Each year I've been blessed to spend an hour (or more, some years) starting around 2 a.m. Good Friday morning in adoration in our Blessed Sacrament chapel. Our men's group makes sure that someone is there throughout the night, in case anyone wishes to come pray. For me, it's typically a unique time of special connection with my Lord's suffering and love, and it was this morning, as well. I usually end up with several pages of reflections based on what I'm reading and praying, but that wasn't as much the case this morning. It has been a tumultuous Lent for me personally, and for my wife and I together. So my prayer time this morning was a closer uniting of the challenges we've tried to face lovingly this season with the far greater ones of my Savior, of getting things more fully into perspective. Still, there was some written reflection, too (parentheses reflect expansion on the words on my page):
The "cross" which I consider mine to bear, this cup I'm treating as mine to drink? I could not live without it! How can that which God has given me - through which God has saved and sustained my life - how could it be a burden? If I will truly die to myself it will not seem so.
(I then read:)
The way of the Christian life is cruciform. Jesus did not suffer and die in order that we need not suffer and die, but in order that our suffering and death might be joined to his in redemptive victory . . . The Christian way is not one of avoidance but of participation in the suffering of Christ, which encompasses not only our own suffering but the suffering of the whole world . . . Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his classic The Cost of Discipleship, wrote, "When Jesus calls a man, he calls him to come and die.
To many, this does not sound like good news." - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon
(pretty cool how we get such confirmation when we earnestly seek the Lord.)
(Indeed. But these words must be seen in the light of my previous post, which I simply didn't develop to completion, another victim of my recent prolificacy. Perhaps it was also the challenges to which I've alluded above that kept me from getting there yesterday. That post should have moved onto the joy that abounds when the love we bear for others finally bears fruit. Our formerly-estranged son-in-law's return to our family, to his wife, and to the church is one of the most tangible recent examples we've seen of this.
As for this morning's reflection, it occurred to me immediately that Jesus invitation must be expressed more completely than this quote from Bonhoeffer, who we must understand was struggling to rouse up complacent Christianity in opposition to the rising influence and evil of the Third Reich. I'm not criticizing this 20th century martyr in the slightest - whose writings I have not read and who very well may have gone on to make a similar point himself - when I suggest that Jesus would probably say something more complete. Perhaps, he'd say something like:) "Come and live fully! Come and love completely! Come and die to yourself, and so live!"
Lord Jesus, for my sake you have borne so much more than I can imagine. From your cross, your sacrifice, and your death to yourself you have brought forth the ultimate victory! Holy Spirit, let me be so united with Christ that I see and experience this victory in my life. My God, break every part of me that you must in order to love through me more fully.
On my knees at the end of my prayer time, this occurred to me: focusing so long and so intently on my past failings and unworthiness, I have in some ways neglected to allow Jesus to be Lord of the remainder of my life.
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