VIII Jesus speaks to the women

What sort of places are stations anyway? Stations of the cross...why stations? Stations are places where we stop, pause and wait for something to happen, or for someone to arrive. Perhaps that is why these are stations - we are waiting for God to speak, to arrive, and for something to happen. A lot of prayer seems to me to be about waiting, listening, hoping. Maybe it is like being at a station.

Even on a crowded station there is a sense of being with others, but alone. We take a step back to think - where am I going? Everyone is on a journey and we are all going in the same direction. Where we came from is different; our reasons for traveling are different - sometimes full of joy, sometimes sorrow and suffering - always hope, God will arrive.

I travel to London after school once or twice a week, and for me stations can be quite frightening. They are places where you can be called to witness something - someone drunk, and argument, someone crying. It is always difficult to know what to do, it can be threatening. Do I just watch and witness? Look away? Intervene? The suffering of those closer to us can be equally challenging and pose the same questions, but mostly all people need is to know that you are there, present, walking with them.

The women in this picture are waiting for something: justice, peace, mercy, compassion. Jesus speaks to them. He is present to them, they walk with Him, he walks with them: waiting for something to happen, waiting for God to arrive and for God-with-us to make himself known once more.

VIII. Jesus speaks to the women

There is something about this picture that speaks to me of repentance. In a way, this is the moment of Christ's passion addressed to me. So much of what takes place occurs in masculine society, the courts of the Sanhedrin and Pilate from which women were forbidden, the courtyards of soldiers where women would rather not be seen. But here, in the street, women are not only witnesses, their mourning makes them involved. 'Weep not for me', says Jesus, 'weep for yourselves, and for your children'. There is in the same sentence a deep need for conversion, turning back to God, and a responsibility for the next generation, the children.

In many ways this picture moves me to look in places I would rather leave in the dark, places of suffering and pain. I feel a 'sense of revolt at my own foolishness and triviality. Shame and amazement at the way I have trifled with life and grace - how could I be so utterly stupid! A real sense of being flawed and needing immense help, pardon - to recover some capacity to love God.' (Thomas Merton). Are you allowed to steal your own feelings from the mouths of others?

When you see the sorrow of those who suffer great loss, it is impossible to understand, and perhaps that is why it is easier to quote Merton than fathom something of my own. Love is shown most when love is lost; that is when people weep, shout and cry. For me the women speak of the tragedy of 'love lost', they mourn their loss, and wish with all their mind, body and soul, that they could return to a place where love is found once more. A place which can only be found beyond death, a place in eternity.

VIII. Jesus speaks to the women

This picture was taken my Lukasz Trzcinski

Khan Younis, Gaza Strip.

Despairing Palestinian women during the funeral of a Palestinan soldier killed the previous day during an armed confrontation with Israeli soldiers.

5th October 2000

VIII. Jesus speaks with the women

We adore you, O Christ and we praise you

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world

Large numbers of people followed him, and women too, who mourned and lamented for him. But Jesus turned to them and said, 'Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep rather for yourselves and for your children. For look, the days are surely coming when people will say, 'Blessed are those who are barren, the wombs that have never bourne children, the breasts that have never suckled!' Then they will begin to say to the mountains, 'Fall on us!; to the hills, 'Cover us!' For if this is what is done to the green wood, what will be done when the wood is dry?

Luke 23: 27 - 30

VII. Jesus falls for the second time

My most gentle Jesus,

how many times have you forgiven me;

and how many times I have fallen again and begun to offend you!

By the merits of this second fall,

give me the grace to persevere in your love until death.

Grant, that in all my temptations, I may always have recourse to you.

I love you, O my Jesus, with my whole heart;

I repent of having offended you.

Never permit me to separate myself from you again.

Grant that I may love you always, and then do with me what you will.

(Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory be to the Father, etc)

VII. Jesus falls for the second time

I didn't so much fall off the wagon, as fail get on it after Christmas. It was my intention to give up any alcohol during the working week. This wouldn't be asking too much. Most nights we have wine with our dinner. I just thought that giving this habit up for a bit would be good for body and soul. The theory was good, but the practice never got off the ground. Sure there was a week where I didn't drink a drop, but after that refusing a glass of wine seemed miserable. There are still at least three days a week where I don't even walk through the door of home before bedtime, and so both dinner and a drink are out of the question. This little episode of intention verses action has raised several questions for me.

1. What do we identify as failure in our lives? Are we right?

2. Is there a difference between what seems like failure, and what actually is failure?

3. Is it important to fail so as to learn better from our mistakes?

Lent is only just around the corner, and I have decided to try to succeed where I have already failed and give up alcohol for the season, however boring this may seem. This is a shot in the dark as I haven't a clue what it is possible to learn from such an excersize. Jesus falling on the via dolorosa may have seemed like failure at the time, but looking back that cannot be right. He was doing the best he could with what was asked of him, and that was quite a mammoth task in itself! Failure is elusive, and I am not sure that we can ever be certain what we have failed at until we reach the end of our lives. We can be certain that failure exists and that we have succumbed to it, but never to what extent and how our experiences will help us to grow. In conclusion, I am not sure whether failure can be considered important. It happens, but what is most important is that people keep on going, and it is on this that salvation depends.

