Where the Way of the Cross Begins and Ends

The traditionally recognized Stations of the Cross are fourteen in number and begin with Pontius Pilate’s condemnation of Jesus to death.  This Lenten Friday evening at Queen of Peace we have kept again as a parish family---for the last time before the beginning of Holy Week---this devotion to our Savior’s Passion.  Tonight was particularly poignant, because the children of our school embodied for us, in a dramatic form all their own, the Via Crucis of the Lord.  Instead of merely gazing upon the beautiful hand-carved images hung on the stone walls of our church to remind us of the final earthly steps of Christ into His Paschal Mystery, we saw enacted in the lives of our own flesh and blood the work of our salvation.

Just as the Way of the Cross does not end in the tomb of the Fourteenth Station, it does not really begin with the Roman Governor’s infamous judgment of the penalty of death for Jesus.  In today’s Gospel we hear that Christ’s adversaries “picked up rocks to stone Jesus.”  They hold in their own clenched hands and hardened hearts what will form the painful way that the Way must travel, the error that the Truth must engage to correct, the plot of death that Life must pass through to rise above.  The Gospels are unanimous in their witness that even in the events surrounding His birth and childhood, the Lord Jesus began tracing for us the path to Calvary.

In participating in our children’s Living Stations, I could not help but think of the injuries of childhood.  Whether it is physical pain or mental anguish, the young possess a sensitivity that we who have grown calloused to the blows of life often lack.  In several of my previous blogs, I alluded to the fact that the surgeon who operated on my jaw was persuaded by what he saw that my damaged TMJ was ultimately consistent with childhood injury.  This “trauma” (as it is medically termed and has been spiritually felt) is one I do not remember.  It nevertheless halted the full and proper development of my lower jaw, leaving me prone to the later adolescent and adult complications which led to my debilitating pain and seeking of surgical remedy.

That pattern also seems to me consistent with the ordinary course of our spiritual life.  We bear in our souls the primordial wounds of sin---that of others first and then, ineluctably, our own---as we do the childhood scars on our body.  In being unable to recall exactly how my jaw was injured and when, I am prevented from even attempting to calculate my share of the blame (I was in fact a willful terror as a child!), the potential part played by another/others, or even simply the role of troublous circumstance.  Such is any life as lived along the Way of the Cross.

For six Lents in the church of Queen of Peace, I have witnessed class after class of children trace the same movements of Jesus across the passage of these years.  Each and every year Pontius Pilate condemns Jesus from my presider’s chair; Jesus falls where I genuflect; the little body of Christ is laid on the ground in a burial shroud on the very spot on which the tiny Sacred Host of the Risen Eucharistic Lord is daily distributed in Holy Communion.  The young girls dressed as first century women always pretend to cry, as their parents in the pews shed real tears.  The older have carried longer the ancient, tragic secret of the passing of youth in growing up and the myriad threats to innocence which surround those of fewer years.

I shall never forget the first time I saw this children’s Passion Play in miniature.  A boy by the name of Sean Casey was dressed as a Roman soldier, and he was whipping the back of a child-Christ with cords made of bright red tissue paper.  The perfect absurdity and absolutely just depiction of it all overwhelmed me.  What are our blows and insults to the impassible One?  Yet how our Lord must expose the impotence of our evil designs by exposing Himself to our nugatory venality!  With each passing year, I see the generational dimension of our participation in Christ’s Passion.  Our church is a school for teaching the Divine Charity over the course of a lifetime, even as our school exists to prepare students to worship in Spirit and in truth by walking the Way of the Cross.

I went to Our Lady of Grace School in Highland, Indiana and rode the bus to school until I was old enough to ride my bike.  More often than not, that enclosed trip from home to classroom was---call it what you will---a living hell or a Way of the Cross.  There were no cameras monitoring and controlling bullying in the 1970’s!  There was many a day when my ear lobes would be twanged to redness and my heart to rage; all of my winter hats had the strings of the pompon pulled out one by one, like so many threads of self-respect.  But on the bus was the bull’s eye target named Karl, who in his perceived slower mental development became a lightening rod of rejection and venomous hatred.  One day so many older kids spat on him over the few miles of the trip that when he stood to get off the bus at his stop, his coat was literally covered and dripping with the darkly shimmering collective contempt of his tormentors and the guilt and cowardice of the rest of us.  Even through my grade schooled eyes, I saw in the boy Karl the Man of Sorrows.

“Trauma consistent with childhood injury” is not simply a speculative causal evaluation of a broken body part but a description of what has happened both to connect us to---and alienate us from---each other in our shared history, which is a prelude to our restoration in Christ.  On this final Lenten Friday, which only Good Friday can succeed, we confess that our whole life---singly and corporately---is the Way of the Cross.  Christ has borne it to form and reform us into spiritually healthy members of His Mystical Body.  He carries us on shoulders so broad and powerful and grown up as to hold the universe in existence, yet with a fresh and gentle innocence most passionately and vulnerably felt---even if not yet completely remembered---in the earliest joy of children’s play.