When I was a teenager, I used to go to church by myself on Good Friday.
Even though I grew up in a religious family, this was an odd thing for me to do. My parents didn’t go. Neither did my grandparents. My fellow youth group members were never there. It would just be me and a handful of eye-averting, solemn people scattered about the sanctuary—many of whom I didn’t recognize, which was strange, because I knew pretty much everyone in our congregation.
This was the United Methodist variety. On any given Sunday, our sanctuary was packed. People stood up in unison and sat down in unison and sang in unison and worshipped in unison. And after each service, there was always a long and slow-moving line to shake the pastors’ hands and exchange a few words. Everyone chatted while waiting for a turn with the church heads.
These regular Sunday services often made me feel like I had an elephant sitting on my chest. The tie around my neck would become an angry boa constrictor. I could not wait to escape and start breathing again. I think it was the forced group activity that did it. The heavy doses of what felt like mindless conformity. Whenever my parents were sufficiently distracted in the post-service hand-shaking line, I’d slip out the side door, rip my tie off, put my head down, speed walk into solitude—usually the shady, abandoned park at the end of the street—and hide behind a tree, introverting until I had recovered enough to face other human beings again.
But Good Friday services did not require formal wear and seemed to be designed for introverts, which is maybe why I went, even though no one used the term ‘introverted’ in my childhood neighborhood. Back then, I didn’t know there were words for whatever I was, except maybe ‘strange’ or ‘wrong.’ But I’d get these hunches, like there were places and activities for people like me.
If my memory is correct, the Good Friday services of the early nineties went from noon to three, during which time anyone could enter the sanctuary and meditate on Christ’s suffering. There were never very many people there. I mostly remember sitting alone on an otherwise empty wooden pew listening to organ music. The cushions were blood-red velour. Once in awhile someone would get up and read a Bible passage or talk about what Christ might have been experiencing during the current hour, but these person-in-the-pulpit parts were always brief and maybe comprised only five to ten percent of the whole experience. The rest you had to do by yourself with your mind.
A quick internet search suggests that Christ was crucified from 9AM to 3PM—so six hours—but there are conflicting reports. I only remember trying to sit through three hours and thinking that covered the entire event. There were definitely years when I didn’t make it all the way to the John 19:30 ending where Jesus says, “It is finished!” bows his head, and then gives up his spirit.
But I remember one year—maybe when I was seventeen or eighteen—making myself sit the full three hours, during which I thought long and hard about Christ suffering so that I might be redeemed from my sin. I imagined what it was like to have a crown of thorns pierce the thin skin of one’s head and bite into one’s skull, to be blinded by blood and sweat, to be stripped naked in front of a jeering crowd and have soldiers gamble for your clothing, to be beaten and humiliated in front of one’s own mother, to have spikes driven through one’s wrists, to be hung in the sky on a cross between the lowest of the low, to suffocate in the slowest and most painful way possible, to be denied and betrayed by your closest friends, and to be forsaken by your all-powerful God of a father.
A strange mix of emotions swirled inside of me, until an ecstasy finally freed me from my own suffering—all of that anxiety and depression. I remember feeling enraptured by the end of it. I had tears in my eyes. My fingers and toes tingled. Someone loved me enough to sacrifice so much. And I had done what I could to acknowledge that, to make it real, to accept the gift of cleansing and purification.
I’d been washed by the blood of a God.
Here at fifty—and almost four years deep into Jungian analysis—I wonder if the teenaged me just needed Jesus to hold my suffering for three hours. Did I project my own pain onto Christ? Maybe I needed a break from holding my own trials and tribulations. Maybe I had to put all that on someone else.
That’s not me devaluing the religious instinct.
Quite the opposite.
My Jungian work has taught me that humans need transcendent symbols to function psychologically. When we killed the gods, they all became neuroses, the Jungians suggest. I wasn’t feeling too great back when I was a regular churchgoer, but, boy, did my symptoms spike when I stopped engaging with the religion of my childhood. That’s also when alcohol became more and more necessary. I traded one spirit for another.
This year on Good Friday, as I write these words, I’m thinking about a helicopter.
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