Good Friday. By this point in the annual Lenten slog, I was usually running on fumes, summoning the energy to handle one more service–the subdued Tenebrae that would end in darkness and silence– and then trying to leave the building before members of the Altar Guild ruined the mood and scurried about, prepping the nave for Easter morning.

Good Friday is not a misnomer or even a play on words. It’s a faith-filled reflection of how we came to feel about and understand what happened that day. It was, one might think, a bad Friday for Jesus. But it was a good day for those who believe, since Jesus carried the world’s sin on his shoulders all the way to the cross. As you might have heard, he died for us.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt the full impact of what that is supposed to mean. I’m not sure it ever happened. I so hope it did, but I have my doubts anymore.

For the faithful or the habitual attendees, one might think that one time through the church year would be enough to get the gist of the story. But we pastors had to always be taking closer looks, hoping for new slants and discoveries that took their time morphing into revelation that we could bend without breaking and turn into metaphors and allegories and timely stories that conveyed different ways of saying the same thing.

In other words, faithful churchgoers and even casual observers know how the story ends, but our lives tend to be a reflection of that passage from Mark 9: I do believe; help my unbelief.

The ritual doesn’t captivate the way it once did. It doesn’t even feel comfortably familiar anymore. Sadly, it feels more like a ruse, a crutch. We’re always waiting, as people suffer horribly and the world burns, and adapting to God’s timetable looks more and more like a fool’s errand.

It’s only a TV show, but after watching the first episode in which the ER team and other hospital staff on The Pitt dealt with a mass shooting, I was moved to opine on the depravity of anyone who decides a viable option for expressing anger or making a name for themselves is by unleashing high-powered weaponry on unsuspecting victims and wreaking absolute carnage.

It was the part most of us never see—the victims brought in by ambulance and police cruiser and family vehicles; some trampled in the rush for cover, others hit by cars, but most with varying degrees of gunshot wound ranging from grazing to fatal shots that reduced a human body to a target for projectiles that rip through human flesh and bone with unimaginable force and horrific result.

Lives instantaneously ended or permanently changed; the purposeful chaos of triage and an urban ER that turns into a MASH unit, the focused attention and expertise of a hospital staff that has to compartmentalize their revulsion and anger so they can function and tend to the massive needs at hand.

It’s only a TV show, but one surely must sense that what unfolded on the screen was not excessively dramatized, not wildly different from real life. As bad as we might imagine these incidents to be, the reality has to be much worse.

But, well, thoughts and prayers, right?

For a few moments yesterday, the only focus was on Artemis II. Watching the coverage of the first moon launch in over 50 years provided echoes of the child-like wonder and amazement that prevailed when the Apollo program was in high gear back in the early 1970s.

I wasn’t thinking about current events, though I did momentarily succumb to imagining how Trump would try to make this achievement all about him. That thought was banished temporarily as we learned all systems were Go and a spectacular launch commenced.

It was a nice break from the avalanche of glaring incompetence that usually occupies so much of our time and attention.

Epstein. Iran.

Has it settled in yet, or has it finally dawned on us that we should be incensed, outraged, and mad as hornets?

The person taking up space in the Oval Office unilaterally gave the order to tear down the East Wing of the White House.

It’s not his house! Kudos to the judge who said as much and ordered a stop to the construction of Trump’s damned ballroom.

Someday, many of us will have an epiphany. It will stir up feelings. Strong feelings, perhaps. Maybe these will come out of left field, maybe they will be confirmation of something we’ve known all along: Donald Trump is a flaming narcissist, a hot mess of a moron with stunted moral development and a wickedly skewed set of values.

In short… he’s massively unfit to be President of the United States.

How could anyone—ever—think he would be the one to introduce straight talk and common-sense insight to governance in the nation’s capital? Because he was a good businessman? Laughable. Because he talked a good game and why not give him a chance? He’s been given an inch and he’s taken a million miles.

Because he wasn’t really a Washington insider, a politician? That may be the most laughable idea of all.

Extensive damage has been done. The whole East Wing debacle probably cracks the Top Ten List of the 500 or 1000 most insane actions and statements that have warped our collective psyche since Trump took office the first time.

Meanwhile, Mike Johnson and the rest of the servile flatterers, apparently indifferent to democracy withering on the vine, stand by and applaud a flatulent pile of protoplasm.

Iran. Epstein.

I want to believe that there are other things to talk about. It’s just that every new day doesn’t feel totally new, which I guess would be the case even in normal times. A good night’s sleep doesn’t miraculously cure or erase the ailments of advancing age or dissipate the dark cloud that is the Trump administration.

The latter’s presence translates to daily wear and tear, a daily toll on many a psyche—in part because Trump is a daily embarrassment, and things often seem so bad, so much a caricature of evil and incompetence, that many of us can’t believe it’s real.

It is real, of course, and the longer it all goes on, the harder it will be to stop. It’s a battle of attrition; it has meant constant vigilance and protest at every turn. Many may be hoping that time itself will take care of the cancerous growths that have been allowed to spread, checked on occasion by litigation and protest but stunningly resilient. Letting things play out is not a cure, though.

Words come haltingly at times, because we’ve already used so many to describe the coldness and reckless abandon and deceit and zeal and almost cartoonish evil, along with a difficulty in believing that we could let such garbage through the door.

Endless verbal critique won’t rid us of the pestilence. We need to meet this coldness, this attack on reason and good judgment, with a dogged determination to preserve the founders’ vision, and to remind Trump and the rest that certain rules and guidelines are sacrosanct, in a non-religious sense, and not even he in all his ignorance masquerading as competence dare mess with trivializing their importance.