CONCLUSION: SUNDAY!

Sunday, the day when we cannot die. ‘My Father and I keep on working’ (Jn 5: 17). The paradigm has shifted. It behoves of Saturday to rest, with Sunday, creation happens perpetually.

Send forth Thy Spirit and they shall be created…. Sunday is a day for newness, it is ever beginning, ever creating and recreating, ever renewing, ever resurrecting, no dull moment. Christianity is a religion of newness. 

The book of Genesis describes light being created on the first day of creation. ‘Let there be light’. Jesus also describes Himself as ‘the light of the world'.  Christ’s resurrection was a great paradigm.  Behold then, the ‘deathlessness’ of light! Our dry bones shall rise, it shall not rot with Friday. The Lord’s day is the first day.

If Black hole is permitted to consume the Light, it is that Black hole can be redeemed for the children of the Light. 

In The Matrix movie, after Neo had received a kiss from Trinity, the entire army of Sentinels were no more able  to affect a hair of his. Such will be our lots as we rise out of these ordeals.

Our initiation experience has come through the stations of the cross. We are now a new creation, old things have passed, behold all things have become new! (2 Cor 5:17). Let us lose our fears. No weapon fashioned against us can prosper anymore. We have known and seen Truth, not as in afterlife, but here and now!

So let us arise from hence with courage and without fear. Emmanuel. God is with us

ELEVENTH STATION: JESUS IS NAILED TO THE CROSS

This is my body (Lk 22:19). 

When the body suffers, the human natural potential is halted, and without health, our body becomes a victim of the entire force of gravity which implodes and forces us towards the zero volume and infinite density of the Blackhole, the culmination of the physical death of man.

Let us make a pilgrimage to the hospital. There, let us visit the temple of Intensive Care, the altar of Acute Assessment and the shrine of Operating Theatres, there we shall find our reason not to complain about our own prickly headache. Blessed are those who are committed to the alleviation of the sufferings of the sick, indeed they perform a Divine vocation.

You have prepared a body for me (Heb 10:5) and, this is my body (Lk 22: 19).

We shall many times be tested through body illness and sickness. The more gravity lays its claim on us, the more our faith will be tested, and the more we shall be susceptible to denial, anger and depression.

When the body suffers, we can quickly forget the Body given up for us (Lk 22:19) and desperately scramble for alternative cures to alleviate their pains, and here, suicide can be contemplated, voodoos can be consulted, astrology can be practised, fake Prophets and Pastors can be visited.

When one suffers, without the help of grace, it takes an instant to lose one’s head and bridle the voice of conscience, to bargain and give in to the devil, to accept his terms and accept his empty promises. And it is also at this very same point that our entire salvific destiny is defined.

Let us beg God to forgive the instances in which we have lost our head and patience during our bodily suffering. Let us have recourse to the True Body and Blood which is capable of saving us. 

FOURTEENTH STATION: JESUS IS BURIED IN THE TOMB

On the 7th day, God rested from his works of creation; and here on the seventh day, God is buried in the tomb. What else can happen? If God rests, creation stops, nothing exists.

Without Christ, the seventh day, for humankind, becomes a Period (full-stop) for hope, but with Christ it is indeed a period of hope.

Nietzsche concluded that God is dead, the French revolutionaries’ motive was to kill God, Stalin and Lenin perpetuated a grand plot to destroy God. And today, for many who cannot cross the bridge of Sabbath, God may yet be dead.

No amount of rationalisation can get us out of the ordeal of the seventh day, it is through the ability to remain in hope with the Madonna that the meaninglessness of our ‘Friday’ can transform, through Christ, into the meaningfulness of our ’Sunday’.

This period may be tough but Let us keep hope alive and we shall soon arrive at the reasonableness and deathlessness of ‘Sunday’. We shall soon know why, not only in the afterlife, but also here in time, because the journey to Truth is an experience. Freedom is very experiential.

THIRTEENTH STATION: JESUS IS TAKEN DOWN FROM THE CROSS AND GIVEN TO HIS MOTHER

How many deaths we must pass through to be wise, and these little deaths are a subset of the one great death which has already been won over for us on Calvary through our Baptism. The life we live now is hidden with Jesus in Christ (Col 3:3).

We shall have to pass through rivers, cross through seas and navigate through oceans of trials before we can attain our freedom. Let us sail with the Star of the Sea who can guide us from the Inferno of life, through its Purgatorio and unto the bliss of its Paradiso, where our tragedy is changed into a Divine Comedy.

The softest landing we can experience during a deep crisis, is to find ourselves in the arms of the Blessed Virgin, that is why we ask her to aid us now, and at the hour of our death in the Hail Mary. And a sword shall pierce your own soul … (Lk 2:35). Let us have recourse to Mary, the pitiful maiden who receives the dead body of her son from the cross. 

When the Crucifix becomes the Pieta, Easter can already be smelt from afar. The Crucifix and the Pieta should make their space in every home.

Albert Einstein clearly expresses the 13^th Station emotion when he noted that the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express, the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are known only to him who has experienced them himself.

Pain may endure to the nights but joy cometh in the morning (Ps 30:5). It cannot get worse, things can henceforth get better. Where many without faith have fallen into despair, here let us keep hope alive. 

