It's Good Friday.

Good Friday was always the part of Easter that hit hardest with me. Easter day itself was more about marshmallow chicks and jelly beans and lilies and violets than about Jesus, but I've never seen anyone capitalize on Good Friday. It's largely ignored by everyone else, but I never could. Even now, four years after the Easter I abandoned Christianity, Good Friday is still somewhat sacred. Throughout Holy Week I still think: today he came into Jerusalem. Right about now he would have been having the Passover supper. Now he was going into the garden. Now he was praying, now he was coming out. Now he was being captured, now tried. Now he was being marched through the city. Now he was being crucified. Now he was dead. Now Mary was crying and the women trying to comfort her. Now he was buried. Now his friends and relatives were trying to have the Sabbath without him. Trying to be happy about Passover.

One year when I was in the church choir, we sang a song about the Garden of Gethsemane. It remains in my mind one of the only really good pieces of music we ever managed in that choir.

Into the woods my master went,
He was sore forspent.
Into the woods my master came,
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to him
The little gray leaves were kind to him
The thorn-tree had a mind to him
When into the woods he came.

Out of the woods my master went,
He was well content.
Out of the woods my master came,
Content with death and shame.
When death and shame would woo him last,
From under the trees they drew him last:
'Twas on a tree they slew him last
When out of the woods he came.

Ubi caritas et amor
Ubi caritas, Deus ibi est.

The first part is a modified version of a poem by Sidney Lanier, but the part in Latin was added by the composer. The last part was to a different tune, and it means "where there is charity and love, God is also there." That really struck me. That even on a day so much about death, it's still about love. That God is about love. It's a comforting thought.

This morning part of Bach's St. Matthew Passion was on the radio. (I had to explain how Passion with a capital P is different from people running around being ardent.) We got to sing that a few years ago and it was really...good. And sad. But it was supposed to be. The children's choir doesn't have much of a part, just some "Lamb of God" stuff. The soloists have all the really nifty parts. Except the baritone, who's the narrator, and mostly just gets to say "und sprachen..." between solos. The thing's mostly done as a dialogue between characters with some commentary by the narrator and other stuff by the choirs.

Later this afternoon I'll put Jesus Christ Superstar on. My family laughs, but I find it expresses the story as related in the Bible more than all the hymns and things. It's all very well to see it as some far-off, divine thing, but humans don't relate to that. They relate to human emotions and human events. And, if you look at the texts, it's a very emotional story. Look at the part in the garden of Gethsemane! He's in doubt, he doesn't want to die! People condemn ALW for writing that part because it's "blasphemous", but look at the text. The character is afraid of the death he knows is waiting for him, and he says so. He tells God he doesn't want to die, but in the end his resolve comes back and he accepts what's coming. That's not blasphemy, that's drawing out the humanity in an otherwise distant character. The beauty of the musical is that it doesn't rely on the religious aspect of the story to make it interesting to people, although I can see it would appeal to Christians because of that aspect. But he takes the dialogue and scenes already laid out, puts them in modern context, and makes people see the drama that's already there. If you look at the libretto, he's hardly changed the text at all. That's what makes it so good.

This afternoon Mom showed me how to make a worm bin. There's going to be an Earth Day hoo-ha at Byrd Park next Saturday and my science teacher is giving us extra credit if we did some sort of display for it, so I'm going to make a worm bin. We actually just cleaned out the one that Mom already had. So we took the bin out on the sidewalk and dumped all the dirt out in a cardboard box and sorted the worms from the compost. Some of them were really big, too, and good at escaping. So as we were sorting them, the dog came dashing out of the backyard and across the lawn. Apparently Mom had forgotten to latch the gate. In the end we got the worms all happy and the dog back inside, so it's all good.

April 6
April 14