Friday

The Fourth Station - Jesus meets his mother.

Photo by AFP Photo / Eric Feferberg
We affectionately remember and praise you, Jesus,
because your life teaches us how to live as your disciples.
You must have wished that your family members, Jesus, would be spared your final, harrowing hours. Amid the dusty clamor of a morbid, public spectacle your eyes, Jesus, met the eyes of your inconsolable mother. Lamenting and faithful, she endured in her own being your stumbling, torturous trudge towards Golgotha.
Love insists on presence even though horror may accompany such devotion. What monstrous sorrow afflicts the families of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib denied access to their sons and brothers, husbands and fathers. Imagine parents and siblings, wives, husbands, children and partners separated from dear ones bearing arms and constantly in harm’s way! How many loved ones have muffled a scream with the dread appearance at the front door of Casualty Assistance Calls Officers reporting, “We regret to inform you…?”
To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. - Nuremberg Tribunal