{"id":10412,"date":"2011-04-22T11:10:28","date_gmt":"2011-04-22T15:10:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/thebloggingmonk\/?p=10412"},"modified":"2012-03-05T18:40:54","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T23:40:54","slug":"a-monk-at-the-foot-of-the-cross-good-friday-22-april-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/2011\/04\/a-monk-at-the-foot-of-the-cross-good-friday-22-april-2011.html","title":{"rendered":"A Monk at the Foot of the Cross: Good Friday, 22 April 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the course of these days, the Christian world is in the midst of celebrating what the Catholic Church calls the Easter Triduum<\/em>, that three-day period of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday.\u00a0\u00a0 During a triduum, the Church celebrates with more intensive prayer and devotion the occasion leading up to the occasion immediately following it, so it is typical for a triduum to precede some important feast.\u00a0 Certainly for the Easter Triduum, the feast transpiring is the greatest feast in the liturgical year, that of the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus at Easter.<\/p>\n

For Christians truly to reap the spiritual fruit of Easter, we must be willing to enter as fully and as deeply as possible into the Paschal Mystery\u00a0 — that is, the passion, death, and resurrection — of our Lord Jesus.\u00a0 This feat is no easy one, for as our hearts and minds are willing to enter more deeply into the Will of God in this holy season, we are drawn more intimately into the intense love of our Lord in His perfect gift of self in the Holy Eucharist at the Lord\u2019s Supper of Maundy Thursday, and soon thereafter into His lonely agony of the Garden of Gethsemane.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We stand next to Jesus as Judas Iscariot betrays our Lord with the worst \u201ckiss of death\u201d known in the history of mankind and experience the abandonment of the Lord by his best friends at the time of His greatest need.\u00a0 God confronts us in this moment not to abandon Christ again, but rather to sit in humble adoration of Him as Lord, even through witnessing His mocking and scourging, the farce of His trial, and along the Via Crucis <\/em>(Way of the Cross) up until His death at Calvary on the Cross of Good Friday.\u00a0 We long to rest with Him in patient waiting within the tomb of his Holy Sepulchre, watching in expectant, prayerful hope for Jesus to arise in new life in the splendor of Easter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is the most beautiful time of Church\u2019s liturgical year, and also the most difficult if it is taken with the seriousness that it merits.\u00a0 In entering into the Paschal Mystery, the Christian dares to encounter the living Lord Jesus in the fullness of what He has endured for the sake of our personal salvation.\u00a0\u00a0 It is important to note here the terms personal<\/em> and encounter<\/em> within the spectrum of human time and God\u2019s eternity.\u00a0 As Son of Man, Jesus lived the historical events of the Easter Triduum into Easter Sunday at a specific point in human history approximately 2,000 years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, as Son of God, Jesus is not bound by time.\u00a0 Rather, as Eternal Son of the Father, these events are not bound by time.\u00a0 At any given human moment in our personal encounter with Jesus, we face our Lord in our own personal lives as He bows down in loving service to wash our feet and as we sup with Him, as we betray Him by our sinful actions, as we abandon Him in fear of what the world threatens to do to us if we remain faithful to the Lord.\u00a0 We personally sit in cowering fear of those who mock Jesus and deny that we know Him when He desires our friendship the most, lest the world subject us to the same trials, and we experience the deep shame with Saint Peter for having caved in to the world\u2019s sinful ways once again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We strive to walk alongside Jesus to be His Simon of Cyrene, at first protesting because it is too humilating and no human being ought to be subjected to such torture and ridicule \u2026 It is so offensive to our inherent sense what human dignity deserves.\u00a0 But as we walk alongside Jesus and personally encounter him face to face at every Station of the Cross, by the time we reach Calvary with Him, we are transformed, changed inside and out by the reason why Jesus chose to go through such bitter humiliation, suffering, and even brutal death:\u00a0 He did all of this in perfect love, for me, so that I could live forever with Him and not have to pay forever myself that terrible price due to my own sin.
\n\u00a0
\nWhat is my response?\u00a0 Do I remain spiritually asleep, conveniently refusing to be disturbed as it is simply too uncomfortable to be challenged with the notion that I am called to be transformed into Jesus\u2019 perfect image and likeness?\u00a0 Do I dare admit that there are times when I have been wrong and set Jesus on this course to the Cross by my own personal actions of refusing to love as He does?\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 perfect self-gift on the Cross indeed should be jarring to us \u2026 It should lead us to encounter the One Who has been pierced on the Cross, the One whose total being in Love with us as God\u2019s Love in human flesh for us shows us so starkly just how much further we have to grow in order to be completely loving as He is.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet Jesus nonetheless ever patiently and lovingly looks into our eyes and speaks to our heart, Come, abide with me, wherever I go.\u00a0 If we are awake enough truly to listen to this His invitation, we grow in our desire to respond to Him in expressions of authentic love, allowing His Love to pierce our hardened hearts so that His Sacred Heart — pierced by our sins — may pour forth His Lifegiving Holy Spirit and enflesh our hearts with His Love (Ez. 36.26-27).\u00a0 For our hearts to become like His, we must allow Jesus to transform us \u2026 We cannot do so merely out of our own resources.\u00a0 The Easter Triduum is a pointed reminder that we just don\u2019t have what it takes on our own to live the life of holiness to which Jesus calls us.\u00a0 Rather, we must be open to the Holy Spirit, Who will transfigure us with God\u2019s infinite Love if we only we would invite Him into our life.\u00a0 The more deeply we invite Him in, the more we permit God to transform us into an image and likeness of Jesus that becomes increasingly recognizable as His Own.<\/p>\n

