Palm Sunday

 (Read: The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to St. Mark)

(Msgr. Magee did not preach today because of the Reading of the Passion. He exhorted everyone to go to confession this coming week; to choose for themselves any character of the passion story and try to relive their experience throughout the week; and to focus this whole week on the inner goings on of the mind and heart of Jesus so as to experience his suffering, to forget one’s own and to relate to him as if he were a suffering and dying son, brother or friend.

The following fictitious dialogue is offered for ready hearts.)

“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

Peter, James, Judas, Martha, Lazarus, Nicodemus, Joseph .... : why have you abandoned me?

Whoever you are who hears me, in whatever day of history, wherever you live, whatever your story, however you are: why have you abandoned me?

My people, what have I done to you?

What more could I have done for you that I have failed to do?

How have I aggrieved you?

Answer me!

Do you not see, can you not feel the passion of my heart?

Do you still not understand?

Was not I conceived in human vesture for your sake alone?

Do you not perceive my divine desperation, my human anguish to win back your love, to perish in your place?

All has been for you; no other.

What care I for a universe without you?

What care I for eternity without you?

Hell itself I would endure for you! Without you, hell is the only alternative.

Does not this madness move you? Will you persist in merely nodding at me from the cold afar of your empty God-talk?

Why would you rather feed on the husks of pigs than on my body?

Do you covet my divinity? Here, take it! It’s yours! Body, blood, soul and divinity: come and grasp me in your hands!

Eat God. Consume me. I throw myself into your hands, sinners’ hands.

What do I hear you say? You don’t like being called a sinner?

 Okay, come, give me your sins, I will take them all. I will become sin for you, if only you will love me.

Satisfy my divine craving. Heal my divine craziness by condescending to love me, for I am a worm and no man, a thing thrown away.

Pity me as you would a bum on the street. I will bear your disdain and your snobbery, for at least then you will notice me and I can catch a glimpse of your eyes and drink in the beauty you do not see in your deepest heart, in the furthest realms of the abyss of your conscience.

Unleash your fury on me! Beat me up! Kick me out! But do not abandon me!

Do not leave me alone with no-one to help me, for I sink into the mud of death, to the grief of one who has no hope.

Have mercy on me, your God; have pity on me, your Savior; my heart bleeds to death because in my folly I created you for my love, and you have turned your nose up at it as if at the filth of the sewer.

How can I win you back unless I let you kill me, unless from death itself arises the hope of a new beginning, a new creation, a new Man?

 Abandon me, then! Annihilate me, then! Obliterate my name if you will!

But know that, even should a mother abandon the child of her womb, I will never abandon you. For I am God. And my burning, consuming desire for you will never die.”

“Ah, gracious Lord!

What has become of me? Why so stubborn? Why so locked in on myself? Why so heedless of reality, the hard and fast truth of my being?

Your madness is one of love; mine is the frenzy of pride.

How sweetly sin talks, smells and tastes!

Spiritual dementia! By it I cast you as a frozen fossil of my long-lost childhood! By it, my heart pumps ice throughout my soul. I have become a glacier.

The easy-speak of self-made man drowns out the sound of your warm Creator’s breath.

I drink in the poison like an incurable alcoholic. I play the game of ritual obeisance to you, but laugh at its stupid rigmarole in the company of my so-called friends, or try to manipulate it to serve my own idolatries.

I kiss your Cross, but in truth am ashamed of it because it ridicules the self-invented nirvana of human achievement and of my petty self-complacency.

I play at confessing my sins, because I neither understand what sin is nor like the sound of admitting it. Because absolution is priceless I have come to consider it as cheap, worth nothing.

Eucharistic fast? Eucharistic hunger? The pigs’ husks taste better.

And yet, and yet ...

... when the door is closed and the lights are out and I no longer need to keep playing the game of fake immortality and pseud0-sophistication and –of course!- political correctness, I do sense something deeply amiss within me.

I wonder if I am really there inside myself, or if I have become possessed by the socially crafted persona of twenty-first century delirium.

I wonder who I really am.

I wonder if I have ever really known the true me, if I have ever really broken free from the complexes, the habits, the prejudices, the illusions and the multifarious forces of psyche and body which bear in upon me and ooze out from within me.

