An Unusual Liturgical Observance

As the traditional Churches Together in Hornington Good Friday Walk of Witness got under way a week ago, it was clear that the drizzly weather had proved a disincentive to many: there were, generously estimated (I didn't count) no more than sixty of us and probably fewer. It brought into sharper focus than usual all the questions I have about what it is we are doing.  In cultures which have a stronger sense of Christian self-identification than ours, public expressions of Christian faith are also expressions of community identity; but in ours it's more about sectarian identity, about Christians saying we are still here, that the day as a holiday has something to do with the story we own and communicate. But we walked along a High Street where virtually all the shops were open, making the point that Good Friday is hardly even a day off for many people now, let alone anything like a religious observance. Are we really just making ourselves feel better? Is that enough to justify doing it? Twenty years ago my vicar in Chatham suggested we should do away with the Walk because nobody understood what it was about, and just have somebody stood silently with a cross in a corner of the local shopping centre. I didn't think he was right then: I wonder now whether the time for his idea has well and truly come.

Our local Baptist minister has argued for some years that as well as marking the gloom of Good Friday we ought as a group of churches also to mark the Resurrection. That makes sense but the we're all so exhausted by Easter Day that the idea of adding something else to the cursus ritualorum had very limited appeal. Anyway, this year the Baptists bit the bullet and did it, and a group of us - not a very extensive or ecumenically-mixed group - turned up to do the Good Friday walk in reverse on Easter Day. The question arises of what you actually do: on Good Friday you rather logically carry a cross, but what object can express Easter, whose central motif is the absence of a body? The organisers decided on a stone, the stone that closed Jesus's tomb and was rolled away when the women arrived that first Easter morning. Roll a stone along the High Street, that sounds good. Firstly the chicken-wire and painted-cloth stone turned out not to be disc-shaped, as I'd always imagined it, but spherical: and discovering it was a bit less robust than imagined the decision was taken not to roll it but carry it in a sheet. This added an element of weirdness not even I had anticipated.

I wish I'd had my camera.