It is in this spirit that the monk seeks for his life to be a perpetual Lent but also a continuous Easter.\u00a0 We hear from Saint Benedict in his Prologue of the Rule of Saint Benedict (RB):\u00a0 Never swerving from His instructions, then, but faithfully observing His teaching in the monastery until death, we shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve also to share in His Kingdom <\/em>(v.50).\u00a0 Patience comes from the Latin verb patior, pati meaning \u201cto suffer\u201d, and given that Saint Paul teaches us that \u201cLove is patient\u201d (1 Cor. 13.4), our patience indicates our strong love for Christ Jesus and our open willingness to walk in His Way alongside Him, wherever our Good Shepherd leads us.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While this attitude is one to embrace in daily life, it is not easy even for a monk to live out, due to our human weakness (RB 49.1-2):\u00a0 The life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent.\u00a0 Since few, however, have the strength for this, we urge the entire community during these days of Lent to keep its manner of life most pure and to wash away in this holy season the negligences of other times.\u00a0 This we can do in a fitting manner by refusing to indulge evil habits and by devoting ourselves to prayer with tears, to reading, to compunction of heart and self-denial \u2026 Let each one deny himself \u2026 and look forward to holy Easter with joy and spiritual longing <\/em>(RB 49.1-4, 7).\u00a0<\/p>\n

This compunction of heart\u00a0 (compuctio cordis<\/em>) literally means allowing our \u201cheart to be punctured with\u201d the Heart of Christ, such that by permitting our heart to be pierced with the Love of Jesus while our sin pierces His Sacred Heart on this Good Friday, we may look forward ever more eagerly to Easter with expectant hope.\u00a0 \u201cIt is high time for us to arise from sleep<\/em>\u201d (RB Prol. 8, Rom. 13.11), to \u201crun on the path of God\u2019s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love<\/em>\u201d (RB, Prol. 49) so that we might share forever in His Kingdom.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This Way of God\u2019s Love is a narrow one, for \u201cNarrow is the road that leads to life\u201d (Prol. 48, 5.11, Mt. 7.14).\u00a0 As we place our hope in God alone (RB 4.41), we will come to yearn for everlasting life with holy desire, day by day reminding ourselves that we are going to die, hour by hour keeping careful watch over all we do, aware that God\u2019s gaze is upon us whenever we may be <\/em>(cf. 4.44-47), and we will have to render an account one day for all that we have done.\u00a0 In other words, live every day as if it is your last \u2026 and one day you will be right!\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps this truth is even better articulated by the skeletons of the Capuchin cemetery of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome: What you are, we once were \u2026 What we are, you will become<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In keeping Jesus\u2019 suffering, death, and entombment of this Easter Triduum always before our eyes, we are reminded of the superior price that Love called our Lord to pay so that we might have the fullness of life forever in Him.\u00a0 In remembering that we too shall die at an unknown hour, as Christians we choose to live in the now knowing that we will have to answer for our actions \u2013 right and wrong \u2013 on that day of our death when we will appear before the throne of the Most High God.\u00a0 At that time of God\u2019s judgment particular to us, each human being will encounter Jesus Christ crucified and will hear Jesus\u2019 piercing question: Who do you say that I am?<\/em>\u00a0 May we be able to respond to Him on that day in the fullness of love: You are my Christ, my Lord, my Savior<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 As Christians, may we live every moment now in preparation for that day when all of our heart and mind, body and soul, every ounce of our being is called to experience the powerful splendor of Jesus\u2019 Easter Resurrection in eternal life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the course of these days, the Christian world is in the midst of celebrating what the Catholic Church calls the Easter Triduum, that three-day period of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday.\u00a0\u00a0 During a triduum, the Church celebrates with more intensive prayer and devotion the occasion leading up to the occasion immediately following…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":385,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,10],"tags":[11,13,6,3,12],"class_list":["post-10412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-friday","category-monks-2","tag-good-friday","tag-monastic","tag-monks","tag-prayer","tag-st-benedict"],"yoast_head":"\nA Monk at the Foot of the Cross: Good Friday, 22 April 2011 - The Blogging Monk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/2011\/04\/a-monk-at-the-foot-of-the-cross-good-friday-22-april-2011.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Monk at the Foot of the Cross: Good Friday, 22 April 2011 - 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Gregory Gresko is Chaplain of the new Blessed John Paul II Shrine in Washington D.C. In his new responsibilities, Fr. Gresko strives to integrate the charisms of Benedictine spirituality and life, emphasized beautifully in the current pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI, with the Magisterial teachings of Blessed John Paul II to help set a firm course for today's Christians in their marriages, families, and religious lives. From 2000-2012, Fr. Gresko was a monk of Mary Mother of the Church Abbey in Richmond, Virginia. He earned his S.T.B. from the Pontificial Athenaeum of Sant'Anselmo (2005) in Rome and his S.T.L. magna cum laude in Marriage and Family Studies (2008) from the Pontifical Lateran University, John Paul II Institute (Vatican City). His S.T.L. dissertation was entitled, \"Educating to Love: Foundational Pedagogy in Light of Karol Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility\". Fr. Gregory is working on his doctoral dissertation for the same Vatican institute, on \"The Consecration of the Family to the Heart of Jesus in Light of the Pastoral Ministry of P\u00e8re Mateo Crawley-Boevey\".","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/author\/ggresko"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/385"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10412"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10504,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10412\/revisions\/10504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/thebloggingmonk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}