The relentless monotony of day and night enslave me to the false notion that I am circular, endless. I soothe the aching dullness of it all by justifying all manner of excess.

And when I tire of the excess, I must curse both it and the dullness occasioning it. What is, if any, the point of it all?

Job and Qoheleth got it right, except for the happy ending.

Yet, sometimes I feel that an inner earthquake, an inner volcanic eruption must come sooner or later, my cry of defiance and liberation:

No, I will no longer be the one who suits the expectations of those around me! I will no longer be hemmed in by rut and routine!

I refuse to be the identikit of others’ plans and projections! I refuse to be the meaningless product of pitiless ennui!

No to being an automaton controlled by a soul-destroying and heart-devastating dictatorship of relativism!

I will be free; I will be me!

But who will recognize who I truly am so that I may myself know myself? Mammon? The “nada”? The sincere but painfully mortal reassurances of another I? Are not all these but leaky cisterns? So where is the fountain of living water?

From his side flowed blood and water. Not water only, but blood as well. Not just talk, but deeds. Not just whitewash, but deep crimson stains. Not just promise, but reality. Not ideology, but truth. Not psyche but pneuma.*

Only in the encounter with you, my crucified Jesus, can I truly know and be that me. Only if I hold the lance in your side will your divine desperation decipher for me the code of my true identity. Only if I thrust the lance into your heart will I be able to let the lance go and allow my true self to flow out from deep within you.

For how can I define myself if my powers of defining are themselves flawed and distorted?

And will I entrust this task to others who are no better than I?

_______________________

*”Psyche” is used in the bible to speak of the kind of spirit which mortal man has in himself. “Pneuma” refers to the kind of spirit we shall have at the resurrection from the dead, i.e. we will be vivified by the Holy Spirit.

The road to liberation must be, then, the road of obedience to your truth for me, because your truth is truth itself.

Now I see how your passion is not just an arbitrary event, as if you could have died in another way, or I could have been saved another way.

Now I see that your passion is a mirror which holds up to me the true picture of my own reality.

Now I see that your passion has no effect for me if I take no part in it.

Your passion is no Shakespearian tragedy, but reveals in all its horrendous detail the core truth of human history, my history: that is, the necessary effect of mankind’s abandonment of you in the beginning.

I see how the pain inflicted in Eden by mankind on itself, and thus on you, is simply played out in your flesh as Son of God made Man on Calvary. It is a pain which has its source and its aim in sinful man, this sinful man who bemoans his sin, a sin you did not commit but which you took upon yourself.

And so your passion reveals to me the truth of my life. Suffering and death have the final word, and that word can either be spoken in the defiant rebellion of Gismas or in the obedient submission of Dismas.

In suffering and death our true humanity is revealed or concealed for ever. For in suffering and death love is ultimately victorious or vanquished. Therein lies the test of freedom, its eternal victory or its everlasting loss.

The Cross had to be! For, of itself and for its own sake and glory, Love had to reveal itself in the extremity of its self-giving. By accepting man’s rejection of God’s acceptance of him as rejecting, God’s love had the last word: the consummation of merciful love.

In thus dying for me, my Jesus, you reveal how far God has been willing to go to show me the truth of my life as it is and the hope of how it can be beyond all my rebellion, beyond all my dreams.

You have married that truth and that hope in your passion. You have made immortality gush forth from mortality.

No wonder you cry in such agonizing screams to me and to every human being, “do not abandon me!”, for in abandoning you thus, we would abandon all hope of ever discovering the truth of who we are and of who your crazy love destines us to be.

Oh, my Lord! What misery is mine, what folly, what absurdity what stupidity! I will weep for my darkness; I will sob for the blind thanklessness of my hardened heart! Maybe it will at last break? Maybe your cries will at last pierce the tomb of my soul and my true self will come forth, free at last to gaze upon your beauty in the light of your Day?

And so let the universe, heaven and hell hear my cry:

No, my Lord!

No, no and never!

I will not abandon you!

I will rather abandon myself into your crucified arms wherein lies the passionate love of Eternity itself, the consummation of all Communion and the everlasting fruit of Paradise!

Msgr. Peter Magee

Palm Sunday, April 9^th, 2006