The traditional Lenten act of prayer, the Stations of the Cross, always seems to me to be about waiting around for something. Like standing around on railway stations for arrivals and departures and cancellations. The Hill of Calvary for which the infant of Christmas night was born and waited for, is not so much a hill to preach from, but rather one to stumble and ascend towards. The whole of Christ’s life was about waiting for this ‘hour’. The Passion for me begins in Bethlehem the house of bread, and starts to dramatically unfold in the room where the Passover meal took place and where the eucharist was instituted. Here there is a letting go of things personal and people and promises. Judas leaves the room to betray Christ and the dark night begins. Peter promises Christ the world and is diminished by it. In Gethsemane Christ waits for God to speak to him but nothing, only the tree of the cross looming up in darkness waiting for him. Then waiting before Pilate and the questions of the Sanhedrin. He waits for the cross to appear. He waits to empty the cup of pain and dereliction. He waits for Easter Day. Of course when we do meditate on the Stations of the Cross, it’s not just some sacred act of remembering Christ’s passion, it’s about seeing our own selves looking at us from those images. This is the journey of every person. No one is exempt. Like Christ, we will be condemned sometimes for who we are and what we stand for, and what we say and do. We will carry the heavy burden of what it means to be human and help others to do the same. We will fall and stumble. We will have some who care and others who don’t. We will all come to that point of stripping the spirit bare and seeing ourselves in the stark reality of our humanness and with that sometime awful reality of disintegration mental and physical, sitting in a circle in a nursing home, fixed like Christ to the cross, not able to walk or feed or toilet ourselves – with the inevitability of death generally with fewer and fewer visitors. ‘We will all come to that place where we are no longer free to go and choose our paths. Then what? What after the shadows and silences? The insolence of my mind may lead me to doubtful conclusions to these questions – but my rock hard faith says something different, – this cross, my cross, the world’s cross,…… – with its roots in the mind’s dark – Was divinely planted…..’ R. S. Thomas. ‘Amen’ |
