“Every day is Good Friday,” my next-door neighbor said – from a safe social distance – as I reminded him to put out his refuse and recycling early because our sanitation department was not working on this day.
It’s certainly been a Lent to remember. No need to make sacrifices. We’ve been on a Lenten journey, whether we wanted to be or not, and today Good Friday – April 10, 2020 – we reach our Calvary.
This, too, is our Passover story – complete with its own plague episode – our own Exodus.
The holidays aren’t the same this year. Easter vigils and other services are going virtual. Seders have been less full of family. There will be no Easter Parade of people in fanciful hats on Fifth Avenue, no egg roll on the White House lawn on Easter Monday. At home, Easter egg hunts and rolls and visits from the Easter Bunny won’t have quite the same joy.
And yet joy we must find in this moment. The Israelites got to the Promised Land. Good Friday, Christians believe, is fulfilled in Jesus’ Resurrection on Easter Sunday.
To paraphrase the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, a member of the French Resistance during World War II, we have to go on loving in the void.
Happy Easter. Happy Passover. Happy Spring.
– Georgette Gouveia
