Why the Good Friday Meditation?

In April of 2020, when we were all locked up in our homes with our families, I slipped away into my bedroom on Good Friday and faced my chair looking out the sliding glass door to listen to the Transforming Center’s Podcast “Bonus Episode For Good Friday”. Though I didn’t have the resource guide (a little booklet containing 14 pieces of artwork depicting the traditional stations of the cross) I listened intently, hitting the pause button every so often in order to have just a few more minutes to take it all in and jot down thoughts in my journal. I was touched deeply by this roughly hour-long experience.

I loved it so much that I have gone back and listened to it every year and last year I invited others to join me. This isn’t a Stations of the Cross in the traditional Roman Catholic sense of one moving from one station to the next, kneeling, genuflecting or singing Latin hymns - though that is beautiful in its own way. In this version, which is quite Protestant-friendly, one simply sits and listens as a narrator reads the scripture (or explains the traditional station if not found in scripture) and then offers a reflective prayer prompt. A minute of silence is given to meditate or journal a response before the next station is read.

It is simple and beautiful.

There is something deeply stirring about spending time imagining those last dozen or so hours of Jesus’ life. I think it’s because when we do, we accept an invitation not dissimilar to the one Jesus extended to His disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane:

“He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him,
and he began to be sorrowful and troubled.
Then he said to them,
“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.
Stay here and keep watch with me.” — MATT. 26:37-38

Gary Jansen in His book Station to Station: An Ignatian Journey through the Stations of the Cross (p. 10) ponders this mystery when he writes:

If, as poet T. S. Eliot once famously wrote, time past and time present are perhaps contained in time future (meaning essentially, that the boundaries of time are a lot looser than we might think), then the Stations offer another opportunity as well: to right a 2000 year-old wrong. Abandoned by almost everyone he held dear, Jesus spent most of his final hours without a friend or companion. By entering the Stations, we get the opportunity to journey back there, to be present with Jesus when no one else is, to be his compatriot as he makes his way to Calvary, to stand as a witness by his side and to be a kind face that he looks upon when the loneliness of his ordeal is too much to bear.

I think of how thankful I am that I will be sitting in the comfort of my own home listening to the Transforming Center’s recording – this time with the Resource Guide. It won’t be late at night. I won’t be outdoors in an olive garden. I won’t have just finished a festive meal and have a few glasses of wine in me like those first disciples. Yes, it should be fairly easy for me to simply sit with a few friends in silence focusing on the Jesus who loved us and endured so much for our sakes.

This Friday, we will be keeping vigil with Him in the only way we know to do on a Friday afternoon in North Carolina in 2023.

Yet as we do, something in our souls tells us that Jesus may extend more tangible invitations to sit and keep watch with Him in the future:

with Him and the friend who is processing the scary diagnosis….

with Him in the waiting room of a hospital with a parent whose child is in the operating room…

with Him keeping vigil at the bedside of our dying loved one…

Perhaps this Good Friday’s Stations of the Cross meditation is also good preparation for when the time comes to say yes to those invitations as well.

 We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because, by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.