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But three years ago, late in March, I was driving to work in College Station on Good Friday through a miasma of dogwood and redbud and not feeling good about it at all. It was a sparkling, resplendent day. Thickets of wild plum threw up their dark arms in dreamy clouds of white. Primroses, tenderly pink and gold, filled up the ditches along the road.

I was not pleased. This was not a penitential landscape. Good Friday is not the time for beauty.

Yet here I was on my way to teach a bunch of 19-year-olds—most of whose minds were undefended by dogma, half of whom probably had no idea what Good Friday was all about—a poem that told them they should have their socks knocked off by the ersatz cherry trees blooming all about them. They were probably a good deal more concerned at present with their own hormones than the beauties of the woodland ride. But was converting them from hedonists to aesthetes any improvement?

I drove along, vaguely offended by the fields of flowers in full cry and the hillsides spangled with Easter white. This is the week, I thought, the Savior of the world dies. This is the day when all that is good and true goes down to suffer death at the hands of the arrogant, those swollen with the pride of power. And what is the world doing? What is the earth, its own life threatened by those same enemies, doing? Did it care? Was it grieving? No. It was shouldering aside the clods and the husks of its dead self in order to break into life. This unseemly riot had been going on for at least five days, in fact, ever since Palm Sunday—a term that sounded almost pagan itself. Another tree, another symbol of life had been flaunted in the face of suffering and death on that day, too.

As I watched the land roll by, it was as though this week, this so-called holy week, and this day, this tragically good Friday, were being mocked by the triumph of a fickle and unregarding life—life heedlessly, ruthlessly springing forth with relish, ignoring the torn placenta, the shriveling umbilical cord. Life ignoring the violated flesh and choked-off breath to which it owed its very existence, winking at the blood and muck from which it rose. Disregarding the cost.

I started up the range of hills that form the watershed of the Navasota River, glad to leave the flagrant fields behind me for a while. Dark pines rise up beside the highway there, shading out the understory trees and making vertical walls through which the road cuts toward Carlos, a community of itinerant coal miners who work in shifts for the regional power plant.

This was what Good Friday should be like, I thought. Somber and stripped. And here among the austere pines I could concentrate on what this day was about, could consider my own part in this necessary Good Friday.

All week I had been reading the penitential psalms and examining my sins. The exercise had been a satisfying one since my sins were clear and undeniable, and what was required of me to be rid of them was just as clear.

But now it was Good Friday. What did you do after you'd confessed all your sins and cleaned out all your closets? I took one last look around the bare cell of my heart for some forgotten fault, at the same time being careful to avoid the danger of manufacturing contrition for its own sake. Scruples, the small, sharp stones that score an overactive conscience, can also lead to the sin of self-indulgence, I knew.

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April (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44