Jesus Dies on the Cross

Bl. Teresa of Calcutta was called a fraud and hypocrite by some because instead of using donations to establish big hospitals or fund general health care, she clung to her mission to care for the dying, to bring health to souls, not bodies. She understood the crucial importance of the decisive moments at the end of life, that the transition from life to death is the pivotal point of our existence.

The last mystery of the rosary skips past the nails and the words and gets right to the heart of Christ's life on earth: his death. Unlike us, he chose the precise moment of his death. "No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again" (John 10:18). First he said, "It is finished," and then, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." He could commend his spirit to the Father in utter confidence because he had so perfectly understood and lived the will of the Father that he could allow himself to die as soon as he had finished completing it.

For the rest of us, the Father's will for our death is a mystery sometimes unfathomable in its delay or its swiftness, which is why we strive to care for our souls, and, like Bl. Teresa, the souls of others, so that at the moment of death, each person can say with Jesus, "It is finished."

Jesus Carries His Cross

Not only was Jesus forced to carry his own cross, but he had no choice about where to carry it. Every step of his way was determined by guards prodding him and the crowd bounding him. He had no chance to make a break for it. The only place he could go with the cross was Calvary.

Sometimes our path in life has been determined for us, whether through our own choices or the choices of others. Sometimes earlier sins set us on a course from which we can't deviate later, even long after the sin has been repented. Sometimes the sins of other people force our lives into a different mold than we would have chosen. When we bear our heavy cross down a road not of our choosing, Jesus is with us every step of the way, carrying our burden and his own to the inevitable ending of the Cruxifixion -- and the Resurrection.

The Crowning With Thorns

A number of years ago, I said something to someone. I thought I was telling a few home truths, drawing on my great wisdom to set someone straight (thus proving that a little education can be a dangerous thing). Not long ago, this memory bobbed to the surface, and sharp slivers of shame and remorse bit at me. How could I have behaved so cruelly? How could I have been so wantonly unkind? I was so disgusted with myself that I had to confess this ancient sin, but the recollection still pricks.

Jesus never sinned, so he never felt the shame of remembered sin, the bitter bite of stale vice. But with the crown of thorns, he takes on the stabbing pain of our guilt. He knows, physically, the way sin gets into our minds and wounds us even long after the fact. He buries our worst memories in his own head. The soldiers wove his crown of thorns; we weave our own. But Jesus gladly removes our piercing crowns and wears them for our sake.

The Scourging at the Pillar

The Scourging at the Pillar is the hardest of all the mysteries to contemplate directly because it's so viscerally brutal. The sheer cruel bloodiness of it, the immensity of suffering, is almost incomprehensible. I find that I can best meditate on it in its Marian aspect -- standing outside the praetorium with Mary, hearing the sounds of the flogging, unable to do anything but suffer with her as she suffers with Jesus. Everyone has experienced the helplessness of watching a loved one suffer without being able to alleviate any of the pain. The feeling of impotence, of being entirely other and unable to take away or at least share some of the pain, can be almost worse than the original suffering.

Bl. Elisabeth Leseur speaks of the value, and the usefulness of suffering, either physical or spiritual, directly or on account of others:

The stoics used to say, 'Suffering is nothing,' and they were not telling the truth. But, more enlightened, we Christians say, 'Suffering is everything.' Suffering asks for and gets everything; because of suffering God consents to accomplishing all things; suffering helps the gentle Jesus to save the world. At times, when I feel overwhelmed by the immensity of my desires for those I love, by the importance of what I want to obtain for them, I turn toward suffering. I ask suffering to serve as the intermediary between God and them. Suffering is the complete form of prayer, the only infallible form of action.

The pain we feel on contemplating the Scourging is our offering of love to Christ, our way of participating in this mystery with Mary.

The Agony in the Garden

The first sorrowful mystery is the one in which Jesus most clearly manifests his humanity. He know what's coming, and he's just plain scared. There are plenty of times in the Gospels when Jesus prays, but he's always been confident before. This time he does what we do -- he begs God to take this horrible choice away from him. This is waiting, yes, but not passive, dull waiting. He's waiting to be confronted with a moral choice, one in which the right answer is clear. The cup is not just the Passion as we usually think of it -- the grotesque physical suffering, the loneliness of desertion, the mockery and humiliation. The cup is also making the choice that will set the entire Passion in motion, the choice to "allow it for now" (Matt. 3:15).

But Jesus isn't just thinking of himself. The cup is also Judas's betrayal, and Jesus begs the Father to spare him that -- not because of the consequences, but because of the pain of seeing a friend betray him, and because of the effect it will have on Judas himself. Jesus has accepted the necessity of the Passion, but he pleads that it might come about some other way than having one of his trusted friends hand him over. The false kiss stings more than the whips.

