Providing vital Christian resources from the YMCA past and present to nourish inclusive, equitable work in our diverse and global neighborhoods that build up healthy spirit, mind and body for all.
With the extra time at home, to yourself, with your family, you are given some opportunities to reflect on your self in this pandemic-time.
Socrates once noted that self-understanding was a vital starting point for making sense of the world. This ancient wisdom is still true today, especially amidst our busy, fast-paced, quickly changing environment radically altered by the quarantine.
The Enneagram can be a helpful tool for Christian spiritual formation, whether it be a calm season or a crazy one. It can help you identify what motivates you in engaging the world around you, God, and yourself.
Some friends recommended the above-embedded video by LeeAnn & Michelle, a humorous overview of how each of the typical 9 Enneagram types might be reacting to the quarantine stay-at-home orders.
As you watch it, don’t be looking for exact identification, but consider which of them seems to resonate with you. There is no right or wrong type, no better or worse, there’s just you and how you relate to people and situations.
If you find this helpful, leave a comment below on which type you identified with and why!
What is the way you suffer? How do you adjust to reality? Amidst this pandemic, as we prepare for Easter, consider the Via Dolorosa, the way of suffering by Jesus. Instead of despair, we can abide, lead, and serve in faith, hope, love.
Whether you deserve the suffering you eventually experience or not, we’re all faced with the same existential question: what will you do with it?
For the Christian, we believe it all can be redeemed. We are the Good Friday people, the Easter community.
Like every organization in our nation, YMCA’s are also striving to endure this current pandemic-sourced suffering.
But more than that, especially because of our mission and Christian legacy, Y’s are working to also find a way to grow stronger and more loving because of it.
When you find yourself reflecting and grieving on your suffering in the world, it can be a moment to remember the journey of Jesus on his Via Dolorosa, of what he did with his Way of Suffering.
“He who himself does not wish to suffer cannot love him who has.”
Next week is Good Friday, the darkest afternoon of the year for followers of The Way, when we retrace the steps of the Via Dolorosa in our hearts.
This past February, through a YMCA program called OnPRINCIPLE, a cohort of 12 Y workers, along with our 12 mentors and organizers, spent ten days in the Holy Land of Israel and Palestine. On our third day there, we walked the Via Dolorosa, which includes 14 traditional stations of the cross.
Below are my images from most of the stations, along with reflections on The Way, of suffering, of hope in the world with Jesus, the one crucified and resurrected.
First Station: Jesus Condemned and Flogged by Pontius Pilate
“To suffer patiently is not specifically Christian – but freely to choose the suffering is.”
– Kierkegaard
The natural tendency of humans is to avoid suffering, to reduce the risk of suffering, to take preventative measures to reasonably protect ourselves from it.
Fear can have a healthy role in this labor. Or a sick one.
Love for one another, our neighbors and strangers is a more powerful healing agent for responding to unwanted suffering.
Love and fear – each transforms how we, the YMCA, the world, suffers, and why.
Second Station: Crowd Watches Jesus Carry His Cross
Sometimes though our efforts to insulate ourselves from suffering is fueled by irrational anxiety and selfish paranoia.
A crowd mentality can take hold of us, narrowly driving us to resist and revile suffering, which causes us to misunderstand and misapply the medicine at hand.
Third Station: Jesus Stumbles Under His Cross
Sometimes members of the community have to take on suffering as a way to bring healing to those who also suffer.
This can be done out of duty, it can be done out of cynicism and bitterness, but it can also be done fueled by the common bond of humane responsibility to each other.
This is partly what we see in Christ purposefully embarking on the Via Dolorosa; it is what Y members can aspire to, what we in the church can imitate, for the world.
Fifth Station Entrance: Simon of Cyrene takes upon himself the Cross of Christ
“Adversities do not make a person weak, they reveal what strength he has.”
– Kierkegaard
Fifth Station: Simon of Cyrene taking up the cross from the shoulders of the fallen Christ
Imagine being Simon of Cyrene, on a religious sojourn from his island homeland to the Holy City for Passover, caught up in the terror and surge of the crowds pressing in on Jesus.
Out of all the men to be asked by the soldier to carry the cross of Christ, why Simon?
Why you, when drawn into the suffering of others?
Fifth Station: Altar
Having walked the Via Dolorosa with fellow YMCA workers, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, amidst the adversity pressed upon our society these days, Simon of Cyrene has become a sort of mentor for me.
Caught up in a storm not of his making, out of his control, he chose to kneel and turn his suffering into a form of holy service.
Simon’s participation in the carrying of Christ’s cross, like ours, is how we contribute to the redemption of the world.
