I came to Good Friday noon-day service at St. John’s Cathedral with unusual anticipation. My wife’s lung cancer was in its 19th month, and she had already outlived the very first diagnosis of 4-12 months that she had received in a blurry life-rearranging moment in September, 2022. The reality since that day has been like flying into – and out of – a fog bank: after the first 11 months of total unpredictability, the last 8 months have become unexpectedly stable. She has low energy, which is a real problem, but her health issues are no longer keeping us on high alert.
Through the ups and downs of this journey, my singular mantra over the last 18 months has remained a passage from Cynthia Bourgeault’s Eye of the Heart:
All roads eventually lead to a mysterious waiting in emptiness . . . The heart will always know what it wants, deep inside, and does not need to be reminded. Do not use your mind to create scenarios for your heart. When the time is right, the heart’s own speaking will be clear (122).
For the first time in my life, I copied down a passage on a 3 x 5 card – “mysterious waiting in emptiness” – and posted it on my nightstand as a reminder to let go of future expectations.
It seems, then, that Zella and I came to this Good Friday service in a posture of waiting, seeking wisdom from Jesus himself, who knowingly walked the kenotic path to the end.
We arrived uncharacteristically early, and, having sat briefly, decided to move closer, enabling us to observe the absolute beauty of the sacred space in front of us: the glowing red candle bud-like lamps highlighting the choir, the Gothic arches sturdily pointing upwards, the triangulated stained glass window image of Jesus on the cross connecting heaven above to earth below where Mary and John stood holding the pain of their suffering son and master.
In the inviting silence before the service I suddenly had an idea. I jumped up and headed to the left hand side of the pulpit where something of a clandestine door led out of the church proper to an immediate inner sanctum, a small chapel that I have used on many occasions to meditate as a brief respite from the normal busyness of Hong Kong’s Central finance district. The room’s square design has inviting touches: a mosaic floor, a wooden window design,* and an altar with candles. A memory came flooding back from 9 years ago in that very room when I heard Bach’s familiar wedding song “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” played ceremoniously on the booming pipe organ in the sanctuary.
The altar had been moved, however, from facing one way to its perpendicular, and I was thrown off slightly by the new arrangement. I took out my camera to capture the scene. Then I turned 90 degrees for a second shot. And that’s when I saw! In front of me was a haloed St. Francis on one wall and a matching St. Clare on the other. A shift in my physiological core alerted me that a fleeting moment of heart recogition had just occurred. I took a picture of the couple and walked back out to begin the service.
The service proceeded, leading us through the Good Friday liturgy. The priest spoke simply and powerfully that the meaning of Jesus’s death was that he suffered for love, which resonated not only with Bach and the inner sanctum, but also with the only mystical experience of my life two years ago in the chapel of the Trappist monastery in Snowmass, Colorado in which I saw and felt – in the eye of the heart – love become real in the triple presence of the Virgin Mary, the Chinese goddess of compassion, and my own dear mother sitting next to me. When the service ended, the lyrics of one of the hymns – “love so amazing, so divine” – continued to echo within me.
After the service I felt compelled to return to the chapel. What had just happened? I wasn’t sure. Drawn back to the portraits, I took close-ups of Francis and Clare, for the answer to the riddle of what I saw and felt had to do with them. Here was the inner story of Good Friday. A Christian yin-yang pair in human relationship: St. Francis, who loved the poor, the lepers and the animals in a legendary way; and his soul sister St. Clare, who had the same vision of love for all of God’s creation. Despite having been in that chapel many times, I had somehow never noticed their twin portraits on the wall.
“The heart will always know what it wants, deep inside.” In that chapel love as a presence surprised me – now for a second time – as a raw upwelling of vibrancy. It caught me unaware and child-like: in a quiet chapel, hearing wedding music, in church symbols that point beyond themselves to something ineffable and sublime for sure, but most powerfully in the complementary hallowed faces of Francis and Clare as a pair. Here is the hidden bridal chamber at the center of the Christian faith. They knew – and somehow at some level now I know, too. Even this brief revelatory moment was a yin-yang experience: the context was in the service externals – “For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son into this world” to die (John 3:16) – but it took an inward turn to see what Francis and Clare knew – that “love is stronger than death” (Song of Solomon 8:6).
I return to my life’s realities of a wife with terminal cancer. The heart’s seeing had nothing to do with future assurance, but rather its meaning was about a visceral moment of hope, some mysterious force field of love that lies riddle-like inside external realities. A mycelium of hope extends from a suffering earth to highest heaven, employing Christian saints and sages – and those in other traditions as well – who can be leaned into when one’s own life feels empty. Someone else’s halo or someone else’s path of conscious love can carry a person where one needs to go in this extended community of followers.**
In this Easter season I will continue my yin mantra of a “mysterious waiting in emptiness,” but I will – waterwheel-like – consciously attempt to trust that a yang presence, too, will return in due time.
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* See picture directly above.
**On the day after Good Friday I listened to my favorite group of Chinese medicine scholar-practitioners discuss the coming of the wood element and the coming of spring. Some of my comments in the second to last paragraph draw upon images discussed in this excellent co-created sharing of perspectives.
Social Conscience and Inner Awakening 