Good Friday Confession

The admission of disbelief
is not the end I once imagined.

It does not arrive as clarity
but as a quieter claim,
a placing of the self
where something greater
was said to stand.

And yet, on this day,
when the story is rehearsed again
in churches, in memory, in the air itself,
I hesitate.

For I was formed by it.
Not only instructed
but shaped, as stone is shaped
by the long insistence of water.

To say it was not true
does not empty it.

The cross remains
not in heaven
but among us,
carried in gestures,
in the reflex to kneel,
in the fear of being alone
in a silent universe.

I know now
how easily a life is given
to what cannot answer it.

Still, I do not stand outside it.

Even disbelief
is a kind of inheritance,
and I, unwilling heir,
continue to bear it
on this day
above all others.