Good Friday in Dublin

Patrick Comerford

Good Friday was an intense climax to Holy Week this year.

It began with a simple reading of Saint John’s Passion narrative in the chapel of the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, which had been stripped bare the previous evening at the end of the Maundy Eucharist, and a reading of the Litany in the Book of Common Prayer:

By your agony and trial, by your cross and passion, and by your precious death and burial,
save us, Lord Christ.
The small congregation concluded with the Collect of Good Friday, the Lord’s Prayer, the Prayer of Saint John Chrysostom, and the Grace.

In the Collect of Good Friday, we prayed:

Almighty Father,
Look with mercy on this your family
for which our Lord Jesus Christ
was content to be betrayed
and given up into the hands of sinners
and to suffer death upon the cross;
who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

From there, I went into Dublin’s city centre to take part in the annual commemoration of all the victims of the violence in Northern Ireland.

This service in the Unitarian Church in Saint Stephen’s Green is now in its ninth year, is believed to be the only religious service of its kind in Ireland. From noon, the list of more than 3,500 people who have killed in the conflict are read out during the three-hour commemoration.

We were welcomed and introduced by the Revd Bill Darlison, Minister of the Dublin Unitarian Church, and I was asked by him to begin reading the names of the dead. As I read those names out, one by one, from A through B, it was sad to realise how many of the names I had forgotten, and how many I actually remembered.

I was followed by Monsignor Tom Stack, former parish priest of Milltown, Co Dublin, and while I was there the names continued to be read by George McCaw of the Unitarian congregation, my former colleague in The Irish Times, Andy Pollock of Armagh, and the RTÉ broadcaster Doireann Ní Bhroinn.

Before I left, I was intereviewed for RTÉ’s News at One.

On Friday evening, we went up the hills behind us to Orlagh, the Augustinian Retreat Centre at the top of Ballycullen Road. There an hour of meditation around the Cross was led by Bernadette Toal and John Byrne, who at the beginning of lent had led the Ash Wednesday retreat for students from the Church of Ireland Theological Institute.

As we left in silence, the city was lit up below us, and a ship could be seen making its way into the bay. Life continues, but there is always the promise of hope and of new life.