2020: The Way of the Cross When You Are Physically or Emotionally Ill

The Way of the Cross is an ancient devotion of the Church which has been used for centuries to bring the believer into deeper union with the Passion of Jesus Christ, using words, prayer, imagery and visual aids to effectively join Jesus on his walk to Calvary.

This is written in the hope that, in these these meditations, people undergoing evaluation and treatment for physical or emotional illness may find companionship, understanding and even, with the help of God, healing.

My prayer is that any who use these Stations will find comfort and sustaining courage in the faithful promise of Christ that he will be with us to the end. Please pray for me, also. – Elizabeth Scalia, Oblate, OSB

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OPENING PRAYER:
O Christ, you healed the deaf with a touch and a word, “Ephphatha! Be opened.”
As I open this meditation, let me be opened to you.
Let me be opened to your love.
Let me be opened to your healing
Let me opened to your voice
and to every prompting of the Holy Spirit,
as we walk this road together.
Amen.

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STATION ONE: JESUS IS CONDEMNED TO DEATH

Jesus, when you stood before Pilate and received the sentence of death, you were utterly alone, abandoned by your apostles and rejected by the crowd.

Yet you faced your fate with courage and acceptance.

Always, in ever step of life, we are faced with the possibility of death — death of the body, death of the spirit, death of hope. Even when we have family and friends to turn to, ultimately we make our most difficult journeys alone. Others may sympathize or even empathize, but one person can never fully enter into another’s heart of pain and fear.

Now, as I await the evaluations and recommendations of others — of medical workers, therapists and counselors — I remember your acceptance of Pilate’s decree. I don’t know what lies ahead, or what tomorrow will offer or take away, and I admit to my fully human fear. Give me courage and a sense of your companionship and support in this journey.

Though you had to face your walk alone, and with a certain outcome, I invite you to walk with me on this path, toward an outcome still unknown.

Do not be afraid, for I am with you; stop being anxious and watchful, for I am your God. I give you strength, I bring you help, I uphold you with my victorious right hand. (Isaiah 41:10)

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STATION TWO: JESUS BEARS HIS CROSS


Jesus, when they handed you the cross that was to be your final oblation, your final act of offering and obedience, you were already weakened by the earlier sufferings and abuses heaped upon you by others. Yet you bore your cross with extraordinary bravery and dignity. You took onto our already beaten and bruised shoulders the heavy and cumbersome wood, and you bore it.

Perhaps you even astonished and surprised some who had expected you to be too weak to receive, and to sustain, your cross.

As I face heavier burdens, heavier fears, the seemingly insurmountable weight of my own cross, I know you are with me. Having walked this path before, you will guide me, if only I keep my eyes on you.

Grant that I too may bring dignity, bravery and strength to what I bear.

With the help of your grace, perhaps I can surprise and astonish those who think of me as too weak, or too fearful and fragile, to go forward.

I will go forward, with you, to further glorify your name.

Christ, help me to carry this.

I will instruct you, and teach you the way to go; I will watch over you and be your adviser. (Psalm 32:8)

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STATION THREE: JESUS FALLS FOR THE FIRST TIME


Why do we always assume that this first fall came from your weariness and physical pain? Could you have fallen in simple fear? You, Jesus, who are both God and human, you understand how fear and anxiety can paralyze the will, paralyze the strength of the body, and sometimes paralyze even the strength of mind and spirit.

I admit there are times when I am overtaken with fear, and I feel unable to move, to think, to pray — even to breathe. This fear brings with it a weariness that defies description and snatches away the small pockets of peace I am seeking in my life.

So, I fall with you, Jesus, prostrated in fear, knowing that I must rise and go on. My face is dirty; I am gasping through the dust in the road.

But I get up with you. I breathe in deeply, and breathe out.

With you, I move slowly forward.

