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!

EIGHT STATION: WOMEN OF JERUSALEM WEEP FOR JESUS

Jesus wept (Jn 11: 35). The women of Jerusalem wept (Lk 23:27).

Weeping is a very deep and great source of energy, especially when it transcends from sympathy into empathy. And when a woman weeps, it acquires a double potency.

This is so because the primal cause for change Within this realm is by a woman.  A woman controls the bloodline. Feminism rightly channelled can revolutionise the world, and that fact became Christ’s counsel to the women of Jerusalem.

‘Weep not for me’.  I go to open the scroll and the seven seals (Rev 5:3-5) ‘Weep for yourselves and your children’. Labour to write a good scroll and to package it with a proper seal.  

‘Do not weep for me’ (Lk 23: 28) Go back home. Charity begins at home. Do not abscond nor ignore the bloodline where Destiny has positioned you. There is a reason behind that, make the best out of it.

‘Weep for yourself …’ (Lk 23:28). Do not worry how many will be saved, simply labour your best to enter the arrow way (Lk 13: 23-24) and multitudes shall be brought to life through your freedom. Your entire ancestry is in you, awaiting their freedom through your recognition of truth.

‘Weep for your children…’ (Lk 23:28). Channel your empathy into your bloodline.  This matter, even after death. Just as Dives realised, as he thought of his family and 5 brothers as lifelines, after the futility of reaching out to Lazarus (Lk 16: 27-28).

Our ancestry still matters. Modern DNA and genetic researches are revealing how we are a composition of our past, an entire ancestral genome labouring and waiting to be free inside us. We are the salvation of the past and hope of the future.

Why look elsewhere. Let us start from home. As all shall eventually come home to roost, there shall be a woman awaiting us. Even Science is fast realising the potency of a woman’s chromosome (X) and the uselessness of a man’s chromosome (Y) which has gone with the wind.

Sometimes it is tougher along the bloodline, even Jesus’ bloodline imploded on Him, but this is the best place to start if we want to sustain our freedom.

Blessed are those who mourn, they shall be comforted.  Charity begins at home and ends abroad.

SEVENTH STATION: JESUS FALLS THE SECOND TIME

Poor human nature. We shall fall more than once. But guess what? It is through these falls, these miseries, and the recognition of our feebleness, by which his heart is attracted. He raises great edifice on mere nothingness and utter insufficiency.

If our falling and failing brings about a recognition of our weakness, and we cultivate confidence in His mercy, everything becomes gain for us. Falling by the gravity of self, Satan and sin increases our merits when we are little, and when we keep up the struggle.

Our freedom entails us digging more into our failings and hustling more to be the best version of ourselves. How can we keep aloof from sacramental confession for so long? How can we say we have got nothing to confess? Steve Jobs once counselled folly and hunger as a prerequisite to success.

Let us recognise truth (Jn 8: 32). Let us be poor in Spirit (Lk 6: 20). Humility is truth and it consists in the recognition of our nothingness, with an absolute dependence on His righteousness. His heart is the throne of mercy and the most wretched are the most welcome.

Our progress lies not in the satisfaction of our virtue, but in the recognition of our vice. He loves our littleness, not our goodness; our absolute nothingness, not our utmost righteousness.

His Sacred Heart is the abode of little ones from where the science of glorying in their infirmities  is mastered. Let us enter into this abode where we can discover the meaning of mercy and confidently repose in it.

Sanctity, according to St. Therese, does not consist in this or that practices, but in a disposition of the heart which makes one humble and little in God’s arms, conscious of one’s weakness, and confident even to audacity in the goodness of the Father.

Although we recognise the pain of our humanity, let us – like Maya Angelou - leave behind nights of terror and fear, and repose confidently in a daybreak that’s wondrously clear. Let us bring the graces our faith bestows and be the dream and hope of our world. Let us rise!

SIXTH STATION: VERONICA WIPES JESUS’ FACE

Change, they say, is the only constant, but without the courage of changers, life would be a muddled smelly pond. Just do it, wherever you are positioned, labour to find your voice and change your position.

