Stations of Mercy Part II
During this year of
Mercy, each Sister is taking a turn presenting a particular aspect of mercy to
the community. Below is the first half
of one Sister’s presentation, the fruit of her prayer. She has a special devotion to the Way of the
Cross, and so it is not surprising that she would use the stations to
illustrate her reflections on God’s mercy and our response. This is the second half of her meditation. The first half was posted last week.
Stations of Mercy
And the Life of
Penance
(Love’s Reply and
Other Sources)
VIII. The
eighth Station follows directly on this thought. The image of the weeping women
compassionating Christ. From the Gospel
of Saint Luke: A great number of people
were following Him, and among them were women who were beating their breasts
and wailing for Him. But Jesus turned to
them and said: ‘daughters of Jerusalem
IX.
The Ninth Station—Jesus’ Third Fall. At this Station we might imagine that Our
Lord was a miserable sight, covered in matted blood and gaping wounds and the
dirt of the street… moreover, He was weak, and soon He would die. Yet something about the Blood of Christ stirs
our devotion and desire, almost as if the Blood Itself were love gushing out of
Him. Recall the Second Lesson for Good
Friday by St. John Chrysostom: “As a woman
feeds her child with her own blood and milk, so too Christ Himself continually
feeds those whom He has begotten with His Own Blood.” It is a beautiful Lesson, and it tells us
something about ourselves. By Chastity
and the other vows we are entirely focused, but the desire is not
extinguished. It is a cause of suffering
for us, but also a joy, because we know God has promised to satisfy our need
for Him. This Station is like a pause
when we can remember how important He is to us, and how Merciful He is in
giving Himself to us.
X.
The Tenth Station.
How does God give Himself to us?
There is, of course, a problem, and that problem is human sinfulness and
perversity. As Love’s Reply puts it,
there is one thing which must not attract the servant of God, one thing he must
thoroughly detest, and that is sin. By
sin he ceases to be the servant of God, and seeks to serve another master; by
it the Kingdom of God is destroyed within him, and he is turned away from the
ultimate goal of his life…(and later it says) whoever has abandoned the loving
designs of God through sin and has strayed from the path of Christ must indeed
be punished. He has cut himself off from
union with God and has become a son of the devil, whose works he does…by greed
and desire of possessions he becomes the servant of the devil, a slave of self
and of the powers of darkness which take possession of him.—The problem is that
this is a reality that can’t be shrugged off, and the Crucified Christ
testifies to that. At this Station we
can see Christ’s utter misery, nakedness, woundedness, and shame, as He stands
before a mocking crowd stripped of everything and about to be nailed to a Cross
in that condition. We can see ourselves
as the jeering crowd that has now been given access to Christ. We have been given access to Him, and we can
believe that He intends to continue giving Himself to us until we experience
the full possession of Him in eternity.
Is there any greater evidence of Mercy?
XI.
This Station is the kiss where misery meets love. Christ’s being fastened to a Cross for love,
become totally vulnerable, totally given, is for us the dearest treasure and
testimony of God’s Mercy. But, to quote
again from Love’s Reply, “The lover seeks to become like to the Beloved. If she therefore lives with Christ and
embraces Him, she will also desire to share His sufferings. As His Love for us led Him to suffer and die,
so does it expect to be answered in like zeal on our part. To give answer to such a plea, Our Holy
Father Saint Francis made his own a prayer which clearly expresses such
readiness…Please, O Lord, let the fiery, honeyed force of your love lap up my
spirit from everything there is under heaven: so that I may die for love of
love for you, who deigned to die for love of love for me.” Then it says that the Franciscan mysticism of
virginity is centered primarily on death to self, the dying of the natural man,
that Christ’s Love may live and flower in him: “Temptation overcome is the ring
with which the Lord espouses the soul of his servant.” (quoting Celano) This is difficult of course, but it is
consoling to think that Christ did not nail Himself to the Cross, that is, He
Himself did not wield the hammer. In
this Station, it seems, we are to have some assistance, channeled by our Holy
Vows, Superiors, Rule, etc., in making that complete self-offering which will
unite us to Him forever.
XII.
The most striking thing about Christ’s Death on the
Cross is that it is the Consummation.
From the moment He came into the world He offered Himself as a living
sacrifice to the Father’s Will. There
was no moment in His lifetime that He wasn’t fulfilling His intention of
Sacrifice. But it is interesting to
think that, after the Agony in the Garden when He said “not my will, but Thine
be done.” He never for a moment went back on His decision. From that time on He was peaceful and strong,
with a constant “yes” in His Heart, even during the worst moments. He was so entirely composed and given up to
the Father’s Will that He ceased to think of Himself, and thought instead of
the well-being of those around Him, and of the purpose He had come to
fulfill. Perhaps we do not experience
such a firm yes in our hearts, yet the wonderful thing truth is that Christ’s
Death and Christ’s Merits are ours. If
we claim Him, we too can offer the Father a perfect “yes” at our death. So great is Christ’s merciful gift to us,
that He has not refused us anything, He even gives us His Own achievement, His
Own merit, to present to His Father with Him.
XIII. I
quote our Holy Father Saint Francis: “Now that we have left the world, we have
nothing else to do, save to be solicitous to follow the Will of the Lord and to
please Him.” At this Station Christ’s
Body is entirely vulnerable. It is taken
down by comparative strangers to be laid in a tomb. It would have been possible at this time for
anything to be done to it, and it would have protected itself now even less
than it had before Christ had sent forth His Spirit, since then at least His
Spirit would have been there to give it dignity. It is the same with Christ in the Blessed
Sacrament. He is there for us to tend
and care for, or to ignore… yet He has given the Gift permanently, and He keeps
His Word: He will always come down at the words of the priest, no matter what
will happen to Him then, no matter what kind of evil souls will come to claim
Him. We too can consider that our bodies
are given to Christ. When we die, they
won’t be worth much until the Resurrection.
But now, while we live, they are worth very much, because we have the
opportunity to use them to serve Him.
God has given us the immense and precious gift of life and time in a
mortal body on this earth, and while we’ve got it, we can do like Christ is
doing even now: give.
XIV. Saint
Colette speaks very movingly about the cloister being our Sepulcher of Stone,
in which we can live forty years either more or less, and in which we will
die. This is consoling because, once
Christ’s Body entered the Sepulcher, there was only one thing that happened
next. Saint Colette urged us to praise
Him, love Him, serve Him worthily so as to be certain of unending life, as sure
as those who are already in its full possession and who see God in the clear vision
of His Sweetness and Infinite Goodness with supreme rejoicing and perfect
security of the eternal possession of Him.
If by faith we possess the substance of the Beatific Vision even now,
then we can see in this Station a monument to hope and confidence. It is dark in a Sepulcher, and the Light of
the Resurrection has not yet dawned, but by God’s Mercy we can have joy,
because we have been redeemed.
XV.
As an aside… after reflections on the Stations of Mercy
and the Life of Penance, another means of gaining access to Christ’s Mercy is
through His Wounds. By His Wounds we are
healed, through His Wounds we dare to approach the Father, by possession of His
Wounds, we can attain to the Divine Reality, even in our weak human
condition. If Mercy is defined by God’s
Love meeting human misery, then as Fr. Larry Webber so well put it, the Cross
is the Instrument of Mercy, and understanding the Passion of Christ is the key
to understanding Mercy. Fr. Tijo took it
one step further: we too are called to open the wounds of mercy, to become
vulnerable, so healing streams can flow from us to others.
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