Tag: Good Friday

For Us…

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Cross, dying, Jesus, spirituality3 Comments

Good Friday
April 7, 2023

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/040723.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray the most painful story of our faith. 

So they took Jesus, and, carrying the cross himself, 
he went out to what is called the Place of the Skull, 
in Hebrew, Golgotha.
There they crucified him, and with him two others, 
one on either side, with Jesus in the middle.
Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross.
It read,
“Jesus the Nazorean, the King of the Jews.”

John 19:16-18

As we watch Infinite Goodness broken on the altar of evil, our own sufferings and those of all the world pour out before us. Because it was for our suffering that Christ died, not only for that of his own time.

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore,
    our sufferings that he endured,
while we thought of him as stricken,
    as one smitten by God and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our offenses,
    crushed for our sins;
upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole,
    by his stripes we were healed.

Isaiah 53:4-5

Haven’t you asked yourself the question at least once, “Why did it have to be like this? Couldn’t our Redemption have been accomplished without this agony?

It is a question we carry with us throughout our lives as the profound contradiction of suffering challenges and often confounds us. Our faith is tested in pain’s relentless onslaught. Our souls struggle to understand what suffering is trying to tell us about God!

Jesus himself knew that struggle as we see so clearly in the Gethsemane story.

Good Friday is a day to sit quietly with that question, and to finally release it into the Mystery of God. We can never reach an answer or solution. We were not meant to.

We can only trust. That trust will allow suffering to transform us. And though we cannot find a solution, we can, like Jesus in the Garden, reach a place of sacred abandonment to God. From there, our true salvation can begin.

In the days when Christ was in the flesh, 
he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears 
to the one who was able to save him from death, 
and he was heard because of his reverence.
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered; 
and when he was made perfect,
he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.

Hebrews 5:7-9

Poetry: What If I Fall? by Erin Hanson

There is freedom waiting for you,
On the breezes of the sky,
And you ask, "What if I fall?"
Oh, but my darling,
What if you fly?

Music: Take, Lord, Receive: the prayer of St. Ignatius of Loyola – John Foley, SJ

Take, Lord, receive.
all my liberty.
My memory, understanding, my entire will!
Give me only your LOVE, and your Grace,
that’s enough for me!
Your love and your grace, are enough for me!
Take Lord, receive,
All I have and posses.
You have given unto me,
Now I return it.
Give me only your love, and your grace,
that’s enough for me!
Your love and your grace,
are enough for me!
Take Lord receive,
all is yours now.
Dispose of it,
wholey according to your will.
Give me only your love, and your grace,
that’s enough for me!
Your love and your grace,
are enough for me!

Good Friday 2022

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Cross, Discipleship, Faith, spiritualityLeave a comment

April 15, 2022

Today’s Readings

Today, in in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray within the incomprehensible Love Who is Jesus Christ.

Love given

A most beautiful hymn from the Good Friday liturgy is the Popule Meus.

Popule Meus, also known as the ‘Improperia‘ or the ‘Reproaches,‘ is the hymn sung after the Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday. Christ reproaches the People, contrasting the innumerable favors God has bestowed upon them with the injuries He has received from their hands. Where God led them to the Chosen Land, the Peole led Him to the Cross. Where God gave a royal scepter, the People returned a crown of thorns.

This prayer focuses us on our own relationship with God. We too are Children of the Promise. How have we responded? How do we find ourselves as we kneel before the Cross?

The Trisagion prayer is an ancient chant repeated within the Popule Meus. It is a verse we can repeat as a mantra whenever we meditate on the Cross.

Ágios o Theos.
Ágios íschyros.
Ágios athánatos, eléison imas.

Holy God,
Holy Mighty One,
Holy Immortal One,
have mercy on us.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uK14L5FLV7Y%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26fs%3D1%26hl%3Den%26autohide%3D2%26wmode%3Dtransparent

Poetry: Good Friday – Christina Rossetti

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.

Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Cross, dying, Faith, Jesus, Lent, Mercy, Psalms1 Comment

April 2, 2021

TODAY’S READINGS

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 31, the prayer of one who will not be shaken from faith in God.

