OSV
VIEW FROM THE PEW
Happy Easter to all of you! What? You’re wondering if the writer has finally lost touch with reality? Or did the editor hold this column from a previous edition and it has aged out of use.
Nope, this IS just in time; it IS still Easter and time to celebrate whether you’ve run out of chocolate bunny treats or not.
This theme song is making me remember Sacred Hearts Father Albert Garcia who would repeat that greeting from the pulpit every Sunday until Pentecost.
When my sister and I headed into church on Palm Sunday, we remembered what a long-haul Holy Week seemed for us as kids. The reading of the Passion of Christ went on For Ever. Then you still faced Good Friday. We remember it as a three-hour ordeal and no priest in those sterner times ever took a shortcut and skipped some of those nine “solemn intercessions” for everyone from the pope to atheists to public officials. In my midwestern hometown, it was likely still cloudy winter weather, so you could relate to the Gospel description of darkness descending when Jesus “gave up his spirit.”
I remember my father, who liked to recite some dramatic phrases from the readings, mentioning the intercession prayer for the “perfidious Jews” who mobbed Jesus and took him to the high priest. Now this was a man who made sure our Jewish neighbors got his bounty of fresh fish and wild watercress, so it’s not a reflection of his attitude.
But that was the wording of the prayer from pre-Vatican II time. It was a reflection of the misguided view that generated prejudice against Jewish people, a shameful theme in medieval Christianity and western history for hundreds of years to this day.
Now our Good Friday prayer recognizes the “Jewish people to whom the Lord our God spoke first” and “the people you first made your own” and asks that God “may grant them to advance in love of his name and fullness of his covenant.”
The ignorance of 21st-century skinheads and neo-Nazis who perpetuate the medieval prejudice and hatred probably is beyond curing. Would they even read Catholic and other Christian study Bibles which carry texts expanding on the first Christians who were Jews?
I love to think about those first converts as we read along; we are hearing the memories of the earliest Christians who kept retelling them to their children. Decades after Jesus died, some fellows finally wrote it all down so the “good news” was spread by what we call the Gospels.
Our annual Paschal holy day is not like the horror movie that unfolds with ghastly twists and a horrible surprising ending. It was God’s own script. Nothing makes that more clear than the Gospel of Matthew we heard on Palm Sunday.
Jesus saved us sinners by his suffering, and he knew what was coming. Ponder his prayers in the garden of Gethsemane.
Even though I know them well after all these years, tears were rolling down my cheeks as we heard his words: “My soul is sorrowful even to death.” and “Father if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet, not as I will but as you will.”
Yeah, there I go with the tears again. My pal beside me in the pew won’t look at me.
And that was nothing compared to when the choir launched into “Were you there when they crucified my Lord” at the end of Mass! “Ohhh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble …” I can’t help it. I have to dig out my Mahalia Jackson CD of African American spiritual music and continue wringing out the tear glands.
I needed to hear Matthew’s Gospel which gives those details of Jesus’ words as he prayed in the garden. My reporter instinct is to wonder who heard what he said if, as Matthew writes, he prayed alone while his disciples slept around him.
I was wishing that we’d hear the account of the conversation between the thief crucified next to Jesus, who told his fellow thief that they deserved their death on a cross, but Jesus didn’t. Then he said, “Jesus remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” The Lord told the penitent man, “This day, you will be with me in paradise.” But that’s in Luke’s Gospel and we didn’t hear it this liturgical year; not to say we can’t dust off our Bible and read the whole thing at home.
I consider the tale of the “good thief” one of the most touching accounts by Gospel writers. As a news reporter, I love to ponder about it. Who heard it and shared it and repeated it? A Gospel writer considered it worth reporting.
It is, of course, a snapshot of what we would all love to have happen to us. What if I actually talked to Jesus and owned up to my sins, and then he promised me heaven, just like that.
Slog back to good health
Why relive this story since Easter is pau? I need to tell you that Easter is not in the rearview mirror for me. I’m looking forward to an Easter year ahead.
Hmmm, be thankful that this has not been all about me for all these inches already.
I bypassed all the holidays of the past four months, Christmas is a blur, New Year and Valentine’s day got not a blink, though I did rouse enough energy for St. Patrick’s Day in March to write some cards, which is what an older Irish person does because we use too many words for texts.
I’ve been through a long slog back to good health and I vowed not to dwell on it: a fall, a broken vertebrae, hospital time, long convalescence at home, dizzy but weaning from nasty meds. Thank God for the sister God gave me who has been my caregiver, nurse, driver, cook and most importantly, encourager throughout the ordeal. She will likely be mortified to be mentioned.
I learned that I have never appreciated all the people I have known who suffered much longer than I have with pain, weakness, separation from their familiar and comfortable lifestyle, the humiliation and humility of being under someone else’s care, direction, decision making. I vow to take more time as a listener when I am with them.
One of the very worst things I did was to shut down communication with family, friends and acquaintances rather than bore them with my sad state. A friend at church said I was mentioned on the prayer list but no one knew why. You’ve heard the saying, “Cut off your nose to spite your face”?! I just ramped up my own isolation and sadness and delayed my return to normalcy.
Please don’t think I’m being glib or disrespectful of our Lord by admitting I have echoed his words many many times in the dark moments: “God, let this cup pass from me.” I am sure that this sentiment has run through the minds of sufferers forever though they may not know the words I quote or the deity I address.
For a while, there was a mind-melting time of hallucinations. I went down some very, very dark corridors of thought. It is a relief at this juncture to learn that was likely a side effect of some of the nasty drugs I was prescribed for too long a duration.
When I laid in bed — four months in a rented hospital bed instrument of torture — I tried to ease myself to sleep through my drug-induced fidgets and dark thoughts by reciting prayers.
I was stymied, and lost sleep over it for ages, never thinking of asking my sister Helen or Googling because I could not make it through my favorite prayer. I love the Peace Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi but could only remember one of the three “Ds” in it. At home, I could not locate my ancient little tattered prayer book but finally, my head fog cleared and I got it in hand.
You can look it up yourself; the three Ds, by the way, are about replacing despair with hope; doubt with faith and darkness with light. It goes “grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
I was reluctant to talk about me and the word resurrection in the same sentence. Listening to Father Clyde Guerreiro’s Palm Sunday homily, I grabbed my always-present pen and notebook. The St. Patrick Church pastor, talking about Jesus’ last hours, said we “need his message of patient suffering” and that “we need to go to him in periods of suffering in our lives. We will be raised from the dead at our own resurrections.”
