Godly Friday

If you don't care about religion, feel free to skip this entry.

Today is Good Friday, aka Holy Friday, aka Godly Friday, aka the day Jesus died. I went to a 12 noon service since I will be in a car at 7 tonight when the other service happens. I think the only other time I've been to church during the day is on Ash Wednesday. It actually wasn't too bad. We still sang some hymns, but there were no Tones or Anthems sung. I go to the Cathedral in the city I live in since it has a great choir and one of the main reasons I go to church is for the music. The noon service today was in the chapel of the Cathedral since only about 30-50 people were there. The chapel is a little weird in that it's a circle and the lectern is directly across from the alter. Fr. Ben gave a good homily. It was vaguely familiar as the lesson of Good Friday is pretty straight forward, but he put a neat spin on it talking about how God gave us Jesus to die for our sins, and as a father, he couldn't really understand that, but if you think about it a little more, in that God and Jesus are one and the same, it was really God giving up himself for us, which he could understand. He also threw in some symbolism in that the horizontal slat of the cross represents the human form of Jesus and the vertical slat of the cross represents the divine Christ. Fr. Ben gives good sermons. They usually make you think. The entire passion was read and we sang an African-American spiritual hymn (yeah - it's in the regular hymnal - 172 or something like that - "Were you there..") which the organist really likes since I remembered it from last year too.

I like Good Friday, even though it's not really good. But it's not really bad, either. And it reminds you why Easter is so great.