Letter #34 to Friends and Family: Good Friday re-visited

Yes, it has been three months since Holy Week and my sense of timing is as sharp as ever. Nevertheless, during an evening in Annapolis recently, Angelica and I celebrated Independence Day with my sister’s family as well as the Priest(ess) and her similarly ordered husband (of the Prunells' church) over dinner and fireworks.

What emerged from this few hours of chatting on everything from lapsed Catholicism to Bishop Spong was that Saint Ann’s Church of Annapolis, a mid-to-low Episcopal congregation, had re-enacted the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday 2011 for the first time in many years at the same time I was trudging around the Calesa colonia (i.e., neighborhood) of Querétaro on the “Viacrusis”.

The only difference between the two events that I could detect was that the temperature was twenty degrees higher in Querétaro and walking the good walk in México literally made me a red-neck. Of course, in April and May, I had the blog to end all blogs written out inside my head and, of equal course, I found myself too intellectually and inevitably indolent to do a damn thing about my spiritual insight.

Nevertheless, this parallel between two rather dissimilar groups got my attention since this nitty-gritty and not-so-pretty ritual – after all, it was re-enactment of the ghastly death of a young man – seemed to be addressing some deep-seeded need within the average human breast. I say 'breast' and not 'head' because sacramental acts hardly pertain to the intellect.

Interestingly, however, as the spiritual utility of ritual acts is realized (at least among my acquaintances), intellectual resistance frequently subsides into the irrelevant.

So this action ties, I think, into the sacramental side of Catholicism; that is, the ritual side (i.e. upper-church) Christianity. What do the sacraments mean? In actuality, I am referring to the “action” sacraments, primarily Holy Matrimony, Confession, Holy Communion and Extreme Unction.

Like these rituals, the “Viacrusis” entails the taking of action by at least one key party to it. These sacraments rang hollow for many years as I was struggling mightily to assert, establish and justify my intellectual pride.

Finally, after finding a very old, very Catholic book on the Church and its pre-Vatican II ways in my mid-twenties, sacraments began to hold a third possibility: perhaps, they represented the sacred syntax of a spiritual life in this material world. In all honesty, I still prefer the lower church practices of Unitarianism (not Christian) or Presbyterianism.

Yet I have found the services in lower churches often to be very long and sometimes tedious. And, for me at least, nothing else on Earth quite delights me as the high Anglo-Catholic services – in very limited doses – of Saint Mary’s Church or the Little Church Around the Corner in New York City.

I wonder why.

Could it be that ‘walking-the-walk’ for two hours on Good Friday and a quarter of an hour every Sunday enraptures people far more rapidly than a group talking itself into a state-of-grace?

Could walking through ninety-five degree heat, walking in the sandals of that repudiated revolutionary, bring me closer to his humanity to afford a glimpse into His divinity?

Obviously, I really do not know because I am not a Christian. But Christians of diverse levels of education, intelligence and socio-economic status two thousand miles apart may have established a coincidental consensus.

What do you think?