TWELFTH STATION: JESUS DIES ON THE CROSS

The spacelessness and timelessness of Blackholes that makes the entire creation shiver

Here, blackhole does not admit by observation, it is amongst us

Terrible it is, the day of the Lord!

The paradox of death and life

As Hawking suggested, Blackhole is not black after all

It is a Good -not Bad- Friday. With Christ, Blackhole is a good hole, Blackhole becomes a Big Bang. What is supposed to be the end is a Beginning

Faith is what is required of us. Trust and obey

Whoever believes in Me, even though he dies shall live, and he who lives and believes in Me shall never die ()

Natural light may not escape the natural Blackhole, but the Light of Christ, engages the Blackhole and transforms it into a Good hole. Death, where is thy sting? ()

The works of creation was completed in 6 days, it all ended on Friday, here works meets a dead point. Christ also finished His works of recreation on Friday. ‘It is finished’(), he cried.

The condemnation of Friday is what Christ has come to break. But without authentic faith, without real awareness, without a depth of life lived in spirit and truth, every effort of man becomes a perambulation in futility, a natural Blackhole. ‘Without me you can do nothing ‘. That is why Good Friday is the fulcrum of the entire history of man.

 ‘O blood and water which gushed forth from the heart of Jesus as a fountain of mercy for us, I trust in You’.

Death is life, even though you die, you live () smell it!

That is the origin of breakthrough from the curse of Friday.

Time, as we know it now, is an illusion,

TENTH STATION: JESUS IS STRIPPED OF HIS GARMENTS

It gets tough and scary from hence, for so should an experiential initiation be…

The word ‘Go, sell all that you have’ (Mt 19: 21), shall soon happen to us all. We shall have to, willingly or unwillingly, let go and let God. Everything perishes, why deny that, or why not willingly confront this reality? We live within the confines of change and decay. Nothing we bring to this world, nothing we shall take away from it (1Tim 6:7) It is all vanity of vanities! (Eccl 1:2).

Christ’s admonition for us to leave houses, brothers, sisters, father, mother, wife, children, or fields for His sake (Mt 19:29) is a benevolent one, because entropy is the ultimate nature of everything. Sooner or later all dependency shall go, and only Christ, who is capable of reversing entropy through the cross on Calvary, who shall remain. 

It is good spiritual practice to learn to strip oneself from all things. The money we labour for, the children we groom, the spouse we cherish, the prestige and position we strive after, even the body we protect and adore, all these shall decay, and we ourselves shall be gone. We cannot be spiritual by clinging unto these. Apart from its peak, every hierarchy of Maslow shall collapse. Ego, money, family, security all shall be stripped.

What is tougher to bear in this journey is not so much the stripping, as the fact that these ordeals often happen through human agents who slander, judge, condemn, malign and betray us. The closer those people are, the tougher it is  for us to bear!

The path of liberation is that of detachment, that is the stuff Lent is made of. Detachment is tough, but it makes us wise. Without detachment, we cannot be wise, and without wisdom, we shall remain a slave of the System, and there is more toil being a slave of the System than accepting to be stripped.

Let us ask our Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary, the Star of the Sea, to help us in stripping our numerous garments. She knows how to carefully and lovingly strip us of our attachments so that this is not overtly hurting.

Our Lady (Notre Dame) of Paris, Pray for us.

NINTH STATION: JESUS FALLS THE THIRD TIME

Hypocrisy is a terrible sin (Lk 12: 1-3), scandal is a horrible malady (Mk 9: 42). Christ seriously condemned both in the scripture. But how rare in our age it is to come across a leader who walks the talk and is not a catch 22 victim of hypocrisy or scandal.

The higher one climbs the ladder of leadership -in the public, work or worship places- the more one is faced with its structural hypocrisy and scandal, and anyone who is not matured enough to deal with these human failings will either give up on the effort or join up with the failure. Few people can cope with the reality that exists at the top. The great Babylonic System thrives at the expense of this spirit of discouragement.

Every known malady is tucked up under the misery and mystery behind the 3^rd fall and only Calvary can redeem that.  The effect of the 3rd fall can cause anyone, either to abandon the journey altogether, or to continue up unto Calvary. There is a great personal loneliness experienced after any hypocrisy becomes a scandal for the redeemed and it takes great faith and effort to journey to Calvary.  

Nothing that is hidden that shall not be made known (Lk 8: 17). Be careful therefore, what you do in an age where private scandals are publicly shamed on Facebook, where deep secrets of ages past can easily be purchased for a fiver on Amazon, where any hypocrisy is only but a Twit away. Even the seal of the confessional shall be broken!

The numerous unresolved conflicts are just ways of avoiding Calvary. Neither Peter nor Paul; Francis, or Benedict; Leave, or Remain, Trump, or Obama; PDP, or APC, none of these can resolve our conflicts. Only Calvary! 

Without Calvary, there is no moving on.  Let us go willingly therefore towards Calvary to resolve our scandals and hypocrisies, or we shall be having them resolved for us over there unwillingly. The remaining 5 Stations of the Cross happen  on Calvary because our real initiation is on Calvary. Everything until now is external, the Calvary journey is more internal.

As night draws nigh then, on this Palm Sunday, let us begin this Holy Week with a resolve to embrace the only scandal worth coveting: The scandal of the cross!