This day, which is called good, is the least shallow day of the year. At my church, the cross is veiled, the tabernacle is empty. That provided the backdrop for the Good Friday liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer. It’s a day that brings to mind for Christians around the world the final hours in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, when he was condemned as a blasphemer by religious authorities and executed as a rebel by imperial authorities. In my sermon for the Good Friday liturgy, I most wanted people to know there is no place you can end up in your life, either by choice or by circumstance, that the suffering love of God has not already reached. This I believe.

Even if you don’t happen to share with me the Christian belief that the silence and the emptiness and the suffering of humanity have been mysteriously embraced in the outstretched arms of the Crucified One, surely you’ve had your own experience of Good Friday. Perhaps you’ve also had an unexpected glimpse of hope beyond disappointments, disease, and death. Or maybe you can’t imagine such hope.

These hard times and our deeply rooted convictions about them, religious or not religious, are this week’s haiku theme. So describe what you’ve experienced or what you’ve witnessed in a single verse with five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line, and five syllables in the third line. This is what I wrote:

On Palm Sunday Eve,
Daddy died. My Good Friday
came early that year.