Via Crucis Est Via Lucis

(This post is going to be a bit spiritual, so skip it if you don’t like that sort of thing.)

It was the Saturday before Holy Week, and nobody had turned up for Stations of the Cross at noon. For the last few years we’ve followed the devotion of the Stations once around the church, and, on the Saturday before Palm Sunday, once outdoors, tracing a short route about the centre of Swanvale Halt and causing consternation to the general public. But not this year! Eventually I went back inside the church and thought I’d better have a bit of a pray as I was feeling sorry for myself.

Of course, I found myself reflecting, it’s no surprise that nobody wanted to lose a chunk of a beautifully warm and sunny day contemplating the violent suffering and death of a man two thousand years ago. It’s quite a counter-intuitive thing to want to do.

That said, I considered, the Passion of Jesus makes more sense against a backdrop of sun and heat than England’s usual meteorological mode of overcast grey. It isn’t just that it feels a bit more like Palestine in the early first century AD might have felt, but that the harsh indifference of nature and the jagged contrast of light and shadow calls attention to the cosmic drama taking place on the streets of Jerusalem and, two millennia later, in the souls of human beings.

And what drama has taken place in my soul, then, and to what result? It’s Holy Week again, in my eighth year as Rector of Swanvale Halt, my thirteenth as an ordained person, my twenty-third as a Christian, my forty-eighth as a mortal being. I follow the same route of the Passion of Christ, say the same words, and try to summon up the same feelings. And I see the same sins besetting me, the same temptations and weaknesses. So much of my thinking is a disguised way of telling myself how great I am, it’s both pathetic and disgraceful. Ah, noonday demon, there you are again. Kyrie, kyrie eleison.

But things do shift, ever so slowly, tectonically like the earth. It’s true that the slow practice of religion affects the way you think, the filters which your mind places in front of the world of phenomena. I’m still ambushed by rage from time to time, but I now have deeper defences against it and I don’t think I’m caught out quite so often. And I do feel a greater sense of wellbeing, and even – whisper it quietly – happiness. This is not just because I have very little, rationally, to be unhappy about, because I never did: yet nothing like those old, truly terrifying episodes of blackness has swept across me for a long while.

It was only partly pure reason that drove me towards believing in God, trying to work out what I thought about the texts of the New Testament and where they might have come from: part of the impetus was the poetry of Christianity, the beauty of it, but that wasn’t the whole story either. An element in my conversion, I know, was existential dread. Belief defused the bomb of meaninglessness that sat inexorably ticking beneath the world, which may seem like a very abstract, philosophical thing to you, brethren, but it was horribly definite to me. Paradoxically, God has so smoothed off the lacerating edges of that dread that I can barely remember what it was like, and I can entertain the idea of not believing any more without feeling too unhappy about it. I can look on the world with a kind of gentle equanimity. Strange that, isn’t it? – faith making atheism mentally palatable. That’s a change, too.

Over the last year or so calm, gratitude and affection have been getting the better of me more often. It could just be age, or it could be a genuine motion of the spirit and, although I know that the real test of love is not what you feel but what you do, it is, dare I say it, quite - enjoyable. Where it leads, who can tell? Away from my narrow small self, at any rate, and how great a thing that is.

So Holy Week proceeds, in sunlight or in grey. Behold the wood of the Cross, whereon hung the world’s salvation: O sweetest wood, O tree whose fruit is love.