ON GOOD FRIDAY

 

The Passion of the Christ

We call to mind today.

Shadows of all human misery

Fall upon His final dereliction.

Come and touch those wounds -

Feel them in each others   hearts -

The pain and the poverty of the poor,

Pierced by nails and wounded by the scourge.

Weep the helpless tears

Of the orphan and the battered wife.

The bleeding wound in His side,

The vinegar and the gall

Are but the portion of the outcast and the sinner,

The lonely, the rejected and the lost.

How love has suffered in this nakedness!

The unforgiven -the abandoned left alone -

The starving baby in its mother s arms...

It is life s inevitable suffering.

A most unholy thing has grown

Out of Eden s blissful dawn.

 

Forgive me, you whom I have crucified

That I have never wept for you till now -

Not for Jesus on His cross,

Or for His cry forsaken,

Or for His deathly thirst,

But for the ruin and the fall of us,

And the sins we have done each to the other.

What I see upon His body lifted up

May I heal upon my brother here beside;

Let me work this precious soil

For bread to feed His poor ones -

Not  thorns and thistles for their crown,

Or a cross to be the summit of our making,

And regretting be the end of all our dreams.

 

Pia Fugaccia

 

Good Friday, 2006