GOOD FRIDAY MEMORIES

Good Friday was April 15 in 1960.  I was 12 years old. It was the custom in our family, and in the families of most of our neighbors, that the hours between noon and 3:00 were so sacred that we were not allowed to listen to the radio or have the television on or even to talk to one another.  Silence was to be observed.  The sacred silence.

Our parish church was about a mile and a half away.  We attended the Good Friday liturgy together as a family.  My mother brought my sister, who was 10 years old, and myself to church.  Dad met us from work.  The Good Friday services ended about a half hour early.  Dad headed back to work and mom had to stay back as a member of the Altar Society, to clean the church.  Mom told me to walk my sister home reminding us to remain silent.

I vividly remember the walk home.  It was as if the whole world had gone silent.  I recall that it was warm and windy.  There was almost no traffic as we walked along the sidewalk beside Kelly Rd.  Papers blew down the street.  Everything was closed.  Merit Drugs, Chatham Village Market, Bidigare Hardware and even Kelly's Bar were closed.  The parking lots were empty.  Carol and I were the only ones about.  We walked in silence and waited for three o'clock.

Marty Haugen, a Catholic composer once wrote, "For you, O lord, my soul in stillness waits. Truly my hope is in you."  That day it was as if the whole world waited in silence.

There are days that I miss that kind of sacred silence.  I can turn off the music, silence the BlackBerry and even put the dog outside for an hour a day but it is still not silent.  Planes still take off from the nearby airport.  Traffic moves down Dixie Hwy. around the clock.  Dumpsters are emptied behind the school.  There really isn't any silence.  Even on Good Friday things really never go quiet.  I miss that.

There are some good spiritual reasons for silence.  Unless we quiet down, we can never hear God, never hear hope as it is voiced in our hearts. 

There are also some good common sense reasons for silence also.  We are bombarded with noise and, while we can't silence the airplanes of garbage trucks, we can dial down the sounds that we create.  All those devices that surround us have power buttons.  They can be turned off.  We can silence our own words and listen.  When I silence the noise, I also find that I walk more slowly.  I sit in the chair or on the porch longer.  When I silence the noise my other senses are heightened and the sky is much more beautiful.  When I silence the noise I find that I begin to wonder about the world around me more and more.

Today is Good Friday, 2011.  While I wont be walking my sister home from church, I do hope that I can tap into that sacred silence that I remember so clearly from years ago.