The Wood between the Worlds (Good Friday)

I lit a candle.

Not for peace—

not yet—

but for the man

who called himself

the Bread of Life,

now broken,

butchered,

starved by the world

that never knew him.

He who claimed,

“I am the Resurrection and the Life,”

now swallowed

by the darkness of death.

The one who said,

“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,”

is lost in silence,

shut behind stone,

as I, too, am hidden

in the alleyways of this world.

I know hunger,

the gnawing ache of it,

the cold grasp of isolation.

I know what it is

to be unseen,

to be passed by.

He—

he knows this too.

The man with no home,

no pillow but stone,

the Good Shepherd,

now abandoned,

left to die alone—

as I, too, am forgotten,

swept away in the gutters of the city.

He hangs there,

between heaven’s longing

and earth’s despair,

the wood between the worlds,

a threshold to the realm of love,

where the sacred and the broken meet.

It is not a distant place—

it is here,

in the cracks and corners,

where we wait,

breathless,

for someone to see us

as more than dust.

The one who healed the sick

now bleeds from his own wounds.

The one who fed the hungry

is emptied of life.

The one who called the lost home

now lies abandoned.

But I—

I light this candle

because I am not beyond reach,

and neither is he.

His body,

torn by the world,

is the threshold,

the door where our suffering meets

the mercy that refuses to look away.

And I—

standing here,

a man of the streets,

a shadow in the crowd—

I whisper,

“If this is the wood between the worlds,

a doorway to the realm of love,

then open wide,

that the dark may be swallowed

in the light that calls us

in the gift of Sunday dawn.”

- Rev’d Jon Swales