I was asked to give a reflection during the Good Friday service this year.  I just presented it a few hours ago.

A family that prays together, stays together.

These were the words of my mother when I was growing up when she would call me, my sister, and my brothers to the living room for evening prayer. My oldest brother would always manage to grab the ringing phone and my other two siblings and I would take turns talking about how much homework we still had to do – we’d say anything to avoid evening prayer.  But my mother would say again, reminding us, “A family that prays together, stays together.”

I thought about that phrase a lot growing up – what would it mean if our family didn’t pray together?  Would it mean that some kind of force would tear us apart?  Did praying together put some kind of a bubble over me and my family, protecting us against illness, misfortune, and tragedy?

“A family that prays together, stays together.”

One of the first real tests of this came some years later when I was in high school.  I was seventeen years old and beginning my senior year in high school.  My college applications were piled high on my desk, my car had a full tank of gas ready for the weekend.  It was September of 1996 and I remember thinking and feeling that life couldn’t get any better than this.

It was a Thursday like every other Thursday I’d known.  I had just come home from my friend’s house and it was late when the phone rang.  It was my friend Christy who, without saying hello, asked me if I heard what had happened.

No, I told her, I hadn’t heard anything.

She told me in a shaking voice, “I don’t know how to say this, but Celeste was in a car accident earlier tonight and she didn’t make it.”

I was completely disoriented and silent so Christy repeated, “Lisa, Celeste died tonight.”

Celeste was a year younger than I was and one of those girls in school who simply radiated. She was beautiful, athletic, kind; she was the kind of girl you almost envied except she always made you feel like a million dollars when she smiled at you.   Celeste was one of those people I could count on one hand who was deeply loved by everyone around her, including me.

A few days later, I was leaving the funeral home with my mom and my sister.   While my friends clung to one another in their grief, I clung to my family.  I didn’t have to look up to feel the size of the crowd.  There were people everywhere – hundreds of people, pressing forward, trying to enter the single door to the funeral home to pay their respects.  Everyone was consumed and concerned by their own grief.  Everyone that is, except one person.  With my mother on my left side and my sister on my right, both were practically bolstering me up as we walked out of the funeral home. I was so distraught and my eyes never left the ground when suddenly I felt someone’s hand reach through the massive crowd and grab hold my right arm.

To this day, I do not know who that person was.  It could have been a friend, a stranger, someone who knew me, or just someone who could see the disbelief on my face and wanted to reach out to me.

It’s been 15 years and I can still feel that person’s hand on my arm.  It was steady, knowing and warm, all the things that I could not feel for myself.  Everyone around me, myself included, was drowning in their own pool of sorrow and loss, except for this one person who reached out for me, through the sea of limbs, and tears, and trauma, and touched me.  It wasn’t in a passing, fleeting manner either.  It was in a way that conveyed strength, solidarity, and understanding.  Without saying one word, without seeing this person’s face, this hold on my arm conveyed a message, “I see you. And I am with you.”

We all know Jesus’ story of Good Friday.  It is a story of unimaginable suffering, abandonment, and consuming agony.  In the last hours of life, he is hanging on the cross, alone and in the most excruciating physical and psychological torment.  And what is on Jesus’ mind?  What are his last thoughts? Still, even as he is crucified, He moves beyond his own suffering and sees the need in others.  He says to his mother: Behold your son.  And to John: Behold your mother.  He says LOOK – look at one another.  See one another and care for each other. 

Why do we come together on Good Friday? 

Because whether you see it or not, right now someone in your life is in pain.  And right now that someone is trying to hide how much they are hurting.  Someone in your life is in a darkness much darker than yours.  And someone, right now, is in your life walking with their eyes on the ground, not sure if anyone can see their pain.  And today is the day to hear Jesus’ call to resist being swallowed by our own suffering, and to find that person whose eyes are downcast and tell them: I see you and I am with you. 

Because there is no better day than today to reach out to someone in your life who is in their own private battle of job loss, depression, family disputes, illness, or bereavement.  Just last week I accompanied a group of medical professionals from our parish to visit the medical clinic in Chiltiupan,  El Salvador – our sister parish of Santo Domingo.  I watched them share their gifts and specializations as they taught health promoters and demonstrated different techniques on how to suture.  Despite the poverty that surrounded the clinic, the exchange of ideas and learning lit up each person in the room.  These physicians, nurse and pharmacist, with their actions affirmed each person I see you and I am with you.

There is no better time than right now to live beyond yourself.  It doesn’t have to be in El Salvador.  It can be right here in our St. Dominic parish. We come together to not just be there for one another but to derive strength and comfort as a family, as a community that needs to go out into the world and calm one small piece of a storm in someone else’s life.  What good are you creating on Good Friday if you shroud yourself in more of your own darkness, in more self-worry, in more self-doubt? 

We come together today on Good Friday not just for ourselves but for one another.  I believe you are we are here today, not just to be with Jesus, but to be with one another, to be loving, and like the disciples to gather in grief, uncertainty, and togetherness.

It was in the togetherness of Celeste’s funeral that someone, nameless, faceless and unknown reached out and, with the hand of Christ, touched an extremely vulnerable part of me.  Their handprint is forever and anonymously burned in my memory.

Look around you, this is your family. And families that pray together, do stay together.  Whoever that person was, whoever heard Jesus’ call to move beyond their own pain and to see mine didn’t just comfort me, this person, indeed, has stayed with me. 

Jesus calls us to do the same because, as my mother told me,

Families that pray together, stay together.

Who will you reach out to?