The Long Good Friday
My own Veneration of the Cross completed, I began piously to prepare for the end a ceremony which was beginning to feel a tad too long. Suddenly, there was an unexpected Mexican wave-like movement through the congregation and attention turns 180 degrees to the very elaborate Altar of Repose to be found in the cordoned off main entrance. Clergy processed, canopies were raised, censers were swung and the Blessed Sacrament was brought through the church to the main altar. This all, of course, takes a long time. I wait quietly to escape. Suddenly, the sound of quiet sobbing demanded attention and looking up, I saw to my left a woman weeping into her prayer book. I offered a silent prayer for her private agony, and tried to return to my own, less troubled. meditations. Again, the sound of sobbing, this time from behind. Initially confused by the coincidence, I realised that there were, all around me. people who had been moved by the cruel story that we had all heard together. I found myself unnerved by their emotion and mildly embarrassed. I am not unfamiliar with the crucifixion story, and I believe it quite sincerely, but I have never been moved to tears by the Passion liturgy, and am more likely to notice flaws in the liturgy or beauty of the singing than be that emotionally engaged with the matters under discussion. The ladies (I did not see any men crying) around me seemed to have no difficulty relating to the events of Good Friday, and appreciating its personal significance. I envied them their affective connectedness.
Up to that point I had been condescending of the Liturgy of the Three Great Days as I had seen them “performed” in China. The application of the rubrics is, shall we say, “selective” and one often finds elements of the Tridentine ceremonial sitting cheek-by-jowl with the revised rites. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Distribution of Communion on Good Friday. The modern liturgy has stripped the ceremonial of centuries of accretions, allowing the Veneration of the Cross centre stage. In Beijing, (and most of China, as far as I can tell) the older, much more elaborate rite survives. It has the unfortunate effect of making the rather spare unveiling of the Cross seem like the prelude to a celebration of the Real Presence, the obvious main event. Having known nothing but the thoroughly modern version, I could appreciate for the first time, why a very simple Rite of Communion was insisted upon by the new rubrics.
And yet, this higgledy-piggledy liturgical amalgam touches these Chinese Christians in a way that the tidily reformed liturgy has never touched me. The failure to follow through on the reforms would offend the purist perhaps, but it brings increased drama and intensity to the ceremony. The empurpled statues, (no longer strictly required), the blocked main entrance, the very (and I mean very) elaborate altar of repose, sends visual, if mixed signals that these are special days. Those signals precede words and linger long after words are forgotten. The skewed emphasis of a Eucharistic procession seems not to bother the ladies around me and may even give them consolation after their obviously intense association with the Passion. For all the fuss one hears made about liturgical purity, the Liturgy I prayed on a long Good Friday in Beijing, despite its skewed messages, still proclaimed with great sincerity to a people who have lived the passion more intensely than most that Christ died for US not just in far away Jerusalem here in the centre of China’s capital.