![]() ![]() ![]() Gregory’s for almost a decade by then and a leader in its liturgies, but what I thought of as my “church” life and my “real” life didn’t usually intersect so publicly. Still, I felt awkward when the procession crossed paths with people I knew: a caseworker at the homeless shelter, a guy from our food pantry outside the check-cashing place on 16th Street, a friend at the achingly hip Ritual Coffee. In this neighborhood, an outdoor Good Friday commemoration wasn’t entirely unusual. Most onlookers smiled, and a few fell in step with us at different points, joining in the hymns. A nun in a brown Franciscan habit carried a large photograph of a bound, blindfolded, kneeling Iraqi prisoner with a duct-taped wound in his side two women in sweatshirts took turns carrying a heavy cross and a couple of thurifers censed storefronts and passersby enthusiastically. Some in our group-about 40 men and women and a couple of small children-chatted as we strolled, while others seemed lost in their own meditations. ![]() That day we covered a lot of ground, walking from one end of the Mission to the other, stopping to chant prayers at places where people had been murdered or at sites of suffering designated as “stations of the cross.” We prayed at the police station, in a garbage-filled park where a boy had been shot, in front of a homeless shelter. ![]() Read our latest issue or browse back issues. ![]()
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