Good Friday

This year, the Easter season has an especial significance, because I expect it'll be the last time I'll be spending Easter with my family here at home for three years. And so, on Maundy Thursday, went with my folks on the yearly tradition of church visiting. This year, we went to some of the new churches in the West district, including St. Ignatius (two years ago I watched Kels in a Christmas pageant at her home parish there) and the Franciscan Friary at Mary of the Angels. The latter was really beautiful, an ultramodern church of smooth slate, concrete and glass. No Corinthian columns here, but reflecting pools, rock gardens, rough-cut sculpture, a bell tower with four massive crosses on its flanks, a church with a fully transparent façade and a crucifix without a cross. Seeing the Saviour hanging in mid-air is one of the most powerful religious symbols I have ever seen; and to think that such sensitive, wonderful, spiritual architecture can be found in Singapore!

Then, on Good Friday itself, went to our usual church at Siglap to attend the mass. The parish is the most populous in Singapore, and that Friday morning, the church was packed to overcapacity, with parishioners standing in the aisles and crammed around the doors. And celebrating Good Friday with so many people is moving in itself; the energy and sheer volume of so many others united with you in worship and reflection is intoxicating (perhaps distractingly so - so that the heart is carried away by the glamour of the human celebration of the holy event rather than the event itself). The celebrant, too, was powerful. An old priest from another parish of fire-and-brimstone intensity, he gave a sermon of plodding eloquence. His speech was awkward, refracted through physical hardship and not a small amount of deeply felt emotion; but to see him struggle with his words somehow made the import of those very words much clearer. By the end of the sermon, there were people who were quite close to tears, a sight that you very rarely see in the stoic environs of a Catholic mass.

Over Lent, we are called to make our lives more Christian, to make a greater effort to steer clear of sin, to better understand the difficulty and the beauty of the calling. I can't say I've been very successful at living a more wholesome life; certainly there has not been a transmutation that has purified my days as much as I would have liked. But over the last month, I find that I am regularly surprised and astonished by the things that I have encountered. The people and places that have become part of my personal experience. I am struck by wonder at the whole range of Creation and Opportunity, finding myself filled with an appreciation of what exists and an anticipation for what may yet come to be. Within this, I believe you can draw near to God on a daily basis, by delighting in the incidental good that is made possible by the Divine becoming manifest in this existence, and by putting your own effort to the work of bringing out more of the Divine in this very existence.

And, reflecting back on the year since the last Easter, I am once again struck at the range of things that I have to be thankful for. The strength to overcome the challenges of the military era; the experiences in foreign places; the continued health and safety of my family and friends and myself; and, not in the least, the people who are around me and who enrich my life so by being a part of it, incidental or otherwise. The circumstances I find myself in humble me, and demand to be shared and spread, in order that it be broadened and deepened. And this, I think - I feel - is the heart of the Christian life: to spread the good that we find around us as far as possible, ceaselessly and without discrimination of any kind.

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And have also been spending time reading my birthday presents. Finished Lewis' The Four Loves while in Penang, and found it shockingly apt, finding in it the words to articulate a lot of my own thoughts and feelings. And now, in the middle of Wilde's A House of Pomegranates. Dahl wrote fairy tales for adults, in the sense that his style hearkened to childhood while his content was decidedly adult. A House of Pomegranates, however, is a fairy tale that appeals to the kind of child that is only found in a grown-up, I think, in that its language is comprehensible in all its glorious shades and nuances only by experienced readers, but its content assumes and taps reserves of childlike wonder in the reader. It is an enchanting combination, and I find myself regretting that the book itself only consists of four short stories. And I find myself also lingering over every sentence, like with a Winterson book, savouring the texture and flow of exotic and archaic words and constructions, to make the taste linger.

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Oh, and one more thing - the photos for the Penang trip are up! You can find them in the Photography section of the Second Lumière Project, here. Putting the album together was also delightful; there is a special satisfaction in seeing the products of days and nights spent wandering through the streets and landscape. There were things I saw that took my breath away in the ways that the light and the sound intersected to create compelling patterns: a visual symphony. In these photos are recorded the walks through the misty morning lanes atop Penang Hill, the busy market streets of the old town, a beachside sunset that I chased down across the island one evening, and riding the train leaning out an open door, painfully self-conscious but also totally taken by the sheer novelty of the experience. I wish you could have seen what I saw, felt what I experienced; but I also have to acknowledge that a lot of these things would have remained unexperienced if I had not been travelling alone.