First, from a 1964 column:

Last week I faced the usual problem, as senior official of a small office, which I expect a great many others of you face; and, perhaps, like you, I did not quite know what to do about it. It is this: whether to close the office on Good Friday. The obvious reflect for a practicing Christian, as for a practicing Jew on his holydays, is to do so – to close down, as an act of religious reverence. At the same time, the worldly observer is increasingly aware that it is becoming harder and harder to define the meaning of closing the office down on Good Friday. Does the act of doing so, if you are in the position of authority, signify your own obeisance to, and recognition of, the holy day? Or is the reason we close down primarily that we wish to give the staff the opportunity to observe the holy day, at least to the extent of punctuating a half hour or more of it, with worship, with an act of gratitude to the Man who made the most awesome decision in the history of tragedy and hope, the act of all acts most celebrated by the writers, painters, and poets of the past two millennia? And yet the worldly observers know that a very small minority of American Christians take thought, during Good Friday, of the meaning of the day; that rather . . . [they] spend the day about as they would spend Memorial Day, or Lincoln’s Birthday, or any adventitious holiday. And so the moral dilemma begins to take form: Is it not contributing to a travesty, to close the office on Good Friday so that the staff may spend the day – not at work, whose accomplishment, reflecting the human estate, is in so acute a sense an act of submission to divine arrangements; but at play, whose pleasures are by no means metaphysically anti-Christian, but whose pursuit, to the total exclusion of any act of reverence, constitutes, on a holy day away from the office, an act of religious profiteering . . .

Second, from his book Nearer, My God:

It surprises almost no one that Christians believe in the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ and His subsequent Resurrection. What isn’t easily dramatized is the mind-numbing scene on Calvary. I remember that Fr. Burke, our parish priest in Camden, South Carolina, read out one Good Friday when I was a boy a technical description, done by a pathologist, of the pains inflicted on Christ. I was much moved by the recitation. It is easy to forget pain – it is healthy to do so, the mother’s transcendence of childbirth pain serving as the standard metaphor. At Millbrook School, Nathaniel Abbot coached junior varsity football, taught Latin, conducted the Millbrook orchestra, and gave a class in music appreciation. A feature of his music class was a look – a very long look – at J.S Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. On the day he began it he told his dozen-odd students that in the succeeding six class sessions we would be listening to all four hours of the Passion, a kind of twitch-anticipating warning which had exactly the results Mr. Abbot could predict, having seen the same thing happen to a generation of boys – general dismay at the prospects of six hour-long sessions of Baroque boredom. The boys would sit through it, as I did, only because we had no alternative. At the outset Mr. Abbott would read out the scripture verse Bach set to music, giving us some narrative orientation of what the music was up to. He knew that many of the students would pass the experience by . . . One more exposure to a great work, ho hum, and on to livelier things. But Mr. Abbot knew also that some of the boys would be taken by what in my experience is the most compendiously moving extended piece of music I ever heard. The artistic climax is the chromatic movement toward the depths of desolation as Christ dies (“et sepultus est“), leading to the brassy triumph of His Resurrection (“Et resurrexit“). Bach did this in a composition quite simply overpowering, infusing in the recitative, followed by the aria, followed by the chorale, an intimate sense of the pain, the sorrow, and the joy.

William F. Buckley Jr. writing about faith is my favorite Bill, because it’s from where everything else flowed. It’s why he was so grateful and awestruck and present and persevering. In Nearer, My God he goes on to talk about mysticism and how some of those gifted in prayer have helped him along the way encounter God in a deeper way. It’s a good meditation for entering into deeper prayer during these most holy days.