VII. Jesus falls for the second time

I discovered later, and I am still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (the so called priestly type!), a righteous man, or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes, failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world - watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That I think is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian (cf. Jer.45). How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God's sufferings through a life of this kind?

Letters and Papers from Prison
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer wrote this in a personal letter to his best friend, Eberhard Bethge from Tegel Prison on 21 July 1944. I think I have chosen it to reflect this station because for me it highlights the mission of Jesus. Jesus never set out to make something of himself, most of the titles used to address him in the synoptic Gospels are given by other people, not something that he said of himself. Christmas reminds me that God came and lived completely in this worlds' duties and responsibilities, successes and failures. There are, after all, 30 years of Jesus' life which we know nothing about - I wonder if he was any good as a carpenter, could he make a living, was he good with figures? It was in those 30 hidden years that Jesus threw himself completely into the arms of God, where he discovered his relationship to the Father, and submitted to his duties as the son of Mary and Joseph. These final moments of Jesus, on the road to Golgotha, explore the perplexities of complete trust in God. Failure becomes success, success becomes failure - and all the way along Jesus remains God with us.

On 9th April 1945 Bonhoeffer was executed at Flossenburg for his part in the plot to kill Hitler. He was deeply conflicted, throughout the war, about the morality of his actions, and he was someone who was used to acknowledging failure and uncertainty.

VII. Jesus falls for the second time

'Which of you walks in darkness and sees no light?'

On that note I am taking a sabbatical for Christmas - 'The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light.'

See you in January.

VII. Jesus falls for the second time

The Seventh Station

VII. Jesus falls for the second time
Illustration: ewtn

V. We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you.
R. Because by your holy Cross, you have redeemed the world.

Lord Yahweh has gven me a disciples tongue,
for me to know how to give a word of comfort to the weary.
Morning by morning he makes my ear alert
to listen like a disciple.
Lord Yahweh has opened my ear
and I have not resisted
I have not turned away.
I have offered my back to those who struck me,
my cheeks to those who plucked my beard;
I have not turned my face away
from insult and spitting........
Which of you walks in darkness
and sees no light?
Let him trust in the name of Yahweh
and lean on his God.

Isaiah 50: 4 - 6, 10

VI. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus

My most beloved Jesus, your face was beautiful before, but in this journey it has lost all its beauty, and wounds and blood have disfigured it. Alas, my soul also was once beautiful, when it received your grace in Baptism; but I have disfigured it since by my sins; you alone, my Redeemer, can restore it to its former beauty. Do this by your Passion, O Jesus. I repent of having offended you. Never permit me to offend you again. Grant that I may love you always; and then do with me what you wilt.

Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory be to the Father, etc.

VI. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus

The face: it is the most public, and most intimate part of our being. We only touch the faces of the the people we love. We touch them to express our most private emotions, love, grief, sorrow, celebration. If you ask people to recall a moment poignant in time for them, happy or sad, they remember peoples faces. Our most treasured memories are those when we witnessed people show their emotion in their faces: 'I remember you laughing'; 'you cried on that day'; 'the look on your face'; that is what we recall and share.

Faces make their home in our subconscious. They come back to us when we least expect it: the face of your mother when you notice something she would have disapproved of (a dusty shelf, perhaps), a friend when you hear someone else utter the words of a once shared joke, your father when someone new tells a story he always narrated. When we are apart from those we love most, it is their faces which we miss, and which we want to see again. In the faces of people we read thoughts, emotions and reactions, but we also recognise the wealth of emotions that remain hidden from us in the guarded smile, laugh or grin. Perhaps this recognition is why, in so many cultures, their is a desire to see the face of their dead - to say goodbye, to recognise a 'passing' of those features which made someone precious. We cover the faces of the dead, close their eyes, when we recoginse that they have 'gone.'

Veronica, so we have heard in tradition, went and wiped the face of Jesus while he was in his weakest moment. Many people believe that the image of his face, full of the emotion of that moment in history, scarred the cloth which she used. To run to someone and wipe their face in a moment of need is a remarkable act. Even recalling those whom we might tenderly wipe the face of, we can see this is a act which simultaneously reveals love and vulnerability. Children, the very sick, the old and the vulnerable trust others to wash their face. The healthy and the strong would not allow themselves to be so personally touched by someone they barely knew. Veronica acts with compassion and is received with compassion. In her act of love a gift is bequeathed - she would remember, have imprinted upon her mind, the face of Christ. This gift she would no doubt treasure, but it would also bring with it the inevitable pain of longing to see again the face of someone you have loved. The desire to see and speak with someone 'face to face'.

The gift of Veronica on the way of the cross is an intimate gift of loving compassion and a gift of longing. Jesus came to show all people the face of God, and in the revelation he rekindled in all people the desire to speak once again with the divine honestly, face to face. This desiring is echoed in our human longing to see those we love 'face to face', when they are travelling far away, or when they have died and passed on to their final resting place. Travelling the way of the cross it is possible to recall our own desires to see God's face and begin to understand fully what it is we have been called to become.

Love never comes to an end....When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and see things as a child does; but now that I have become an adult, I have finished with all childish ways. Now we see only reflections in a mirror, mere riddles, but then we shall be seeing face to face. Now I can know only imperfectly; but then I shall know just as fully as I myself am known

1Corinthians 13: 11 - 12