Here it is, Good Friday. If you told me at Christmas churches would be closed as a precaution against a lethal virus once confined to the Chinese horseshoe bat, I would not have believed you. That my son and a dear friend would  contract the virus and recover, while thirtyeight people in a nursing home a half mile from my home would die,  I would again have been incredulous. 

Words and phrases we have become used to hearing, propaganda, spin control, scapegoating, fill our language. So much over which we have no control, but other things we can hold in our grasp, like my daily power walk. I walk six miles straight. The calorie burn is estimated at around 440 calories.I can control what I eat, much as I like to deny that. I will always be a slave to my appetites. I do this little walk, in hopes of letting go. It takes work to let go, to forgive, and to forget takes down right Herculean effort.

So much we want to be right about, So much that matters not a whit.

So today, absent hearing the Passion Story at my parish, will be an irregular Good Ftiday. Yet the suffering we usually hear, even feel, as the brutal story of The Crucifixion still fills the background, will linger in our consciousness till only Sunday morning. And then we shall feel the reset of  redemption and forgiveness.