Good Friday

This morning Ella asked me why today is called Good Friday. I'm glad no one was around to hear me fumble my way through trying to explain it to her. Like always, her question makes me think. How interesting that we do call this day, this day we remember the humiliation, abandonment, torture and crucifixion of Christ, a "good" day. And I think for a while on the paradox of how terrible things can also be beautiful, good things.

I think about Sully and his condition and losing him. I have lived through many people's worst fear, losing a child. And yes, there is a horror to it but also beauty. I think about what I believe, my theology. If there was ever anything I cling to it is this. That even in the brokenness and horror, God has promised me himself, promised to redeem the brokenness, to bring beauty to the ashes. And, he has done that, is doing that. He is being faithful.

I went into the attic to pull down a few things I tucked away for the children’s Easter baskets and ran across my art history text book from college. I pulled it down to flip through. As I skimmed over the introduction I saw highlighted a definition of beauty: “a harmony of all the parts, in whatsoever subject it appears, fitted together with such proportion and connection, that nothing could be added, diminished, or altered but for the worse.” I think about Sully.

So much of the pain for me lies in the loss of what I had hoped this third child would be. But, when I accept that Sully’s life was what it was supposed to be, there is a peace, a stillness. Instead of thinking of all he wasn’t, I think of all that he was and is. Yes, his outward physical beauty did please my visual senses but his beauty went far beyond that. Part of his beauty is everything that was wrong with him. Somehow there was a harmony to all of it. If anything were “added, altered or diminished” then Sully wouldn’t have been the boy that he was. If he had been a healthy child then we wouldn’t have even called him Sully. I had discarded the name originally when I read that it could mean hushed or quiet. What vigorous newborn should have that name? But then, back it came to me after learning our baby was a boy and a very different boy. Sully was his name. Sully is who he was meant to be: broken and tragic but overwhelmingly beautiful and, yes, good.