Good Friday people
By JUAN L. MERCADO, juan_mercado77@yahoo.com
March
29, 2012
“Ironically, it is often non-believers who
seem closest to following Christ.”
[ Looking for a book that will carry you beyond Palm Sunday?,
we asked a few Lents back. Written by Dr. Shiela Cassidy, “Good Friday
People” looks at broken men and women – and the grace that shines
through them. She was jailed and tortured by the Chilean military, for
treating rebels. Dr Cassidy is a
UK
hospice medical director – JLM ]
"Good Friday people is
a phrase I coined, for those who find themselves called to
powerlessness and suffering,” she writes. “(These) are men and women,
broken in body and assaulted in mind – deprived not merely of things
we take for granted.
"God calls them to
walk the same road His Son trod.... I have no clever answer to the
eternal 'Why' of suffering. But whatever its cause and outcome, it is
never without meaning."
Nobel laureate Elie
Wiesel captures this “sense of the absence of God”, Cassidy notes.
Then 14-years old, Weisel was forced along with other Jewish prisoners
at Auschwitz, to watch the Gestapo execute a child.
"Where is God? Where
is He now?’ someone behind me asked, Weisel recalls in his book: Night
"And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is –
He is here hanging on this gallows.
“Never shall I forget
these moments which murdered my God and turned my dreams into dust,"
Weisel added. "Never shall I forget even if I am condemned to live as
long as God Himself. Never."
Weisel had the look of
a “Lazarus, risen from the dead yet still a prisoner…stumbling among
shameful corpses,” recalled Catholic philosopher Francois Mauriac. In
his foreword to Night, Mauriac wrote: "And I, who believed that God is
love, what answer could I give my young questioner whose dark eyes
still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which appeared on
the face of the hanged child?
"Did I speak to him of
that other Israeli, his brother – the Crucified, whose cross conquered
the world? Did I affirm that conformity to the Cross and suffering
was, in my eyes, the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the
faith of his childhood had perished?
"We do not know the
worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If
the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs
to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child," Mauriac
adds. "But I could only embrace him weeping."
In her book, Cassidy
accompanies "Good Friday people" – from El Salvador’s Oscar Romero,
the timid priest who emerged into a fearless defender of the
descamisados, sick people, Maryknoll nun Eta Ford to Marxist folk
singer Victor Jara.
Their suffering "make
us want to screen our faces, to turn away," Cassidy writes. "Yet, is
through them that the grace of God flows to our arid souls... There is
a terrible agony in watching someone hollowed out with a knife… even
if the end result is an instrument on which is played the music of the
universe”.
There is Beth and her
third bout with cancer. "Unable to wait for her to die, her man had
gone off with another woman. She “spent a life of drawing short
straws'." Or the dying Katie. "Day after day, she waited. But the
visitor never came: not her mother, nor her lovers, not even her
children."
Catherine’s tumor had
spread to her brain. She had few symptoms but soon she’d be in deep
trouble. Radio therapy could only buy time. “I just want whatever is
best for my daughter,” she said as tears fell.
“There is rare beauty
in selflessness of this kind,” Cassidy writes. “Some go to their
deaths grasping everything. These are people who will call you away
from another patient’s deathbed to adjust their television.”
Jesuit priest Rutilo
Grande insisted his
El Salvador
seminarians live among slum dwellers and landless peasants. “However
much one may know about poverty and oppression at an intellectual
level, meeting the poor themselves is something quite other.”
Like that of
Archbishop Oscar Romero, Father Grande’s efforts, helped the poor
"rediscover the Old Testament concept of God as liberator of his
oppressed people." It was the poor who showed Grande and Romero “what
they required of their church,” Cassidy notes. “Not just the catechism
and the sacraments but something much harder: to speak out against
injustice.”
The military junta
goons killed both of them, of course.
But Grande’s system of
exposure to “Good Friday people” anchors seminary training today,
including the Philippines. And Romero’s address, on receiving the
Nobel Peace prize in 1980, still resounds: “There are those who sell a
just man for money and a poor man for a pair of sandals…It is the poor
who force us to understand what is really taking place…The poor are
the body of Christ. Through them, He lives on in history.”
Ironically, it is
often non-believers who seem closest to following Christ. Chilean
singer Victor Jara abandoned studies for the priesthood “and put his
‘honest guitar’ to work on behalf of the marginalized. He too was
killed.
“Should I be speaking
of a Marxist folk-singer in the same breath as Jesus?,” Cassidy asks.
“The answer is surely yes. For did he not embark on his road to
Calvary in response to a call to serve the poor.”
"(Yet), we are all
potentially Good Friday people. We are all frail earthen vessels who,
should the potter choose, be fashioned in His image and for his own
mysterious purposes….And we tremble because we too may be called to
powerlessness... “