Meditations on the way of the Cross

                        STATIONS OF THE CROSS – FROM OUR MONASTERY

                                    Words by Miriam Pollard – Christian author.

                                                FIRST STATION: THE TRIAL

Beginning can be difficult. We are scattered, for one thing, dry and disconnected like Ezekiel’s field of bones. We would be glad enough to pick up the pieces and start out fresh, but we have never been able to manage it. Beginnings always seem to start in the wrong place. We are also worried. It is as if our problems would run away and get worse if they were not being constantly worried about. We can find ourselves at the Sixth Station without ever having got to the first. Be glad it does not matter that much. Pick up one piece of yourself if that is all you can get your hands on, one worry, or sorrow, or ecstatic joy. One will do. Fit it slowly and deliberately into the accepting heart of Christ and let it go. He will take care of the rest of you.

We have to be on our way.

                                            SECOND STATION: ACCEPTING

The cross is not that thing you hate and cannot get rid of. The cross is not dead wood. The shadow of the cross is not a fearful thing. Shade can be comforting. The human heart has two great quarrels with itself, suffering and guilt. In the shadow of the cross these two great adversaries sit down and make peace with you. Hot, sweaty, short-tempered and short-sighted, they come in out of the sun. The strident voices hush, the argument, the questioning subsides. To accept the cross is not to acquiesce in or own destruction or to let ourselves in for more of what we now cannot stand. It is to keep ourselves from looking at things all wrong and adding to the pain.

Let the cross root, let it grow branches and be shade.

                                        THIRD STATION: THE FIRST FALL

This is not much of a start if we are going somewhere, to fall, to be crowded, to be yanked up and hustled off without a chance to think the matter over. You need some mental space in which to come to terms with what falling is about. Or do you? John Donne spoke of the Advent Christ as ‘immensity….shut in a little room.’ A lot of life is shut in a little room, without adequate resources of time or thought, education or even love. We all have our personal litanies of construction. At this point in our travels, we can at least take notice that Donne’s rhyme closes with the only appropriate word – ‘womb’. We can agree that being shut in a little room has something to do with being born.

                                              FORTH STATION: THE MOTHER

Letting go is part of responsibility and also of love. We can cling to one form of a relationship because we cannot imagine any other. But a moment comes when the bearer of our love will leave, and we do not know the geography. Some people have to reach their Easter without us. We can nurse our regret at having to let go or at remembering that we did not. We need to let go of our regret, for this kind of self-torment is not contrition but despair. There is a season, a season for everything under the sun. There is a way of cherishing which entrusts our loves to their own seasons of Resurrection.

                                                     FIFTH STATION: SIMON

We have been loved; we still are loved – inadequately sometimes, but people do the best they can. We have been helped, and maybe the love and help would seem less inadequate if we stopped awhile to ponder the privilege of having them. We could take count of service and courtesy, kindness, humour, friendship and generosity. The privilege of loving is just as good as the privilege of being loved. They go together. But giving does not mean forcing on others the things we want to give, in order to feel valuable. It means respect for what they really need. It can mean providing space for them to make mistakes in, or space for honesty and a helping hand.

                                                  SIXTH STATION: VERONICA

It does not happen this way to us. We wish it would; we would like to have the chance for such a graceful gesture. Do not think it is always easy to be yourself and someone else, to be yourself and also an-other. We cannot get ourselves on order. There is this face inside that is ours and someone else’s, and the form it takes is determined as much by what we are not as by what we are. The face of Christ is being pressed into our capacity for human expansion, for love, service and joy, but also into our limitation, into the fabric of all we do not want to be, all we would rather transcend, change or ignore. The face of Christ looks out at us from a world of other people, from lives that attract and sustain us; and from lives we would rather transcend, change, or ignore.

