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Palm Sunday
(Mark 11.1-11, John 12.9-33)
At my first communion I went up to the communion rail at the Sanctus bell instead of the Domine, non sum dignus, and had to kneel there all alone through the consecration, through the Pater Noster, through the Agnus Dei—and I had thought I knew the Mass so well!
I loved the Church for Christ made visible. Not for itself, because it was so often a scandal to me. Romano Guardini said the Church is the Cross on which Christ was crucified; one could not separate Christ from his Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church.
—Venerable Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
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Fig Monday
(Mark 11.12-27, John 2.13-22)
What then of all the great tradition, the freeing of slaves at the Exodus, the determination of the prophets, the long effort against the monstrous impiety of Cain? The answer is obvious; all that is assumed as a mere preliminary. The rich, while they remain rich, are practically incapable of salvation, at which all the Apostles were exceedingly astonished. But if riches are not supposed to be confined to money, the astonishment becomes more general. There are many who feel that while God might damn Rothschild he could hardly damn Rembrandt. Are the riches of Catullus and Carnegie so unequal, though so different? Sooner or later, nearly everyone is surprised at some kind of rich man being damned. The Divine Thing, for once, was tender to us; he restored a faint hope: ‘with God all things are possible.’ But the preliminary step is always assumed: ‘sell all that thou hast and give to the poor’—and then we will talk. Then we will talk of that other thing without which even giving to the poor is useless, the thing for which at another time the precious ointment was reserved from the poor, the thing that is necessary to correct and qualify even good deeds. Even love is not enough unless it is love of a particular kind. Long afterwards St Paul caught up the dreadful cry: ‘though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.’ It is not surprising that Messias saw the possibility of an infinitely greater knowledge of evil existing through him than had been before: ‘blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended at me.’
—Charles Williams, He Came Down From Heaven
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Temple Tuesday
(Matthew 21.23-24.2)
The priest said, ‘Those laws were made for man. The Church doesn’t expect … if you can’t fast, you must eat, that’s all.’ The old woman prattled on and on, while the penitents stirred restlessly in the next stall and the horse whinnied, prattled of days of abstinence broken, of evening prayers curtailed. Suddenly, without warning, with an odd sense of homesickness, he thought of the hostages in the prison yard, waiting at the water-tap, not looking at him—the suffering and the endurance which went on everywhere the other side of the mountains. He interrupted the woman savagely, ‘Why don’t you confess properly to me? I’m not interested in your fish supply or in how sleepy you are at night … remember your real sins.’
‘But I’m a good woman, father,’ she squeaked at him with astonishment.
‘Then what are you doing here, keeping away the bad people?’ He said, ‘Have you any love for anyone but yourself?’
‘I love God, father,’ she said haughtily. He took a quick look at her in the light of the candle burning on the floor—the hard old raisin eyes under the black shawl—another of the pious—like himself.
‘How do you know? Loving God isn’t any different from loving a man—or a child. It’s wanting to be with Him, to be near Him.’ He made a hopeless gesture with his hands. ‘It’s wanting to protect Him from yourself.’
—Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
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Spy Wednesday
(Matthew 26.6-16, Luke 22.1-6)
Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.
One evening I seated Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter. And I cursed her.
I armed myself against justice.
I fled. O Witches, O Misery, O Hate, to you has my treasure been entrusted!
I contrived to purge my mind of all human hope. On all joy, to strangle it, I pounced with the stealth of a wild beast.
—Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell (trans. Louise Varèse)
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Maundy Thursday
(Luke 22.7-34, John 13.1-35)
What is belief really? It is a human way of taking up a stand in the totality of reality, a way that cannot be reduced to knowledge and is incommensurable with knowledge; it is the bestowal of meaning without which the totality of man would remain homeless, on which man’s calculations and actions are based, and without which in the last resort he could not calculate and act, because he can only do this in the context of a meaning that bears him up. For in fact man does not live on the bread of practicability alone; he lives as man and, precisely in the intrinsically human part of his being, on the word, on love, on meaning. Without the word, without meaning, without love, he falls into the situation of no longer being able to live, even when earthly comfort is present in abundance.
… Christian faith is more than the option in favor of a spiritual ground to the world; its central formula is not ‘I believe in something,’ but ‘I believe in you.’ It is the encounter with the man Jesus, and in this encounter it experiences the meaning of the world as a person. In Jesus’ life from the Father, in the immediacy and intensity of his converse with him in prayer, and, indeed, face to face, he is God’s witness, through whom the intangible has become tangible, the distant has drawn near. He is the presence of the eternal itself in this world. Christian faith lives on the discover that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me.
—Pope Benedict XVI, Introduction to Christianity
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Good Friday
(Mark 14.32-15.41, John 18.1-19.37)
Sonne of God heare us, and since thou
By taking our blood, owest it us againe,
Gaine to thy self, or us allow;
And let not both us and thy selfe be slaine;
O Lambe of God, which took’st our sinne
Which could not stick to thee,
O let it not return to us againe,
But Patient and Physition being free,
As sinne is nothing, let it no where be.
—John Donne, The Litanie
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Holy Saturday
(Matthew 27.57-66)
The end of love is that the heart is still
As the rose no wind distresses, still as light
On the unmoved grass, or as the hummingbird
Poised the pure moment by an act of will.
Death may be like this, but here before night
Sends us to sleep murmuring a drowsy word
Of prayer, affection, or the idle flight
Of fancy, let us praise the rose and light.
—Dunstan Thompson, The Moment of the Rose
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Easter Sunday
(Luke 24.1-43, John 20.1-23)
Here we had a man of Divine character walking and talking among us—and what did we find to do with him? The common people, indeed, ‘heard Him gladly,’ but our leading authorities in Church and State considered that He talked too much and uttered too many disconcerting truths. So we bribed one of His friends to hand Him over quietly to the police, and we tried Him on a rather vague charge of creating a disturbance, and had Him publicly flogged and hanged on the common gallows, ‘thanking God we were rid of a knave.’ All this was not very creditable to us, even if He was (as many people thought and think) only a harmless crazy preacher. But if the Church is right about Him, it was more discreditable still; for the man we hanged was God Almighty.
So that is the outline of the official story—the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when He submitted to the conditions He had laid down and became a man like the men He had made, and the men He had made broke Him and killed Him. This is the dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of God is the victim and the hero.
The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore; on the contrary, they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. He insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites; He went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as ‘a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber’; He cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people’s pigs and property; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, He displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and He retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in His human lifetime, and if He was God, there can be nothing dull about God either.
‘And the third day He rose again’: what are we to make of that? One thing is certain: if He was God and nothing else, His immortality means nothing to us; if He was man and no more, His death is no more important than yours or mine. But if He really was both God and man, then when the man Jesus died, God died too; and when the God Jesus rose from the dead, man rose too, because they were one and the same person. In any case, those who saw the risen Christ remained persuaded that life was worth living and death a triviality.
That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find Him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing it for the first time, would recognize it as News; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it News, and good news at that; though we are apt to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational.
—Dorothy L. Sayers, The Greatest Drama Ever Staged
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