Good Friday in the Dark

I have attended church my whole life but this year something broke open in me during the Good Friday service that never had before. We were sitting in darkness — the candles extinguished one by one — and when the last light went out I began to weep in a way I had not since childhood. Not from grief exactly. From recognition. I felt, in a way I cannot make rational, that I was not observing something that happened two thousand years ago but was present to it — that the darkness in that sanctuary in Richmond was the same darkness, and that I was being held inside it rather than left alone in it. Holy Saturday felt different after that. And Easter morning felt like it cost something real.