For all my foes I am an object of reproach,
    a laughingstock to my neighbors, and a dread to my friends;
    they who see me abroad flee from me.
I am forgotten like the unremembered dead;
    I am like a dish that is broken.
But my trust is in you, O LORD;
    I say, “You are my God.
In your hands is my destiny; rescue me
    from the clutches of my enemies and my persecutors.”

Psalm 31: 12-13

What is there to say about the Good Friday journey of Jesus? It may be that we can only walk beside him in loving, heart-broken silence.

There are times in our lives when we will be called to walk like this beside others in loving and merciful ministry.

There may be times when others are called to walk with us in such a way.

Let these times inform our prayer today.

Good Friday is the time we gather strength and compassionate understanding from Jesus to help us, in his Name, be Mercy in the world.

Poetry: From “The Dream of the Rood”, one of the Christian poems in the corpus of Old English literature and an example of the genre of dream poetry. Like most Old English poetry, it is written in alliterative verse. Rood is from the Old English word rōd ‘pole’, or more specifically ‘crucifix’. Preserved in the 10th-century Vercelli Book, the poem may be as old as the 8th-century Ruthwell Cross, and is considered as one of the oldest works of Old English literature.

The Rood (cross of Christ) speaks:

“It was long past – I still remember it – 
That I was cut down at the copse’s end,
Moved from my root. Strong enemies there took me,
Told me to hold aloft their criminals,
Made me a spectacle. Men carried me
Upon their shoulders, set me on a hill,
A host of enemies there fastened me.

“And then I saw the Lord of all mankind
Hasten with eager zeal that He might mount
Upon me. I durst not against God’s word
Bend down or break, when I saw tremble all
The surface of the earth. Although I might
Have struck down all the foes, yet stood I fast.

“Then the young hero (who was God almighty)
Got ready, resolute and strong in heart.
He climbed onto the lofty gallows-tree,
Bold in the sight of many watching men,
When He intended to redeem mankind.

I trembled as the warrior embraced me.
But still I dared not bend down to the earth,
Fall to the ground. Upright I had to stand.

“A rood I was raised up; and I held high 
The noble King, the Lord of heaven above.
I dared not stoop. They pierced me with dark nails;
The scars can still be clearly seen on me,
The open wounds of malice. Yet might I
Not harm them. They reviled us both together.
I was made wet all over with the blood
Which poured out from his side, after He had 
Sent forth His spirit. And I underwent
Full many a dire experience on that hill.

I saw the God of hosts stretched grimly out.
Darkness covered the Ruler’s corpse with clouds
His shining beauty; shadows passed across,
Black in the darkness. All creation wept,
Bewailed the King’s death; Christ was on the cross….

“Now you may understand, dear warrior,
That I have suffered deeds of wicked men
And grievous sorrows. Now the time has come
That far and wide on earth men honor me,
And all this great and glorious creation,
And to this beacon offers prayers. On me
The Son of God once suffered; therefore now
I tower mighty underneath the heavens,
And I may heal all those in awe of me.
Once I became the cruelest of tortures,
Most hateful to all nations, till the time
I opened the right way of life for men.”

Music: Pie Jesu – Michael Hoppé

https://youtu.be/xDc4hFrU3Oo

Good Friday

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Discipleship, dying, Faith, Jesus, PoetryLeave a comment

Click here for readings

Good Friday

Good Friday

Calvary was a glass box where God,
confined, no longer touched the world.

 It was a white plain, without sound,
not the groaning, blood-soaked hill
the scriptures leave us.

 I know.

Calvary hewed itself inside me once
with the chisel of a long sorrow
that fell, persistent, merciless
like cold, steel rain.

 It was a place bereft of feeling.

Only the anticipation and
the memory of pain are feelings.
Pain itself is a huge abyss,
bled by the silence that mimics death,
but is not as kind as death.

 Calvary is the place where
all strength is given
to the drawing of a breath
to linger in it unfulfilled.

God, now I go quietly inside
where you are dying in a glass box, still.
I am changing now to glass
to pass through and companion you.

 I watch the rain, itself like glass,
crashing to an unknown life
beneath the earth.  Where love roots
absolute, unbreakable, I cling to you
in a transparent act of will.

Music: Handel: Messiah – Part 2