From Flor Larios' Etsy Site
I hesitate to tackle this. The topic overwhelms me. My family and I attended the Good Friday service at our church and were overwhelmed by Christ and His actions on our behalf. I felt humbled and blessed and deeply in love as I watched each of my Loved Ones weep as we made our way through the Stations of the Cross. These Loved Ones are not bawlers and each of them cried. Only Jude felt up to braving the "Jesus' Suffering" station with me and as we left early, me holding his tiny-yet-enormous shoulders, heaving as they were, I felt strong within myself, thinking that if ever there were something in the year to weep about, this is most emphatically, most blackly It. I feel stunned into uncharacteristic stillness when I think of what Christ did for me. I think of my selfishness, my various and sundry superiority complexes, my vanity, my pride, my gluttony, my "Martha" complex and all the rest of the sin that so often characterizes who I am while still living on this Earth. I think of all of it and the great divide between it and me and the Perfection of a Living God and I want to cry of shame, of joy, of thankfulness and of a renewed awareness of my smallness.
This year, for the first time, I looked upon a replica of the blood-stained grave cloths and realized, for the first time, that they probably were blood stained. I realized that I'd been believing a sort of cartoon version of the Easter Story, a dumbed-down version meant to be more palatable for the refined sensibilities of the Hoity Toity. While never exactly embracing the bunnies and the chicks and the chocolate, I've been glossing over the viciously hurled insults as He hung there, leaking out life. I've been forgetting the anguish of His mother as she watched it all unfold. I imagine that she wished to be dead herself, seeing His lifeless body hang there, so absent of her Son. I rarely consider what it must have been like for the sky to turn black in the very middle of the day as He died. I've been taking what He did on my behalf that day on the Cross lightly and I wish to do so no longer. I see my children understanding in their childlike, faith-filled way and I wish to emulate them. They cry as they remember their Lord's sufferings and the profound appropriateness of this centers me.
I've always loved and felt relieved by this quote:
Be comforted. It is no doing of yours. You are not great... Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad. Have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing this world. Look! It is beneath your head and carries you."
This year, for the first time, I looked upon a replica of the blood-stained grave cloths and realized, for the first time, that they probably were blood stained. I realized that I'd been believing a sort of cartoon version of the Easter Story, a dumbed-down version meant to be more palatable for the refined sensibilities of the Hoity Toity. While never exactly embracing the bunnies and the chicks and the chocolate, I've been glossing over the viciously hurled insults as He hung there, leaking out life. I've been forgetting the anguish of His mother as she watched it all unfold. I imagine that she wished to be dead herself, seeing His lifeless body hang there, so absent of her Son. I rarely consider what it must have been like for the sky to turn black in the very middle of the day as He died. I've been taking what He did on my behalf that day on the Cross lightly and I wish to do so no longer. I see my children understanding in their childlike, faith-filled way and I wish to emulate them. They cry as they remember their Lord's sufferings and the profound appropriateness of this centers me.
I've always loved and felt relieved by this quote:
Be comforted. It is no doing of yours. You are not great... Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad. Have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing this world. Look! It is beneath your head and carries you."
- C. S. Lewis, in Perelandra
RSS Feed