Sixth Station: Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus
Therefore, dare to renew your decision. It will lift you up again to have trust in God.
For God is a spirit of power and love and self-control, and it is before God and for him that every decision is made.
Dare to act on the good that is buried within your heart.
We don’t know much about Veronica, there is nothing in the Gospels about her tender caress of the bleeding and broken face of Christ.
What courage, though, embodied by this caring woman, seeing this suffering servant of the Lord, mocked and gawked at by the crowds, to venture forth, prompted by the compassion in her heart, to take a risk and wipe the tears of Jesus.
It’s redemptive stories like these that prompt us to enter into the suffering of others, moved by courage and compassion for our Lord.
Seventh Station: Jesus Falls Again Under the Cross
This much is certain: the greatest thing each person can do is to give himself to God utterly and unconditionally – weaknesses, fears, and all.
For God loves obedience more than good intentions or second-best offerings, which are all too often made under the guise of weakness.
– Kierkegaard, Provocations, 8
When we suffer, whether it be something chronic or uniquely difficult, within our spirit or throughout our body, as a Christian, we are allowed to submit it to the Lord.
When we fall under the weight of it, weak and worn, we can pray for the Lord to remove it.
But, we can also yearn for courageous obedience, seeking to imitate Christ who gave himself to God utterly and unconditionally.
Eighth Station: Jesus Pleads with the Women of Jerusalem
“Therefore never in unlovingness give up on a person or give up hope for him, for it is possible that even the most prodigal son can still be saved, that the most embittered enemy, alas, he who was your friend, it is still possible that he can again become your friend; it is possible that he who has sunk the deepest, alas, because he stood so high, it is still possible that he can be raised up again; it is still possible that the love which has turned cold can burn again – therefore never give up any man or woman, not even at the last moment;do not despair.
It’s remarkable to me that while Jesus suffered, he took time to pray for the women of Jerusalem, to plead for them to flee and seek refuge: do not despair, hope all things.
When we suffer amidst pain, anxiety, and loss, we can become passive, waiting for others to lift us up.
But there are times amidst our straining difficulties that we can lift up the heads and hearts of others with our words to resist despair with enduring hope.
Ninth Station: Jesus Staggers Under the Cross Thrice
It must be firmly maintained that Christ did not come to the world only to set an example for us.
If that were the case we would have law and works-righteousness again.
He comes to save us and in this way be our example.
His very example should humble us, teach us how infinitely far away we are from resembling him.
When we humble ourselves, then Christ is pure compassion.
And in our striving to approach him, he is again our very help.
It alternates: when we are striving, then he is our example; and when we stumble, lose courage, then he is the love that helps us up.
Three times on the Via Dolorosa we stop to meditate on the falling of Jesus under the weight of his cruel cross.
It’s a testament to his perseverance, his faithfulness, his striving to complete what he set out to do – for us, and with us, amidst the world’s suffering.
It’s when we stumble under the weight of suffering in our homes, churches, YMCA’s, community organizations, businesses that we can become humbly ready to approach the Man of Sorrows and discover his compassion and redemptive help.
Front Entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, site of the final four stations of the crossEleventh Station: Jesus Nailed to His Cross
By abiding, the one who loves transcends the power of the past.
He transforms the break into a possible new relationship, a future possibility. The lover who abides belongs to the future, to the eternal.
From the angle of the future, the break is not really a break, but rather a possibility.
But the powers of the eternal are needed for this.
The lover must abide in love, otherwise the heartache of the past still has the power to keep alive the break.
It seems impossibly unrealistic to consider how one might abide while suffering, especially while being nailed to the cross.
But in reflecting on the fresco at the eleventh station, it does seem like our Lord is abiding, in love.
Kierkegaard cuts to the heart with his comments on the Lord abiding in love: otherwise, the heartaches of the past still has the power to keep alive the break.
For so many of us, isn’t this – the keeping alive the break – the compounding wound of suffering, the one that sticks us with toxicity more fatal than the initial wound?
Is it humanly possible to abide in love while suffering?
It would take a miracle, divine intervention, holy help.
The site where St. Helena discovered the lost cross of ChristStatue of St. Helena clutching Christ’s cross, mother of Roman-Byzantine Emperor Constantine
Surely Christianity’s intention is that a person use this life to venture out, to do so in such a way that God can get hold of him, and that one gets to see whether or not he actually has faith.
Helena ventured forth with her entourage in the early fourth century to discover the sites of our Lord as described in the New Testament.
What she found became sacred places for Byzantine churches, some which can still be touched today, some in ruins, some preserved.