Often, there is a certain unwritten law, an unseen barrier, a real but hidden boundary, developed by the rule of conformity, which mutes people and keeps them a slave of the System. The System needs massive slavery to function and slavery is borne of lack of confidence and the inability to find one’s voice. Do not live others lives, struggle to find your destined purpose!

Can any good come out of the Good guy, I mean, those who would conform and live entirely according to the dictates of the System? If you are not truthfully tough, you’ll simply be used as a pawn in the hand of the powerful.

Look at what is happening around you. The unrighteous get bolder but the good guys panic to affect the status quo. let us not fear to live.

Courage is needed but it needs to be seasoned by Prudence, and what we find in excess is much each in isolation. Much courage without prudence, or much prudence without courage. A combination of these two is rare.

Rare is a prudent and courageous person, and that, Veronica was. She did not wrestle the cross of Christ from the soldiers, that would be suicidal, she focused and went boldly to wipe His face, and she was saved!

May your face shine upon us and we shall be saved (Ps 80:19) so says the Psalmist, and this happened to Veronica. Christ's face shone on her through the cloth she dared to to wipe His face with amidst such pandemonium and danger.

Don’t die before your time through a misguided courage, and avoid living without actually living through a false prudence. Follow the path shown by Veronica, a woman who was wise and dared.

FIFTH STATION: SIMON OF CYRENE HELPS JESUS

In any natural ecosystem, the fittest specie thrives and survives at the expense of the weak and vulnerable. Until Christ came and corrected this basis upon which the strong preys up on the weak. Christ pitched His tent with the weak and said 'It must not be so among you...' (Mk 10: 42-44) and He paid the price for daring to correct the ‘Origin of Species’, an age long anomaly, the consequence of  Adam's fall. 

  

The soldiers easily picked Simon the Cyrenean o carry Jesus’ cross because he was the weakest link in the pack. Simon was a stranger, a ‘nobody’, but he firmly and patiently revolutionised the plights of the poor with Christ through this cross.

The real victims of our age are the outcasts, immigrants, the marginals, the minority class, those across the Periphery, the vulnerable, the unrepresented, public sinners, those struggling with addiction, the prisoners, the neglected. It is amongst these that God is found, this is where breakthroughs are discovered, it is an environment where Christ is better experienced. God dwells amongst hustlers, he is rarely found around the complacent mainstream.

Financial poverty is not man’s actual problem, it is the poverty of the mind and the ability to realise what reality consist that is the root cause of every poverty there is. We Westerners have pretended to be champions of the weak until the present unsatiated rise of the ego manifested in tribalism, nationalism, far rightist, eugenics and wall building, which manifests our utter hypocrisy all along. Our poverty mentality sowed the seed of paranoia and it is already reaping the fruit of discord.

We can give a penny or two to quieten our conscience on the plights of weak, but we keep aloof as much as we can from sharing an outsider’s experience.  It is not enough to assist those on the fringes, what is needed is a real-time identification with an outsider’s experience of being racially, tribally, morally, economically discriminated against.

If we have not experienced what it is like to be on the edge, to be a minority, to be victimised, to be manipulated, we shall be lacking a great deal in lasting wisdom, and we are likely to be greatly flawed in our judgement.

Our living on the edge is intended to shake off our presumption and complacency , it should be invite us into a holy discontent and should make us struggle and hustle, prudently, temperately,  lovingly and patiently to free others and self from these anomalies. 

The Kingdom of God suffereth violence mate (Mt 11: 12). Not the ISIS type, but the Gandhi type, the Martin Luther King Jnr type, the Mandela type, the Simon type, the Christ’s type! Our Jihad is not inflicted unto others, it is reflected on self through the mastering of the Cardinal virtues. 

Don’t just cater for the minority, find a minority to be. Tough, yea? But necessary it is. Be a Simon on the fringe, identify with the fringe. The manipulated will outlast the strong, that is the new rule of Christ, and this is what lasts because it is truth.  

History is on the side of the punished and it is littered with examples to buttress this. The least today will be the leaders of tomorrow. We must discover something about us that puts us on the edge and the unpalatable experience of being ignored and being victimised, and work out prudently and courageously to correct things, as the woman at the next station shows us.