
                   20051111.01

                  Thomas Hardy

              Unkept Good Fridays

         There are many more Good Fridays
         Than this, if we but knew
         The names, and could relate them,
         Of men whom rulers slew
         For their goodwill, and date them
         As runs the twelvemonth through.

         These nameless Christs' Good Fridays,
         Whose virtues wrought their end,
         Bore days of bonds and burning,
         With no man to their friend,
         Of mockeries, and spurning;
         Yet they are all unpenned.

         When they had their Good Fridays
         Of bloody sweat and strain
         Oblivion hides. We quote not
         Their dying words of pain,
         Their sepulchres we note not,
         Unwitting where they have lain.

         No annual Good Fridays
         Gained they from cross and cord,
         From being sawn asunder,
         Disfigured and abhorred,
         Smitten and trampled under:
         Such dates no hands have scored.

         Let be. Let lack Good Fridays
         These Christs of unwrit names;
         The world was not even worthy
         To taunt their hopes and aims,
         As little of earth, earthy,
         As his mankind proclaims.

         Good Friday, 1927.



     The foregoing poem, "Unkept Good Fridays," by Thomas
Hardy, has found its place in the shrine of my understanding,
if not of my memory.

     It is based on the notion that Good Friday should be
kept, should be celebrated rather than being lived.  The
institution of the feast, of the holy day, of course has its
origin and prototype in the Sabbath, observance of which, on
pain of death, was decreed as one of the very earliest
obligations of formal, public religion.  The injuction is:
"to keep the Sabbath," and the implication is that one should
be obligated to keep Good Friday as one keeps the Sabbath.

     Public religion translates inward religious life into
objective, outward ritual.  But for the sensitive, insightful
individual, what is there to celebrate about Good Friday?
Implicit in the concept of the Feastday, is the
ecclesiastical usurpation of spiritual life, which impedes
that life's development or expansion, paralyses it, and in
the end makes it to suffocate.  The consequence of Hardy's
rejection of convention is that since not all martyrdoms can
have their memorial day, Good Friday itself should be
recognized as a travesty of meditation on suffering, that
because of the universality of suffering, the memorial of a
specific suffering, albeit divine, is incongruous.  The
prototypical celebration, so soon rescinded, was Jesus
triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  It is more edifying to
meditate on suffering rather than to celebrate it.

     The actual explanation of the suffering of the divine
human being is to be sought elsewhere.  It is in the prophesy
of Isaiah of the man who, though depised and rejected by men,
and led like a lamb to the slaughter, was nonetheless, or
more accurately, for just that reason, the messenger of God,
the Messiah.  Hence Good Friday, if it is to have meaning at
all, must be recognized as a day on which one is mindful of
all the suffering that men inflict on each other.  And that
day should be every day.

     Reflection on Good Friday as the memorial day for the
suffering inflicted on _all_ human beings, unavoidably leads
to consideration of the ubiquitous crucifix or cross, which,
implemented in gigantic or miniscule design perched on church
steeples, dangling from necklaces, pinned to lapels,
threatens or comforts me, according to the circumstances.  I
have often asked myself with bewilderment and consternation,
how it is possible that from the days of the medieval
crusades to our own, it has been possible for men, to use
this symbol of divine-human suffering to justify the torture
and carnage of their fellow human beings.

     And this is once more one of the questions, unanswered
for many years, that demonstrate the dullness of my thought,
a question with which I have struggled since adolescence,
while the answer lies patent before my eyes.  The cross,
whether it boasts and threatens from the steeple, or serves,
with the torso transfixed, as a totem, or slung about the
pretty neck serves as a signpost into the unveiled cleavage,
must be understood as an amulet which spares him or her who
contemplates or wears it, the excruciating pain of suffering
at the hands of his fellow men.  But, to be noted, protects
only him or herself, by no means necessarily another person,
the neighbor.  by no means shields from my cruelty or
aggression, my enemy whom I torture to death.  Such
protection would be afforded by that brotherly love which is
historically inseparable from the symbolism of the cross, yet
whose separability is proved anew from day to day.

     The cross may be a sign of salvation, but, absent agape,
it is a sign of terror to threaten me like the sword which it
resembles, with the death from which it protects him who
brandishes it.  Inadvertently then, the cross turns me into a
Moslem, for whom it looms as a threat as great as the bloody
jaw of the tiger.

                          * * * * *
Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