Jesus, in the garden, is just like us. He is scared like us. His heart breaks over betrayal and lost friendships, just like ours do. He became like us in all things but sin, and that means being scared to death and sick with grief like us. Jesus isn't remote from our sufferings. He knows. And that makes him the perfect model of fortitude, of strength in weakness. "Power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Cor. 12:9). That isn't just comforting drivel for us failures. That's Jesus, in the garden, sweating blood from sheer terror, and choosing the cup anyway.

The story of my prayer life

The truth is the Rosary can be a real chore. St. Thérèse, the Little Flower, was being more honest when she said, “I am ashamed to confess it, but the recitation of the Rosary costs me more than to use an instrument of penance. I feel I am saying it so badly. Try as I may to make myself meditate on the mysteries, I never manage to fix my thoughts on them."

This is a quote that speaks to me as I'm trying to make the rosary novena for the elections.

(h/t to Matthew Lickona)

SSPX on Luminous Mysteries

I should, by now, know better than to read anything on the SSPX website. It's pretty much an occasion of sin. Which I suppose it's an actual sin to share the occasion with all of you. But oh well...

I came across this, as one does on the internet, though a series of links (I was originally looking for a picture of a rosary to put on my iPod to go with Biber's Rosary Sonatas.) but once there I had to watch it, rather like a car crash.

It seems that not only does this spixie priest not like the Luminous Mysteries (which I guess considering given that all-that-is-new-is-anathema attitude of that particular schismatic group is hardly surprising) but he claims that the encyclical in which John Paul the Great announced them is a sinister attempt to undermine the very nature of the Rosary, deny the importance of the Blessed Virgin, endorse naturalism, say that all other religions are equal, and probably ban rice pudding as well, though he doesn't seem to have managed to highlight that last point.

But the kicker is this section where he complains about the events that were selected to be the Luminous Mysteries:

All three sets of mysteries are necessary for our Redemption, and it could not have taken place otherwise. It is certainly true that most of the mysteries are in Sacred Scripture. Nevertheless, it is not for this reason that they are included in the Rosary. It is because living Catholic Tradition that passed them down through St. Dominic as the mysteries of our Redemption that need to be meditated on through the Rosary. It is consequently entirely false to call the Rosary " a compendium of the Gospel" (§19), as this Apostolic Letter claims, just as it is not according to Catholic Tradition, and consequently not Catholic, to want to add five mysteries "for the Rosary to become more fully a compendium of the Gospel (Ib.).It is consequently not surprising to note that the proposed mysteries of light are not events in our Redemption. They are simply beautiful episodes from the Gospel and words that are encouraging to us. Consequently, their insertion into the Rosary obscures the reality and the importance of the objective Redemption that the Rosary traditional portrays. Furthermore, the new mysteries are all stories from the Gospels, that Tradition has never linked in any way to the Rosary. To add further to the attack on the truly Marian aspect of the devotion of the Holy Rosary, only one of these mysteries even mentions the presence and role of Our Lady, and then only barely, the marriage feast at Cana. The Blessed Mother is in no way present in the other mysteries. One legitimately wonders what they are doing in the Rosary, if not to surreptitiously turn attention away from Our Lady.

Allow me to list these five "significant", "luminous" "moments" (§21): Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, his self-manifestation at Cana, his proclamation of the Kingdom of God and call to conversion, his Transfiguration and his institution of the Blessed Eucharist. You might legitimately wonder why these of all the episodes in the Gospel, and what it is that these episodes have in common to merit the title of "mysteries of light". It is manifestly not anything to do with Our Lady, or even with the objective Redemption for that matter either.

Now, is it just me, or is he saying here that the institution of the Eucharist is not an "event[s] in our Redemption"?

It's all very well to be indisposed to any sort of change. I'm conservative by temperment myself. But to allow that attachment to the past to become a god unto itself can be seriously destructive. The entire document is an exercise in taking the most uncharitable set of assumptions possible -- but at places, as in asserting that the institution of the Blessed Eucharist is not an part of our Redemption, it strays in what is pretty clearly heresy by any standard.

Perhaps this is hardly surprising in a group which has separated itself from the pope in their alleged enthusiasm for the Church. For, in the language of the Church: Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia.

Biber: The Rosary Sonatas

I came across a fascinating piece of music last night, while browsing around on Magnatune: Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber's Rosary Sonatas. (Magnatune allows free previews of the entire tracks from all their albums, so feel free to go listen.)

Dating from the 1670s, the rosary sonatas are fifteen baroque instrumental pieces, each one a musical meditation on a decade of the rosary. The collection concludes with a violin solo piece dedicated to the guardian angel.

While the music is clearly baroque in style, the emotional specificness with which some of the mysteries are described by their sonatas seems like something of a much later date. This is added to by Biber's use of selective re-tuning of the violin to achieve different effects in each sonata. The violin starts at a standard turning for the first sonata, and is retuned for each subequent piece, until it returns to standard tuning in the 15th decade. The most extreme re-tuning is shown below, where the center strings are restrung to form a symbolic cross for The Resurrection.

Really interesting music. Unless the baroque bores you, give it a try.