Good Friday

It was 1958, and as I recall, it was an unseasonably warm day for San Francisco. The Bay Area was typically much cooler for that time of year. Our local parish Church, St. Thomas the Apostle, was packed for the Good Friday services, and since this was before the Second Vatican Council, the somber proceedings were conducted in Latin, which lent a timeless and mysterious air to the theater.

All of us from 1st through 8th Grade at the adjacent Catholic School, coincidentally named St. Thomas the Apostle, were forced to attend the 3-4 hour long holy ritual commemorating the passion and death of Jesus Christ. This involved squeezing into narrow pews, and then kneeling, standing up, then kneeling again repeatedly as the various droning litanies were recited and requisite prayers offered up to the designated Father, Son, Holy Ghost, numerous saints, and assorted blessed ones.

As a highlight to the ceremonies, Fr. Stephen Barron, the Parish Pastor, led the congregation through the Stations of the Cross –also known as the Way of Sorrows or Via Crucis — a dramatic series of painted images depicting Jesus Christ on the day of his crucifixion, as things went from bad to worse for that legendary spiritual hero, culminating in his famous death event.

Nor were things going too well for Father Barron, from the sound of it. The good Monsignor must have had a lung condition, since every time he beat his chest ritualistically with his fist in a “Mea Culpa” or comparable mystic formula, he horked up a dollop of phlegm into his handkerchief. He was probably a smoker. In any case, he had likely seen quite a bit of death himself as a chaplain during the War, so he was no stranger to suffering mortality.

Many systems of belief devised by the human persona postulate that suffering is good for the soul, and/or that one must endure some dramatic misery in order to reach higher spiritual attainment. The nuns told me that Jesus died on the cross for my sins. That started me thinking that time must not be linear, which opened a number of new avenues of enquiry.

Meanwhile, lining the Church walls, there were 14 consecutive pictures depicting salient moments during the Passion of Jesus, and Fr. Barron, accompanied by a costumed retinue of altar boys and various clerical functionaries, stopped in front of each picture of Jesus long enough for us to privately sigh and squirm. Tedious and incoherent prayers were recited, while an obnoxious incense was waved back and forth by a smirking altar boy, nearly smoking out the people who happened to be in the adjacent pews, as each station was attended in turn by the processional crew.

The ordeal began at Noon and ran on at least through 3PM — the time God the Son was finally killed on the cross. I began the event feeling a lot of sympathy for the poor Savior, but by the end of the production, I was prepared for them to finish him off so I could get the hell out of that building. Is this what I had to go through every year, only to be rewarded with stale candy-laded baskets and painted hard-boiled eggs?

In any case, it must have been a combination of overpowering incense fumes, the endless moaning chants, the tragic story being played out at each station, the crush of kneeling bodies crammed together in the pews, and the exceedingly stuffy atmosphere, but at around Station #12, I fainted. I remember feeling increasingly dizzy, and then suddenly it was lights out.

Sometime later I was groggily coming back to waking consciousness outside on the Church steps, and a nun was staring down at me with a mean look, accusing me of faking it. I assured her that was not the case, but she thought that she had me figured out, and so pulled me up by my sweater and marched me back inside. The rest of the assembled parishioners, including my classmates, were either appalled or amused, and I recall a blur of funny looks and whispers as I was summarily shoved back into my pew.

Fortunately, I had missed the actual crucifixion, so that was one upside to the debacle, and now I only had to sit through another hour of Mass and Communion in order to complete the exercise and finally get released. My initial religious sentiments had long since been replaced by some serious questions regarding the sanity of what I had been forced to endure, as well as the eccentric rationale behind the event. As I walked slowly down the hill and home that day, I had a lot to ponder –should I go down to the beach, or over to the park, to finish the day. Given the unusually warm weather, the beach seemed a good idea.