good choice. I drive carefully, checking the banks on either side of the road. A few minutes later, another deer races out in front of me, stumbles on the road and tumbles over itself and keeps going with the recognizable desperation of panic. I exclaim outloud and grip the wheel tightly.
My headlights catch the tangled body of a deer on someone’s lawn. I see wet, matted fur and limbs. It is there and then it is gone. The truck ahead of me turns around. Did they hit it? Are they going back? Will they collect the body? Do they want venison or do they want to save the homeowners from this discovery in the morning?
Are they just on the wrong road?
This land undulates, it is scrunched into low ridges like fabric. In all the low spots the water gathers. Each time the road dips, my truck is fulled with the high pitch of spring peepers. I descend and their voices drown out all other noise; I rise and they disappear.
PAPER PLOW FURROW 