                                        SEVENTH STATION: SECOND FALL

This is a strange circumstance in which to celebrate the works of human skill. Falling down is not what we were born for. Yet falling is not only unavoidable but useful, even necessary. We get to praise the hands by which we are lifted up, supported. And set once more on our way. Let us praise the skills of human understanding, which appreciate the value and potential of our falls and teach us how to walk again. But let us be glad as well for the medicine, art, and architecture, the farming and the books, the labor which fashions a thousand methods of lightening our burden. Praise the marvel of the human tongue and all its languages; praise every gift in which God visits the world and places in our hands something of his power and concern.

                                EIGHT STATION: THE MOURNING WOMEN

‘Mourn for yourself and your children.’ Yes, but let the Resurrection in. We are torn. We know it is not right to let the sorrow of the world, in its malice, violence, and exploitation paralyze our capacity to help. The magnitude of all that is wrong is enough to numb the healing will. But it must not. Despair is not compassion.  What limited but practical help can we give – today, tomorrow, and another tomorrow? On the other hand, we have to settle for a lot less than we want. The world will not permit itself to be made over to our specifications. We ought not be so compelled by our own vision of improvement that everyone in reach suffers as much from our ministrations as from the original disorder.

                                            NINTH STATION: THIRD FALL

It is strange how running can feel so much like falling down. Some of us like to do too much. It is a kind of importance; it is better than being ignored. We do not like always feeling that there is something we forgot, we would like to pray and be wholly there, to get to the end of a day in one piece instead of two dozen, to finish one task at a time. We try to keep our balance, and get mad when our trying is pitiful and unsuccessful. We are angry at our anger and terribly afraid of getting lost in out desperation. Bring it here – the frazzle, the failure and the anger. Hand him the desperation. Be still for just one minute. God fell down; he knows all about it. He brushes the tips of his fingers over the jagged edges of our fractured hearts.

                                               TENTH STATION: STRIPPING

What we can do and give and be for others is only part of love. If you add what they can do and give and be for us, you still do not have the whole of it. Sometimes we have to let things be taken away, and not only things but our own selves. The occasion might be small. An opinion, a conviction, a cultural outlook may not be shared or confirmed by someone else. The outlook is more than a garment: it is a second skin, and in its rejection, we ourselves go unconfirmed. The occasion may be vast beyond reckoning, as deep as bereavement, as radical as exile or abandonment. We do not belong; sometimes it feels as if we do not exist. But belonging is something inward which no one can take away. Someday we will know this, and we will know that only from this place of belonging can we truly love.

                                             ELEVENTH STATION: NAILING

If we are going somewhere, what are the nails for? This is not a pause along the way, it is a full stop. A lot of life can feel this way. The gift of responsibility can upon occasion feel this way, the commitment given in a gentler hour. When we want to run away we are in danger of skipping out on the dark sweet mystery of the responsible choice. The nail holds. It also pierces – down to a region of the heart whose entrance would be locked except for promises, promises made before we knew what was expected of us. This is a place of beautiful secrets told only in the dark, a place where the waters of Easter flow very close and clear.

                                                TWELFTH STATION: DEATH

We are climbing now. Somewhere near here it begins, and we would find the place if only we could see. Why has the sun gone out? Darkness is a silence of the heart. It erases the non-essential. What we want to be and to do and become – those terrible important concerns which cluttered up the outset of our journey – settle themselves over there on the fringe of the crowd. We sit in the dark at the centre and listen to the breathing of God.

                             THIRTEENTH STATION: RECEIVING THE BODY

We know in some way, what it is like to be unable to provide, unable to stop harm. But this is the quietude, the cessation of the struggle with appearances because there are not any left to struggle with, the evaporation of alternatives. Is it a place of creation? It cannot be unless – unless God has been here before us and is still here, unless this negation is the unbinding of his wings, a night rocked by the warm wind of his creative tenderness.

                                   FOURTEENTH STATION: ENTOMBMENT

This is where the road goes. Our human effort has been spent and we do not have to walk any more.  Waiting is expectation, and expectation is what life is for. But even waiting is not the goal. Something else is, something we are waiting for, something we can only be given, something we know will come.

‘Come down from the cross if you are the Son of God.’

He has. So have we.

                                BY  HIS  WOUNDS  WE  HAVE  BEEN  HEALED