Stations of the Cross

Back in the summer, I had a post about the Stations of the Cross at St. Martin’s Catholic Church in Louisville. The gist of it was that I was spending some time in the church, meditating (as much as is prudent for a Protestant…) on the Stations. It was a huge time, really, of digging into the suffering of Christ. Melissa was in the throes of transplant, and she was holding on to the holding cross Sharon Perkins gave her day and night.

When she went in for the transplant, the cancer had spread extensively. There were a few places she said she could feel with her hands. I was too chicken. I wouldn’t touch where she showed me. I wonder about that. Would it have helped or hurt if I had? Somehow, I see it as a failing, a moment of selfishness, like all cowardice. Anyway, the worst was in her lower back. It was just a lot of pain. When she went for the radiation, she had to lay flat on a hard table, and it was the worst pain she said she had ever felt. “But,” she said, “I kept thinking about Jesus on the Cross, and how He has gone everywhere ahead of me.”

So there I was in the church, trying to get my mind around that, around the Cross, around the suffering of Jesus. Each of the stations seemed to flow to me, they began to make sense. You can go back and look at the post if you want to, but there’s one that hits me right now. I wrote down the ideas that were coming to me in the back of a nice Bible Sissy gave me. The last station: “Jesus is laid in the tomb.” After each station, I wrote a “reason.” There, “because we think death is the end.”

When I was sharing that with Sissy right after I came back, she said, “HA!”