Meditating on the Passion

In the first part of this series I introduced the brief prayer, doce me passionem Tuam—teach me Your suffering—a simple aspiration we can say many times a day. I also suggested that to help us go deeper into the meaning of this prayer, I would publish here during Holy Week a prayer for Consecration to the Most Holy Cross of Jesus, which can be made on Good Friday. Here I want to offer some suggestions on how we might use the remainder of Lent to prepare for this consecration. Indeed, the preparatory work for the consecration is as important as the consecration itself and will make it more fruitful.

To consecrate means to “set aside” for sacred use, as when objects are consecrated for use in the Church’s liturgy. The consecration is a symbolic act—a means to an end—intended to cultivate devotion of the heart. There are many ways in which one could prepare, and I do not want to be too prescriptive here. I offer just a few ideas and suggestions that each can tailor to their own circumstances. The purpose of the preparatory period is to allow sufficient time for one to understand, learn, and enter into each stage of Christ’s Passion. There is value to renewing the consecration on an annual basis on Good Friday, and one could approach the preparatory period during Lent from a different angle every year.

I recommend setting aside at least twenty minutes a day for meditation, though ideally one could do a daily Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament, focused on considering a different aspect of the Passion. One could begin by slowly meditating on the Passion narratives in the four Gospels. Similarly, one could use the traditional fourteen Stations of the Cross as a guide, meditating more deeply on just one of the Stations each day. There are several good books of meditations on the Stations of the Cross, from St. Josemaria Escriva, Caryll Houselander, Benedict XVI, and St. John Henry Newman, among others, which may be helpful guides. Likewise, Blessed Ann Catherine Emmerich’s book, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, or Luis de la Palma’s The Sacred Passion are excellent books for meditation on this theme.

Another approach could involve meditating on a different mystery of the Rosary each day for a minimum of twenty minutes (in addition to praying the Rosary). One might think that only the five Sorrowful Mysteries would be suitable for meditating on Christ’s sufferings; but in fact, the other fifteen mysteries are also imprinted, each in their own way, with the sign of the Cross. In the next part of this series, I will expand upon this theme, showing that the Cross is present in every moment of Our Lord’s life, including the Joyful, Luminous, and Glorious Mysteries. For God to become incarnate as a man in a fallen, sinful world itself constitutes a kind of humiliating suffering. The entire Rosary is a compendium on the life of Christ, and the Cross is imprinted on this life from the Incarnation to the Ascension. Jesus’ heart beats to the rhythm of the Hail Mary, and the Rosary is most pleasing to His ears; but we can also bring these mysteries into our mental prayer as well, placing ourselves in the scenes they depict.

There are countless ways to meditate upon the suffering of Christ, and each of us can discover our own path. The point is that our meditation should be personal, for Jesus died for each one of us alone and individually, not just for an abstract mass of humanity collectively.  He assumed and experienced the consequences of each one of our personal sins, and not just symbolically but experientially.

As we meditate upon and consider the Passion in relation to our own lives, the moments that stand out may not necessarily involve the “big” details, like the lashes from the scourging, but Jesus’ more insignificant wounds. Perhaps those on His face pain us the most. The abrasion on His upper left cheek that had scabbed and dried so that it could not be fully cleaned when His body was prepared for burial. The specks of dried blood on His nose that could also not be removed, because doing so would have ripped off the thin top layer of skin. The blood that matted and hardened into His beard. The taste of blood, mixed with gritty dirt, that was His only nourishment as He carried His Cross. The film of tears that crusted over His eyes and burned His skin. The torn skin across the knuckles on His fingers and hands from every time He fell while dragging His Cross. Carrying the Cross on His right shoulder would have also produced a terrible wound on His lower back over the curved top of pelvis bone, where the weight of the Cross rubbed and tore into His flesh. Perhaps that particular wound—one that we had never considered—hurt more than all of the others.

I’ll mention by way of example just one approach to meditation that has worked for me personally as a physician. I consider in prayer the wounds and suffering Our Lord endured beginning with the agony in the garden up until the moment right before the nails are driven into His hands and feet. I then imagine what I would do, as a medical doctor who cares for afflictions of the body and soul, if Jesus was brought to me as a patient in that battered state, having endured what He did. I consider everything that I would need to do to care for His physical wounds and try to heal them—from His cracked lips to His abraded knees; from the large splinters in His hands, shoulder, and back from carrying the Cross, to the bleeding lacerations from the scourging and the puncture wounds from the crown of thorns. How would I tend to each of these wounds?

I imagine needing to attend not just to His physical wounds but His emotional state as well—something I have more training and experience with since I specialize in psychiatry—but how does one counsel the Son of God? How would I support Him with my words—he who was abandoned by virtually all His friends and disciples, subjected to the worst injustices, maligned and scorned? And then I recall that all of that happened to Christ even before He bore my sins in His body on the Cross, before He was nailed to the Cross and died just for me.

As I said, this meditation might be suitable for a physician or counselor, but it may not work for others, which is fine. The point of this example is that each of us can find something like this—something suitable for our temperament and our gifts—that allows us to draw very close to Our Lord in His suffering. It should be tangible, physical, and intimate: we can touch and tend to His wounds; we can kiss His face; we can hold His hand; we can be present to Him, and He to us, in His humanity, in His bodily presence. We can try to engage all our senses and imagination to enter into His Passion, as we pray, doce me passionem Tuam—teach me your suffering.

These suggestions for preparing for the consecration are merely a guide, and each can be suitably modified to fit one’s own circumstances. Each person must walk their own personal journey with Jesus on the Way of the Cross. Each of us can seek prayerfully and personally to learn Our Lord’s suffering in communion with Him. One can search for decades for an answer in books, but ultimately the answer can only be found by letting Jesus into the deepest corners of one’s heart—by letting Him teach me about His suffering, not just mine.

Author’s Note: This is Part 3 in a weekly Lenten series on the Christian meaning of suffering and the Cross of Christ. All other articles of the series can be read here.

Image from Wikimedia Commons