My Very Good Friday

Today began with a three hour visit with my friend Eric, incarcerated in Ohio's Grafton Correctional Institution. He's been there more than two decades. He said something this morning that seemed appropriate for Good Friday, though I didn't recognize it until during worship this evening.

Eric told me that someone once told him that he needed, in prison, to live each day as if he were going to "go home" (be released) tomorrow. He called it the best advice he'd ever been given.

Somehow we got distracted from what should have been an obvious follow-up conversation about what that advice means to him. But on my drive home I thought about what living every day like that might mean to him: to live as if tomorrow he will be free and ready to take his place in society; to do what he can today to prepare for what he most dearly hopes for in the future; to be able to move into new life without regret or remorse. Eric has always seemed to me to live that way, and maybe now I know why.

Tonight's Good Friday service was beautiful, as Episcopal services, I am learning, tend to be. Long, yes, (as Episcopal services also tend to be) but filled with powerful, compelling, poetic words and soul-touching music and rich symbolism and actions.

In some strange long-distance leap from Grafton's visitation room to that classic, colonial American-like sanctuary, I heard Eric's words: "Live each day as if you are going home tomorrow."

Somehow the rituals of these somber services of Holy Week prepare us for the joy of Easter. But by Easter I mean not just the day after tomorrow, but tomorrow itself. They help us taste the freedom for which we devoutly long, to do what we need to do to live the kingdom of God in whose midst we are, to live forgiven of regret and liberated from remorse. Eric's advice from prison is good advice to all who live in prisons that keep us from real life.

At the end of the service worshippers were invited to come forward "to offer their adoration of the Cross by touching it and offering silent prayer." The Cross in question was a simple wooden one with a symbolic "crown of thorns" hanging from its crossed beams. From the choir area I watched worshippers come forward, almost lean on the cross and silently pray. (We were leading the congregation in singing, "My Song is Love Unknown.")

Toward the end a man with a maybe three-year-old child in his arms came forward to touch the cross. First he touched it, and then he guided her hand to touch it, too. He was white, the child was black. I don't know their story. I do know the scene brought tears to my eyes. Not just, perhaps, father and daughter, but also white and black. I know she learned a whole lot of real Christian theology tonight. And I know that they are ready for God's realm of peace, justice, and freedom that is at hand–so near they reached out together and touched it.

When Our President Gets Generous, Hold On to Your Wallet

I am amused and appalled by Donald Trump's donation of his first quarter's presidential salary to the National Park Service. That comes to $78,333, a pittance given his administration's proposed $1.5 billion cut in the Park Service's funding for the coming fiscal year. It's even a pittance compared to  $229 million, which is how much Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke says the Service is behind "in deferred maintenance on our battlefields alone." Trump designated his "gift" for historic battlefield maintenance.

If he'd given the NPS the value of the perks and benefits he's received in flitting back and forth to Florida and in maintaining and protecting luxury homes for his far-flung family this might be a different story. Perhaps it would provide enough money to remove all references to "climate change" from all Park Service signs and publications, no doubt a costly project. But perhaps ExxonMobile is underwriting it already.

Of course, Trump's minions made a big deal of it. Smilin' Sean Spicer presided over the giving of the check to Secretary Zinke, who was accompanied by Harpers Ferry National Historical Park Superintendent Tyrone Brandyburg, who just happens to appear to be black! A perfect photo op if the world ever saw one.

President Trump's gift is amusing, but in an appalling sort of way. The president who is hellbent on turning our Park Service, and many other beneficial government agencies, into charity cases, donates money that means nothing to him to the maintenance of historic battlefields.  Battlefields . . . lest anyone doubt his love for military spending.

He turns the National Park Service into a plaything for him to be "generous" to, or not, upon his whim. Take away $1.5 billion here, put in $78 thousand there. Enough $78 thousands gifts and you might get to $1.5 billion some day, or even to $229 million.

What a joke. When will everyone see the sham and shame this guy represents?