Good Friday

“Turn and look once more, and smite a rock.”

When I was a little girl, I often fell asleep to the sounds of my dad, composing new music on the piano in the next room over. A classically trained baritone with a once-in-a-century kind of voice like Pavarotti, he also took a lot of composition classes in college. He put those skills to work right away.

Funny enough, when I asked him about his composing process trying to get clarity on how to compose my own first piece, he just said, “I just play stuff on the piano until I like it.”

He was mighty good at it.

Back in the turbulent 1960s, he turned down a deal with Motown, believe it or not. A few years later, after a period of questioning and seeking, he made an abrupt turn from atheism to Christianity. From that point on, his compositions centered on sacred music for church choirs, sacred solos and sacred hymn arrangements for violin, cello, piano…and especially kids choirs. He loved teaching little kids to sing.

I grew up in small country churches where musicians were somewhat sparse. Often, my dad conducted the church choirs. Sometimes these choirs had all SATB, but often whole sections were missing. And necessity being the mother of invention, Dad would write pieces these little church choirs could sing with two or three parts.

In the early 2000s, in 2009 or 10 my parents moved to Colorado to assist my brother-in-law at his church plant. This was where the vast majority of dad’s choral music was written.

This particular piece, Good Friday, was written specifically for the children of High Country Baptist Church to sing in unison for the annual Tenebrae service. Tenebrae means “darkness” or “shadow” and is held three days before Resurrection Sunday. Scriptural readings and songs about Christ’s suffering, death, and burial are intertwined while the lights are gradually extinguished. In darkness, the congregation leaves without speaking or socializing.

Somber stuff for children, but I was there for one such service and heard them singing this piece. With proper gravity, they sang it with their whole hearts under Dad’s direction.

A few years after that, Dad revised the piece and added some beautiful harmonies that blend perfectly. This last week, I recorded all the parts, my husband recorded the piano accompaniment, and my brother, Justin, put all the recording tracks together and edited the video.

A good quality recording of this piece had not been done before last week, and it’s been in my heart to do it for a while.

Because Dad is gone now.

He loved, and I love, the poems of Christina G. Rossetti. She was an honest Christian and had a way of reaching back through the years and saying, “You’re not alone. I have felt it too.”

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.

This remaining hardness of heart, the echoes of the old man who will be with us until we die…is something my dad keenly felt all of his Christian life.

But he doesn’t feel it anymore. He has no darkness, no shadow, no wrestling to feel and desire as he ought.

That is because of the victory Christ won for all of us on that Sunday morning.

So, forgive me for publishing this unexpectedly early rather than on Friday, as I had originally intended. But I thought, given that it’s Holy Week, it might be even better to have this song in your heart and mind a few days longer before Easter Sunday.

I hope it’s a blessing to you.

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Isaiah 53:3

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…

Richard Joseph Barber

June 21st, 1944 - July 7th, 2021

Dad, arranging his music, on my wedding day.