Good Friday People

GOOD FRIDAY PEOPLE by Juan L. Mercado

( Looking for a book that will carry you beyond Palm Sunday? Written by Dr. Shiela Cassidy, “Good Friday People” looks at broken men and women – and the grace that shines through them. She was jailed and tortured by the Chilean military, for treating rebels. Dr Cassidy is a UK hospice medical director -- Juan L. Mercado )

"Good Friday people is a phrase I coined, for those who find themselves called to powerlessness and suffering,” she writes. “(These) are men and women, broken in body and assaulted in mind --- deprived not merely of things we take for granted.

"God calls them to walk the same road His Son trod.... I have no clever answer to the eternal 'Why' of suffering . But whatever it's cause and outcome, it is never without meaning."

Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel captures this “sense of the absence of God”, Cassidy notes. Then 14-years old, Weisel was forced, along with other Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz , to watch the Gestapo execute a child.

"Where is God? Where is He now?’ someone behind me asked, Weisel recalls in his book: Night "And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He?. Here He is ---He is here hanging on this gallows..

“Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and turned my dreams into dust, " Weisel added. "Never shall I forget even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

Weisel had the look of a “Lazarus, risen from the dead yet still a prisoner…stumbling among shameful corpses,” recalled Catholic philosopher Francois Mauriac. In his foreword to Night, Mauriac wrote :

"And I, who believed that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner whose dark eyes still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which appeared on the face of the hanged child?

"Did I speak to him of that other Israeli, his brother --- the Crucified, whose cross conquered the world?... Did I affirm that conformity to the Cross and suffering was, in my eyes, the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished..?

"We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child," Mauriac adds. "But I could only embrace him weeping."

In her book, Cassidy accompanies "Good Friday people" -- from El Salvador’s Oscar Romero, the timid priest who emerged into a fearless defender of the descamisados, sick people, Maryknoll nun Eta Ford to Marxist folk singer Victor Jara.

Their suffering "make us want to screen our faces, to turn away," Cassidy writes. "Yet, is through them that the grace of God flows to our arid souls... There is a terrible agony in watching someone hollowed out with a knife…even if the end result is an instrument on which is played the music of the universe”.

There is Beth and her third bout with cancer. "Unable to wait for her to die, her man had gone off with another woman. She “spent a life of drawing short straws'." Or the dying Katie. "Day after day, she waited. But the visitor never came: not her mother, nor her lovers, not even her children."

Catherine’s tumor had spread to her brain. She had few symptoms but soon she’d be in deep trouble. Radio therapy could only buy time. “I just want whatever is best for my daughter,” she said as tears fell.

“There is rare beauty in selflessness of this kind,” Cassidy writes. “Some go to their deaths grasping everything. These are people who will call you away from another patient’s deathbed to adjust their television.”

Jesuit priest Rutilo Grande insisted his El Salvador seminarians live among slum dwellers and landless peasants. “However much one may know about poverty and oppression at an intellectual level, meeting the poor themselves is something quite other.”

Like that of Archbishop Oscar Romero, Father Grande’s efforts, helped the poor "rediscover the Old Testament concept of God as liberator of his oppressed people." It was the poor who showed Grande and Romero “what they required of their church,” Cassidy notes. “Not just the catechism and the sacraments but something much harder : to speak out against injustice”.

The military junta goons killed both of them, of course.

But Grande’s system of exposure to “Good Friday people” anchors seminary training today, including the Philippines. And Romero’s address, on receiving the Nobel Peace prize in 1980, still resounds:

“There are those who sell a just man for money and a poor man for a pair of sandals…It is the poor who force us to understand what is really taking place…The poor are the body of Christ. Through them, He lives on in history.” .

Ironically, it is often non-believers who seem closest to following Christ. Chilean singer Victor Jara abandoned studies for the priesthood “and put his ‘honest guitar’ to work on behalf of the marginalized. He too was killed.

“Should I be speaking of a Marxist folk-singer in the same breath as Jesus?,” Cassidy asks. “The answer is surely yes. For did he not embark on his road to Calvary in response to a call to serve the poor.”

"( Yet ), we are all potentially Good Friday people. We are all frail earthen vessels who, should the potter choose, be fashioned in His image and for his own mysterious purposes….And we tremble because we too may be called to powerlessness... “ (Juan Mercado is my uncle and the doyen of Philippine journalism)