Today, 25 March, is both Good Friday and also the date for the Feast of the Annunciation, being 9 months before Christmas. This hasn't happened since 1951 (when I was a 10-month-old baby) and won't happen again until 2046.
Today, for the traditional noon-to-3pm Good Friday service at our church, St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Glasgow, our two priests (technically provost and vice-provost) Kelvin and Cedric decided they'd look at the Crucifixion from Mary's point of view. After all, she was the person who knew Jesus best.
So what we did for 3 hours was to journey with Mary through the story of all that she had gotten herself into, when -- in the words of the lovely John Bell song that we ended with -- she said at the Annunciation to the Archangel Gabriel: "Tell God I say yes".
Somehow, this was the most moving Good Friday service I've ever been to. I had many thoughts during and after, as I walked home down a busy Great Western Road, among them: The different chapters of this story, all of which we peeked into during our pilgrimage to the Holy Land last year, especially Mary's little underground room that we saw at the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, the high point of our pilgrimage the Holy Land last May; also my mother's fascination with Mary and the Goddess and her own spiritual journey, and my own connection to that. But more than anything, the meaning of the word, "Yes!": what it means to take that leap of faith, to give oneself to another person, to a principle, to God, to the Universe.
If you'd like to know more about this, go to: http://thecathedral.org.uk/2016/03/good-friday-preaching/
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