It was a risky journey, and many wonder if she actually found the original sites of Christ’s gospel work.
But it was a sojourn prompted by faith, sustained by faith, appreciated by faith – much like why we might enter into the suffering of others.
Station Fourteen: top of the Holy Sepulchre, the site where Jesus was buried and from whence he resurrected, under the beautiful church cupola
For Jesus and those of us on The Way with him, resurrection is a powerful reality and hope as we endure suffering in this world.
But in love to hope all things signifies the lovers’ relationship to other men and women, that in relationship to them, hoping for them, he continually keeps possibility open with infinite partiality for his possibility of the good.
Consequently he hopes in love that possibility is present at every moment, that the possibility of the good is present for the other person, and that the possibility of the good means more and more glorious advancement in the good from perfection to perfection or resurrection from downfall or salvation from lostness and thus beyond.
The hope of redemptive suffering, to have new life and possibilities on the other side, to have not just survived but to have grown in love and faithfulness – these are divine and sacred realities we need in our homes, our YMCA’s, and communities.
God’s raising up of Jesus from the stone tomb was an affirmation of his loyalty and goodness amidst his temptations and suffering.
It affirms for us that Jesus is worth imitating, that the hope he instills in us is real, and that suffering we endure with him is redemptive.
Everything is preparation for the future. Everything is seemingly meaningless if there isn’t a future hope you are keeping your eyes on. A future hope helps put the past – the pains, the failures, the disappointments – in perspective.
But even a future hope is kind of vague. For Christians, that future has a name, the future is grounded in a person, that future is becoming present through the presence and work of Christ Jesus.
So for Christians, we can believe that everything that happens to us now is preparation for the future – maybe for tomorrow, maybe for next year, maybe for something Christ is working on in three decades that he needs us to do.
We get this kind of perspective in the opening lines of the Gospel According to Mark:
The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the Prophet:
“I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepareyour way” –
” …a voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.'”
John the Baptist was born before Jesus in order to be the messenger who went ahead of his cousin to announce the good news of his arrival as the anointed deliverer of Israel and their long awaited King. John is the one appointed to prepare the way for Jesus. For thirty years John lived with this mission, knowing that someday his moment would come. As a young man he sojourned into the wilderness as part of his preparation. It was there that he began his ministry.
What about you?What are your future hopes? What are the tough things you are going through now that could be prepration for something in the future?
More importantly: what might God be wanting to send you to do as a way to prepare others for the arrival of Christ Jesus in their life? How might what you are going through now be preperation for that future work of Jesus becoming real to someone important in your life?
It’s important to know that John didn’t know how everything is going to play out. Jesus had to give repeated instructions to John about what was going on, what was going to happen, and why. John had his doubts, and so do we – especially when times get really difficult.
The medium is the message.
It wasn’t just the words that John was preaching about repentance for the forgiveness of sins, it was John’s life, him as a person embodying this message that added power to his words.
Repentance is about change, about returning, about new possibilities.
John was in the wilderness re-enacting the story of Moses, preparing the people of Israel to re-enter the Promised Land as a cleansed, made-holy, recommited kind of people of God. Everybody came to see John to be baptized – they were so sick and tired of the corruption and evil – they wanted to see a change, they wanted to see God rule the land again – and that starts with a people being changed by letting God be king of their hearts, mind, body and soul.
You embody a message.You are a message. You are a message of hope (or despair), of repentance and forgiveness (or embittering grudges), of restoration and reconciliation (or envy and hate).
God sent John ahead of Jesus into Israel to prepare the people for the Christ (anointed one) to deliver them from their sins and sow seeds of shalom (peace). John preached a message of repentance for the forgiveness of sins and renewal of allegiance to God.
God is wanting to send you ahead of Jesus into the world to embody the message of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. When you repent of your sins, when you receive and extend forgiveness, when you sow seeds of peace and reconciliation, you are not only preparing people for the presence of Christ, you are embodying and extending the presence and work of Christ himself.
John begain his ministry on his own, but eventually formed a community from which he continued his ministry of preaching and baptising, of teaching the people how to repent, forgive, and start their lives over again in God. The same goes for us: whatever God calls us to do, wherever and to whomever he wants to send us, it will need to be in community. The gospel is embodied best by community.
How might your perspective change on your present pain in light of the preparation God might be bringing you through in order to extend the healing and reconciling work of Christ to others in the future?
Who has God laid on your heart? What if some of the tough things you are going through now are preparation for what Christ wants to do through you for them?
If the medium is the message – and everything is prepration for embodying the message of the gospel – what kind of work do you know God needs to do in you now so that others can more clearly hear the good news of Christ through your words and works?
