I'm not especially religious--actually, that's a horrible overstatement. If Sister Mary Jean or any of the Sisters of Charity who taught me in grades three through eight could see me now, there'd be new sub-divisions in Dante's Inferno Estates where I'd be getting my mail forwarded.
Growing up I was always afraid of Good Friday and to this day, I've never really gotten the idea behind the 'Good'. Raised as a loyal son of Holy Mother Church, I believed years before I ever understood the significance of the day and grasped that in many ways, it was central to my faith as a Roman Catholic.
If your religious belief is otherwise, or none at all, I intend no offense but will point out that for me of little faith (I don't pretend to know for whom else to speak) today is part of the three most critical days of what shreds of religious belief I still have. As I've aged, and more of life in this world has proved to be beyond my capacity to understand, I find myself coming back to the Roman Centurion whom, it was reported, was witness to the Divinity of Christ Crucified at the hour of His death, "surely this was the Son of God."
I read and re-read the New Testament accounts of the Passion every year and my admiration for the Centurion's leap of faith grows with every reading. I am not a young man anymore-and very probably never was when I think about my growing up. I've always known the price of a thing, but never its value. Good Friday is a day I use to reassess who I am and try to sort out how I've gotten here. So accustomed am I to weighing options and calculating distances, that I shrink from the notion of taking and making a leap of faith by myself and for myself. Perhaps, Good Friday is supposed to be a day of simultaneous endings and beginnings and within every stop is the seed of a start.
-bill kenny
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