"EMPTIED HIMSELF" (Philippians, 2:7)

"EMPTIED HIMSELF"

It was a Sunday morning and I was “filling in” for a priest on holiday from a neighbouring parish. I was busy getting myself ready for the early Mass when the telephone interrupted me, mid-shave.  “Tony” had collapsed, would I please come. 

As it happened, although I was not in my own neck of the woods, I knew the address having been to a meeting in that house only a short time before. I dashed off. The ambulance people had got there before me and I only had to look at them to know that Tony had not just collapsed, he was dead. A massive heart attack as we say. 

I did all the priest things and spoke briefly with the younger ones before going back upstairs to have a word with Winnie, Tony’s wife. I pushed open the bedroom door thinking desperately of what to say. I need not have worried, Winnie spoke first and more than forty years later I can still clearly recall what she said. Looking across her husband’s body at me, but I think not really seeing me at all, she said with what I can only describe as a great forlornness of heart, “Father, he was my life”.

For all I know some of you reading this may well have lived through such a harrowing experience; the death of loved ones comes the way of us all sooner or later, and it was certainly not my intention to renew anyone's pain. But it's almost Good Friday and I've been thinking of things I like to do on that day. 

Weather permitting I love to wander about among trees, tall and spare, not yet in leaf. I like to feel their great strength about me, admire their sheer size and listen in awe to their creaking and groaning in the wind. Inevitably I find myself thinking of the Cross of Christ and of how the Church liturgy so often refers to it as a tree; the tree of life, the tree of victory. And I love to be alone as I wander about among the trees. I'm not sure why, but it helps, sometimes even more than the Church liturgy does. 

I also like to sing quietly, if only in my head, that lovely hymn, "My Song is Love Unknown". It was the favourite Holy Week hymn of a parish choir-mistress I once had. She went to God a few years ago and now, especially on Good Friday, I like to cherish her memory, and again, doing so just seems to help.

Then too, and always, I find myself hearing again the awful call of Christ, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" It is then that all the little things I like to do on Good Friday, seem to shatter and lie worthless about me. How can I possibly dare treat Good Friday as if it were simply "a few of my favourite things", designed to pander to my aesthetic tastes?  

Good Friday must never amount to this and neither does it.Those last despairing words of Christ on the cross have a habit of surfacing in our own lives insisting that Good Friday is never just a memory but an experience, a genuine sharing in his crucifixion. I think of Winnie and so many like her, left gasping "He was my life". 

At moments like that I find myself saying those simple, daft, words of the childrens' catechism of my early days at school, " God made the world, he made it out of nothing because he is our creator."

Is that the answer then? The answer to the lonely cry of Christ on the cross, that first Good Friday, the bewildered cry of Winnie over the dead body of her young husband, her own Good Friday? Or is it that God our creator, does not allow us answers of any kind,  preferring to work with a blank sheet. It would seem so for Christ the Lord took on the loneliness of his death with a final cry, " Father, into your hands I commend my spirit".  With that great cry, he asks us to empty ourselves of all earthly reassurance and accept instead the lifelong call to faith.