Today is Good Friday, one of the days of the Christian calendar that I’ve always connected most deeply to. Not because I love thinking about crucifixion or because I think I can possibly grasp what happened on the cross. But because it’s a day we’re all allowed to be sad and mad and heartbroken and quiet at church. And if you ask me, we could do with a lot more of those kind of days.
I wrote this poem back in 2013 for my church in San Francisco’s Stations of the Cross service. Just a little explanation: Traditionally in the Catholic church, there are fourteen stations of the cross. Only eight of those have a clear scriptural foundation, and because Protestants love to make sure it’s in the Bible, sometimes not all fourteen of those moments are marked in every Good Friday service. But if you have a chance today to walk through the Stations of the Cross, I highly recommend making space to do so on this day. Some Catholic and Episcopal churches will have their doors open for prayer today. Some have paintings and images available to help you walk through them. There are plenty of prayer gardens with marker points for the stations of the cross. If Good Friday has not been a practice for you in the past, I hope you’ll take a chance on it this year. There is something deeply meaningful about feeling the suffering of this day, so that you can lean all the way into the joy of Easter.
This poem was written in response to the eighth station of the cross: The Women of Jerusalem Weep for Jesus. This particular part of the story is taken from Luke 23:27-31, a moment when Jesus turns to the women who are weeping for him after he has dropped the cross had been forced to carry (his own execution device), on a parade of suffering through the city. Simon of Cyrene, a stranger (we think?) to Jesus has been picked out of the crowd on this strange parade and forced to carry it for Jesus, who is already so beaten and weak from his abuse that he can no longer carry the giant slab of wood. Still, Jesus is able to talk. He turns to some women in the crowd who are weeping over his suffering and says the strangest thing, something I was always drawn to even as a girl, because my ears always perked up anytime women were involved in the Jesus story. He tells these women, “hey, stop weeping for me and start weeping for yourselves. Things are going to get so bad that you’ll wish you’d never had babies, ladies. Then he talks about trees, “for if these things happen when the tree is green, what will happen when it’s dry?”
I wrote this poem at a moment when I was very close to the birth giving, breastfeeding, baby carrying part of my life. And my hope was to work out Jesus’s strange words for myself. What is he trying to say to those women? Why not just say “thanks for caring about me!” What is he thinking about when he mentions the green tree versus the dry tree? This poem isn’t meant to answer those questions, but simply to sit with the moment.
Today this newsletter is already available as a podcast. If you’d like to hear me read this poem and lead you in a time of reflection around it, jump on over to your your favorite podcast streaming service. Wherever you are, I invite you to listen with care, to imagine the moment, to ask the Spirit of God to let a word or phrase rise above the others so that you can carry it with you today and into the weekend.
Let’s begin with reading the passage from Luke 23, and then we’ll read the poem. After you read it I invite you to have a moment of silence, a moment for you to acknowledge to yourself or possibly write down the word or phrase you were drawn to. Then I invite you to read the poem one more time. When you read it the second time, listen for a takeaway. What do you need to think about, consider, or respond to from these words?
Luke 23: 26-31
As the soldiers led him away, they seized Simon from Cyrene, who was on his way in from the country, and put the cross on him and made him carry it behind Jesus. A large number of people followed him, including women who mourned and wailed for him. Jesus turned and said to them, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then
“‘they will say to the mountains, “Fall on us!”
and to the hills, “Cover us!”’
For if people do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
Daughters of Jerusalem
from Luke 23:27-31
Blessed is the womb that never felt one tiny foot
press out and drag slow inside. The living lump
beneath skin, a curled child who begs to stretch.
Gravity presses even the unborn toward earth’s dust.
Blessed are the empty breasts, the woman
who never held the baby’s body against her own,
rocking in the late night darkness, eyes closed,
bodies alive, both clinging to the other for living milk.
Blessed are you, woman! The days are coming
when you will be called safe, you without grief
for the tender bodies or the world’s sharp corners.
Children crash and tear and never come home whole.
Blessed are you who grieve the teacher’s dying,
watch his moaning crawl along the broken road.
Blessed are you who weep for his blue-beaten body,
his wretched stumble under splintered wood.
Blessed woman, you who wail his torn flesh, its dangle
toward earth, you who grasp hope that he’ll summon angel
warriors, blast this barren hill with light, burn bright
this dried up death. Blessed are you who beg mercy.
Daughters of Jerusalem! It would be better if you’d never held
the living beneath your skin, known the weight you carried.
You point toward what is taken here: The Word that speaks
us into being is silenced. The celestial carrier of hope, emptied.
He speaks desperation; he leaves his body. But he is pregnant
with mystery: he gathers the cosmic collection of every hopeless
sigh, every loss, every hatred formed against another,
every embittered soul, every unloved and unlover.
It enters him: the great hot chasm of sin. He opens his chest
wide to hold the oozing dark. Weep, you who cannot
undo the life you’ve made: the small hands, the legs
that wobbled and tipped toward earth. Grieve the children,
grieve the tree as it falls. Let the green wood
thump into the loose dust. Earth gives life green
then dries it brown. We take wood and form it
either to table or death tool. Who can say?
Find this poem and prayer practice in today’s episode of The Slow Way Podcast. Also, tune in on Easter Sunday for a special newsletter and podcast available that morning for you! (There will be no newsletter on Saturday.)
I hope today is sacred and tender for you in just the right ways.
Love,
Micha