A disappointment. . .

The truth is that I have sat on this for some time.  Perhaps I was so happy to begin a sense of normalcy to the Holy Week observances lost in the wake of the pandemic year, I did not think to spoil the week I had been longing for with complaint.  But it is shocking to me and something I did not expect and could not have predicted.  That is, the surprising meaninglessness of Holy Week, in particular Good Friday, in the South.

I grew up in Nebraska and Holy Week was a big thing among the mostly Lutheran population there.  It was a somber day in which one would not think of challenging the landscape of the cross with humor or distraction.  No, we did not observe the rigorous fasts of Roman Catholics (in a small minority where I grew up) but neither did we ignore that this was the day on which we commemorate that our Lord Jesus had to suffer and die for us and our salvation.

Yet Good Friday in the Bible belt is largely no different than any other Friday.  Business goes on.  Even schools do not uniformly offer the day off for students and staff.  Bars and restaurants continue to serve to the merriment of those attending.  Spring sports programs schedule practices and games for the Friday on which we note the Lord's death.  In fact, I recall one practice in which a coach insisted that if our son did not join them on the mound on Good Friday, he would not play other days!  Baptists and other churches that do have services mostly likely have Easter cantatas on Holy Thursday and Good Friday in which the focus is less on the cross than on the empty tomb.  This year the marquee on the church next door advertised exactly that.  The empty cross is symbolic of an event we have chosen to forget or ignore on the one day of the year devoted to it.  If Jesus is risen, the cross is no more -- except where did you ever read that in Scripture?

But what do we expect from a nation so proudly Protestant?  After all, it was on Good Friday that Lincoln chose to head to the theater and view a comedy -- a profoundly religious man who seemed to be immune to the religious significance of that day.  This year golfers took to the greens for the Masters on Good Friday.  Even Roman Catholics who should know better have largely ignored the religious implications of this day.  The Kennedy clan has a history of Good Friday's spent at home rather than in church (or, in the case of 1991, in a bar where the claim of rape was made against one of them).  

We like to point out that Americans are a much more overtly religious people that Europe and yet in Europe it is more likely that theaters and night clubs and bars would be closed or close to empty as the culture has made more prominent the Good Friday holy day.  Great Britain is Protestant, at least in a classical sense of that term, and there Good Friday is a national holiday.  How strange it is that we would add days to our calendar of national holidays (Juneteenth, for example) and find absent the most sacred day for Christians of all stripes!  Perhaps we have taken too seriously the words of Jesus to hide in the prayer closet.  Or, perhaps, the individualization of a private faith has made it easy to party hearty on the outside while praying on the inside as Jesus mounts the altar of the cross.  In any case, it is a rude lesson to learn that Good Friday is simply one more Friday in the South.  As it might be in many places in the US.  But you might think that in a nation that so loudly lauds its Christian origins and devout people, it might still be a holy day.  There.  Well, you have heard my complaint.