Sale on canvas prints! Use code ABCXYZ at checkout for a special discount!

Passion Triptych

Blogs: #183 of 274

Previous Next View All
Passion Triptych

Something to think and pray about-From the Irish Jesuit website, Sacred Space
The Stations of the Cross is ultimately a journey of self-emptying. As we walk with Jesus toward Calvary, we see that he keeps leaving more and more of his old life behind. He lost most of his friends, his popularity, his clothes, his dignity, and his life. Yet all of this allowed Jesus, supported by beams of wood, to rely solely on God the Father.
Is this how Jesus wanted things to end? We can say that, because he was God, this is absolutely the way he wanted it. But if we’re being honest, then the best we can say is that we just don’t know. We have to remember that, at the start of the Stations, Jesus acts a lot like you and me. He prays to God to spare him from being put to the test. He doesn’t want to suffer. But he knows that his life is not about him. “Yet not my will,” Jesus says, “but your will, Father.”
We, too, leave things behind as we make our way along the path we’re given in this life. It’s been said that there will be a time when the world stops giving us things and starts taking them away. We know that as we get older we may leave behind loved ones, old friends, homes, jobs, our health, our hair, our enthusiasm, and our memories. Yet as in Jesus’ life, all these losses bring us closer not to self-reliance, as Henry David Thoreau might have it, but to God-reliance. The deeper awareness that comes from meditating on the Stations sets us free from having the world just the way we want it. Our expectations, or rather our attachments to our expectations, become barriers to joy.

—Excerpted from Station to Station