Tenebrae.

I just got home from the Good Friday service at my church.

Because Unitarian-Universalism is a non-creedal religion, the various people in one church may follow very different religious paths. Sometimes this leads to services full of vague, colorless religious generalities. Sometimes it leads to an unthinking mishmash of religious concepts without much thought given to how they come together.

Sometimes it leads to services of great power, drawing on deep underlying themes which connect different religions. Tonight was one of those times.

The liturgy combined a Service of Tenebrae, which is the Christian liturgy marking the passion and death of Christ, with a Service for Yom Hashoah, which remembers the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. It reached back to the story of suffering and liberation that is Passover, and forward to our present-day fears of the world's growing darkness. It wove together themes of oppression, bitter suffering, the endless struggle for truth and liberation, and the courage of those who stand up for good in the face of great evil. We closed with Communion, taken "in memory of Jesus and of all those who have died - for the sake of justice, for the sake of truth, for the sake of love, and sometimes for the sake of nothing at all. In their deaths, we remember our human oneness."

It was painfully beautiful, intensely moving, deeply powerful. I feel... sanctified.

( the opening and closing portions of the liturgy )

Putting this here so I don't lose it...

Nothing is lost; the universe is honest,
Time, like the sea, gives all back in the end,
But only in its own way, on its own conditions:
Empires as grains of sand, forests as coal,
Mountains as pebbles. Be still, be still, I say;
You were never the water, only a wave;
Not substance, but a form substance assumed.

- Elder Olson, 1968