Were you there?

Good Friday. 

When Christians think of that their minds and hearts dwell on the Cross, the agony of death, and the moment when God separated himself from Christ. And at last night's Good Friday Tenebrae service, the candles being slowly extinguished at the utterance of each of Jesus' Last Words from the cross only amplified the solemnity of the evening. 

But for me, the significance of the evening was in two of the hymns selected. For they were hymns that my mother would sing to me out of a 1939 hymnal. 

So, last night, as the sanctuary darkened with each of Christ's last words, all I could think of was the gentle and loving voice of my mother as she sand "Beneath the Cross of Jesus" and "Were you there?" And while the text of those hymns speak of trembling, or "the burning of the noontide heat", with my mother's voice in my head they were (and still are) hymns of reassurance. 

Perhaps it was because she, a woman who possessed a strong faith, saw those hymns as reassuring. My brothers and I were never fed a message of God as a vindictive and angry God. We were given the loving God as manifest in Jesus. Perhaps it was her gentle love for all of us that permeated those hymns as well. 

So, on this Good Friday, while remaining contemplative about the significance of the event, I was dwelling on the love, the love that surrounded me as my mother sang in her clear, gentle voice.