Friday

The Ninth Station - Jesus falls for the third time.


Photo by Joe Raedle / Getty Images

We gratefully remember and praise you, Jesus,
because your life teaches us how to live as your disciples.

The accumulated malevolence of all wars and ethnic killings of the centuries was condensed into your onerous cross, Jesus. How could you maintain such a burden for any length of time? You strain every fiber of your waning energy to resume the ascent to Golgotha out of love for every person of every age.



When we begin to enumerate not only the intra-and international conflicts of the last 2,000+ years, but the misery and vulgarity each of them propagated, we cringe from embarrassment and disgust for having turned to violence in any form during our lifetime. Perhaps that is why those initiating strife on a nation, in the name of some virtue or economic advantage, try to shackle the media in its attempts to reflect the horrors, to stifle the right to know how insufficient are the motives to go to war.



The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. - Aldous Huxley