Good Friday always brings mixed feeling to me. For years I sang in the choir before I left the church and before that I lit the candles for each of the “7 Last Words of Christ” because our church always did Dubois’s famous piece.
It was one of the 2 times in the holy year I ever felt the presence of magic/Holiness/spirit in church. The other was Christmas Eve.
The “7 Last words” is an amazing piece of music and with a huge pipe organ doing the earthquake it feels darn near real here in California. When we little the choir babies got recruited to light the candles in the front of the church. My brother did it a few years with a friend. My part was to shove Cam and Scott to do it at the right time or there was a whispered chorus of “Now? Now? Now?” if I didn’t. So I sat with the score and matches for the huge lighter and shoved at the right times.
It was also the site of my last spectacular public faint. I used to faint at the beginning of any illness that caused a fever. I fainted before I got the measles or flu and most of other times it was at home. This time I wasn’t feeling that bad when we went but as the rehearsal practice and then the service went on I started feeling really sick. I was also standing dead center in the choir loft in full view of the entire congregation. When the earthquake part starts they used to turn the lights out and Charles the Organist would play in the dark. Well, this time, we finished that word and I passed out, BOOM! And the lights went out. So the congregation saw me go straight back and disappear backwards and then darkness.
I came to and decided I had to get out of the loft because I was going to start hurling really quickly. So I crawled down the pew behind the standing choir and shot into the choir room and decided the men’s room in the men’s robing room was as far as I could go. So I got sick and left a trail. And almost passed out again. Very shortly I heard the choir ladies calling my name they found me after following the trail. Ewww! They had been in the balcony and seen me go over like the statue falling over.
They managed to get me out of the men’s robing room and into the women’s just barely. Once I was done being sick I felt better but then we had to wait through the rest of the piece and then communion. It felt like forever. When the service was over I found out just how many people had seen because while I was waiting to go home I got mobbed by little old ladies who wanted to know if I was alright. Our church holds about 2500 people and it was full. If I had been after attention that was sure the way to do it.
Now I miss the magic and the music of the night but I don’t miss the rest of it at all. I’ll take a Samhain ritual any day.