Friday - Goodness and Not so Goodness.

Every course at St. George's has a time set aside for doing the Stations of the Cross in situ, so to speak.  Inevitably, it is at 6:00 am, near the end of the course, and I have done it once, and never again!  The idea of getting an early start to avoid the distraction of crowds sounds good on paper.  But, all the stations are closed until the "owners" who are almost all Moslem, decide to open them, if they ever do, when it is convenient for them, usually around 9:00 or 10:00.  Additionally, some past professor or dean, wrote his/her own version of the Stations of the Cross.  If I had to guess, I would guess that he/she was a graduate of EDS because this version is all about contemporary issues like man's inhumanity to man, environmental concerns, world and local politics and what have you.  This is the version which gets used.  Personally, I've concluded that the placement of the traditional Stations of the Cross are wrong and their location has more to do with crowd management than replicating the path of our Lord on his way to the cross.  There are several traditional devotions, including traditional Anglican scripts, which seek to bring participants into a closer identification with Jesus and, I think they are the ones that are appropriate.  That is a long way of saying that I blew off Staions of the Cross in the old city, again, and slept in.  Otherwise, I was pretty well behaved through out the day.

The Good Friday service at Saint George's Cathedral was recognizably from the Prayer Book, with local variations.  All the essentials: Good Friday lections; sermons/meditations; Veneration of the Cross; 

Solemn Collects; Mass of the Presancttified; abrupt conclusion; all present and accounted for.  I thought that I was the only person to have remembered that Good Friday is a fast day, only to discover that several other people considered themsrelves "fasting" if they didn't eat meat, in other words, like it was any other Friday.  I call that abstinence.  I suppose that kind of thinking is far more wide spread than I would like to know.  For myself, I held true to the tradition of no food until after sundown, and feel self righteously proud for having done so in the presence of so many slackers!

The truly new experience of the day was attending another Armenian service observing the burial of Christ.  Held at St. James' Cathedral, it was another musical tour de force, this time with the entire seminary chorus in place.  In reflection, I would describe it as an extended Evensong with Good Firday elements such as a beautifully decorated "grave" as a focal point.  Looking at a translation of the texts, I noticed a continuing plea for peace as a dominant theme, and who would not applaud that.  However, two solid hours of Armenian liturgical music while standing, no matter how beautiful and executed, is still a lot!  Since I have no other pictures for the day, I'll include a few from this service.