Lord, I called on your name from the deep pit. You heard me crying, “Do not close your ear to my prayer.” You came near that day when I called to you; you said: “Do not be afraid.” (Lamentations 3:55-57)

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It’s a time for hard questions. And hard answers. Ask Mary.

It’s a time for hard questions. And hard answers. All week long, I have been pondering this piece I wrote a while back, a mediation on why, if we keep the crucifix before our eyes, it will teach us everything, and train us for the long view

It’s not that I’m an egoist, so fascinated with my own words. In truth, most of the time I forget what I’ve written unless someone reminds me or I come across an old piece while doing research.

But this piece has been singing to me all week, and forcing me back into a contemplation I have always found instructive and stirring. So, I’ve been praying with it, as though I’d never written it.

Today, I was struck in particular by this graph:

“Ask Mary to teach you what she knows too, what she learned while she stood beneath the reality of it. Ask the Blessed Mother to explain about taking the “long view” of things, about keeping the faith even when one does not understand why things happen as they do; about how sometimes what is horrifying and unjust must happen, if something else—something remarkable and unimaginable and precisely what is required—is to be able to happen.”

That’s a hard, hard teaching to share with anyone. How to say to someone who is processing trauma that, “this must happen; you must surrender to it, allow it to happen, because there is a greater plan at work.”

It sounds so awful, so smug, so condescending, too. “Deal with your personal horror for the sake of future glory” is a hard message to take when you’re in the thick of something so awful you can’t wrap your mind around it; when you feel violated and shredded and you know with certainty that everything you thought you knew, everything that ever felt common, ordinary, reassuring or warm would now feel forever changed, because something has pierced you to the heart, beyond your heart, into your very soul.

And perhaps that’s why — if the instruction of the crucifix (which teaches precisely that hard lesson) is hard to absorb because Christ Jesus is the man-god and we are all too human — we might ask Mary, his fully human mother, to explain it, to show us how to do this. How to keep going in the belief that all of our sufferings are not pointless but full of meaning — especially when they are joined to Christ’s sufferings on the cross — and wholly purposeful within the divine plan beyond all understanding.

O Mary, teach us what you know. Pray for us who have recourse to thee.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

How to Tweet Without Losing Your Soul

One of the great pleasures of working with the Word on Fire Team is the opportunity to contribute, as both writer and editor, to the Word on Fire Institute’s quarterly journal, Evangelization and Culture, a beautifully wrought printed journal overseen by the remarkable Tod Worner and WoF’s extremely talented graphics team. Each issue concentrates on a particularly theme: Our first issue was all about creativity and the Christian imagination. The second focused on the poor and Catholic social justice teachings. Issue #3, which came out last week, is all about digital media and how it impacts our lives and our spirits, for better or worse.

My contribution to the issue took a look at all the ways we can endanger ourselves spiritually — or just make stupid mistakes that end up costing us a lot — and how we might mindfully protect both our souls and our reputations while on social media. An excerpt:

As I watched my beloved Twitter slowly morph from cyber-pub to digital brawling ring, I decided that if the scuffles were going to become bad-natured and destructive to people, I wouldn’t participate. Announcing (probably a bit smugly) that I wanted “to love, again.” I determined that one way to do so would be to stop labeling people, to stop identifying people as “types” and “theys” and “thems” on social media, a bad habit which I’d come to see as a precursor to throwing them away altogether.

Essentially, it meant simply pulling back and thinking a bit before posting – remembering the humanity of the person on the other side of the screen and then responding to them like an adult Christian. It wasn’t as fun as playing mutual whack-a-mole with others on the platform, but I believed it kept my soul safe, and injured no one else’s.

Over time I began to feel very comfortable operating like that, and perhaps a little prideful. Look at how good I was at not being bad!

Pride came before the fall, but you all knew that.

Anyway, Word on Fire Institute Director Jared Zimmerer and I had a chance to chat about that piece and I thought I’d share a link to our discussion: How to Tweet Without Losing Your Soul.

