God promises to sprinkle clean water upon the people, and cleanse them from the idols they had served. As water rushes over a rock, it not only cleanses it, it smooths out its rough, jagged edges over time. The currents of the water slowly open up tiny crevices in the rock for new life to find safe spaces in which to be born.
We are now the ones sitting in the aftermath when nothing will happen for a little while. And we begin to tell the story all over again. This is the work of Good Friday, to be in the scraped-out, empty place and to stay there for a while, for as long as we can stand it.
Perhaps last suppers and hard times are when we especially need to love as though we’re simply obeying a clear and doable command. Perhaps these are the times when we just do the next loving thing we can think of, speak the kind word, wrap a towel around us and serve someone, even when we don’t feel very loving quite yet.
Whether today’s trail is a shortcut through the week or not, the scraps of fabric are blazes, trail markers, pieces of cloth snagged and caught like evidence left behind, signaling that the story went along this path, marking the twists and turns from joy to a supper to a garden, passing through a midnight courtyard to a hill named for a skull to a tomb.
Danielle Chapman is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in English at Yale University. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Poetry International, and elsewhere. Delinquent Palaces, released by Northwestern University Press in April 2015, is her debut collection of poems.