Earlier this week, I was deep in the weeds at work when the shadow of a deadline for my next Good Letters post began creeping over me. “I’ve got you down for Good Friday,” our long-suffering editor, Greg Wolfe, noted in a friendly nudge on Monday, before I got around to asking him exactly when my post was due.

“Don’t feel you have to write about Good Friday,” he added.

Oh, but I do.

Other ideas for the post had been brewing, but upon learning that today was the day it would appear, I promptly shelved them for another time.

For it was two years ago on Good Friday, a day remembered for the death of God’s own Son, that unto us (me and mine) a son was born. Luke Guerin Winters. Luscious Luke. Schmilthy Lucre. And come Halloween, Spooky Looky.

Like his two older sisters, Luke presented breech in the womb and never dropped. But thanks to a formidable OB who does not abide the current trend in the medical community against vaginal births after Caesarians, he was given the same chance as his sisters to be turned, induced, and delivered without a C-section.

And thanks to what felt like an added touch of grace for the ease with which the turn took place, as with his sister before him it worked.

Fittingly, given the day in question, a Caesarean did not come to pass. In an e-mail sent out to friends and family from our room in midtown Manhattan I wrote:

“The Bradford pear trees were in bloom outside the hospital, a Passion play replete with Roman centurions marched by on the streets far below, and at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt we received our very own little saint Luke. All in all, it was a very Good Friday.”

At the time, of course, the dominant emotion was sheer elation. Standing at the hospital’s elevators over Easter weekend, heady with all the notes of birth and death and resurrection in the air, I found myself prone to compose a haiku on the spot:

EPITAPH FOR A BORN-AGAIN DAD

Here lies one who rode
the Sabbath elevator
all the way to heaven.

But on the two Good Fridays since then, and this one more than the last one now that I’ve sat down to organize my thoughts about it, I have had the occasion to consider afresh the unspeakable horror that the day commemorates.

Put simply, I simply cannot fathom what the Father had to witness being done that day to the Son. Forget any prior knowledge of it on either’s part, or even the agreement between them before the foundations of the world; on that day, at that hour, a father had to watch his son die a slow, bloody death over the course of many hours.

This is why the graphic extremities of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ did not bother me, despite my usual aversion to gratuitous violence in film. How could any portrayal of the Crucifixion even begin to render how awful it truly must have been?

While I can appreciate one friend’s summary judgment of the movie as “a slasher film in Aramaic,” the difference in slasher films is that the bloodshed is not supposed to denote the provision for every last sin in human history. How much is too much?

(All of that said, my problem with the movie is that it wasn’t actually a movie, altogether lacking as it was in story, character, and a true dramatic arc on any level; rather, it was an icon made of celluloid instead of paint. Not that you can bill a film as that, but I’m convinced that even unconsciously Gibson set out to make an icon more than a movie. The fact that his production company is called Icon Films only tends to prove the point.)

In those moments when I get a fleeting glimpse what it would be like to lose Luke (or his sisters) prematurely, to say nothing of what it would be like to see him murdered before my own eyes, I can feel the ground vanish into my blessed suspension from a bottomless abyss.

At any moment, I know the suspension could give way.

And if it did—well, that is where my imagination stops.

To think of the millions upon millions of parents worldwide who go into such free-fall day in and day out. From the parents of Trayvon Martin to the Mothers of the Disappeared, from every nook to every cranny of the globe in between…how do they go on?

Since becoming a father myself, it is this and other questions that keep me tethered to the Christian construct as much as any of its answers: how did the Father go on past the first nail that was hammered into the hand of the Son?

If there is a peace that passes all understanding, it is only because there is a horror that does the same.

By bordering on the surreal, I think, the redemption at Calvary remains so bloody real.

And little saint Luke tells me the story every bit as powerfully as his namesake