We had fun doing it and even my husband — who quite rightly has had just about enough of me during our (long story) extended quarantine — still found it interesting and amusing. I really need to learn how to stop running my hand through my hair…

If you have some free time, check it out, and do also check out the Word on Fire Institute in general and see what’s going on over there. It’s all good!

Coronavirus: A Prayer for Wisdom in the Midst of Mystery

O, Christ Jesus, help us to refine our perspective on what we call a blessing or a curse.
Help us to remember that hindsight is the great bring of wisdom, by which we realize that some perceived ‘blessings’ have — because we are broken — served our weakness, while some real tragedies have fortified our strength; that we are always and forever in the midst of a great and unseen battle by which both darkness and light may mysteriously spill into our paths and add to our confusion about what constitutes a blessing.

Help us continue to ponder the strange idea (so often repeated by your saints) that ‘all is blessing’ while what is before us seems so much like a curse, and an injustice, and abandonment.

Help us to remember the Great Paradox of your mysterious reality — the paradox we almost dare not speak for fear of being misconstrued, yet but it’s the message of your Cross: That sometimes awful, unjust things must happen in order for something great & salvific to occur. That some blessings can only be seen from a distant light, through the cracks of our broken hearts.

We do not understand, Lord; we never can. Help us to nevertheless trust in your endless desire for our good, especially in this time so fraught with fear and unknown outcomes. We place all of our hopes in you, and in the deep and mysterious love of the great Oneness of your Holy Trinity.

“All of God’s purposes are to the good, although we may not always understand this we can trust in it.” — St. Philip Neri

Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us

St. Michael the Archangel, Pray for us

St. Joseph, Pray for us

St. Mary Magdalene, Pray for us

St. John the Baptist, Pray for us

St. Benedict, St. Dominic, St Francis, St. Ignatius, Pray for us

St. Philip Neri, Pray for us

St. Catharine of Siena, Pray for us

St. Charbel Makhlouf, St. Thecla, Pray for us

St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, Pray for us

St. Aloysius Gonzaga, Pray for us

St. John Henry Newman, Pray for us

(Add your favorite saints, ora pro nobis, as you like…)

Image: Public Domain

Coronavirus and Quarantine Challenge us. Do Not Be Afraid.

When evil wants to foment misery, it destroys the joyful.
When evil wants to sow darkness, it clouds the light.
When evil wants to instill despair, it hinders goodness.
When evil wants us to believe in lies, it shadows the truth.
When evil wants to destroy hope, it hides beauty.

Our job is to keep seeking the joyful, the light-bearing, the good, the true and the beautiful, uncovering it from where it is buried or hidden, wherever we can. The products of Victory begin to come together when we make even that minimal effort.

Jesus’ urgent question: What are you thinking in your heart?

Over at Word on Fire, I am still looking at one particular piece of scripture — and the important question Jesus asks — because it’s been a very rich bit of Lectio:

We put enough expectations upon holiness to be ever-shocked at a suggestion of imperfection, or sin. But that only means we have been looking at the world through eyes willing to be deluded, rather than Godly eyes.

Because God is never surprised, or shocked, or scandalized by sin. God knows us too well for any of that, much better and more intimately than we know ourselves.

Which is why Christ Jesus asks the question outright: What are you thinking in your heart? He wants them to understand that their own hearts, no matter how holy they try to be, bear repeated examination to keep them honest. That’s how holiness moves beyond the superficial and becomes more than mere pretense, and how it remains humble.

Because what is truly holy may be wise, or wealthy, or beautiful, but it must also possess an element of true humility—enough humility to look at the actions of others and assume only the most positive of motives; to look at people lowering a crippled man through a roof and not think, “How dare they?” or “Who do they think they are?” or “How presumptuous!”, but “See how great is their faith . . .” and then to ask where our own has gone.

You can read it all here.

© José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro under Creative Commons