Holy Week 2025......... Palm Sunday Eve,at 9:30 p.m.
Faith is always a journey into the unknown mystery of our lives and our living. We life our lives looking forward but understanding comes in our looking backwards. In what we see, in the reflection of the life we have lived through. Our goal is it to live life, not merely eke out an existence. Yet, that is the lot of not thousands, but millions of our sisters and brothers through our own country and billions across our shared home.
This thought just struck me. Why am I making the effort, again this year, to put into words, a spiritual pain that is way beyond the power of human expression ? I do have the right to presume that my word will properly express the in-expression-able ? Then it dawns on me are we not all struggling with the same human life, and the mystery, being discovered, hidden in a same human fleshiness. The same flesh we are contemplating is the same flesh, The Revelator of Mystery, was incarnated into. John O'Shea wrote " Jesus's story IS our story today. We must read the Gospels, not as the accounts of what happened about 2,000 years ago. It is your story, and my story today.
Please, please read, and listen, attentively to what will bubble up from your depths. This is your truth. This is the gospel you have been chosen to write. You are The Contemporary Christ writing a gospel for our contemporary world. The same Holy Spirit that guided the First Evangelists is the same Holy Spirit that is powering all of our lives, into life. As guides we have then have been provided in The Four Gospels accounts of His life, Death, Burial, Resurrection. These Four Gospels are four accounts of the in-expression-able human misery, degradation and suffering. As His disciples we have been chosen, from eternity, to follow in the footsteps of Him Who has trudged the same journey we are trudging right now. He was not Incarnated in a special humanity and we were gifted a less dignified version. So then, SAME FLESH, SAME SPIRIT...........
Words that I remember from Palm Sunday's Liturgy, were, " let us then, with, a lively faith, go forward". These words I did my level best to emphasize. I saw them as a prerequisite for the whole week ahead for both myself and the community I was leading. Always with deep, deep trepidation !!! We are living, existing in a very tough, tough environment. We are journeying through, what some spiritual authors are calling, an experience of "the dark night of the soul."( There is not enough room to be able to rightly deal rightly with "the dark night of the soul", so I plead with you, please do the necessary.) This is a very demanding, challenging journey. It brings to the forefront the truth that our journey in faith, is a journey into, darkness. A journey into, not knowing what is ahead, having no sign posts, no map. It a journey we are reduced to taking one very careful step at a time. In dark faith we place one foot of the other. We do not take giant steps, we are back to baby steps.
From the wisdom of those who have gone before, and written of this purification experience. I am happy to say, we do not come out in any way spiritually poorer. We slowly emerge come out with a knowledge, a gift of understanding, that was not there before. We are somehow enlightened with new understandings. Understandings that appear very subtly, they take us by surprise. How often has the question been asked, "where did that come from?" The Spirit does for us what is best for us. These are good days to have Thomas Merton's prayer " My lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I do not know for certain where it will end, Nor do I really know myself ....'' Provide yourself and all your friends with a more complete copy of this prayer of surrender. We will continue to refer to this prayer. So are you going to do it now, or when the fear-filled pain gets to the point of, " My God, My God, why have You forsaken me ?" A blessed mysterious Holy Week !!!!! Gramps
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