Good Friday

We were gathered in the central plaza of Ayacucho, our feet stepping in a frenzied, tiptoed dance with a sea of partners. Behind us, insistent people, pressing for their private piece of pavement. Before us, transient masterpieces of colored sawdust and flowers and leaves and grass that would not last the night’s coming rain.

Night fell, but slowly, blanketing first the mountaintops in her cold embrace, muting all but the earth-bound stars that clung, yellow, to the distant hillsides. She continued her descent, eventually reaching the city, bringing with her that reverent and subtle silence of a thousand hushed voices that falls each night to mourn the death of another day.

As darkness reached the plaza, harsh fluorescent lights were extinguished, replaced slowly, deliberately, by the faint flickering of candlelight.

Silence.

The silence of a thousand hearts beating, a thousand wicks burning.

A shift in the air. The breeze brought us distant voices – men’s – singing slowly, tenderly. In the yellow darkness, bodies passed before us. Bowed heads, yellowed by candlelight. Metronome steps, measured by breath. We watched, intruders. Foreigners to this somber, sacred march.

When Jesus entered the plaza, he came in a casket. Carried on the shoulders of weighted men, heavy with sorrow and touched by the darkness, the glass casket outshone the candles. It shone blue, ethereal. Alien. Hundreds passed before us, furrowed brows, silent, mourning an execution we have never understood, will never understand.

They passed. The blue casket faded, floating above the sea of firefly flickering candles. The body of Jesus, broken for you.

Before us, the plaza lay silent – empty but for a thousand souls. Under the feet of the passing men, a child’s face depicted in the sawdust before us had been transformed, mutilated. Her face, distorted, seemed to cry out, tears running up her cheeks and into her hair.

A hollow, wailing melody of a hundred women’s voices broke the static silence. The women, unseen, sang a song of sorrow. Mary’s song. We waited, unmoving. Listening, eyes closed.

Bodies passed before us once more. Women, beautiful and dark-skinned, walked with graceful and deliberate steps. They blended with the night, their black dresses of mourning forming a daunting darkness broken only by candlelight on tear-stained faces.

Finally Mary, garments of black, vestments of sorrow, shouldered by twenty women whispering prayers while watching the ground. She wept.

When the last woman passed, stepping in time with her heartbeat and her candle held at her breast, there was but a moment’s silence. A moment, a breath, of divinity. A tender, holy pause before the sounds of the city resumed. A baby cried at my shoulder, girls ran before us, laughing at life’s secrets, a woman with a face of worn canvas scolded her husband, You got wax on my shoes.

I paused a moment longer, lingering in that holy place. I turned, a prayer on my lips, and went on my way.

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